AI visibility for recruitment & talent

Both sides of the recruitment market now ask AI for direction. A hiring lead asks "which agency is best for senior software roles in fintech?" A candidate asks "who recruits for marketing jobs in Leeds?" The engine answers with a handful of named agencies, and those names win the brief or the registration.

This matters because the buying decision is moving earlier. Conductor reports that 37% of consumers now start their searches with AI rather than Google (Conductor, 2025), and 94% of B2B buyers now use AI as part of their purchasing research. A hiring manager building an agency shortlist is exactly that buyer.

The engine builds its answer from your specialism, your reviews, your placement case studies, your presence in sector and trade coverage, and how all of that compares to other agencies in the same niche. A generalist site that says "we recruit across all sectors" gives the engine nothing specific to cite. A named specialist gives it everything.

Google AI Overviews now appear on the majority of searches, and Similarweb found that 69% of Google searches end without a click (Similarweb, 2024). A hiring manager can get a recommended shortlist of agencies without visiting a single one. If your agency is not in that shortlist, you are not in the pitch.

Recruitment has a second wrinkle that few sectors share: your visibility decides both your supply and your demand. If candidates cannot find you through the engines, your talent pool thins. If clients cannot find you, your brief flow thins. The two feed each other, because the agencies the engines recommend to candidates tend to be the ones with the strongest, most current placement evidence, which is the same evidence that wins client trust. Weakness on one side quietly erodes the other.

The engines also reward agencies that have said something specific about their market. A firm that publishes a clear view on, say, contract rates in cyber security or hiring trends in adult social care gives the engine a reason to treat it as an authority on that niche. A firm that only lists vacancies gives the engine job ads, not expertise, and job ads are not what gets quoted when a hiring manager asks who to trust.

AI engines cite recruiters that are clearly specialised, visibly credible and consistent about the roles and markets they serve. A vague generalist is hard to place in an answer. A named sector specialist with proof is easy. The Known & Cited framework scores this across three dimensions.

• AI Visibility (40%). How often the engines name your agency when someone asks for a recruiter in a sector, function or location. We test by discipline, seniority and geography, from contract to executive search, and record where you appear and where a competitor does instead.
• Source Quality (30%). Whether the evidence behind your name is strong. Client and candidate reviews, named placement case studies, sector commentary, awards and professional body membership all carry weight. Anonymous testimonials and undated stats do not.
• Narrative Fit (30%). Whether the story the engines tell matches your positioning. If you want to be known as a niche executive search firm but the web frames you as a high-volume temp agency, the engine sends you the wrong briefs. We measure that gap and show how to close it.

Many agencies are visible for their location but invisible for their actual specialism, or have strong client proof that no engine connects to a named market. We find which dimension is costing you briefs and registrations, then fix that first.

We run your agency through the three engines that matter: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity. Each gets a sector prompt set written for recruitment, covering discipline and function searches, seniority and contract-type queries, location-led searches, employer-side and candidate-side questions, and direct comparisons against named competing agencies. We run these in structured research waves so the reading is repeatable.

Every result is scored 0 to 100 and placed in one of five bands: Ghost (0 to 10), Whisper (11 to 30), Emerging (31 to 50), Cited (51 to 75), and Known and Cited (76 to 100). The score breaks down across our 12-pillar framework, so you can see which specialisms and markets you win and which a rival owns. The method is set out in full on our methodology page.

The result is a clear map of your AI market: the prompts you win, the agencies taking the answers you want, and the proof points the engines trust. The work that follows targets the specialisms where the briefs are.

The 12-pillar breakdown is what makes this actionable for an agency with several desks. It is common to find that one desk is well known to the engines, with case studies and sector commentary behind it, while another desk doing the same revenue is almost invisible because nobody ever wrote up its wins. The pillars surface that imbalance clearly, so you can lift the desks that are losing briefs rather than spreading effort evenly across the whole business.

Every engagement starts with a free Exec Brief. We run a focused set of recruitment prompts across the three engines, score you, place you in a band, and show the gap between your agency and the competitors winning your sector answers. You see the real recommendations AI is giving hiring managers and candidates in your niche today.

The full AI Visibility Strategy goes deeper. You get a complete 0 to 100 score across all 12 pillars, a comparison against your chosen competing agencies, a prioritised list of the case studies, reviews and sector coverage that would lift your score, and a plan to change the answer. Cadence is bespoke: Annual, Bi-Annual or Quarterly research waves, all bespoke priced to the number of specialisms and markets you want tracked.

The output is written for an agency, desk by desk. It shows which disciplines the engines recommend you for, which a competitor has claimed, and which proof points would turn a Whisper desk into a Cited one. Often the recommendation is not to publish more, but to publish differently: a named placement story with a real outcome, a clear point of view on a niche, a case study tied to the exact market a hiring manager would ask about. That is what gives the engine something specific to quote.

The Exec Brief is free and there is no obligation. Start here to see what AI says about your agency. To explore a worked example first, visit see it in action.