Company context
appleute, a German B2B software and app development company selling into DACH from Munich. Invisible in AI assistant answers for its core commercial queries when I started.
My role
Demand generation, owning SEO, paid, website and lifecycle email, later AEO. A one-person marketing function reporting to a co-founder, grown to three.
- Built the hub and spoke content model for every service line
- Owned the website end to end: deployment, error handling, case study pages, app development cost calculators
- Ran Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads, and built HubSpot nurture across cold warming, demo follow-up, webinar follow-up and reactivation
- Led German market messaging localisation, and ABM into German schools and computing centres
- Hired and managed an SEO specialist and a web developer, which is what freed me to focus on AEO
How it runs
Models do not cite a company because its website is good. They cite what their sources say about it.
For a services business those sources are third party, so most of the work sits outside your own site.
- Measured first: tracked what the assistants returned for commercial queries, which competitors were named, and which sources the answers leaned on. Manual at first, then Peec.ai for prompt and citation tracking
- Rebuilt review site authority on the platforms feeding those answers, G2 and Crunchbase among them
- Published supporting content so the picture assembled across sources stayed consistent rather than contradictory
- Weighted output toward assets that get cited rather than clicked: case study pages, cost calculators, specific commercial content
- What went against me: general informational content stopped earning its keep once AI Overviews arrived and Google began answering on the results page. I would make that shift at the start rather than discovering it midway
Integrations
G2 · Crunchbase · Peec.ai · HubSpot · Apollo · Google Ads · LinkedIn Ads · GA4
Asked about app development in Munich, the assistants named established agencies. appleute was not ranked low. It was not present at all.
That is not a ranking problem. A whole surface had opened up between the buyer and the search engine, and nothing on our own website could close it.
Results
- Cited in AI assistant answers for core commercial queries, from complete absence
- Signups arriving directly from LLM referrals
- Organic traffic up 250%+ and signups up 400%+ over six months
- 5%+ CTR sustained across email campaigns
- All of that growth organic, with no paid spend claiming credit