Rootly's AI citation rate rose from 3% to 30% in AthenaHQ case

AthenaHQ, a vendor of AI search tracking software, published a case study on Rootly, an AI-native on-call and incident management platform. It reports that Rootly’s citation rate rose from 3% to 30% across the prompts it tracked. This is a write-up of that vendor’s own account, not independent research, and the limits below matter as much as the numbers.

What problem was Rootly trying to solve?#

Rootly already captured demand through SEO, comparison pages, integration content and documentation. Its head of marketing, Adam Frank, says the shift was in where buyers started: with AI assistants, asking questions such as “best incident management for Slack”, “PagerDuty alternatives” or “how to run incident retros”. In his words, discovery is moving “from ‘search to click’ to ‘ask to decide.’”

The team found that ranking in search did not guarantee presence in AI answers. Before the project, AI discovery was mostly anecdotal: win-loss notes, sales calls and the occasional prospect who mentioned finding Rootly through ChatGPT or another assistant. The team could not see how Rootly was described, where it was missing from shortlists, or which sources the models drew on.

What did Rootly change?#

The team set a baseline by adding its top competitors to AthenaHQ, then aligned tracking with the prompts that most closely mirror buyer evaluation. AthenaHQ’s recommendations were turned into a short list of improvements across documentation, content, messaging and third-party sources, which the team shipped. The page names five steps: competitive baseline, revenue-mapped prompt selection, authority content and docs alignment, a weekly operating rhythm, and a monthly re-baseline that expands the prompt set.

The page does not itemise which individual edits moved the numbers, and it does not name the AI assistants that were tracked.

What results did AthenaHQ report?#

The page reports a citation rate rising from 3% to 30% across tracked prompts, and a mention rate rising from 7.5% to 18.3%. It separately claims a 2.5x lift in mention rate on non-branded prompts. The timeframe is given only as “within months”.

It also reports $126,076 of incremental equivalent media value, from $87,832 to $213,907 a year, and an annual equivalent ad value of $1,169,532. AthenaHQ calculates these itself as the value of the extra visibility. They are not revenue, pipeline or ad spend saved.

Beyond the numbers, the page says AI answers began describing Rootly more accurately and consistently, and that AI search now sits beside SEO and paid acquisition in its demand strategy.

Can this case be trusted as proof?#

Treat it as a documented claim, not a controlled result. The figures are self-reported by the vendor that sells the tracking tool, and no control group, prompt list or engine list is published. AI answers vary between runs, so a tracked-prompt rate can move without any site change. The prompt set was also expanded monthly, so later measurements may not cover the same prompts as the baseline. Rootly’s other marketing in the period is not accounted for.

The mention figures are loosely labelled. The page never says whether 7.5% to 18.3% covers all tracked prompts or only non-branded ones. That rise is about 2.4 times, close to the 2.5x claimed for non-branded prompts, so they may be the same measure, but the page does not confirm it.

What should a site owner take from it?#

The direction is plausible and the method is concrete: baseline against competitors, track buyer-style prompts, fix documentation and the third-party sources models cite, then re-measure on a fixed schedule. Keep your own prompt list stable so before and after compare like with like.

For Google specifically, its documentation on AI features says there are no additional requirements or special optimizations to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. A page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, and clicks from those features are counted in the Search Console Performance report under the Web search type, not a separate channel. The AI answer readiness checker covers page-level basics, and Ahrefs’ 75,000-brand study looks at which signals correlate with brand mentions across AI assistants. Related coverage sits in the AI search topic hub.