The way consumers discover and choose products and services is changing fast, as AI-powered tools increasingly shape which brands get recommended, and which get overlooked. To help brands navigate this shift, GALE is developing a new playbook for the AI era focused on boosting brand visibility in the answers consumers increasingly get from LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini. Recently, that approach delivered standout results for a nationally recognized home services brand.
The effort comes at a pivotal moment: home improvement demand has been volatile with rising costs and economic uncertainty, while the category remains a profit-rich battleground, with aggressive investment from both VC- and PE-backed challengers and long-standing incumbents. At the same time, reliance on LLMs for recommendations continues to grow in popularity.
GALE began by measuring this client’s “AI visibility” across national and local prompts and uncovered a clear challenge: for local queries, the brand was mentioned less than 40% of the time, often trailing top competitors. To close that gap, GALE and this client focused on what increasingly shapes AI answers: the third-party sources LLMs cite. The strategy centered on strengthening this client’s presence within those high-authority ecosystems, starting with Yelp.
Following a test in select cities, locations that advertised with Yelp saw a 7% greater lift in visibility in the LLM responses compared to the locations that didn’t. As a result, this client jumped to the top spot in the LLM visibility rankings within seven days of going live. Those gains were reflected in the underlying citation footprint: in cities where Yelp advertising was active, visibility went up by 28%; in cities it wasn’t, visibility declined by 21%.
Yelp also grew as an AI-cited source across the category during the same period—but only the cities where Yelp was actively being utilized converted that shift into positive results, underscoring the value of intentional partnerships. Before the effort, the home services brand trailed its top two competitors. After, it ranked #1.
The results illustrate that LLM brand visibility is measurable, and increasingly consequential. And the right KPI isn’t simply direct referral traffic from Yelp; it’s whether stronger authority signals are driving AI-led discovery and demand.
Every client will require a tailored strategy in this new era of marketing, shaped by factors like category dynamics and where customers are most actively researching and discussing providers. But this kind of strategic, deliberate action reflects how GALE continues to drive meaningful results for its clients.
