Why we built this
How I became the #1 AI-cited domain in my industry — from an operations desk.
In Q2 2025, our CEO asked: “Are we getting picked up by ChatGPT?” I wasn't on the marketing team. But the answer mattered more than I expected.
Brand visibility rank
Domain retrieval rank
Domain retrieval rate
Share of Voice
The problem
We were barely on AI's radar.
I worked ops at a B2B SaaS company under $10M in revenue. We had a marketing team, a website, a blog — we were doing the things you're supposed to do.
But when I checked whether AI tools were actually recommending us to buyers researching our category, the answer was: barely. We were near the bottom of AI brand visibility. The companies above us had marketing teams of 50–200 people and content budgets of $50–150M per year.
Nobody assigned me to fix it. I decided to try anyway.
What I tried first
A content strategy that assumed a content team.
The first thing I built was a thorough content strategy. Two-team approach, three content pillars, full funnel mapping, competitive analysis. Very professional. Completely unusable — it assumed resources we didn't have.
So I threw it out and started building with what I actually had: AI tools, time, and access to our sales call recordings.
That last part turned out to be the thing.
The breakthrough
Buyer conversations beat keyword tools.
We had hundreds of recorded sales calls — real buyers describing their exact problems in their own words. I stopped sourcing content from keyword tools and started sourcing it from those conversations.
The articles I wrote weren't optimized for search volume. They answered the specific questions buyers asked on call after call. Content quality jumped immediately.
Domain climbing in AI retrieval rankings. Blog views down. AI citations up.
#1 retrieved domain in our entire product category — ahead of every competitor, including companies with 100× our marketing budget.
Held that position for nine months and counting.
What I learned
Two things that don't show up in the numbers.
LLMs don't match keywords the way Google does. They retrieve content that demonstrates authority and answers real questions. A templated page targeting high search volume will rank on Google. It won't get cited by ChatGPT.
The content that wins in AI search sounds like someone who's actually done the work — because it is.
You don't need to outrun the bear. You just need to outrun your friend.
A small B2B company doesn't need to beat billion-dollar platforms everywhere. It just needs to be better than the 3–5 competitors it actually loses deals to.
BrandNav exists because I proved this system works — and then realized almost no company has the infrastructure to run it themselves. The monitoring, the competitive tracking, the technical optimizations that make you crawlable by AI — most small B2B companies are doing none of it, because nobody showed them the playbook.
That was Q2 2025. We've been building and refining ever since.
See where you stand right now.
BrandNav runs the searches your buyers are actually making and shows you exactly where you appear — and where your competitors do instead.