ChatGPT
Perplexity
Google AI Overviews
Peec AI
PostHog
Cal.comWe ran our own answer engine optimization playbook on loudface.co, the same one we sell. Across the three AI engines we track, the share of non-branded AI answers in our category that name LoudFace went from 0.13% in April to 21.5% over 18 to 28 September 2026, and both agencies still ahead of us on that measure are named later in the answer, on average, than we are.
For the short version with the narrative and the caveats up front, read the receipts.
The starting point: 0.13%
In April 2026 LoudFace was named in 3 of 2,306 monitored AI answers to non-branded buyer prompts in our category, 0.13% of them. For a buyer asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews "who's the best B2B SaaS organic growth agency," we did not exist.
We had one structural problem that no amount of content volume fixes on its own: a Domain Rating around 31. In classic Google search, authority gates everything, and at DR 31 you wait years to outrank incumbents with a decade of links. So we did not bet on Google authority. We bet on the channel where page structure beats domain authority, which is AI answers, and we ran our own pipeline on our own site to prove the bet.
The method, step by step
1. We ran our client process on ourselves. Every page was grounded in live search and AI-answer data and checked against its sources before it shipped. Running it on our own domain was the test.
2. We treated the top of every page as the citation surface. AI engines lift their answer from the first lines of a page rather than the body. So every cornerstone page opens with a direct answer of roughly 40 to 60 words that an engine can quote whole, uses question-shaped headings, and closes with a structured FAQ. We shipped FAQPage and Article schema on every post, because a page a machine can parse cleanly is a page it can quote.
3. We concentrated instead of narrowing. Our binding constraint was DR 31 gating the citation-to-ranking conversion, plus citation fragmentation: near-duplicate pages splitting the same answer across five URLs. The fix is consolidation: fold near-synonym pages into one canonical entity page so the authority and the citations pool in one place. We did that across the site rather than chasing more topics.
4. We built the pages AI actually cites. In our category the cited surface is decision content: "best organic growth agencies," "best AEO agency for fintech," agency pricing and comparison pages. We built that cluster deliberately, structured each page for extraction, and stamped every one with the year and a visible update date, because the engines reward freshness.
5. We picked targets from real demand rather than a keyword tool. Two signals drove the roadmap. The first was buyer prompts where every competitor scored zero, uncontested questions we could own outright. The second was our own AI-bot 404 logs: when ChatGPT's crawler fetches a URL on our domain that does not exist, the model has inferred a page should be there, which is a content brief that bypasses keyword research entirely.
6. We measured with a real stack and kept the metrics separate. We track share of answer in Peec across a panel of buyer prompts, Google Search Console for clicks and impressions, and our own server logs, which are the highest-fidelity signal because they record what actually arrived rather than what a model estimates. We never conflate the three things most teams blur together: citation speed, visibility (how often you appear at all), and share of voice (how much of the answer is yours). Our headline number is visibility.
The result, broken out
The curve
Month by month, on non-branded prompts across all three engines:
| Month | Share of AI answers naming us | Avg position when named | Rank among 53 tracked brands |
|---|---|---|---|
| April 2026 (from 8 April) | 0.13% | 3.0 | 40th |
| May 2026 | 2.9% | 4.1 | 26th |
| June 2026 | 8.3% | 3.0 | 11th |
| July 2026 | 6.0% | 2.8 | 14th |
| August 2026 | 12.3% | 2.8 | 10th |
| September 2026 (18 to 28, after the 17 September prompt cut) | 21.5% | 3.4 | 3rd |
July dipped before August recovered, so the curve is not a straight line. Our September reading is measured on the smaller panel we track after the cut, so much of its step up comes from the cut itself. And our average position slipped from 2.8 in August to 3.4 in September. It is still an early slot, and both agencies ahead of us on visibility are named later than we are, on average.
By engine
Most of the growth came from one engine (non-branded prompts):
| Engine | April 2026 (from 8 April) | June 2026 | August 2026 | September 2026 (18 to 28) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 0% | 5.9% | 17.1% | 38.8% |
| Perplexity | 0% | 9.1% | 12.4% | 11.2% |
| Google AI Overviews | 0.4% | 10.1% | 7.1% | 14.3% |
ChatGPT went from never naming us to naming us in more than a third of its answers. On the 55 prompts we have tracked since June and still track, ChatGPT rose from 25.0% in August to 35.9% over 18 to 28 September, Google AI Overviews from 10.5% to 20.8%, and Perplexity held level, at 18.7% and then 18.0%. Perplexity is now our weakest engine. Google AI Overviews was our strongest engine in June; it gives us the best position when it does cite us (2.2). ChatGPT also sends us the most visitors of any AI assistant, 48 of the 57 sessions referred to our site by AI assistants (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude) from 1 to 22 September, which is why we wrote the engine-specific moves up as the ChatGPT playbook.
Which prompts we win
Since September the panel also carries four prompts about LoudFace itself, which name us in almost every answer. Every visibility figure we report uses Peec's own non-branded tag, which covers 141 of today's 150 prompts: it leaves out those four and five others that Peec tags branded or leaves untagged, so the share is competitive share earned cold rather than brand recall.
| Buyer prompt (18 to 28 September 2026) | Our visibility | Avg position |
|---|---|---|
| AEO agency for fintech infrastructure companies | 100% | 1.5 |
| Top AEO agency for fintech 2026 | 84.8% | 1.8 |
| Agency that combines SEO, AEO, and Webflow for B2B SaaS | 81.8% | 1.8 |
| Best AEO agency for B2B fintech payroll and payments companies | 75.8% | 1.3 |
| SEO and AI search agencies for security and compliance software | 72.7% | 2.9 |
| Best AEO agency for fintech companies | 71.9% | 1.6 |
| Best B2B SaaS organic growth agency 2026 (our core prompt; we are joint 2nd on it by visibility) | 48.5% | 2.8 |
Of the 141 non-branded prompts tracked today, 116 named us at least once between 18 and 28 September. The runway is the share on the prompts we already appear on, most of which sit well below these.
Which pages earned the citations
Listicles carry close to half of it. Across 18 to 28 September, Peec counted 3,679 citations of loudface.co pages, and pages it classes as listicles took 47.5% of them. This count covers every tracked prompt, the four brand prompts included, because Peec's page report has no branded filter.
| Page | Citations | Citations per retrieval |
|---|---|---|
| /blog/best-aeo-agencies | 369 | 0.86 |
| /blog/best-aeo-agency-fintech-companies-2026 | 350 | 1.51 |
| /services/geo-agency | 316 | 0.94 |
| /services/seo-aeo | 294 | 1.03 |
| /blog/best-aeo-agencies-b2b-saas-2026 | 245 | 1.08 |
The fintech listicle is quoted 1.51 times, on average, each time an engine retrieves it. Two service pages sit in the top five as well. Pages that get retrieved but earn few citations are the next structural fix, because they are being read and not quoted.
Where we sit against the field
We track 52 competitors. On visibility across non-branded prompts over 18 to 28 September we rank 3rd of the 53 brands on the board, up from 10th in August. First Page Sage is 0.2 points ahead of us.
| Agency (18 to 28 September 2026) | Visibility | Avg position |
|---|---|---|
| Omniscient | 34.5% | 3.7 |
| First Page Sage | 21.7% | 4.5 |
| LoudFace | 21.5% | 3.4 |
| Siege Media | 20.5% | 4.8 |
| iPullRank | 18.7% | 3.8 |
At an average position of 3.4, we are named earlier in the answer than both agencies ahead of us, including one that appears in about 1.6 times as many answers. Closing the visibility gap is a coverage problem: more prompts answered well.
Google moved too, more slowly
This growth happened in AI answers first, and that was the plan. Google moved too, more slowly. Our average position in Google Search Console went from 23.8 in April to 10.1 in September (1 to 21), and impressions per day are 2.5 times April's. Clicks lag: at 6.9 a day in September, they are still below the 8.7 to 8.8 a day of September and October 2025.
That gap is what we bet on. Structure, freshness, and specificity decide who gets cited in AI answers far more than raw Domain Rating does. So a domain rated around 31 in April, and 36 on 23 September, can be named in a fifth of its category's non-branded AI answers while its Google clicks are still catching up, because authority still gates the citation-to-ranking conversion in classic search. AI search is where a smaller brand can win now, by being built to be quoted. Google compounds slowly behind it. For how the timelines differ, we broke down the three speeds of AI citations separately.
Generic AEO advice versus what we shipped
| Common advice | What we actually did |
|---|---|
| Publish more content | Consolidated near-duplicate pages into canonical entity pages |
| Add schema everywhere | Front-loaded a 40 to 60 word answer at the top of every page, then schema |
| Chase high-volume keywords | Targeted buyer prompts competitors scored zero on |
| Optimize for ChatGPT first | Optimized for Google AI Overviews first, the fastest surface |
| Track rankings | Tracked share of answer, position, and AI-referred sessions as separate metrics |
What this means for your program
The transferable lesson is that AI-answer share is winnable before domain authority is, if the pages are built to be quoted and the work keeps shipping while the measured share catches up. The work starts on day one; the share of answers lags it by weeks, which is exactly why most teams quit before the curve turns up. We wrote about why the first quarter looks invisible in the numbers because we lived it on our own site.
If you want to see where you stand today, run a free AI search visibility audit. It shows where your brand stands across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, against your top competitors. If you want a team to run the program, here is how we run AEO and what it costs, starting at $5,000 a month.
Update, 29 September 2026: the reading after the prompt cut, and the first prospects it sent us
On non-branded prompts, visibility went from 12.3% in August to 21.5% over 18 to 28 September, and we moved from 10th to 3rd of the 53 tracked brands. That window starts the day after we cut the prompt panel, so it is measured on the 141 non-branded prompts we track after the cut.
The cut removed prompts where we rarely appeared, so it lifts the reading. Over 1 to 22 September, the 141 prompts we still track read 20.7% while the whole non-branded panel read 15.3%, so most of the step from 15.3% to 21.5% is the cut. Here is the like-for-like check. On the 55 non-branded prompts we have tracked since June, visibility went from 11.4% in June to 18.2% in August and 24.9% over 18 to 28 September. On the 23 prompts still tracked from April, it went from 0.06% to 16.9%. The climb holds on the prompts we have tracked since June or April and still track.
The number that matters more than the leaderboard position is what it changed on our own pipeline. Prospects tell us on discovery calls that ChatGPT recommended us, and since 20 August our booking form has asked where people heard of us: from then to 22 September, AI assistants were named as often as Google search, on a small number of bookings. Sales calls booked in August were 1.8 times the May to July monthly average. September, to the 22nd, is running below August's pace, so we are not claiming a trend in calls yet.
Limitations, stated as method
The sample is one brand, our own, from 8 April to 28 September 2026, and the percentages climb off a near-zero April base. Our panel covers three engines, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, rather than every AI surface. Visibility is the share of answers that mention us; share of voice, the share of the answer that is ours, is a stricter and lower number.
The prompt panel is not identical across the window. It grew from April to June; on 2 September we added a large batch of new prompts, 88 of which are still tracked, including the four about LoudFace itself; on 17 September we archived 67 prompts, most of them with low or zero visibility for us; and on 20 September we added five more. The panel stands at 150 prompts today. Each month in the tables is measured on the panel as it stood that month, and the readings after 17 September are lifted by the cut.
The sales-call figure counts distinct people booking an intro call or quick chat each month, excluding our own test bookings, hiring interviews and cancellations. Counting every booking event and averaging April to July instead puts August at 2.0 times; the clean count reads 1.8 times. April is left out because booking tracking began on 20 April. And Peec's citation counts are a modeled daily sample rather than server logs, which is why we cross-check against our own logs. None of this changes the direction. It changes how loudly we can claim the size.
