AI Search and Marketing Systems Consultant
If your rankings hold but your traffic is falling, it is not a penalty. The answer now appears above the result, so the click no longer has to happen. I help marketing teams find out what AI assistants say about them, and fix it before a competitor owns the answer.
17+ years running marketing teams. Fixed-fee diagnosis, no retainer.
The problem
It looks like a tracking glitch or a seasonal dip, so it gets ignored. It is neither. Three things changed at once, and each one breaks a different assumption your reporting still runs on.
Most teams respond by publishing more. That treats a measurement problem as a volume problem, and it is why the output goes up while the pipeline does not.
A buyer asks a question and reads a synthesised answer. Your page may well be one of its sources. That is a visit you never see in your analytics, and a mention you are not measuring.
Position three still matters, because being in the source set is a precondition for being quoted. But a rank on its own no longer predicts a visit, and reporting that stops at rank now hides the thing that changed.
Rank trackers answer where you sit in a list. They do not answer whether an answer engine can retrieve you, whether it trusts you enough to quote you, or which competitor it quoted instead.
How I help
The audit is the front door. Once you know where visibility is breaking, we rebuild the system underneath so the fix holds. Every engagement ends with something you can act on without me.
We are losing visibility and cannot see where.
A fixed-fee diagnostic of where you stand across AI assistants and traditional search, which questions you have stopped appearing for, and what is worth fixing first.
AI is producing drafts, not revenue.
The team adopted the tools and output went up. Pipeline did not. Content operations, workflows and tooling rebuilt so the output reaches qualified pipeline instead of stopping at volume.
My team needs to use this, not just hear about it.
You have the team and the budget. What you want is your people building with AI in a working session run by someone who has done the work, not sitting through a keynote about it.
Who this is for
The audit is built for marketing leaders at SaaS and hospitality companies who are losing ground in AI search and need to know exactly where, before they spend on fixing the wrong thing.
A CMO, marketing director, or founder with the budget and the mandate to fix this, not just flag it in a deck.
The questions your content used to win are being answered on the page, and nothing in your reporting explains where the visits went.
Your buyers ask assistants before they ask you, and you have no way to check whether you are named or a competitor is quoted instead.
The audit
A fixed-fee diagnosis you can read in an afternoon and act on the same week. No retainer, no tooling to buy, and no dependency on me afterwards.
Your visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Gemini, scored against a fixed set of buyer questions.
The searches where an answer now replaces the click, and whether you are cited in that answer or missing from it.
The sources AI quotes in your place, and the reasons it trusts them over you.
What to fix first, in order of impact, in a form you can act on with or without me.
Viken Patel
Consultant
About
I have spent 17+ years inside marketing teams rather than adjacent to them. Most of that was operator work: owning the number, not presenting a deck about it. When I ran marketing for a SaaS hospitality company, I learned that the constraint is almost never the channel. It is the system feeding it.
That is what I do now. I diagnose why a company is losing visibility as search moves to AI answers, and I redesign the marketing system underneath so the output reaches revenue. Strategy, audits and workshops. Implementation is handled separately by theCSS Agency, so the diagnosis and the delivery never get confused with each other.
That is the difference this brings to an engagement: not AI opinions, but 17+ years of knowing how marketing systems actually break.
Free
The same four-layer method I run in the audit, as a checklist you can work through yourself. Find out where your AI visibility is breaking, at no cost.
Recent thinking
One idea per piece, always something you can use.
ChatGPT is most useful in marketing as an assistant inside a defined process: research, first drafts, repurposing, and structured analysis, all reviewed by someone who knows the brand and the facts. It is weakest as an autonomous content engine, where it produces confident, generic output. The value comes from the system and judgement around it, not the prompts.
Cost per lead (CPL) is the amount you spend to generate one lead, calculated by dividing campaign spend by the number of leads it produced. A good CPL depends on your industry, deal value, and close rate, not on an absolute figure. The trap is optimising CPL in isolation: a cheap lead that rarely converts costs more per customer than an expensive one that does.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the total sales and marketing spend it takes to win one new customer, calculated by dividing that spend by the number of new customers it produced in the same period. Measured honestly it includes salaries, tools, and overhead, not just ad spend. On its own the figure means little. It only becomes useful next to what a customer is actually worth.
Before you change anything, find out what is actually broken. The audit maps which questions you appear for, which sources are cited instead of you, and what is recoverable. You get the findings whether or not we work together after it.