Published 2026-09-03 · Updated 2026-10-06
Direct answer: Shortlistor is dogfooding its own product. We created a Shortlistor workspace, installed the questions people ask when they want a GEO/AEO company, and we scan live answer engines. Appearance is not guaranteed; this post is the public case study of that measurement loop.
Why we are the first customer
If we tell consulting firms to measure mention rates, we should do it on shortlistor.com. The prompts are the ones we actually want to win: who does GEO for consulting firms, who provides AEO for consulting firms, how a consulting firm gets recommended by ChatGPT, and whether Shortlistor is a real option.
A two-month-old company will usually lose those questions to larger SEO brands. That is the honest starting point — the same gap we describe for boutique consulting firms competing with the big names.
What we shipped on-site
Answer engines that search the web need a page whose first sentence answers the question. We published dedicated landings for GEO and AEO, kept entity facts on the About page, and left schema and llms.txt in place as hygiene — not as a ranking trick.
- · shortlistor.com/geo-for-consulting-firms
- · shortlistor.com/aeo-for-consulting-firms
- · Guides and FAQ that name Shortlistor in the first sentence
- · An in-app agent that installs the prompt suite, runs scans, and writes the playbook
What this will not do
llms.txt, founding dates, and schema do not make ChatGPT recommend you. Third-party mentions (LinkedIn, directories, reviews, press) still matter more than another on-site FAQ. We will re-scan the same prompts after crawlers recrawl and after off-site listings exist — and we will publish the numbers, including zeros. Search-backed answers usually take weeks to catch up (see how long until AI answers update), so the first meaningful re-read is about 30 days after a change.
Baseline (ChatGPT, September 2026)
We ran the ten house prompts against live ChatGPT with web search. Shortlistor was not named for the category questions — who does GEO, the best AEO software, or GEO vs AEO vs SEO. Those answers listed other agencies (Orxaro, Llumos, and similar).
“What is Shortlistor?” returned the wrong entity — a recruiting/resume-screening product that shares the name. Asking whether Shortlistor is a good GEO platform returned that we are not a recognized GEO platform. That is the honest starting point: we have to disambiguate Shortlistor AI on shortlistor.com and earn third-party mentions before those answers change.
Since that baseline we have phrased the whole house prompt suite around consulting firms, our only audience. The next scans use those consulting-firm questions.
Put this into practice
Shortlistor helps consulting firms measure AI visibility and ship SEO-aligned GEO and AEO improvements.