The offer01 / 04
What do you do?
A plain statement of your services, in words a model can lift and repeat without guessing.
Narrative + AI-Readiness Audit
Your next client asks AI first.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google's AI Overviews increasingly do the first round of research for B2B buyers. They read your website, weigh you against the alternatives and hand back a shortlist. The Narrative and AI-Readiness Audit shows how those systems understand your business today, and what to change so they describe it accurately.
+ For growing B2B companies
The shift
From search engines to answer engines.
For twenty years, getting found meant SEO. You wrote pages for people, earned rankings for keywords and trusted the buyer to click through ten blue links, compare the options and decide.
Today that first read often happens inside a large language model. A buyer asks an AI assistant who can help with a repositioning or a market entry, and the model summarizes the field before anyone visits a site. AI agents are starting to go a step further and gather options on the buyer's behalf.
Marketing now has two audiences: the people who hire you and the machines that brief them. The businesses that come through clearly state what they do, who they serve and what proves it, in language a model can read, trust and repeat.
Then
Search engine optimization- Reader
- People scanning a results page
- Currency
- Keywords and rankings
- Output
- Ten blue links
- Who compares
- The buyer, tab by tab
- The win
- The click
Now
Answer engine optimization- Reader
- LLMs and AI agents, then people
- Currency
- Clear facts, entities and evidence
- Output
- One synthesized answer
- Who compares
- The model, before the buyer arrives
- The win
- Being named, and described accurately
What the model is asking
Four questions every AI asks about your business.
Before an LLM recommends anyone, it tries to answer the same things a careful buyer would. Your website is the first source it reads. Here is what we look for in each.
The fit02 / 04
Who is it for?
Named industries, company stages and situations, so the right buyer recognizes themselves in the answer.
The proof03 / 04
Can you deliver?
Case studies, outcomes and outside references a model can find, connect to the claim and cite.
The choice04 / 04
Why you?
A point of view and a difference that survive summarization, so you read as a distinct firm instead of a category.
What we audit
Four lenses on AI readiness.
We read your business the way an answer engine does, then the way your best prospect does. The space between those two readings is where the work is.
01
AI search visibility
Where you appear when buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews about your category, which sources those answers cite and how you're described next to competitors.
02
Machine readability
Whether your pages can be crawled, parsed and understood: clear service definitions, consistent entity names, schema.org structured data, llms.txt and a page structure a model can extract from.
03
Narrative clarity
How well your messaging explains the offer, the audience and the outcome. We flag vague language, buried services and claims that sound like every other firm in your space.
04
Proof and authority
Which claims your case studies, results and outside mentions actually support, and where added evidence would give a model something credible to cite.
Search rewarded the loudest page. AI rewards the clearest one.The Vault Collective
What you walk away with
A clear read. A clear plan.
We agree the pages, buyer questions and data sources up front. You receive the findings and a prioritized plan your team, writer or web partner can put to work.
Scoped to youPrice agreed before work begins
01 · Baseline
AI visibility baseline
A sample of real buyer questions run across major AI assistants, showing where you appear, what's said about you and which sources get cited.
02 · Assessment
Messaging and readability review
Page-by-page notes on what machines and people can understand clearly, with examples pulled from your own site.
03 · Proof
Differentiation and evidence
How your story compares with competitors, which claims hold up and what evidence would make them stronger.
04 · Plan
Prioritized action plan
The changes to make first, why they matter, who should own them and how to track progress.
An example of the work
A finding your team can act on.
Illustrative example. This is not a client result.
Your best evidence is invisible to AI.
- What we found
- The services page promises faster onboarding. A customer story backs it up, but nothing on the services page links to it, and the story never surfaced when we asked AI assistants about onboarding providers in the category.
- Why it matters
- A model can only cite evidence it can connect to the claim. A buyer skimming between tabs works the same way.
- What we recommend
- Place the supported result beside the service description, link to the full story, mark it up with structured data and add a clear next step.
- What to check
- Visits from the service page to the story, the inquiries that follow and whether the story starts appearing in AI answers. Review alongside other changes before calling the result.
Who it's for
For businesses people hire for their expertise.
Built for founders and marketing leaders at established, growing B2B companies with an offer that takes some explaining.
- Professional services firms
- Specialized technology companies
- Companies entering a new market or repositioning
- Teams planning a website rebuild
- Leaders who want a real baseline on AI search
Why TVC
We work on the business behind the message.
The Vault Collective is a growth strategy consultancy led by Lisa LaCour, with three decades of marketing and growth leadership at Endeavor, AOL, Outbrain and Comcast. We look at how the offer is organized and who it's for, then make it legible to the people and the machines doing the choosing.
For a global ticketing platform, that meant organizing more than 40 product names into one product story, four market messages and a sales narrative leadership could use.
Read the ticketing platform story →
Questions
AEO, GEO and AI search, in plain terms.
What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
AEO is the practice of making your business easy for AI systems to understand, trust and cite when they answer a question. SEO focuses on ranking pages; AEO focuses on how clearly LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity can describe what you do. You'll also hear it called generative engine optimization, or GEO.
How is AEO different from SEO?
They work together. SEO still matters, and many AI answers draw on pages that already rank well. AEO adds a second layer: clear definitions of your services, consistent naming, structured data and proof a model can connect to your claims.
What do AI agents have to do with my website?
AI agents research and compare options on someone's behalf. They read websites quickly and literally. A site that states its offer, audience and evidence plainly gives an agent what it needs to include you.
Can you guarantee we'll show up in ChatGPT or AI Overviews?
AI answers vary by question, model and moment, and anyone promising placement is guessing. What we deliver is a clear view of the changes most likely to improve how you're understood, plus a way to track visibility, visits and inquiries separately.
What does the audit cost?
Each audit is scoped to your business: the pages, buyer questions and competitors in the review. We agree scope and price together before work begins. The audit stands on its own or as part of a broader TVC engagement. See how we work.
What happens after the audit?
You keep the findings and the plan. Many teams hand them to a writer, designer or web partner. When you'd like help with the writing, the site or the bigger positioning question, we scope that separately.
Let's see how the machines see you.
Tell us what you sell, who you want to reach and what you're trying to improve. We'll confirm the fit and agree the pages, access and scope before work begins.
Start a conversationAlso available as part of a broader TVC engagement. See how we work.