The challenge
Lumenpay ranked respectably for its head terms but was completely absent from AI-generated vendor shortlists. Baseline tracking across 180 buyer prompts found the brand named zero times, while three competitors appeared in more than half. Their documentation — by far their densest factual asset — was blocked from AI crawlers by an inherited robots directive nobody had reviewed in two years.
What we did
- 01
Fix the access problem first
Crawler log monitoring surfaced the blocked documentation subdomain within the first week. Unblocking it and adding structured navigation was, on its own, the single highest-impact change of the entire engagement.
- 02
Own the shortlist queries deliberately
Thirty-four comparison, alternatives and 'best X for Y' pages were built to a consistent standard: honest about competitor strengths, explicit about who should choose someone else, and structured with the labelled comparison tables models lift cleanly.
- 03
Restructure documentation for citation
Each documentation page was given a standalone definition block and answer-first summary, turning reference material into retrievable passages without changing what it said.
- 04
Earn corroboration where models look
Source-graph analysis identified eleven third-party domains the engines leaned on in the payments category. Nine placements were secured over five months, alongside a disclosed presence in four active community threads.
The outcome
By month seven, Lumenpay was named in 61% of tracked vendor-shortlist prompts, within four points of the category leader. Organic demo requests grew 5.1x over the same period, and the comparison page programme became the highest-converting content the company had ever published.
“The comparison page programme alone paid for the platform in a quarter. What surprised us was the AI tracking — we were absent from every shortlist prompt in our own category and had no idea. The fix started with a robots.txt line from 2024.”