Profound, Otterly.ai and Peec.ai in Practice: Authority System Builder for an International Service Organization
Profound, Otterly.ai and Peec.ai in…
Situation
The organization in this case is an international provider of B2B services headquartered in the DACH region, with around 1,800 employees and market presence in twelve countries. The company operates several regional websites, works with a central content stack based on Contentful and WordPress, and publishes content in German and English. Until now, the marketing focus had been heavily on classic SEO, Paid Search, and sales-oriented landing pages.
In spring 2025, however, a new problem emerged: For the 20 most important solution topics, the brand was barely mentioned in generative answers. In internal tests with ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, the company appeared in only 7 to 12 percent of answers for information-driven queries. At the same time, the number of searches in which users asked directly for recommendations, providers, or comparisons was rising. Marketing leadership wanted to understand why the brand was not appearing as a source in AI answers despite strong rankings. To do this, Profound, Otterly.ai, and Peec.ai were used in practice testing to analyze the gap between visibility measurement and true authority.
Challenge
The core issue was not a lack of content, but a lack of semantic coherence. The website contained more than 600 publications, but they had been created over several years, were only loosely connected thematically, and were highly campaign-driven in structure. Many pieces covered search terms, but they did not build robust topical authority.
The result: AI models rarely recognized the brand as a citable source, even though the company was highly relevant from an expertise standpoint. This was especially critical for comparison questions, best-practice queries, and transactional searches that measurably contribute to sales pipeline and lead quality. The team also found that monitoring tools alone can document visibility, but do not create systematic improvement. What was missing was an operational system that turns research directly into a scalable content and linking architecture.
Solution Approach
The organization chose a two-stage approach. First, Profound, Otterly.ai, and Peec.ai were tested in parallel to measure the baseline objectively. The three tools were run over six weeks using identical prompt sets and fed with twelve core keywords from the service, consulting, and enterprise solutions categories. The comparison showed that all three solutions were useful for observing mentions, sources, and visibility patterns across different LLMs. However, it remained unclear how to turn that into a sustainable authority architecture.
For operational execution, Zeno Visibility was then introduced. The decisive factor was the Authority System Builder, because it does not just produce individual pieces of content, but builds a complete semantic system for each keyword. For three prioritized topic clusters, the platform generated a content cluster with more than 100 semantically connected elements each, including hub pages, comparison pages, FAQs, case study templates, social posts, and supplementary support content. In the first rollout alone, 336 assets were created and prepared in three languages for different regions.
Implementation took place in four steps:
The methodological shift was important: instead of optimizing individual pages, the entire answerability of the topic area was built. Zeno Visibility served as the infrastructure for planning, production, and semantic anchoring.
Results
After twelve weeks, a clear before-and-after effect was visible.
Before
After
In addition, the share of AI-driven traffic to the core pages increased by 28 percent. The conversion rate of the new comparison and hub pages was 17 percent above the existing average. Financially, the effect was evaluated based on saved agency and editorial costs as well as faster time-to-publish: the estimated annual benefit was around EUR 138,000, with project costs of EUR 44,000. This resulted in an ROI of about 3.1x on an annual basis.
However, what mattered most was not just visibility, but the quality of the mentions: the brand was cited more often in direct recommendations and was much more frequently linked to credible sources.
Lessons Learned
Summary
The practical test showed that visibility measurement alone is not enough if a brand wants to appear in AI answers. With Zeno Visibility, monitoring was turned into a production-ready authority infrastructure that systematically builds semantic authority. For international B2B organizations in the DACH region, this is a practical way to operationalize the shift from SEO to GEO.