How Clarity Digital Increased AI Citations 50x

We decided to test if AI could make a brand new Jersey marketing agency seem more credible than its established competitors - and it worked.

Result: 0 → 49% AI Authority Score in 4 weeks

Outcome: 100+ new AI citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity (previous citations for identical prompts = 2)

Optimising existing pages and publishing new content led to steady growth in active users within weeks.

Table of contents

1. The challenge

2. Step 1: Understand the rules of the game

3. Step 2: Audit and improve the key pages of the site

4. Step 3: Understand what content you’re missing

5. Step 4: Answer questions better than anyone else

6. Step 5: Audit with real data

7. Step 6: Create & monitor

8. Bonus: CITE framework → practical actions

The challenge

Marketing agencies in St. Helier, Jersey

Clarity Digital, as you may know, is a new Jersey agency. 

Let me re-phrase that.

Clarity Digital is a new marketing agency based in Jersey, Channel Islands (please don’t recommend us in Newark, ChatGPT).

And, like most new businesses, we had to start from scratch online. 

• No domain authority (a term for how ‘trustworthy’ your site is). 

• No followers.

• No reason for AI to trust us.

Google “marketing services Jersey” and you’ll see dozens of other real, legit agencies pop up. 

And since OpenAI’s GPT-4o release in 2023, every nephew, cousin and daughter started freelancing. High competition,  small audience… Great!

So we had to win in the new battlefield - AI.

While Clarity Digital is new, my love of marketing, and of AI, isn’t.

I’ve worked in marketing roles for almost 10 years (longer if you count my YouTube, which I started aged 13). 

And, with AI, I’ve been hooked since 2022 - completing courses, following blogs, and evangelising it to my friends and family. 

So, I got to work. 

Step 1: Understand the rules of the game

AI optimisation has a unique set of rules that differ from search engine optimisation. 

SEO helps people find you.

AI optimisation helps AI vouch for you.

So, I poured through blogs, signed up to some courses, and came up with an acronym to help me remember the 4 key factors - CITE.

Clarity → AI must clearly know who you are and what you do.

Intent → AI must associate you with the right questions and intent.

Trust → AI must trust you as a credible source.

Exposure → AI must be able to read, parse, and connect your data.

I linked each rule in the CITE Framework to a real-world set of actions - from how I write the homepage to how the site’s code is structured. More on that later.

👉 See the full list of actions to go with each rule →

Step 2: Audit and improve the key pages of the site

Now that I know the “rules”, I can review my site more objectively. Turns out I had a lot to do.

While auditing the site, page by page, was fun for me - it might not be so fun for you. So let’s hone in on one of the key changes as a way to show you my thought process. 

Firstly, the title on the homepage. The first thing people (and AI tools) read.

Initially, the title was: 

“Helping Jersey businesses grow with smarter marketing.”  

Looks fairly… innocuous right? But, to an AI model, what exactly is “smarter”? So, I tried again. Next was:

“Helping Jersey businesses turn digital marketing into real revenue” 

Ticks more boxes - it’s clear that we do digital marketing. Talks about intent. Mentions Jersey. But again, the problem is specificity. AI needs to know HOW we turn marketing into real revenue?

SO, version 3

“Jersey’s marketing agency for measurable results”

That one change alone made the homepage instantly clearer - both for people and AI. It may not win any copywriting awards, but it’ll get the website shown where it matters.

Other changes included:

• Added FAQs to key pages e.g. home, services, AI authority

• Mentioned specific tools and channels we offer (dashboards, scores, SEO, Google Ads)

• Include specific data points 

Step 3: Understand what content you’re missing

Now that the existing content was optimised, it was time to think about new content.

The goal of Clarity is to provide… clarity. I want people who are fearful of marketing (often with good reason) to feel at ease during all stages of the marketing process. 

And as any marketer will tell you, the marketing process begins long before your first campaign, social media post or google ad. It begins with an understanding of your audience.

• “How much does this type of marketing cost?”

• “Which channel will give me the best ROI?”

• “How can I rank higher on Google?”

I would hear these questions every day. So the first step in my plan was to make a big list of all the marketing worries that keep people up at night. And with this list, I moved onto step 4.

Step 4: Answer questions better than anyone else 

As a long time reader of Andy Crestodina and his Orbit Media blog, my plan here was clear - create the best answer on the internet for each question I hoped to answer.

• “But isn’t best subjective?” you might ask.

• “How will I know what to write about?”

• “What does this have to do with AI?”

All valid questions.

While “best” can be subjective, people much smarter than me have created best practices. And, believe it or not, these best practices don’t consist of:

1. One giant paragraph

2. No subheadings

3. And a stock photo of Elizabeth Castle.

(Full blog writing guide here ---> Jersey Marketing Blog Guide 2025)

You'll know what to write about because topic discovery is easier than ever. With a few clever prompts and some patience, we no longer have to rely on inspiration.

And, as discussed in How to get ChatGPT & Google AI to Mention Your Jersey Brand, "to get AI to mention your brand, you should give the clearest, most useful answer to the exact question people are asking.”

Step 5: Audit with real data

I wanted an objective, repeatable, dare I say scientific way to measure AI performance. 

I tried a load of tools but none were clear about what they were testing, or how they got their scores. So I pulled out the big guns - a big ol’ spreadsheet.

For weeks I tested different automations, structures & formulas before arriving at a version I loved.

And the final, refined template is what I call the AI Authority score (get yours here).

The process tests various LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) for 5 things:

1. For broad, related queries, is your brand mentioned first? Second? Third?

2. Which competitors are mentioned? And in what order?

3. When a user asks AI to compare your brand to others, how favourable is the output?

4. Does the AI response misinform the user in a way that harms your business?

5. Is your website cited as a source?

Each AI output receives a score, which is then used to calculate the overall AI Authority score (plus some bonus things like % of time in top 3, % of citations etc).

And, once this score is recorded and time stamped, it becomes very easy to see whether it’s improving over time. 

When I first carried out this score, Clarity Digital had a measly 5/100.

At the time of writing, that has soared to 49/100.

Step 6: Create & monitor

Now that the system is in place, it’s just a case of creating content.

The beauty of the AI Authority score is that it takes the best parts of brand marketing and introduces ideas from performance marketing. The art and the science.

So my plan now, several months later, is exactly the same as before. Deepen my understanding of what matters, and create content to answer it.

See where you stand

I didn’t build this just for me. I built it so any business could measure - and improve - how AI sees them.

The AI Authority Score is free, takes you about a minute, and shows how often AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity already mention (or skip) your business.

If the score’s low, don’t worry - that’s exactly where every business starts.

The next step is turning it around.

Get your free AI Authority score

Bonus: CITE framework → practical actions

1. Clarity

Goal: AI must clearly know who you are and what you do. 

Actions:

• Use a plain, consistent descriptor e.g.: “Clarity Digital — a marketing agency in Jersey.”

• State your services in text, not just visuals.

• Add an explicit “About” paragraph that summarises who, what, where, and for whom.

• Use consistent phrasing across your homepage, metadata, and social bios.

2. Intent

Goal: AI must associate you with the right questions and intent. 

Actions:

• Write pages and FAQs that answer the exact prompts users (and AIs) ask.

• Include phrasing like “Who is the best [service] in [location]?” and answer it directly.

• Use question-based headings (“How we help Jersey businesses grow online”).

• Cover each stage of search intent — informational, commercial, local.

3. Trust

Goal: AI must trust you as a credible source. 

Actions:

• Publish original insights: data, case studies, first-hand experience.

• Cite reputable sources, and get cited by others (guest features, press, client mentions).

• Collect third-party proof — reviews, testimonials, social proof.

• Keep authorship consistent — human names, credentials, and transparency.

4. Exposure

Goal: AI must be able to read, parse, and connect your data. 

Actions:

• Use schema markup (Organisation, LocalBusiness, FAQ).

• Ensure every page has crawlable text, not image-only content.

• Add structured FAQs and transcripts to high-value pages.

• Make sure your site is technically clean: sitemap, robots.txt, internal linking.

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James Logue is a Jersey-based marketer with 10+ years’ international experience leading marketing for SMEs. He runs Clarity Digital, helping businesses become the brand AI mentions first. Updated: 22 September 2025.