AI visibility · B2B SaaS — Fintech — Cybersecurity

Your buyers ask AI who to trust. We engineer the answer.

51% of B2B software buyers start research in an AI chatbot (G2, up from 29% in a year). Every answer names two or three vendors. We measure how often the answer is you — then move that number, reported weekly in your Surge Ledger.

Run my free 150-prompt teardown → See how the answers get made ↓
150–600 prompts per engagement 6 answer engines 48h free teardown turnaround
Your category · what the engines answer today you’re named in 14 of 150 answers
best SOC 2 automation tools 2026not in the answer ✗
safest corporate card for startupsnot in the answer ✗
most trusted zero-trust vendorsin the answer ✓
best CRM for a 200-person companynot in the answer ✗
top data warehouse alternativesmentioned only
You9% · 14 of 150 answers
Your top competitor61% · 92 of 150
Illustrative panel — your free teardown shows the real one
Running your category — 150 questions × 3 engines…
best SOC 2 automation tools 2026checking
safest corporate card for startupschecking
most trusted zero-trust vendorschecking
best CRM for a 200-person companychecking
Your top competitor—
You—
Illustrative panel
Right now

A buyer you’ll never meet just asked ChatGPT who to trust.

No search results. No ads. No visit to your site. Just a question in plain language — and an answer forming in seconds. We run that question 150 times, phrased the way real buyers phrase it.

Three seconds later

It answered with three names. Not ten links — three names.

The engine names two or three vendors and moves on. 51% of B2B software buyers now start research this way — up from 29% one year earlier. Watch the competitor’s panel fill.

G2 · Apr 2026 · n=1,076
And it decides

69% chose a vendor the AI suggested over the one they planned to buy.

The shortlist is written before your first call — and it’s written from panels exactly like these.

G2 · 2026
The opening

1 in 3 bought from a company they’d never heard of.

If a third of deals go to names buyers didn’t know a month earlier, absence is a growth channel — someone else’s. 51% of B2B tech brands hold zero citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini; in cybersecurity it’s 73%. Movement is cheap for whoever shows up first.

machinerelations.ai · GrackerAI 2026
0%of US Google searches end without a single click — the fastest acceleration since tracking began.SparkToro / Similarweb · early 2026
−0%clicks to the #1 ranked result when an AI Overview appears above it.Ahrefs · Feb 2026 · 300k keywords
0%of Google AI Mode sessions end without a website visit.Cloudflare Radar · 2026
0×better conversion from the AI-referred visitors who do click through.Semrush 2026 · independent studies range 2–9×
The zero-click era

The search box started answering.

Two-thirds of searches now resolve on the results page itself. The question gets answered; the links go untouched. Your traffic didn’t go to a competitor — it stopped existing.

Rank ≠ found

You can rank #1 and still lose 58% of your clicks to the answer above you.

A decade of SEO position defends less than it used to — the answer box outranks every rank.

And it’s Google too

93% of AI Mode sessions end without a website visit.

2.5 billion people see Google’s AI answer before anyone’s link, and queries are doubling every quarter. Google calls it “the biggest upgrade to our iconic search box in over 25 years.” This isn’t a fringe channel. It’s the default.

Google I/O · May 2026
The consolation prize

The visitors that survive convert 2 to 4.4x better.

AI-referred buyers arrive pre-sold by the answer that sent them. Fewer clicks, better buyers. The economics moved inside the answer. So that’s where we work.

Did you know?

10%

ChatGPT now sends Vercel one in every ten of its new customers. Seven months earlier, it sent almost none.

VercelCEO Guillermo Rauch, on X · April 2025
01 / 06
03 / The mechanics

AI trusts what people say about you, not who links to you.

When the web talks about a brand by name — in articles, reviews, press — AI trusts it three times more than a link (Ahrefs measured this across 75,000 brands). Here’s where the answers actually come from.

Where the engines get their answers
“Best of” comparison articles32.5% of citations
Press & earned media84% of citations
Review platformsthe entry ticket
Your own siteif AI can read it
Reddit & YouTubelicensed sources
61.7% of citations never name the brand — “ghost citations”
What we get you into, deliberately
One format dominates

Comparative listicles are a third of all AI citations.

“Best X for Y” pages are what engines reach for on buying prompts. If you’re not in the comparisons the engines already trust, you’re not in the answer — no matter how good your product page is.

Semrush · 2026
The 3-to-1 signal

Being talked about beats being linked to — 3 to 1.

Old SEO buys links. AI barely cares. What moves AI is your name showing up in press, articles, and reviews — 84% of everything AI cites is earned coverage. This is PR work, not link building — and it’s the part your SEO agency isn’t doing.

Ahrefs 75k-brand study · Muck Rack Generative Pulse
The gates

Reviews qualify you. Your site has to be readable.

Effectively every B2B tool ChatGPT recommends has a live review-platform presence — it qualifies you without ranking you. Meanwhile most AI crawlers execute zero JavaScript: 36% of the world’s top fintechs are serving them empty pages.

Vercel crawler study · May 2026 fintech audit
The catch

Most citations never say your name.

61.7% of AI citations are ghost citations — your page is the source, your brand isn’t in the answer. Getting named is a separate discipline: entity consistency, brand-attributed passages, self-contained sections. This is why “just SEO” doesn’t fix it.

Growth Memo · 3,981 domains × 115 prompts
04 / The method

Answer Engineering.

Every agency has a named methodology. Ask to see the internals and the slides come out. Ours are printed below — prompt counts, cadences, and denominators included.

Phase 01 / 03 — Baseline 0%204060 incumbent competitor day 14day 30day 60day 90 your answer-share band

Bands, not lines — a single AI run is noise. We report trailing 4-week share-of-voice ranges per engine. Illustrative shape; your baseline sets the scale.

Days 1–14 · Baseline

Find out what the machines actually say.

We build your prompt panel from real buying language — 150–600 prompts per category, run repeatedly across all six engines — and audit whether AI crawlers can even read your site. Your baseline ledger lands inside 14 days.

From day 14 · Engineer

Earn the sources engines actually cite.

Placement in the trusted comparisons, digital PR for branded mentions (the “talked about” signal, worked deliberately), review-site ops, and retrieval-ready pages — chunk-level, self-contained, brand-attributed.

Every week after · Compound

Play both clocks.

Retrieval moves in weeks; model memory moves in quarters — about 65% of ChatGPT answers come from memory, not live search. We run the fast loop (Bing + IndexNow, 3–6 weeks) while freshness and entity work harden the slow one. Cited pages decay on a ~13-week half-life; we refresh on schedule.

05 / Published research

The Surge Index.

The quarterly AI-visibility benchmark for B2B SaaS, fintech, and cybersecurity. Which brands the engines actually recommend — ranked, denominated, and dated.

90 brands 250 buying prompts 6 engines Q3 2026 first edition
Reserve the first edition →

Half of all AI citations flow through just 20 domains. The citation economy is consolidating — authority built early compounds, and so does absence.

RankBrandAnswer shareTrend
01
02
03
04
05

Fieldwork in progress — panel runs began Aug 2026. Ranked table publishes with full methodology, free.

NO PAY-TO-RANK · EVER
06 / Client results

Measured, then quoted.Sample layout — awaiting first cohort

This section ships with real names, real titles, and one measured number each — with the denominator attached. Until the first cohort completes, these tiles are placeholders. We don’t fabricate proof; that’s rather the point.

12% → 41%answer share · 240 prompts · 2 quarters · per-engine ledger attached
Placeholder quote — the specific sentence a VP says when the board stops asking “why aren’t we in ChatGPT.”
[ Name ]VP Marketing · Series B cybersecurity company
$1.2Manswer-influenced pipeline · CRM-attributed · methodology in footnote
Placeholder quote — what a CMO says when self-reported attribution starts naming ChatGPT unprompted.
[ Name ]CMO · fintech, Series C
absent → citedon 8 of 12 money prompt families · 90-day sprint
Placeholder quote — the one about leaving with the raw data and choosing to stay anyway.
[ Name ]Head of Growth · B2B SaaS

FTC-native by design: typical-outcome bands with timeframes and denominators — never outlier screenshots with a “results may vary” footnote.

07 / Before you ask

Fair questions.

The things every smart buyer asks us — answered straight.

Isn’t this just SEO with a new invoice?+

Some of it starts there — AI can’t recommend what it can’t find. But SEO stops at links and rankings. We work where your buyers actually are now: inside the answers ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity give them. Different game, different work, measured differently.

How do you actually measure this?+

We take 150+ real questions your buyers ask, run them through every engine on a schedule, and count how often you’re named. You see every question, every run, every number. No black box, no blended score.

AI traffic is still small. Why now?+

Because the traffic isn’t the point — the shortlist is. Half of B2B buyers now start in AI, and the ones who do click through buy at several times the normal rate. And answers harden: whoever the engines trust today keeps getting recommended. Waiting just makes it more expensive.

How does this show up in revenue?+

Three ways: we tag AI visitors in your analytics, we ask new customers how they found you, and every quarter we match AI-sourced deals against your CRM. Attribution is partial by nature — we say so — but it’s measured three ways instead of guessed.

Would you actually turn a client down?+

Yes. Under $1M revenue, nothing published for AI to find, or a category nobody asks AI about — we’ll tell you on the first call and save us both a quarter.

08 / The first move

Find out what the machines say about you. Before your board does.

The free teardown

We run 150 real buyer questions through ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity — by hand, for your category — and walk you through the results on a call. Ready inside 48 hours. If the numbers say you don’t need us, that’s what we’ll tell you.

  • How often the engines name you — the exact number
  • Who they recommend instead of you, question by question
  • The three questions costing you the most deals
  • The first fix we’d make — yours to keep, hire us or not

Free, no strings — and the data is yours either way.

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