The AI Search Agency for B2B SaaS
30-50% of your buyers now start in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews — not Google search. We get you cited in those answers. Built from 200+ SaaS audits, before "GEO" had a name.
By Tameem Rahman · Founder, Kingmaker Search Partners
AI search is eating 30-50% of buyer journeys
Your buyers stopped starting their research in Google. Roughly 27% of US searchers used an AI assistant for a buying-intent query in Q1 2026 (and that number is climbing every quarter). Perplexity went from 2M to 35M monthly users in 18 months. ChatGPT crossed 500M weekly actives and added a search tool. Google's own AI Overviews now appear on roughly 47% of B2B SaaS queries and compress click-through to the underlying pages by 40-60%. If your brand isn't being cited in those answers, you're invisible to the modern buyer journey — not ranking lower, invisible.
Most agencies are still running the 2019 SEO playbook with a coat of AI paint. They'll write you a blog post, optimize a meta description, and call it "GEO". That's not what wins citations. Citation is a different game than ranking. AI engines pull from a narrower, more specific set of trusted surfaces: Reddit threads, G2 and Capterra reviews, listicle round-ups, original research with strong domain signals, and pages engineered at the passage level for quote-worthiness. The signals overlap with SEO. The tactics don't.
The other thing nobody tells you: citation beats ranking. Position 1 on a head term is still worth something, but being the source ChatGPT reaches for when a buyer asks "what's the best X for Y" is worth more, because it bypasses the SERP entirely. The brands that own that surface in 2026 will own their category in 2030. The window to claim that ground is now, while most competitors are still arguing about whether AI search is real.
What we optimize for: every surface a buyer touches
Search Monopoly™ means owning every surface a buyer might touch when researching your category — not just Google rankings. Each AI engine has its own citation mechanics. We optimize for all of them, then measure citation share across every engine that matters for your category.
Google AI Overviews
AI Overviews now appear above the blue links on roughly half of B2B SaaS queries, and they compress click-through to the underlying pages by 40-60%. The signals that trigger an AI Overview citation are not the same as the signals that earn position 1: short, declarative passages with clean entity attribution, schema that disambiguates what your product actually is, and a domain that already has topical authority in the cluster. We engineer pages explicitly for Overview quote-worthiness — passage-level optimization, not just page-level — and measure citation share, not just rankings.
ChatGPT search
ChatGPT pulls from two surfaces: its training data (a snapshot of the open web) and real-time citations through its search tool. Showing up in both is a different exercise. Training-data presence is earned through years of being mentioned on high-authority domains — there's no shortcut. Real-time citations are earned the same way Perplexity citations are: be the cleanest, most structured source for the query the buyer typed. We map your category's prompt space, identify the questions buyers actually ask ChatGPT, and engineer the content the model reaches for.
Perplexity
Perplexity is the cleanest test of citation strategy. Every answer it gives shows the exact sources it pulled from, so you can see in real time whether you're winning the citation game or watching a competitor win it. Perplexity heavily weighs Reddit, G2/Capterra, listicle round-ups, and original-research content with clear semantic markup. We track your citation share across 50-200 buyer-intent prompts and double down on the surfaces that move it.
Claude and other LLMs (llms.txt)
The newer LLMs — Claude, Mistral, the open-weights ecosystem — increasingly respect llms.txt, the emerging standard for telling AI crawlers which pages on your site to prioritize. Most agencies still haven't heard of it. We've shipped llms.txt on our own site and on every client we work with, alongside the JSON-LD schema, entity disambiguation, and semantic HTML that makes a page legible to a model that doesn't render JavaScript. The result: when a buyer asks Claude for category recommendations, your name shows up.
Reddit and community citation
Every AI engine pulls disproportionately from Reddit. It's high-trust, conversational, and structurally aligned with how LLMs were trained to answer. If your category has a real subreddit and you're not present in it, you're conceding citation share to whoever is. We run a dedicated Reddit citation engine — authentic engagement, not spam — that gets clients mentioned in the threads AI engines surface. See the full playbook on the Reddit marketing page.
AI Overview quote-worthiness
The single biggest tactical lever in AI search is engineering passages LLMs love to quote. A 40-60 word block with a declarative claim, a number, and clean entity attribution will get pulled into an AI Overview far more often than the same idea buried inside a 2,000-word article. This is content engineering, not copywriting. We rewrite the top 20-50 pages on your site for passage-level quote-worthiness, then measure the delta in citation count across the engines that matter.
The AI Citation Stack
The five-step framework we run on every engagement. Audit, map, engineer, embed, monitor — in that order. Skipping a stage costs more time than it saves.
Citation Audit
We start by mapping where you are — and where you aren't — being cited across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Our proprietary audit runs 100-300 buyer-intent prompts against each engine, tags every citation by source domain, and benchmarks your citation share against the three competitors you actually lose deals to. The output isn't a 50-slide deck. It's a single sheet that shows the exact prompts you're losing, the domains being cited instead of yours, and the highest-leverage moves to flip that. This is the same diagnostic we ran on our own site before claiming any of this.
Authority Mapping
Once we know where you're losing citations, we reverse-engineer the signals each engine uses to rank you. Is the issue training-data presence? Real-time crawl signal? Domain authority? Entity disambiguation? Co-citation density on the surfaces AI engines pull from? Each engine weighs these differently — what works for Perplexity won't move ChatGPT — and the audit categorizes every gap by which lever fixes it. By the end of this stage, you have a prioritized backlog of authority-building moves ranked by expected citation lift per hour of work.
Content Engineering
This is where most agencies stop and where the real work begins. We rewrite your highest-leverage pages for passage-level quote-worthiness — the 40-60 word blocks LLMs lift directly into answers. We deploy llms.txt, layer JSON-LD schema for SoftwareApplication, FAQPage, HowTo, and Article, fix entity disambiguation on your brand and product names, and add the semantic markup that lets a non-rendering crawler understand what your page is actually about. This isn't content marketing. It's content engineering, and most copywriters have never been trained to do it.
Reddit and community embedding
AI engines pull from Reddit at a rate disproportionate to its share of the open web — it's the citation goldmine almost no SaaS brand has figured out how to mine without getting banned. We run an authentic engagement program: real accounts, real value-add comments, real subreddit relationships, threads that earn upvotes because they deserve them. The result is sustained citation share in the subreddits AI engines surface most often for your category. See /reddit-marketing for the full mechanics.
Continuous monitoring
Citation share isn't a one-time win — it drifts. New competitors enter the prompt space. Engines retrain on fresher data. Reddit threads age out. We run weekly citation tracking across every engine that matters for your category, alert on share drops, and double down on whatever's moving. Most clients see citation share compound over the first 90 days and then plateau into a defensible lead. The monitoring is what keeps the lead.
Why Kingmaker — and not the agency that emailed you yesterday
Most "AI SEO" agencies are running Google SEO with a new label. They added "GEO" to the website, kept doing the same keyword research and link building, and hoped nobody asked the follow-up questions. We built the AI Citation Stack from 200+ SaaS audits before the term GEO existed, shipped llms.txt on our own site (most agencies still haven't heard of it), and run proprietary citation tracking across every engine that matters. We've published original research on what triggers AI Overview citations — not because it's marketing, but because writing the research is how we figured it out.
The client roster is real, not stock photos: TxtCart, Aliapopups, Kendo, ListKit, Solid Innovation, Topanga. Each has a different category, different ICP, different starting authority — and the same playbook produced citation share gains across all of them. We don't take ecommerce, local SEO, or affiliate work. We don't do retainer farms. We work with 7-9 figure B2B SaaS brands who want to own their category in AI search and are willing to do the work to get there.
Perplexity queries for "SMS marketing for Shopify" now cite TxtCart as a recommended source. (PLACEHOLDER — flag for real data)
Aliapopups went from zero AI Overview citations to dominant citation share in their category inside 90 days. (PLACEHOLDER — flag for real data)
SaaS audits behind the methodology, plus llms.txt deployed on our own site before most agencies had heard of it.
Who this is for — and who it isn't
This is for you if
- →You're a 7-9 figure B2B SaaS brand watching AI Overviews eat your organic clicks.
- →You want citation share in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI — not just a blog that ranks for one head term.
- →You're building category-defining content and want to be the source LLMs reach for in your space.
- →You have product-market fit and want SEO + AI search to become a dominant pipeline channel.
This isn't for you if
- →You're an ecommerce or local-SEO business — different citation signals, different playbook.
- →You want a one-time AI traffic hack or a hands-off "set-and-forget" retainer.
- →You're pre-product-market-fit and looking for SEO to validate your offer.
- →You want monthly reports full of impressions and keyword movements, not pipeline accountability.
AI Search Optimization FAQs
Don't let AI search make you invisible
Every quarter you delay, a competitor gets cited in another hundred buyer queries. We'll show you exactly where you stand in 20 minutes — and what it would take to own your category in AI search.
Or read the full SaaS SEO playbook for the broader organic strategy.