Arnica became the source AI engines reach for on DevSecOps
A crowded category where buyers ask AI first. We earned the authority and the citations to be the answer.
Arnica secures the software supply chain and developer permissions in a DevSecOps category dominated by well-funded incumbents. Security buyers increasingly open ChatGPT or Perplexity before a vendor site, and those answers named larger players while Arnica went unmentioned. Over nine months we ran a research-led digital PR program to earn the authority the category demands, then engineered every key page to be the citable source. Non-brand organic clicks grew 89 percent, Domain Rating rose 18 points, and Arnica became a cited answer across all four major AI engines.
Outranked by incumbents, invisible to AI.
Arnica secures the software supply chain and developer permissions, but the DevSecOps category is dominated by well-funded incumbents with deep backlink profiles. Security buyers increasingly asked ChatGPT and Perplexity which tools solve pipeline and identity risk, and the answers named larger vendors while Arnica went unmentioned. The brand was fighting two fronts at once: it lacked the authority to rank against incumbents and the machine-readable structure to be quoted by engines.
The technical picture compounded the authority gap. Domain Rating sat at 31, well below the vendors engines were already citing, and Arnica's strongest material on non-human identity and pipeline security was written as marketing prose that engines had to paraphrase rather than quote. There was no llms.txt, no answer-first page structure, and no way to see which pages engines reached for. In a category where the buyer's first question goes to an AI engine, being absent from the answer meant being absent from the shortlist.
Earn the authority, then engineer the citations
Citations follow authority, so we sequenced the work deliberately. First we built the backlink foundation with a research-led digital PR program that gave the security press something worth covering. In parallel we rebuilt the content engines actually quote, added the machine-readable layer that lets them find it, and stood up daily citation monitoring so we could see exactly which pages were landing in AI answers and tune the ones that were not.
The work, month by month
The same plan, laid out on the calendar it actually ran on.
Technical and research base
Fixed schema and crawl gaps, then commissioned the original supply-chain security research that would anchor the digital PR program.
Digital PR push
Placed the research with security press and analyst sites, earning the links that started moving Domain Rating off its starting point of 31.
GEO layer
Rewrote the key pages as answer-first content, shipped llms.txt, and began daily citation monitoring across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Mode.
Compound and tune
Reinforced the pages engines quoted, kept earning links to hold DR at 49, and closed the gaps on the queries where Arnica was still being skipped.
Domain Rating rose, then the citations followed
Composite of Domain Rating and AI citation rate across all four engines over the nine-month engagement.
What we fixed to become citable
The authority and machine-readability gaps that kept engines from quoting Arnica, and how each was closed.
Domain Rating of 31 sat far below the vendors engines already cited.
The cited answer in a category it had to break into
Nine months in, a prospect asking an AI engine about supply-chain or pipeline security now gets Arnica in the answer, alongside the incumbents that once crowded it out. The authority earned through digital PR made the rankings possible, and the GEO layer converted that authority into citations. Non-brand organic clicks grew 89 percent and Domain Rating held at 49.
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