// Case study · CRM

A $7M ARR CRM company moved from #14 to #6 in the Shortlist Index in 11 weeks.

Mid-market CRM running a Growth retainer. Started invisible in three of five AI engines. Eleven weeks later, cited in all five — and ranked above two competitors with 4× the marketing budget.

Client: B2B CRM (anonymized) · ARR $7M · Growth retainer · started 2026-02-10 · anonymized at client's request

// before

22 / 100

Rank #14 in CRM

Cited only in ChatGPT and Perplexity, never on category-level prompts. Zero presence in AI Overviews. Reddit threads about the CRM existed but never made it into AI responses.

Per-engine

ChatGPT

PPLX

Gemini

Claude

AIO

// after · 11 weeks later

41 / 100

Rank #6 · ▲ +19 points

Cited across all five engines. Top-3 on persona-specific prompts ("best CRM for solo founders who hate Salesforce"). Made the Shortlist Index Top 10 in week 9.

Per-engine

ChatGPT

PPLX

Gemini

Claude

AIO

// What we did

The work, in order.

01
Restructured the top 8 buyer-intent pages with direct-answer leads, FAQ schema, and named-entity consistency. Six weeks of work, ranked by impact × effort.
02
Launched a Reddit-first authority-surface push: 4 organic threads in /r/SaaS and /r/sales, plus replies to 14 high-traffic comparison threads — no spam, all written by the founder.
03
Earned two podcast spots (Indie Hackers + a vertical SaaS show). Both episodes mentioned the brand by name in the opening.
04
Shipped a /vs comparison page targeting the prospect's two largest competitors — ranked in week 5.
05
Re-ran the Shortlist Score weekly. We dropped the two prompts that were structurally unwinnable (the brand isn't in those buyer journeys) and added three that better matched their actual ICP.

// What buyers actually see now

The proof is the AI response, not the dashboard.

Type "best CRM for solo founders" into ChatGPT or Perplexity today and the brand appears in the top 5 of the recommendation list 78% of the time. Pre-engagement: 12%. The CMO confirmed three inbound demos last month came from prospects who said "ChatGPT recommended you."

// Honest caveats

What we want you to know before signing.

AI Overviews coverage is still partial (32/100). Google has a stronger preference for sites with high domain authority — that compounds slowly. We expect this to keep climbing through month 6.
Claude (Anthropic) underperforms relative to the other engines for this client. Likely a training-data gap; we're testing whether the new content cycle closes it.
11 weeks is fast — most clients see a 12–15 point lift in this window, not 19. Don't anchor on this number for forecasting.

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A $7M ARR CRM company moved from #14 to #6 in the Shortlist Index in 11 weeks.

Mid-market CRM running a Growth retainer. Started invisible in three of five AI engines. Eleven weeks later, cited in all five — and ranked above two competitors with 4× the marketing budget.

Client: B2B CRM (anonymized) · ARR $7M · Growth retainer · started 2026-02-10 · anonymized at client's request

The work, in order.

Restructured the top 8 buyer-intent pages with direct-answer leads, FAQ schema, and named-entity consistency. Six weeks of work, ranked by impact × effort.

Launched a Reddit-first authority-surface push: 4 organic threads in /r/SaaS and /r/sales, plus replies to 14 high-traffic comparison threads — no spam, all written by the founder.

Earned two podcast spots (Indie Hackers + a vertical SaaS show). Both episodes mentioned the brand by name in the opening.

Shipped a /vs comparison page targeting the prospect's two largest competitors — ranked in week 5.

Re-ran the Shortlist Score weekly. We dropped the two prompts that were structurally unwinnable (the brand isn't in those buyer journeys) and added three that better matched their actual ICP.

What we want you to know before signing.

AI Overviews coverage is still partial (32/100). Google has a stronger preference for sites with high domain authority — that compounds slowly. We expect this to keep climbing through month 6.

Claude (Anthropic) underperforms relative to the other engines for this client. Likely a training-data gap; we're testing whether the new content cycle closes it.

11 weeks is fast — most clients see a 12–15 point lift in this window, not 19. Don't anchor on this number for forecasting.