Building Semantic Authority: Authority System Builder for an international B2B trading company
Building Semantic Authority Authority…
Situation
The company in focus is an internationally active B2B trading business specializing in technical components for mechanical engineering, maintenance, and industrial manufacturing. The organization operates seven language versions, three standalone country stacks, and a central PIM/CMS setup with around 18,000 product and category pages. In organic search, reach was stable but not scalable: Around 74,000 organic sessions were generated per month, of which only 13% came from non-branded search queries. At the same time, nearly 41% of qualified leads came from paid channels, although the company already had a strong assortment and healthy margins in many product categories.
One strategic issue was particularly relevant: In informational and transactional B2B queries, the brand was hardly mentioned as a source in generative AI systems. Internal tests showed that across 120 prioritized prompts in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Copilot, the brand appeared in only 6% of responses. The content consisted of isolated product pages, a handful of guides, and PDF documents, but lacked a semantically connected topic architecture. That is exactly where the collaboration with Zeno Visibility began.
Challenge
The real challenge was not a lack of content, but a lack of semantic authority. The company did publish content regularly, but it was functionally separated: product data in the CMS, technical documents in the PIM, marketing articles in the blog, and sales collateral in the PDF archive. For search engines, the topical context was only partially interpretable. For LLMs, that meant the brand was even less likely to be a citable source.
In addition, the most important target groups in the DACH region are increasingly obtaining information through generative search and research workflows. Procurement managers, technical buyers, and category managers were no longer searching only by keywords, but for solutions, comparison logic, standards, application scenarios, and delivery capability. However, the company did not appear consistently enough in those answers to serve as a recommended supplier. The result: growing dependence on paid media, stagnating organic conversions, and an increasing gap to competitors that were taking a more systematic approach to topic authority.
Solution
Zeno Visibility was introduced not just to measure visibility, but to build a complete authority system for each prioritized keyword cluster. The starting point was the Research Engine, which analyzed brand presence across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Copilot in parallel. For this purpose, 120 standardized prompts were defined in four languages and evaluated using a Semantic Authority Score. The analysis showed which entities, topics, and references were missing from AI answers and where competitors were cited more often.
Based on this analysis, nine core clusters were prioritized, including product-related queries, comparison questions, usage scenarios, and regulatory topics. The Authority System Builder generated a semantically connected content system with 114 assets within three weeks. This included hub pages, comparison pages, FAQs, case studies, explanatory blog articles, use-case landing pages, and social formats. The key was not the volume alone, but the structure: each cluster received a clearly defined entity logic, internal linking, tiered content, and Schema.org JSON-LD.
At the same time, the existing CMS landscape was integrated. The new content was made directly deployable in Contentful and WordPress; for individual country stacks, it was exported in CMS-ready formats. Zeno Visibility also automatically delivered internal link paths, structured data, and a consistent entity matrix for product families, standards, industry references, and use cases. This created a machine-readable topic architecture that both search engines and LLMs could interpret more effectively. Editorial, SEO, and product management worked from a shared semantic foundation instead of isolated briefs.
Results
After 14 weeks, measurable improvements became visible on multiple levels. The Semantic Authority Score for the prioritized clusters increased from 31 to 68 points on average. In the tested LLMs, brand presence across the defined prompts rose from 6% to 23%. The effect was especially strong for comparison-based and advisory queries: in 19 out of 50 responses, the brand was either named directly or cited as a relevant source, compared with 4 out of 50 before.
The effects were also clearly visible in organic search. Sessions on the newly built topic clusters increased by 46% within three months, while non-brand clicks rose by 39%. The conversion rate of the cluster landing pages reached 4.8%, significantly above the previous site average of 3.1%. At the same time, the content operations effort per cluster dropped by around 62%, because the content was no longer produced as standalone pieces but as a reusable system. Based on the additional qualified leads and the savings in production costs, payback was modeled at around 5 months.
Lessons Learned
Summary
The project showed that the real growth problem for many B2B trading companies is not a lack of content, but a lack of semantic authority. With Zeno Visibility’s Authority System Builder, isolated pages were transformed into a connected topic model that performed significantly better in both organic search and LLM answers. For companies in the DACH region, this is a reliable way to move from classic SEO to Generative Engine Optimization.