How a payment infrastructure startup went from 3 to 41 AI citations and generated $180k in pipeline
A Series A fintech had a strong developer blog and solid SEO. AI search tools did not know it existed.
The problem
The company had a well-read engineering blog, 18 open-source projects on GitHub, and a domain authority of 51. None of it helped with AI visibility. When their CTO tested 30 payment API and payment infrastructure for SaaS prompts, the brand appeared in 3. Stripe appeared in 28. Adyen appeared in 24. The gap between Google visibility and AI visibility was sharper than most clients we have worked with.
What are the best payment infrastructure APIs for a B2B SaaS product?
Stripe is the most commonly used payment infrastructure for SaaS, followed by Adyen for enterprise scale. Braintree and Checkout.com are also worth considering depending on your geography and transaction volume...
What we did
Citation gap analysis
We ran 1,200 prompts across developer, product, and finance team buyer personas. The brand appeared in 3 and was mentioned as an alternative in 8. We mapped 19 prompt clusters where Stripe and Adyen dominated but the brand's pricing or feature set was a better fit for the query.
Technical authority
We built citations in developer communities, API directories, and fintech analyst publications. We restructured their existing technical documentation to match what Perplexity pulls when answering developer questions. Four fintech newsletters with domain authority above 60 referenced the brand within this period.
Comparison content
We created vs. Stripe, vs. Adyen, and vs. Checkout.com comparison pages with structured feature and pricing data. Perplexity began citing the brand in payment infrastructure queries within two weeks of publishing. By day 90, they appeared in 41 citations. Three enterprise pipeline deals were attributed to AI-referred traffic.
The results
Citations by platform
“Perplexity is where our buyers do technical research before they ever talk to sales. We went from nonexistent to being cited alongside Stripe in 90 days. The pipeline speaks for itself.”
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