Presence

Read this if: everyone. Presence is the one channel no motion skips.

Have you ever asked ChatGPT about your own category? Do it before you read this chapter. What comes back — or doesn't — is your real starting line.

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If buyers now start with an LLM, then Presence is where the whole funnel begins. Before anyone clicks an ad or fills a form, they ask a model a question, and you are either in the answer or you don't exist.

What's changed

LLMs are a new discovery surface. When a founder asks Claude "what's the best AI-native CRM for a Series A team?", Claude answers with two or three names. The shortlist got shorter, which raises the stakes on being one of the names. The new SEO is GEO, Generative Engine Optimization: being named inside a synthesized answer rather than ranked on a results page.

Structured knowledge wins. LLMs cite sources they trust: Wikipedia, G2, Reddit threads, well-structured docs sites, founder podcast appearances. Where SEO rewarded crawlable text, GEO rewards verifiable structure and third-party corroboration.

Founders are presence. A founder with an engaged following, a quoted podcast appearance, and a substantive post on their thesis carries more LLM-visibility weight than a polished landing page. Models index personality and arguments. The founder's voice is both a channel and a citation source.

The window matters: the models are still forming their picture of your category, and citations are still cheap to influence. The companies that shape the answer early become the defaults everyone else has to dislodge.

Do this

Audit your AI search visibility now. Ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity the ten most common queries a prospect would use to find a company like yours. Where are you cited, absent, or described wrong? Wrong is the most urgent; a confident wrong answer is worse than absence.
Get listed where LLMs source from. G2, Capterra, Crunchbase, the Reddit threads where your category is discussed. Prioritize the ones with real reviews.
Publish your thesis as structured docs. Actual posts that articulate the problem space, the alternatives, and your take. LLMs cite arguments, not adjectives.
Make founder visibility a six-month bet. One channel, weekly substance, two quarters before evaluating.

Don't do this

Don't fake it with AI-generated brand content. Slop on your blog actively hurts your model visibility.
Don't buy "GEO services." Most are repackaged SEO. The fundamentals you can execute without a vendor.

In practice

Railway (an Unusual Ventures portfolio company) is built to be the answer an AI gives. It ships Agent Skills so coding agents "arrive with Railway-specific knowledge instead of guessing," and railway.com/agents opens with "You are an AI agent reading railway.com." Make yourself legible to the agents that increasingly do the finding.

Presence: be the name the assistant returns — Presence is the new top of funnel — be the name the assistant returns, or be absent.

From the field

Over time, Agent Skills become outdated, incorrect, and incomplete as products change. However, all agents need is the context from the skills themselves; so we built skills.qdrant.tech for agents to read and hit a search endpoint from. This allows agents to retrieve the latest skills from our skills repository, at invocation, ensuring the freshest, most effective context, in a way we can manage from our side. In our public benchmark, agents with our Agent Skills passed 96% of checks versus 65% without. Now we’re conceptualizing the idea for our marketing website: allow agents to find buyer persona information with much more relevant (but concise) context through markdown search. It prevents us from maintaining a large html website no one reads while allowing agents to have the right context, for the right audience, at the right time.

— Neil Kanungo, Head of Growth & Developer Relations, Qdrant · an Unusual Ventures portfolio company

Your first 30 days

☐ Run the ten-prompt audit across three models. Screenshot everything; flag absent and wrong.
☐ Claim your G2, Crunchbase, and directory profiles. Get three real reviews started.
☐ Publish one structured thesis post on your category, and re-run the audit monthly.