Insights
Notes on visibility, reputation, and the new shape of B2B trust
Editorial notes and longer pieces from It’s a Shovel. Senior strategic perspective on AI search, reputation work, founder-led growth, and how buyers now find, shortlist, and hire.
Does GEO Boost Visibility?
GEO can lift your AI visibility by up to 40%. But here’s what that number leaves out.
Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, does improve how often AI assistants cite you, by up to 40% in the founding academic study. But that figure comes with caveats, and the lift it describes has a ceiling.
Visible Expertise Now Beats Trust. That’s Where Founders Win.
89% of senior B2B buyers now say trust on its own no longer carries them across the line on a high-stakes decision. What does is visible expertise from a named, credible human whose track record can be verified. The Big 4 are publishing more research than ever and still losing ground because their IP has been corporately stripped of the one thing that converts knowledge into confidence: a real expert attached to it. Founder-led professional services firms own that asset by default. The question is whether the founder is showing up the way the C-Suite now needs them to.
Why Expert Consultants Are Invisible in AI Search
Even if you understand the structural reasons why expert consultants stay invisible online (the modesty instinct, the 'when I have time' delusion, the platform problem) and the changes in B2B buyer journeys, there’s an even deeper problem. Most people think the ‘fix’ is to produce more content, show up more, optimise harder. It treats a reputation problem as a volume problem. And volume without authority, in the verdict economy, is noise.
From Reputation to Pipeline
Founder-led businesses usually get their first 10 clients from referrals. The next ten require a different kind of infrastructure.
About this publication
A few notes on what we publish, and what we do not
We do not write listicles. There is enough “five ways to improve your LinkedIn presence” content in the world already.
We do not write hot takes on industry news unless we have something genuinely useful to add.
We do write longer pieces on the structural shifts in how buyers find and shortlist B2B providers, and shorter pieces on what we are seeing in client work, in the research, and in our own AI visibility data.
We do write pieces that take a clear position, sometimes a slightly contrarian one. We try to be useful rather than safe.
The senior strategic communications discipline has, in our view, been under-served by online content in recent years. There is a great deal of tactical material on individual channels, and very little serious commentary on how reputation actually compounds across them. We aim to write the second category.
Most engagements start with the free AI Visibility Heatmap
If anything you have read here makes you want to know how your own business shows up in AI search, that is the simplest place to begin.