From unmentioned to a top three recommendation for personal branding agencies

Lever Brands builds personal brands for founders and executives. When buyers asked AI assistants which agency to hire, Lever Brands was not part of the answer. It is now consistently among the top three recommendations on Claude, ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Which personal branding agencies in the UK should I talk to?

Before

1A competitor
2A larger firm
3A directory listing

Lever Brands is not mentioned

Not named when buyers asked AI assistants for personal branding agencies.

Now

1Lever Brands

2A competitor
3A larger firm

Named first, with its own pages cited

Consistently in the top three recommendations on Claude, ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Work: Measurement, Technical fixes, Content, Distribution and authority
AI engines tracked: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews
Website: leverbrands.com

What was in the way

The company

Lever Brands helps founders, executives and industry experts become recognised voices in their field, mainly through LinkedIn content and thought leadership.

Most of its new clients arrive through referral and the founders' own content. The team had noticed that prospects increasingly said they had asked an AI assistant for options before getting in touch.

The problem

On day zero we ran the questions its buyers ask, such as which agency to use for a founder's personal brand, across the main AI engines. Lever Brands was rarely named. The answers favoured large generalist marketing agencies and directory listings.

The site did not state clearly who the company served or what made it different, and the company's facts varied between its own pages and its external profiles. AI assistants had little to go on.

The work, phase by phase

Baseline
We built the set of buyer questions with the team and recorded what each AI engine answered, which firms it named and which sources it relied on.
- Buyer questions in the clients' own words
- Competitors and cited sources mapped
- Day zero report agreed with the founders
Technical fixes
We corrected the structured data and the company and founder entities, cleaned up dead and duplicate pages, and made sure AI crawlers could read every important page.
- Organisation, service and person markup
- Dead and duplicate pages resolved
- Crawl access and sitemaps
Content
We rewrote the service pages to answer the questions buyers ask, and added comparison and guide pages built around the specific situation of B2B founders.
- Service pages that answer the question
- Comparisons with alternatives buyers consider
- Guides for founders and executives
Distribution and authority
We worked on the lists, directories and publications that answers in this category draw on, so that independent sources described Lever Brands consistently.
- Agency lists and directories
- Consistent company facts across profiles
- Features in business publications

Where they stand now

Lever Brands moved from being left out to being consistently in the top three recommendations for personal branding agencies on Claude, ChatGPT and Perplexity.

We keep measuring the same questions at each milestone, so gains and slips are seen early.

Measured October 2026Across the personal branding questions we track, Lever Brands was the agency AI engines named most often, ahead of every competitor in the set. Claude names it most consistently.

What we learned

A clear statement of who you serve gives an AI assistant something specific to repeat.
Facts that match across your site and your external profiles are easier for an AI assistant to trust.
Lists and directories in your category carry real weight in the answers.

About the Lever Brands engagement

What did Cited change for Lever Brands?

We measured what AI assistants said about personal branding agencies on day zero, fixed the structured data and entity information on the Lever Brands site, rewrote its service pages to answer buyers' questions, and worked on the external lists and directories that answers in the category rely on.

Which AI assistants recommend Lever Brands?

Lever Brands is now consistently among the top three recommendations for personal branding agencies on Claude, ChatGPT and Perplexity. We also track Gemini and Google's AI answers.

How was progress measured?

Against a day zero baseline. At each milestone we rerun the same buyer questions on the same AI engines and compare where Lever Brands is named, how it is described and which sources are used.