Earning AI citations for a forklift and material-handling supplier
Conversational, intent-matched content plus schema and citation work that took an industrial equipment supplier to top-three visibility across three AI platforms — 327 sessions at a 69.11% engagement rate.
Anonymised at the client’s request — results are real and unedited.
The challenge
The supplier sells and hires new and used forklifts, parts and servicing to warehouses, logistics operators and industrial businesses. Its traditional SEO was working — generating sessions, impressions and clicks from results pages — but as AI models started answering buyer questions directly, click-through rates began falling and traffic with them. Ranking on Google was no longer sufficient: the business needed to be cited and referenced wherever its buyers were actually searching, including inside AI models.
Our approach
Conversational, prompt-ready content
Created long-tail blogs, FAQs and prompt-ready content matched to how buyers phrase questions to an AI assistant — which is a full sentence about a problem, not a two-word keyword.
Schema markup and structured data
Implemented and kept updating structured data so AI systems could interpret the equipment range, hire options and service coverage without guessing.
Authority through citations and mentions
Built authority the way AI models measure it — citations, backlinks and natural brand mentions across the wider web, not just on-site content.
An llms.txt roadmap for AI models
Submitted an llms.txt file so AI systems referenced the correct, current pages when describing the business.
The results
- 327 sessions and 165 users from AI platforms, with monthly sessions rising steadily from April to August 2025 and peaking at 114 — the June-to-July jump being the clearest single step change.
- A 69.11% engagement rate from that AI-referred traffic, indicating visitors arriving pre-qualified by the answer that sent them.
- Top-three visibility across three AI platforms, with link presence and brand mentions inside AI answers on Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Key takeaway
In technical B2B categories, buyers ask AI assistants full questions before they ever open a supplier website. Content written the way those questions are actually phrased is what gets pulled into the answer.
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