Soar: from #4 to #1 in AI answers

By September, Soar led our tracked agency category.

Soar went from appearing in roughly one in five AI answers to more than one in two. Our mention rate rose from 22.1% to 56.7%, and we held #1 on every recorded day from August 17 through September 8.

We published an agency comparison, expanded our service pages, and answered common hiring questions. In Parse, we could see those pages getting cited, read how AI described us, and find the questions where competitors still led.

We operate both Soar and Parse. This case compares two 30-day windows ending July 31 and September 8, 2026, for two agency questions on ChatGPT Search and Google AI Mode.

The results

More answers mentioned us, and more cited our website:

Our comparison article went from 3 cited answers to 21, seven times as many appearances in a smaller sample. Our Quora service page grew from 23 to 36.

We tracked mentions to measure how often we appeared, and citations to see which pages the answers used.

Getting on the shortlist

At Soar, we help brands reach relevant conversations on Reddit, Quora, and other community platforms. For our own marketing, we wanted buyers asking AI for an agency to find us.

Those buyers could get a shortlist without visiting our website. Our homepage alone could not explain everything they needed to know.

So we built out the details: how to choose an agency, what working with us involves, and when it makes sense to hire one.

The timeline

Our content history records the April changes. Parse supplies the later discoveries and results.

The Reddit discussion was an opportunity Parse identified; we have no verified placement there. The page updates are documented in our content history.

A clearer service page

Our Quora service page answered concrete buyer questions: how to become a recommended answer, reach relevant topics, manage reputation, and connect Quora activity with search visibility.

We also laid out the work: audit the existing footprint, identify questions, publish answers, develop the stronger ones, and measure results. That gave AI answers something specific to say about us.

The page's citation reach grew from 16.9% to 30.0% of sampled answers. On September 8, Google AI Mode described us as:

Best for SEO-driven organic reach.

It then summarized footprint audits, long-form content, and amplification of answers ranking on Google. Beside that explanation, it cited our Quora service page.

Google was using our process to explain why someone should consider us.

The agency comparison

Our Reddit marketing agency comparison addressed results, pricing, fit, transparency, AI visibility, and operating risk. We gave buyers criteria for comparing providers and a shortlist to evaluate.

We wrote the comparison and ranked ourselves first. That makes it an owned source, not an independent endorsement.

The article went from appearing in 2.2% of sampled answers to 17.5%. On September 7, ChatGPT Search cited both the comparison and our guide to when a company should hire a community marketing agency. In the same answer, it named us:

Best overall for Reddit/community-driven acquisition.

Both pages appeared as sources beside the recommendation.

If you want to see how AI engines describe your own brand, run a free brand check — it takes a minute.

Which pages gained ground

The overall rank hid some differences between pages:

By the later window, more than half of the answers cited our website. Yet the gains were selective. Our broader article about whether Quora was still worth using disappeared from the later sample, while the service page and agency comparison gained reach.

In this sample, the pages about choosing and hiring an agency gained the most. That gave us a useful starting point for deciding what to maintain and expand.

Citation reach means the percentage of answers citing a page at least once. The rows overlap: one answer can cite several of our pages. It is not our share of all citations.

Who else shaped the answers

The source record also showed us that we were competing with publishers as well as agencies.

Parse flagged Growth Marketing Pro's dual role: its website could help shape an answer while its agency competed for the recommendation. We checked the source coverage across our two windows:

Our website became the most frequently cited of these four domains. Growth Marketing Pro also gained reach, so its pages were worth reading alongside our own.

In June, Parse also found a Reddit discussion asking for a good Quora marketing agency. It had been cited ten times during the observation week, but Soar was absent from the page.

That gave us a specific conversation to investigate, with evidence that AI was already using it.

Taking the lead

Here is how the same agencies ranked in July and September:

We finished 15 percentage points ahead of the next agency. We also held #1 on every recorded day from August 17 through September 8. Those daily readings use overlapping windows, so they show a sustained ranking rather than 23 independent experiments.

The rank measures frequency of inclusion across the tracked answers. It does not mean we appeared first in every answer. The dated ChatGPT and Google excerpts show individual recommendations; the table shows our broader progress.

ChatGPT vs. Google

Our strongest improvement came from ChatGPT Search's community-agency answers. We went from appearing in 17.6% to 83.3% of them: a gain of 65.7 percentage points.

We improved in all four combinations. But Google's community-agency answers still omitted us more often than they included us.

Our next step would be to inspect the sources Google uses for the community-agency question. Parse also flagged weaker coverage on comparison and alternative-agency questions in August. Those are specific gaps we can investigate.

What worked for us

The pages that gained reach answered practical buying questions. They explained our work and helped someone choose an agency. We would take that approach again.

Parse let us check the result against actual answers: were we included, which pages were cited, and did the explanation reflect what we offer?

Reaching #1 was a good result. The gap on Google showed us where to keep working.

How we measured it

We compared July 2–31 with August 10–September 8, 2026: 136 sampled answers in the earlier window and 120 in the later one. Both windows cover the same two eligible questions about community and Quora marketing agencies, on ChatGPT Search and Google AI Mode. The category is named Reddit and Community Marketing Services; this sample does not establish leadership across every Reddit-agency question.

We checked our mention totals against the underlying answers and counted each cited page once per answer. We verified our content changes in Soar's repository history and matched the September excerpts to their cited pages. We did not count automated task closures as proof that someone completed the suggested work.

This is our observed progress, not a controlled attribution experiment. We can show what we published, how AI used it, and how our visibility changed. We cannot assign a separate causal lift to each edit or claim revenue from this dataset. The downloadable data contains the calculations and excerpts. Our measurement methodology and guide to mentions versus recommendations explain the metrics.

Common questions