Differentiation from Otterly.ai: How Zeno Visibility delivered not just LLM monitoring for an industrial company, but built autonomous AI authority
Differentiation from Otterly.ai How…
Initial Situation
The fictitious Rheinwerk Maschinenbau GmbH is a mid-sized industrial manufacturer from southern Germany with around 620 employees and annual revenue in the low hundreds of millions. The company develops components and special-purpose systems for the packaging, food, and process industries. Its sales process is highly consultative, buying cycles are long, and a large share of demand is generated through technical research, comparison queries, and application-focused content.
In marketing, the topic of AI visibility initially presented itself primarily as a monitoring problem. The team wanted to know whether the brand was being mentioned at all in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude for relevant industrial and application-related topics. As a first step, a pure LLM monitoring tool such as Otterly.ai was tested. The result was sobering: it provided reference data on brand presence, but no reliable method for increasing visibility in a targeted way.
At the outset, the values for 42 prioritized search and prompt combinations were low: only 11% of responses contained a brand reference, and in 0 out of 15 highly relevant purchase-phase prompts, Rheinwerk was named as a recommended solution. At the same time, the share of non-brand organic visits to key product pages fell by 14% compared with the previous quarter. The problem was therefore not just visibility, but a lack of semantic authority.
Challenge
The core question was: How can an industrial brand be not only found in generative search systems, but classified as a citable and recommended source? This is exactly where the limits of traditional LLM monitoring approaches became apparent. They measure how often a brand appears, but they do not change the underlying content and linking structure that models use to assess relevance and trust.
For Rheinwerk, this was business-critical. In early research phases, the brand lost out to large platforms, specialist portals, and competitors with far denser semantic coverage. Internal expertise did exist, but it was fragmented across PDF documents, product pages, trade fair materials, and individual blog posts. To AI models, the profile did not look like a coherent knowledge system. The result: low AI visibility, few citations, and little influence on the response logic in LLMs.
Solution Approach
After the monitoring test, Rheinwerk decided against yet another measurement solution and instead chose to build a structured AI Authority infrastructure with Zeno Visibility. The key reason was that Zeno Visibility not only monitors brand presence across major LLMs in parallel, but also derives and outputs a semantic authority system directly from the data.
The project approach consisted of four steps:
First, brand presence across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Copilot was measured for 42 prioritized topic clusters. This resulted in a Semantic Authority Score for each topic area. The weakest clusters were “Hygienic Design,” “Custom Systems for Food Processing,” and “Changeover Time Optimization.”
Instead of isolated SEO texts, Zeno Visibility developed a complete Authority System for each core keyword. For twelve strategic search intents, more than 100 semantically interconnected pieces of content were created: hub pages, technical FAQ modules, comparison pages, case study templates, application articles, glossary entries, and social snippets. The goal was not reach at any cost, but a closed body of evidence.
Zeno Visibility generated Schema.org JSON-LD, internal linking logic, and clear entity relationships for all core pages. This improved the semantic mapping of products, use cases, industries, and technical features. For an industrial company with complex product relationships, this was crucial, because generative systems evaluate not only text, but structure as well.
The content was transferred directly into the existing WordPress setup. For the content team, it was important that Zeno Visibility not only delivers export formats, but also accelerates editorial processes. The content was reviewed by subject matter experts before publication and then moved into a clear publishing plan. This turned a one-off project into a repeatable process for AI visibility.
The strategic difference to Otterly.ai was therefore clear: Otterly.ai showed where Rheinwerk was missing in LLMs. Zeno Visibility built the semantic substance needed for recommendations in generative systems.
Results
After 90 days and the expansion of 12 Authority Systems, measurable effects became visible. The Semantic Authority Score across the full portfolio rose from 31 to 67 points. In the prioritized prompt clusters, brand presence increased from 11% to 34%. The increase was especially pronounced for explanation-heavy topics: in eight out of 15 purchase-phase prompts, Rheinwerk was now mentioned at least once as a solution, manufacturer, or reference.
SEO and business metrics also improved. Organic visits to the newly built topic clusters increased by 38% compared with the previous quarter, while qualified contact inquiries from this content rose by 21%. Average time on the new hub and comparison pages was 2:46 minutes, significantly above the previous site average of 1:41 minutes.
Compared with a purely manual content build, the team saved around 60% in production time according to internal calculations. That amounted to roughly 4.5 person-days per topic cluster. ROI turned positive after six months: the additional pipeline contributions from the AI-optimized pages covered the project costs already in the second quarter after rollout.
Lessons Learned
Summary
With Zeno Visibility, Rheinwerk Maschinenbau made the leap from pure LLM monitoring to the operational development of AI Authority. Instead of merely determining that the brand was underrepresented in AI answers, semantic topic clusters, content systems, and machine-readable structures were built. The result was a measurable increase in AI visibility, more qualified traffic, and a significantly stronger position in generative search systems.