Industry
B2B Sales Training and Consultancy
Challenge
In 2024, organic traffic dropped across B2B - a response to AI platforms reshaping how buyers research and discover companies. Funnel Clarity had the content and the credibility. What they needed was a way to make both visible to a new class of search engine.
Results
After an AEO audit and six targeted technical changes, Funnel Clarity's AI-referred contacts converted to customers at 15%, compared to 3% for organic search. Results appeared in HubSpot within approximately one month.
Services
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) Audit, AI Visibility Monitoring Setup, AI HubSpot Source Attribution Configuration
Recognizing the Opportunity Early
Case Study Updated May 26, 2026
Funnel Clarity works with B2B sales teams to improve performance and consistency. When ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and tools like Perplexity started becoming how B2B buyers research their options, Tyler Vance, Funnel Clarity's Director of Client Engagement, took notice, but wanted the data before making any moves.
"We're a data-backed company. We didn't want a knee-jerk reaction. We wanted to find out what the hard data said about how to shift our strategy to become more visible to AI."
The Challenge: Strong Content, Low Visibility
Funnel Clarity had built a content-rich website over years of operation. The problem wasn't quality. It was structure. Their answers to common buyer questions were scattered across blog posts and landing pages.
Their About Us page lacked the verifiable human detail AI weighs for credibility. Page titles were written for clever positioning rather than literal description. Their privacy policy and terms pages were blocked from AI crawlers, which ended up being a standard legacy SEO setting that was now working against them. And schema markup, once prioritized, had quietly fallen out of date.
The result: AI couldn’t fully verify or recommend their expertise.
What Orange Marketing Did
Orange Marketing ran a full AEO audit of Funnel Clarity's website using AI Trust Signals, a purpose-built assessment tool that scores AI readability across key trust factors. The audit produced a clear, prioritized action plan. Before any changes were made, Orange Marketing also ensured HubSpot's AI referral source tracking was enabled in Funnel Clarity's portal so every improvement could be measured.
Rebecca Gonzalez, Orange Marketing CEO, discusses the work:
"When we ran the audit, we found gaps that are incredibly common but completely invisible to standard SEO tools. Funnel Clarity had strong authority, but their lack of structured data and blocked policy pages meant AI couldn't verify it."
Orange Marketing worked alongside Funnel Clarity to identify and implement six targeted changes:
- FAQ Page. Orange Marketing identified that buyer questions were scattered site-wide and recommended consolidating them into a single dedicated FAQ page. Funnel Clarity built one with 60-70 Q&As. Tyler reports that this alone has really helped them be displayed more in AI searches.
- About Us Page. The existing page was thinned out. Orange Marketing recommended adding co-founder depth, LinkedIn profile links, and authored books, the kind of verifiable human detail AI uses to assess source credibility. Tyler explains:
"We were shocked that AI wasn't finding key things about us. Orange
helped us identify things we'd overlooked." - Page Headers and URL Structure. Several page titles were written for marketing appeal rather than clarity. Orange Marketing guided a rewrite toward literal, descriptive language, renaming a page previously framed around "quota crushing sales" to "Consultative Sales Training", and reorganized URL structures to match page content directly.
- AI Crawler Unblocking. Privacy policy and terms pages were blocked from crawlers per standard legacy SEO practice. Orange Marketing flagged this as an active liability: these pages help AI confirm a company is real and legitimate. Funnel Clarity unblocked them.
- Contact Page Response Commitment. A simple, explicit promise, you'll hear back within 24 hours, was added to the contact page. Buyers notice it. AI does too.
- Schema Markup. Orange Marketing guided a full schema review. Tyler used AI tools to generate the updated code and embedded it directly into HubSpot CMS pages, bypassing the plugin-injection issue that makes schema invisible to ChatGPT and Claude, with no developer required.
The Results: 15% AI Contact-to-Customer Rate
Within approximately one month, HubSpot's AI referral tracking told a clear story: AI-referred contacts converted to customers at 15%, compared to 3% for organic search. And that difference comes down to the buyer. AI contacts arrive pre-qualified and ready to talk. Tyler notes:
"I was surprised how quickly we jumped, not only in the trust signals score, but in seeing results with how high traffic and contacts were being converted vs. before."
Orange Marketing has observed the same dynamic in their own HubSpot portal. AI referrals consistently produce the highest contact-to-customer conversion rate of any channel, not because the volume is highest, but because the intent is.
Six Changes. One Month. A New Category of Buyer.
Funnel Clarity's results make a simple argument: winning in AI search doesn't require a content overhaul or a paid media budget. It requires making it easy for AI to find you, verify you, and trust you.
For B2B companies watching organic traffic decline and wondering where to start, the answer is often closer than it looks.
Is your website visible to AI? [Talk to Orange Marketing →]
FAQs
What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and why does it matter for B2B companies now?
AEO is the practice of structuring your website so that AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can find, verify, and recommend your company. It matters now because B2B buyers increasingly use these tools to research vendors before ever visiting a website. If your content isn't readable and credible to AI, you're invisible to a growing segment of your market, regardless of how strong your traditional SEO is.
Our website has years of quality content. Why would AI still struggle to find or recommend us?
Quality content alone isn't enough. AI platforms need to verify credibility through specific structural signals: schema markup, literal page titles and URLs, accessible policy pages, and detailed information about the people behind the company. Content scattered across dozens of blog posts and landing pages is harder for AI to parse than a well-organized, clearly labeled site. The issue is rarely what you've said, it's how it's structured.
Which website changes tend to have the biggest impact on AI visibility?
The highest-impact changes tend to be consolidating buyer questions into a single dedicated FAQ page, rewriting page titles and URLs to use plain descriptive language rather than clever marketing phrasing, unblocking privacy and terms pages from crawlers, adding verifiable team detail to your About Us page, updating schema markup, and adding explicit response commitments on your contact page. None of these require a content overhaul, they're structural and often implementable without a developer.
How quickly can AEO improvements produce measurable results?
Based on documented experience, meaningful results can appear within approximately one month of implementation. Because AI-referred visitors tend to arrive with higher intent and pre-formed confidence in a company, the conversion impact can be significant even when traffic volume is modest. Measuring this requires proper source attribution tracking in your CRM or marketing platform before changes are made, so you have a clean baseline to compare against.
How is an AI-referred contact different from a typical organic search lead?
AI-referred contacts have typically already had their questions answered by the AI platform before reaching your site. They arrive pre-qualified, with a clearer sense of who you are and whether you fit their need. This tends to produce higher contact-to-customer conversion rates compared to organic search, not because volume is larger, but because intent is stronger. For B2B companies with longer sales cycles, this quality difference can be more valuable than raw traffic growth.