The starting point
A Series B finance-operations tool with a good product, happy customers and a growing sales team. Their buyers had started asking AI models for shortlists before booking a single demo, and the answers weren't going their way.
On day one, only one of the five models we tested named them at all when asked about their category. When the models did describe them, they reached for the only independent source they could find: a funding announcement from 2021. The product had changed completely since then. The answers hadn't.
Their own website was detailed and accurate. No model quoted it.
What the audit found
The audit put the same buyer questions to five models and catalogued every source behind every answer. The pattern was clear. For finance-ops tooling, models leaned heavily on Reddit: threads where controllers, finance leads and ops people compared tools with no vendor in the room.
Our client was almost absent from those threads. Their competitors weren't, mostly because those competitors' users had been talking about them for longer. Nobody had asked our client's users to talk anywhere public.
What we did
Months one and two: organic, in the open
We mapped the communities where their buyers actually decide and settled on eleven of them. Then we did what we always do first: read a year of each one before posting anything.
The early contributions had nothing to do with the client. Month-end close questions, reconciliation headaches, honest comparisons of approaches. All posted from disclosed accounts with real histories, inside each subreddit's rules. When the product came up, it came up because it was the right answer to the question, and we said so when it wasn't.
Months two to four: a room of their own
The client's support inbox held thousands of good questions with good answers, all invisible to anyone outside the ticket. We used that backlog to seed a branded subreddit before inviting anyone, so the first visitors found a room that was already useful.
Their support lead and two engineers answered in public under their own names. Complaints got answered in the open rather than moved to email.
Months four to six: let the users talk
By then the work was mostly keeping up. Users had started answering each other's questions, and a long comparison thread written by a customer, not by us, began ranking for the questions their buyers asked.
What changed
- Models naming them went from one of five to five of five, for the same buyer questions, asked the same way as on day one.
- 1,340 more threads cite or recommend them than at the baseline.
- The user-written comparison thread became the top citation in three of the five models. The funding announcement stopped being the main source.
Six months from baseline to result, which is typical for this kind of work.
By the numbers
Twenty buyer questions, asked to five models on day one and again at months three and six. Same questions, same settings, fresh sessions.
| Measure | Day one | Month 3 | Month 6 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Models naming them (out of 5) | 1 | 3 | 5 |
| Answers naming them (out of 100) | 7 | 31 | 64 |
| Average position when named | 4th | 2nd | 1st |
| Threads citing or recommending them | 140 | 610 | 1,480 |
| Communities with active presence | 0 | 11 | 11 |
| Branded subreddit members | – | 12,400 | 31,000 |
| Support questions answered in public | 0 | 2,900 | 8,700 |
The sources that changed the answer
At day one, the five models drew on 23 distinct sources when describing the category. Our client appeared in three of them, and the most-cited was the 2021 funding announcement.
By month six, the sources looked different:
- The user-written comparison thread (r/Accounting, 4,300 upvotes, 1,160 comments) was the top citation in three of five models.
- Two threads in their own subreddit, both about month-end close workflows, were cited by two models each.
- The funding announcement dropped out of every answer.
Timeline
- Week 1: audit and baseline. Eleven communities mapped and ranked by how often models cited them.
- Weeks 2–5: listening and answering unrelated questions. No product mentions.
- Week 6: first mention of the product, in a thread asking for exactly what it does.
- Week 9: branded subreddit launched with 90 days of seeded content from the support backlog.
- Week 14: the comparison thread was posted, by a customer, without any prompting from us.
- Month 6: five of five models naming them on category questions.
In their words
"We'd spent two years trying to get analysts to mention us. It turned out our users just needed somewhere public to say it."
Head of Marketing, Finance-ops platform
What made it work
The client let the work be slow for a month, and let criticism stand. The thread that ended up carrying the result was written by a customer who mentioned a real weakness alongside the strengths. That honesty is part of why models trust it.