How does the Sort-It Audit work?

The Sort-It Audit is a deep dive into your current marketing - what's working, what's wasting budget, and where the real opportunities are. You'll come away with a clear, prioritised action plan that's tied to your business goals, not just a list of vague recommendations.

What results can I expect from a Retained Partnership?

Most clients see a noticeable shift within the first 90 days - more consistent activity, sharper messaging, and better-qualified leads. Longer term, you can expect a structured marketing function that actually drives revenue, not just impressions.

What kinds of businesses do you work with?

Glint works with established B2B service businesses - think consultancies, agencies, professional services firms, and tech-enabled companies. If you've been relying on referrals, have wasted money on marketing that went nowhere, or just need someone to bring proper strategy to the table, you're likely a great fit.

Do I need a big in-house marketing team to work with you?

Not at all. Many of our clients come to us precisely because they don't have that resource. We work as an extension of your team - bringing the strategy, structure, and execution so you don't have to hire a full department to get results.

What makes Glint different from other marketing agencies?

We lead with brand first. That means before we talk about channels or campaigns, we make sure your positioning is clear and your marketing is integrated across at least three touchpoints. It's the difference between scattered activity and a plan that compounds over time.

Can an agency guarantee that my business will appear in ChatGPT or Claude?

No. Inclusion in an AI answer cannot be bought or guaranteed, and any agency promising it is misrepresenting how these systems work. What a partner can do is make your business easier to retrieve, easier to interpret and better corroborated by independent sources, which is what these platforms rely on when they name suppliers. Outcomes still depend on your foundations, your market and indexing timing you do not control.

Is AI visibility different from traditional SEO?

They overlap but they are not the same. SEO is largely concerned with ranking a page for a query. AI visibility depends on whether a system can retrieve your content, extract a clear answer from it and find enough corroboration elsewhere to be comfortable naming your business. A company can rank well on Google and still be absent from AI answers when its services, audience and proof are unclear.

Should I choose an SEO specialist or a wider B2B marketing partner?

It depends on your bottleneck. If your positioning is settled, your website is sound and the gap is technical, a specialist is efficient. If your marketing feels busy but disconnected, or buyers cannot quickly tell why they should choose you, the constraint is strategic and a senior-led B2B partner will be a better fit. Diagnose the bottleneck before you choose the supplier type.

Do we need to rebuild our website before improving AI visibility?

Rarely. Most established B2B sites need content, structure and proof work rather than a rebuild. A rebuild only becomes sensible when core content cannot be rendered as readable text, the information architecture prevents sensible internal linking, or performance problems stop pages being accessed reliably. Any agency recommending a rebuild should be able to explain precisely which of those applies to you.

What should an AI visibility audit include?

It should cover technical accessibility, website and content structure, commercial positioning, service page clarity, published client proof and third-party validation, and how your business currently appears for unbranded buyer questions across search and AI platforms. It should conclude with a written assessment and a prioritised action plan, not a list of undifferentiated recommendations.

How should an agency measure progress?

With a documented baseline recorded before work starts, then regular reporting that separates unbranded discovery from branded search, tracks visibility for the buyer questions that matter commercially, and connects activity to enquiry quality. Reporting that shows only rankings or total traffic tells you very little about whether buyers are finding and trusting you.

Is this work suitable for a small B2B service business?

Yes, provided the scope matches the size of the business. Smaller firms often benefit most, because clarity and published proof compensate for a smaller marketing budget. The work usually starts with positioning and a handful of well-built service pages rather than a broad programme across every channel.

AI visibility guide

How to choose a UK agency for AI search visibility and B2B marketing

Choosing an agency for AI search visibility is not about finding someone who promises to get you into ChatGPT. It is about finding a partner who can make your business clearer, more credible and easier to recommend wherever buyers research suppliers.

This guide explains what to look for, the questions to ask and the warning signs to avoid when choosing a UK B2B marketing partner for AI-led discovery.

Explore the Sort-It Audit

AI visibility is bigger than a new SEO service

Strong visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI results does not come from a single technique. It depends on a set of connected foundations that reinforce each other.

Clear commercial positioning that states who you help and why you are the sensible choice.
Technically accessible website content that can be reached, read and parsed.
Useful, answer-focused service and insight pages written around real buyer questions.
Client evidence and third-party validation that corroborate your claims.
Consistent brand and founder information across your site and external profiles.
Ongoing measurement of unbranded visibility, separate from branded search.

Search engine optimisation is part of this work, and it should be done properly. But AI visibility is not a standalone technical add-on that can be bolted onto an otherwise unclear business. If buyers cannot quickly tell what you do and why it matters, no amount of markup will make an AI system confident enough to recommend you. Our guide to why B2B businesses do not show up in ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini covers the underlying diagnosis in more detail.

Glint frames this work through three connected conditions: whether your business can be found, understood and trusted. Read the Glint Visibility Architecture to see how Retrievability, Extractability and Authority work together.

Signs you may need a strategic visibility partner

Most businesses do not go looking for an agency because of a single failure. They do it because several of the following are true at once.

Your business is respected offline but difficult to find online.
Your marketing activity feels busy but disconnected.
You rely heavily on referrals and want more predictable inbound demand.
Your website explains what you do but does not clearly differentiate why buyers should choose you.
You are publishing content but not appearing for relevant search or AI-led buyer questions.
You have an internal team but lack senior strategic direction.
You are unsure whether to prioritise positioning, website improvements, content, search, social or authority building.

If three or more apply, the constraint is usually direction rather than effort.

If your business is not appearing when buyers ask ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for recommendations, start with our diagnostic guide before deciding what support you need.

What to look for in an AI-search visibility partner

Seven criteria separate a partner who will improve your commercial visibility from one who will simply keep you busy.

Criterion 01

They begin with your business and buyer, not an AI tool

A credible partner will want to understand your commercial offer, your audience, your sales process and the market you operate in before recommending a single tactic. Visibility work only pays back when it is pointed at the buyers you actually want and the questions they actually ask.

Expect early conversations about margin, deal size, sales cycle length and the clients you would like more of, not a demonstration of software.

What good looks like

They ask about your best and worst clients before they talk about channels.
They can restate your commercial goal in their own words.
Recommendations are tied to specific buyer decisions, not generic best practice.

Questions to ask

How will you define our priority buyer questions?
How will you connect visibility work to our positioning and commercial goals?

Warning sign

A proposal built around a list of AI tools without a clear understanding of the business.

Criterion 02

They can explain their approach clearly

If you cannot explain the approach to your board or your sales lead, it is not clear enough. A good partner makes the work understandable in practical terms and is honest about what is known, what is likely and what is still uncertain.

Three plain questions are usually enough to frame the whole conversation. Can people and platforms find us? Can they understand and use our information? Is there enough evidence to trust us?

We use those three questions as the basis of the Glint Visibility Architecture, which gives buyers a shared language for the work.

What good looks like

Jargon is explained or avoided.
Each recommendation comes with a reason and an expected effect.
You can repeat the approach back accurately after one meeting.

Questions to ask

Can you explain your approach without using acronyms?
Which of the three questions is weakest for us, and how do you know?

Warning sign

Explanations that rely on jargon or proprietary language you cannot interrogate.

Criterion 03

They combine strategy, content, technical foundations and authority

Visibility improves when several things move together. A credible partner should know when the priority is positioning, when it is core service pages, when it is content structure, when it is technical accessibility, and when it is proof or third-party signals.

Just as importantly, they should be able to tell you which of those things does not need attention yet.

What good looks like

They can sequence work across strategy, content, technical and authority.
They are willing to say a workstream is not your bottleneck.
Specialist input is brought in deliberately rather than sold by default.

Questions to ask

Which of these four areas is our biggest constraint, and why?
How do these workstreams connect in practice?

Warning sign

Treating AI visibility as only schema, only content or only PR.

Criterion 04

They understand B2B buying journeys

B2B service buying is not consumer marketing at a higher price. Decisions run over months, involve several stakeholders, carry commercial and reputational risk, and are shaped as much by trust as by capability.

An agency that understands this will build visibility around the reassurance a buying group needs, not around volume metrics that never reach a shortlist conversation.

What good looks like

They talk about buying groups, not single personas.
They plan for the questions procurement and finance ask, not only the initial search.
They understand that referrals now trigger research rather than replace it.

Questions to ask

How will you support a buying group rather than a single decision maker?
How does your approach change for a six-month sales cycle?

Warning sign

Consumer-style tactics and vanity metrics applied to a considered B2B purchase.

Criterion 05

They make senior expertise accessible

You should know who is doing the strategic thinking, how decisions are made and how recommendations connect to the wider business. Senior involvement at the pitch followed by junior delivery is one of the most common sources of disappointment in agency relationships.

Ask who you will speak to in month four, not month one.

What good looks like

The person leading strategy is named and available.
There is a clear decision-making route when priorities change.
Your internal team is treated as a collaborator, not a bottleneck.

Questions to ask

Who will lead strategy, and how much of their time do we get?
Who will we be working with in six months?

Warning sign

Senior names in the pitch who disappear once the contract is signed.

Criterion 06

They use evidence rather than promises

AI platforms change frequently, and no agency can guarantee inclusion in a particular answer. Anyone who promises it is either misunderstanding the systems or misrepresenting them.

What a good partner can do is establish a baseline, show what is changing over time, and explain the reasoning behind each recommendation so you can judge it on its merits.

What good looks like

A documented baseline before work begins.
Reporting that separates unbranded discovery from branded search.
Clear reasoning for each recommendation, including its limits.

Questions to ask

What baseline will you record before we start?
How will you show what changed and what caused it?

Warning sign

Guaranteed rankings, guaranteed citations or guaranteed lead volumes.

Criterion 07

They give you a clear priority order

You should leave the early stages of an engagement knowing what to fix first, what can reasonably wait and what good looks like at the end of the first quarter.

A prioritised plan also protects your budget. It stops you paying for content production before the positioning and website foundations are ready to support it.

What good looks like

A written order of work with reasons for the sequence.
An explicit list of what is deliberately being left until later.
Agreed measures of progress for the first 90 days.

Questions to ask

What are the first three things you would change, and why in that order?
What are we deliberately not doing yet?

Warning sign

A long list of activity with no sequence and no stated rationale.

Specialist, full-service agency or strategic marketing partner?

Three broad models exist, and each is genuinely right for a different situation. The question is not which is best, but which matches your current bottleneck.

AI-search or SEO specialist

Best suited to

Businesses with settled positioning and a solid website that need focused technical and search expertise.

Strengths

Deep technical knowledge of crawling, indexing, structure and retrieval.
Fast diagnosis of accessibility and on-page issues.
Efficient where the commercial story is already clear.

Potential limitations

Rarely equipped to resolve positioning or messaging problems.
Can optimise pages that were never commercially persuasive.
Authority and proof building often sits outside the remit.

Full-service digital agency

Best suited to

Businesses that need broad delivery capacity across several channels at once.

Strengths

Wide range of skills under one contract.
Capacity to produce a high volume of work.
Useful when campaign delivery is the main requirement.

Potential limitations

Strategy can be thin relative to delivery.
Senior attention is often spread across many accounts.
Channels can be managed as separate projects rather than one system.

Senior-led strategic B2B marketing partner

Best suited to

Established B2B service businesses that need direction as much as delivery.

Strengths

Positioning, content, website and visibility work planned together.
Senior involvement in the decisions that matter.
Prioritisation based on commercial impact rather than channel preference.

Potential limitations

Not the cheapest option for pure execution volume.
Specialist technical or production work may be brought in.
Requires internal availability for strategic input.

Glint is designed for established B2B service businesses that need senior marketing strategy, clearer positioning, practical content and visibility improvement to work together, rather than being managed as disconnected projects. That is the basis of our retained partnerships.

12 questions to ask before you choose

Take these into every conversation and compare the answers side by side. The quality of the questions an agency asks you back is often as informative as the answers themselves.

1What will you assess before recommending work?
2How will you define our highest-value buyer questions?
3How will you improve our visibility beyond Google rankings?
4What will you change on our core website and service pages?
5How will you strengthen our proof, expertise and authority?
6Who will lead the strategy and day-to-day work?
7How will you work with our internal team, founder or sales lead?
8What should we expect in the first 90 days?
9How will you measure unbranded visibility separately from branded searches?
10What will you not recommend, and why?
11How will we know what to prioritise first?
12What happens if our needs change after the initial assessment?

Red flags when choosing an AI-search agency

Any one of these is worth questioning. Two or more together usually means the proposal has been written for a category of business rather than for yours.

Guaranteed placement in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Google AI results.
Tool-heavy proposals with no reference to your offer, buyers or commercial goals.
Generic content production before a clear positioning or website assessment.
No plan for client proof, founder expertise or third-party validation.
Reporting that only covers rankings or traffic.
No explanation of who is doing the strategic work.
A one-size-fits-all package with no prioritisation.

Choose clarity before activity

The best agency is not necessarily the one offering the longest service list. A broad set of capabilities is only useful when someone senior is deciding which of them your business actually needs, and in what order. Without that judgement, a long list becomes a long invoice.

B2B visibility improves when the business becomes easier to understand, easier to trust and easier to choose. That is a clarity problem before it is a channel problem, and it is why positioning, service pages and published proof tend to move the needle further than additional volume.

Glint starts with diagnosis rather than a predetermined package. The Sort-It Audit applies the Glint Visibility Architecture across your positioning, website, content, search, social and AI-led buyer research. If you would rather talk it through first, get in touch.

Not appearing in AI answers yet?

Read our diagnostic guide to understand the most common reasons established B2B businesses are absent from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini recommendations.

Read the diagnostic guide

Start with a clear view of what needs fixing

The Sort-It Audit reviews your current visibility across website structure, positioning, content, search, social and AI-led buyer research. You receive a written assessment, a prioritised action plan and a strategic debrief before committing to ongoing work.

"Glint has brought a more creative and disciplined approach to our marketing; we now have a regular 'drumbeat' of activity on our socials, with a consistent tone of voice and messaging which supports our positioning in the market."
Alison Camps, Chairman, Quadrangle

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Written by Gala Jackson-Coombs, founder of Glint Marketing and a B2B marketing specialist with 13+ years of experience.