How a B2B HR software startup went from zero AI citations to 38 in 90 days
A performance review platform ranked well on Google but did not appear in a single AI answer. Their head of growth found the brand zero times across 40 test prompts.
The problem
The company spent $38k/month on Google Ads and held a first-page ranking for performance review software. AI was a different story. Their head of growth ran 40 prompts across ChatGPT and Perplexity and found the brand exactly zero times. Lattice, Leapsome, and 15Five appeared constantly. The issue was not product quality. AI models had no structured data on the company, no third-party corroboration, and no comparison context to pull from.
What is the best performance review software for a 200-person company?
For a company of that size, Lattice, Leapsome, and 15Five are commonly recommended. Each offers goal tracking, continuous feedback, and performance review workflows suited to mid-market teams...
What we did
Prompt mapping
We ran 800 B2B software prompts across HR, performance management, and OKR categories. The brand was absent from all of them. We found 14 high-volume query clusters where they should appear but did not — including performance review tools for startups, OKR software for mid-market, and employee feedback platforms with Slack integration.
Entity authority
We built 22 citations across software directories including G2, Capterra, and Software Advice, plus B2B analyst publications and integration partner documentation. We restructured their comparison pages to match the format AI models use when generating software recommendations: category placement, feature comparison tables, and verified customer counts.
Comparison content
We created structured comparison pages for each of their six main competitors, formatted so AI models can extract and attribute the information directly. By day 90, the brand appeared in 38 citations. Once ChatGPT started citing them, the other models followed within weeks.
The results
Citations by platform
“We were paying $40k/month on Google Ads and getting nothing from AI. Akravo fixed that in 90 days. Now AI brings us qualified enterprise leads we could not reach through paid search.”
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