Four leads from Claude in thirteen days.

Homemade Social, a boutique social media agency in Phoenix, received four inbound leads from Claude between September 18 and 30, 2026. Before that, it had none. Cited Co, the AI visibility agency Lauren Lerner runs out of Scottsdale, Arizona, started the work on July 14, 2026. Three things drove the result. We narrowed the agency to one lane AI tools could name it for, food and beverage brands. We turned its press and credentials into structured data AI systems can read. And we published lane-specific content on a steady cadence instead of in one batch. If you want leads from Claude or any other AI assistant, those are the three levers to copy.

This page shows the starting point, what Cited Co built, how the leads arrived, and what we think it means for other service businesses. One note on method up front: the leads told Homemade Social founder Becca Bunch directly that they found the agency through Claude. That is self-reported attribution, and we treat it that way below.

What the Research Shows

The McKinsey number matters most here. Nearly one in five US consumers already uses AI to choose brands and services. The marketers who hire agencies like Homemade Social are consumers too, and they bring the habit to work.

How we got Homemade Social leads from Claude.

Cited Co ran the same process we use with every client, documented on our how it works page. The difference here was focus. We did not try to make Homemade Social visible for everything. We picked one lane and went deep.

How the four leads arrived.

All four leads contacted Homemade Social in the last two weeks of September and told Becca Bunch they found the agency through Claude. We are not naming the brands or the people here, because they are Homemade Social’s prospects, not ours.

Here is our honest read on attribution. We cannot isolate which single asset sent each lead, and self-reported sources are imperfect. What we can say is this. Homemade Social had no Claude leads before September 18. Then four arrived in thirteen days, right after the lane pages, press rebuild, and September posts went live.

A visibility score is a leading indicator. Leads are the scoreboard. When four brands in two weeks say they found you through Claude, the work is doing its job.

Lauren Lerner, Founder, Cited Co

Becca’s own lead log puts those four in context. Over three months, Homemade Social got 35 new-lead notifications, and four of them named Claude as the source. That’s about one in every nine new leads, from a platform that couldn’t place the agency in its niche when the work began in July.

When we started, my agency didn’t show up on any of the major AI platforms when someone asked for the best UGC agency for food and beverage brands. Lauren built out our service pages, a Phoenix page, a pillar page, blog posts, schema, and a press page. Within a few months, Claude was sending us real leads.

Becca Bunch, Founder and CEO, Homemade Social

Why the leads came from Claude before ChatGPT.

Claude was already Homemade Social’s strongest platform at baseline, so it had the shortest distance to travel. When Claude searches the web to answer a recommendation question, it favors pages that answer the question directly and back it with checkable facts. The lane pages were written for exactly that kind of reader.

Our view: you should not pick a favorite platform, but you should expect results to show up unevenly. Living with Lolo, the Scottsdale design firm where Lauren Lerner first built this system, has 32 all-time leads from AI platforms, and ChatGPT sends most of them. Homemade Social’s first AI leads came from Claude. The same work, applied to a different starting position, opened a different door first. The Living with Lolo case study shows the other side of that pattern.

The broader lesson for any service business is that AI tools cite specifics: a clear niche, a named city, a founder with a verifiable record, and pages that answer real questions in plain language. Our guide to writing content AI tools cite breaks that down, and this explainer on generative engine optimization covers the discipline behind it.

What to copy from this case study.

First, pick one lane and own it before you expand. Homemade Social could have chased every vertical it serves. Instead it became the obvious answer for one, and that is what got it named. Second, audit what AI can actually read about you. Credentials locked inside images, logos, or PDFs might as well not exist. Third, publish steadily. One post every ten days beats three posts on the same afternoon.

You can check where you stand today with our walkthrough on how to check your AI visibility score. When you want help, Cited Co’s AI visibility services start with a baseline scan across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude, and pricing is on our investment page. Businesses across the Phoenix area, from Scottsdale to Paradise Valley, can see how we approach local markets there.

What people ask about this case study.