How Opal 13x'd AI brand mentions in 90 days and turned AI search into an inbound lead channel.

When we spoke with Opal in late March of 2026, the product was strong but AI search visibility was non-existent. The site had only 4 indexed pages, no blog, weak metadata, and no sitemap in Google Search Console. Anyone searching for Opal's category in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews was finding only competitors. Opal wasn't in the conversation.

The core issue: Opal is an extremely compelling product with no AI visibility. They were losing out on organic pipeline and category authority while competitors captured the conversation across AI search engines.

Within one week of launching the Ad Pay page, Opal ranked #2 for “ad pay” and #2 for “ad spend cards.” These are bottom-funnel terms searched by buyers already evaluating payment options for ad spend.

By day 90, the wins compounded: the new blog library earned 1,542 Google Search impressions on non-branded topics, the agency ad spend cashback page averaged position 3.9, and Opal held #1.0 to #1.7 average positions on its highest-intent AI buyer prompts, with mention rates as high as 33%.

Opal is now appearing as a named recommendation inside Perplexity AI responses. When a buyer searches something like “what cards allow you to pay ad invoices with a credit card,” Opal Ad Pay surfaces in the answer. Not as an ad. Not as a sponsored result. As the answer, alongside a description of the product, supported platforms, and a direct link to opalspend.com.

Over the 90-day period, Opal's average weekly AI visibility climbed 39%. Opal now leads its brand set in Google AI Overviews and sits alongside Brex and Ramp on competitive visibility in Perplexity. That is consistent presence on the platforms where buyers are actually asking.

A site health score of 89.4 puts opalspend.com in the top 1% of sites benchmarked for technical health, with a technical score of 93.0 and an AEO score of 85.8. That means AI crawlers and search engines can read, index, and cite Opal's pages without hitting dead ends.

In 90 days, Opal accumulated 13,365 brand mentions across LLMs, growing from near zero to roughly 1,000 mentions per week, all earned without ads or a distribution push.

More importantly, Opal began showing up for non-branded discovery prompts like high-limit charge cards, ad spend cashback, virtual cards for ad platforms, and no-personal-guarantee financing, earning 10% to 36% mention rates from buyers searching for the problem Opal solves, not Opal by name.

Before Windgrove, Opal's AI presence lived entirely in the middle of the funnel: a 26.0% mention rate on comparison-style prompts at the consideration stage, and 0.0% at both the top of the funnel, where buyers discover categories, and the bottom, where they ask which platform to choose. Competitors controlled both ends of that conversation across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other LLMs.

Within the first month, Opal expanded visibility across the full buyer journey. By day 90, that expansion had matured: Opal now dominates the branded comparison prompt set of “Opal vs competitor” and “does Opal do X” queries, while non-branded discovery prompts earn 10% to 36% mention rates.