A founder considering a sale may ask which adviser handles software exits of a particular size. A buyer may ask who can source off-market targets in another jurisdiction. Those valuable questions do not contain your firm's name.
The measured gap. In a September 2026 directional sample, seven corporate-finance firms were recommended in 5 of 39 valid unbranded buyer answers. Most were understood when named directly. Far fewer entered a buyer's shortlist without that prompt.
The questions that matter
Buyers describe a situation before they name a supplier. The question set is written around the services, markets and client situations the firm can genuinely support.
Which boutique corporate-finance firms advise UK software founders on a lower-mid-market sale?
Who can run an international buyer search for an owner-managed industrial or services business?
Which advisers help financial-services firms raise growth capital or find a strategic buyer?
Who can identify and approach off-market acquisition targets in Europe or the United States?
Where visibility tends to break
- Sector and transaction experience exists in pitch material but not on crawlable public pages.
- Deal credentials are presented as logos or images without enough text to connect them to a buyer situation.
- Service pages use broad language that could describe hundreds of advisers.
- Team, firm and transaction facts are inconsistent across owned and independent sources.
What the measured pilot includes
Baseline
Your buyer questions are run repeatedly across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. We retain the raw answers and competitors named.
Diagnosis
We trace the answers to the owned pages and independent sources the engines use, then identify the evidence and technical gaps that can be substantiated.
Implementation
We prepare and ship the agreed content, internal-linking, entity and structured-data changes. Factual claims stay subject to client approval.
Proof
We run the same questions again against held-back controls, so movement is separated from ordinary answer volatility.
Start with the buyer situation you most want to win.
Send us your website and the mandate type you most want to win. We will check how the three engines treat that buying situation and whether a measured pilot is justified. The full pilot starts from GBP 500.
Common questions
Do we need to publish client-confidential deal information?
No. Public evidence can be limited to approved sectors, transaction types, ranges, geographies, team experience and already disclosed credentials.
Does this replace SEO?
No. Search and AI discovery share technical foundations, but the measurement is different. SEO tracks rankings and traffic; this work tracks whether an answer engine names and recommends the firm in a buying situation.
Can you guarantee inclusion in an AI shortlist?
No. We can establish the baseline, strengthen retrievable and corroborated evidence, implement approved fixes and show what happened afterwards.
What happens if the firm already appears?
We report that. We then test whether the result is consistent across engines and repeated runs, whether the description is accurate, and whether the firm appears for priority mandates rather than only branded questions.
Published 21 September 2026