One Category, Not the Other: What Three Live Tests Told Me About Being a Solo Consultant in AI Search

For the last several months I've been running a live, public experiment: testing whether my own consulting brand actually shows up when AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity get asked who can help with AI marketing work.

Alongside that, I've put real, deliberate work into making my brand consistent everywhere AI systems might encounter it. The same description of who I am and what I do, no matter where it appears. Structured data on my website that tells search engines and AI tools exactly what NextWise Studio is. Third-party mentions that back up that same story instead of contradicting it.

Somewhere in the middle of that work, a question I couldn't fully answer started nagging at me. I'm one person. My competitors in this space, at least the ones showing up in broad category searches, are agencies with dozens or hundreds of people, years of press coverage, and client rosters I can't match. Was I always going to lose this game just by being small?

I ran three tests this week that gave me a real, if uncomfortable, answer.

Test one: AI readiness, narrowed to an individual in the Bay Area.

I appear. First position. ChatGPT opened with "My first call: Jennifer Leonard, NextWise Studio," and described my actual positioning accurately, strategy plus hands-on delivery, without the overhead of a large agency, ahead of two other named individuals and firms.

Test two: lifecycle marketing and AI transformation, broad.

I don't appear at all. Six named firms show up instead.

Test three: the same lifecycle marketing and AI transformation question, narrowed the exact same way, individual, Bay Area.

I still don't appear. Five specific, well-credentialed people show up in my place, someone leading AI transformation for a 150-person marketing org at Elsevier, a VP of Revenue at Moz, others with real, current titles. Not vague results. Not a sign the query itself doesn't work when narrowed. It works. I'm just not one of the answers.

That third test is the one that actually taught me something.

Lifecycle marketing is real expertise of mine. It's in my background, it's on my site. But it is not what I've spent the last several months publishing about. Every blog post, every article, every LinkedIn post in this series has been about AI readiness and LLM visibility specifically. Lifecycle marketing hasn't been part of that content footprint at all.

AI visibility follows what you've written about, not the size of your team.

So the honest answer to my own question isn't "yes, solo consultants are structurally disadvantaged" or "no, size doesn't matter." It's narrower and more useful than either. Being small didn't cost me the AI readiness category. Sustained, specific, topical content built that one for me, and it can be rebuilt for another category the same way. But no amount of general brand consistency work automatically extends presence into an adjacent topic I haven't actually written about. The consistency I've been building has been consistent about one thing. It hasn't made me visible everywhere I have real expertise, only where I've actually shown up in writing.

That's not a disadvantage of being one person. It's a gap in what I've published, which happens to be entirely within my control to close.

What This Means for AI Search Category Visibility

AI search category visibility follows content footprint, not company size, so the practical question isn't how do we compete with bigger budgets. It's which specific categories are we actually building citation density in, and which are we assuming we own just because we're good at them.

For a solo consultant or small team, the instinct is usually to spread thin, one post on this, one post on that, covering the full range of what you can do. This experiment argues against that. Depth in one narrow, well-defined category beats shallow presence across five. Pick the specific thing you want to own, then commit real, sustained output to it, blog posts, LinkedIn posts, structured data, before splitting attention toward a second area. My AI readiness presence took months of concentrated content to build. It didn't happen by mentioning it occasionally alongside everything else I do.

For a larger team with more resources, the lesson is different but related. Broad category dominance, best AI marketing agency, is mostly a function of accumulated citation volume built over years, which is genuinely hard for anyone to out-hustle quickly. But that same resource advantage is often spent defending broad categories rather than deliberately claiming narrow ones. A larger team that picks two or three specific, well-defined sub-categories and builds real citation density in each, review placements, third-party mentions, structured data, consistent framing, will likely outpace a competitor relying on general brand reputation to carry them into every adjacent topic.

The practical checklist, regardless of size:

• Name the specific category you want to be the answer for, narrow enough that it's genuinely learnable, broad enough that people actually search for it.

  
  

• Audit what you've actually published recently against that category, not what you're capable of, what you've written.

  
  

• Build citation density deliberately: third-party mentions, structured data, consistent framing, repeated over time, not a single post.

  
  

• Test it the way I did here, run the actual prompts, in a fresh session, and see if you show up.

Expect the result to be category-specific. Winning one doesn't automatically win the next, adjacent one, even if your real expertise covers both.

I'll be running the closing measurement on this experiment soon, testing whether resuming the work after a pause brings the numbers back the way this test suggests they should. If lifecycle marketing content changes this result the same way AI readiness content built the first one, that's the clearest proof yet that this isn't about who you are. It's about what you've actually written.