How a performance marketing agency went from zero AI mentions to appearing in 19/25 searches for the best agencies
A 40-person performance marketing agency could not appear in a single AI answer. Three London competitors appeared in 15+ queries each.
The problem
The agency ran paid social and CRO campaigns for e-commerce clients. They had 14 case studies on their website, 12 Google reviews, and a Clutch profile. None of it showed up in AI. When the founder tested best performance marketing agencies for e-commerce across ChatGPT and Perplexity, the agency appeared zero times out of 25. The Google reviews were not connected to a structured entity. The Clutch profile was not optimized. The case studies had no structured data.
Which performance marketing agencies specialize in e-commerce brands in the UK?
For e-commerce performance marketing in the UK, Impression, Jellyfish, and Found are commonly cited. For DTC-focused work, House of Performance and Hallam have strong case studies in fashion and beauty...
What we did
Category ownership research
We mapped 650 prompts across performance marketing, paid social, CRO, and e-commerce categories. The agency had a real niche: mid-market DTC brands spending over £1m on paid media. We found 11 prompt clusters where that specific niche was the right answer but no structured entity existed to fill it.
Entity consistency
We audited the agency's presence across 34 directories, review platforms, and agency databases. Name, service descriptions, and specialty tags were inconsistent in 22 of them. We corrected all 34 and built 6 new citations in agency ranking databases that AI models pull from regularly.
Case study structured data
We reformatted 8 existing client case studies as structured data and added a thought leadership citation in a marketing trade publication. By day 90, the agency appeared in 19 of 25 target queries. Three retainers — totaling £180k ARR — were signed by clients who said they found the agency through an AI recommendation.
The results
Citations by platform
“We run paid media for other companies but could not get our own name in AI answers. It felt absurd. Akravo fixed a problem we did not know how to approach, and the results came faster than we expected.”
Want your brand recommended by AI?
We can show you exactly where your brand stands in AI results today, and what it would take to change that.