How Growth Division became the recommended agency in ChatGPT. The growth agency that had to out-grow its own competitors in AI search Growth Division is a growth marketing agency for startups, scale-ups, and ambitious SMEs, built around Grex, its own AI growth operating system that pairs automated experimentation with human strategists. It sells the exact thing this case study is about: visibility, pipeline, and growth. That is also what made its own AI search visibility such an exposed problem. Growth Division competes for attention against Growthcurve, GrowthRocks, Ladder, NoGood, and Rise - a set of agencies all fighting for the same "which growth agency should I hire" queries. Buyers evaluating agencies increasingly run that exact question through ChatGPT before ever opening a website. The numbers in this case study come from a set of prompts in that exact space - questions about growth agencies and growth experts, phrased the way Growth Division's own target buyer asks them: founders and marketing leaders at startups and small-to-medium B2B companies sizing up who to hire. Every "mentioned" or "cited" figure below is Growth Division's share of ChatGPT's answers across that prompt set, tracked alongside the same five named competitors. Growth Division started working with Airefs in April 2026. At that point, it was squarely in the middle of a bunched field - no single agency stood out, and Growth Division was not the exception. The opportunity. Growth marketing is a noisy category, and most of the noise looks the same: generic "growth agency" content optimized for keywords rather than for the questions buyers actually ask AI tools. That gap is exactly what answer engine optimization is built to close. Growth Division had the credibility - 130+ startups and scale-ups as clients, a clear point of view on AI-powered growth. What it lacked was a footprint in the two places ChatGPT actually draws from when it recommends an agency: cited articles, and the Reddit threads buyers already trust when comparing agencies. The solution. Growth Division ran on the Airefs done-for-you package. The work split across two fronts: the conversations already shaping AI recommendations, and the content that earns a place inside them. 1. Commenting on the Reddit posts AI already cites. Airefs identified the specific Reddit threads that ChatGPT was already pulling from when answering questions about growth agencies. Rather than starting new conversations, the team joined the ones AI was already treating as a source - early, before they saturated. Comments were written to genuinely help: answering the question asked, comparing options honestly, and mentioning Growth Division only where it was relevant to do so. 2. Building out the blog and a partner blog for AI search and SEO. In parallel, Airefs produced article content for Growth Division's own blog and a partner blog. The mix covered two types of content: * Listicles and comparison pieces - the "best growth agency for X" and "Growth Division vs. Y" format that AI tools reach for when shortlisting vendors * Educational and guide content - built around tables, lists, and FAQ sections so it could be extracted cleanly by both AI systems and Google, following the approach in its guide on optimizing content for AI search Every piece was written to be citable first: direct answers, clear structure, and no filler - the same standard Growth Division holds its own clients to. The results. In April, the tracked field was bunched together: five agencies within a similar range of each other, none of them a clear standout, Growth Division included. It sat at 15.0% mention share - in the same tier as the rest of the set. Citations moved first: Growth Division's content started building a lead as a cited source through May. Being named as the recommendation followed a few weeks behind, and from early July onward Growth Division held a clear lead in mentions - not over one rival, but over the entire field: * Growth Division averaged 38.7% mention share in July, more than any other agency tracked, peaking at 48.1% on individual days * The rest of the field kept moving too - competitors ranged from single digits to the high 20s in both April and July - but none of them broke out. Growth Division is the one that did * Underneath that, Growth Division's citation share rose from 7.2% in April to 33.3% in July - the mechanism that pulled mentions up behind it Growth Division didn't just close the gap on the field it started level with. By July, it led the entire tracked set - Growthcurve, GrowthRocks, Ladder, NoGood, and Rise - as the agency ChatGPT named most often, by a wide margin. The lead was even more pronounced in the UK, Growth Division's original market - the numbers above understate how dominant the brand became with the buyers who know it best. That visibility showed up in the pipeline. Across all of 2025, Growth Division logged 15 discovery calls and roughly £32,450 in pipeline value, spread unevenly across the year. In April, May, and June 2026 alone - the same months it pulled away from the field - it logged 11 discovery calls and £52,650 in pipeline value: more than the whole of 2025, in a quarter of the time. The effect wasn't confined to AI answers, either. Over the same six months, Google impressions grew 33%, and Growth Division's Domain Rating increased alongside it. The content and outreach behind the AI mention gains were also the kind Google rewards - proof that AI search and traditional SEO aren't competing priorities when the underlying work is done right. Takeaway. Growth Division sells growth marketing for a living, which made this a stricter test than most. The approach combined two things: * Direct participation in the Reddit threads AI was already citing as sources * Listicle, comparison, and guide content - on both the owned blog and a partner blog - structured with the tables, lists, and FAQs that AI systems extract cleanly Six months in, the field looks different. Growth Division entered the engagement level with a pack of similarly sized competitors; by July, it led every one of them by a wide margin, and had turned that visibility into pipeline exceeding a full prior year in a single quarter - while Google impressions and Domain Rating climbed at the same time.

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