I Asked an AI to Recommend My PR Agency. It Had Never Heard of Me.
The experiment
It started as curiosity. I was researching AI search behavior for a client project, and I decided to run a quick test. I opened Claude — one of the most widely used AI platforms — and typed: “What are the best boutique PR agencies for women entrepreneurs in South Florida?”
Claude returned a thoughtful, well-sourced list. Five agencies, each with a description of their specialty and why they were recommended.
The Agency East was not on it.
I sat with that for a moment. Then I did what any good PR strategist does when confronted with a visibility problem: I turned it into a case study.
Why AI couldn’t find me
The answer, it turns out, is structural — not personal.
Large language models like Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity don’t work like Google. They don’t crawl websites in real time and rank them by relevance. They were trained on datasets: articles, directories, citations, and structured web content compiled over time.
If credible third-party sources haven’t written about your business, LLMs haven’t heard of you. It doesn’t matter how good your website is. It doesn’t matter how active you are on Instagram. What matters is what the rest of the internet says about you — independently, authoritatively, and consistently.
The Agency East was founded in 2025. We hadn’t yet accumulated the kind of press coverage, directory listings, and third-party citations that LLMs use to recognize and recommend businesses. We were invisible — not because we weren’t excellent, but because we were new.
The ChatGPT wrinkle
Here’s where it gets interesting. After the Claude experiment, I ran the same query on ChatGPT — specifically the version with web and map integration.
ChatGPT found us. Listed us at number two.
Same business. Same week. Completely different results.
The reason: ChatGPT with map integration pulls real-time data — Google Business Profiles, current listings, recent reviews. Claude and other knowledge-base models learn from training data compiled over time. The two platforms have fundamentally different information sources.
This revealed something important: AI visibility isn’t one thing. It’s at least two things: your Google/map presence (which feeds real-time AI) and your internet reputation (which feeds knowledge-base AI). You need both.
And there was one more discovery: ChatGPT had found us, but listed us as a “real estate agency.” Not a PR agency. Somewhere, a miscategorized listing was feeding incorrect data into AI answers — and that kind of error spreads once it enters a training dataset.
What I decided to do
I could have treated this as embarrassing and moved on.
Instead, I decided to build a roadmap and execute it publicly — using The Agency East as a live case study. Every step documented. Every result shared. The goal: to prove that a boutique women-owned business can build AI visibility from zero, and to create a replicable framework that I can offer to clients.
The roadmap has six phases: brand copy and foundations, directory presence, LinkedIn authority, press coverage, thought leadership, and Wikipedia. It’s a 12-month strategy built on one insight: LLMs don’t rank businesses. They cite them. And you can only be cited if you’ve first been established.
I’m documenting every phase of this process. You can follow along on LinkedIn, or download the full roadmap HERE
I Asked an AI to Recommend My PR Agency. It Had Never Heard of Me.
