THINK PIECE

The Yard Thesis

For the last five years we've been getting dev tool companies like Cognition AI, CodeRabbit, Mobbin, and dozens more noticed by the right buyers en masse. At first the traditional way, through YouTube, blogs, and events. Then, about a year ago, we realised what many others did too: purchasing behaviour had changed. Buyers, especially technical buyers, or their agents are asking the newest models of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude the same questions they used to type into a search bar.

But nobody really knew exactly how AI visibility worked, although straight away plenty of SF based startups claimed they did. We avoided the more hacky short-term solutions and we got to work building a strategy and a platform to help our customers win long term. And, well… Eureka. The funny thing is, we didn't reinvent the wheel, we just followed first principles. Improving your brand's AI visibility sounds like a complicated business. It isn't. Good AEO/GEO is good SEO, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

How to win AI visibility

If you don't want to use Yard's solution, no worries, here's the formula: when enough authorities and creators say the same truthful things, people engage with it positively, and it gets surfaced by LLMs and search. Translation: you win. And when you think about it, why would it work any other way? Models, at their core, are consensus engines, reflecting what the credible corners of the internet say about a product.

So who's credible? What moves the needle is genuine coverage and mentions from people the audience already trusts, in the right context, at enough breadth that the pattern is clear. Who those voices are can change month by month and differs widely between brands in niches.

Where the market is going

As far as AI visibility tools go, the age of the do-nothing dashboard is hopefully coming to a swift end. Yes thank you our AI visibility is low, can you help us fix it? No? Ok thanks. Brands already know how to map their AI visibility, they just don't know how to improve it.

And the stakes are only rising. Google is still the biggest search engine on earth by a wide margin, and traditional search won't die, but its AI Overviews now sit on top of the same pages that rank, increasingly pulling from YouTube scripts along the way. Technical brands especially operate on a well-funded knife-edge, where one bad quarter or one leapfrog from a competitor can wipe billions off a valuation. But every prompt you win can put you in front of a buyer worth millions. The brands that know exactly where and how to get their name mentioned on a limited budget are the ones that stay alive.

Why we exist

If you've got a massive budget, sure, you can just book Fireship and call it a day. Will that work? Sometimes. Is it the best way to spend your money? We certainly don't think so.

Yard takes a small slice of your marketing or growth team's budget and puts it to work. We pull thousands of prompts and answers to find exactly what your buyers are asking and where a mention of your tool would move the needle most. Those are the articles, posts, and videos with the biggest AI visibility delta for your brand, on top of the organic bump from an engaged audience of real readers and viewers. Then we cross-reference against our exhaustive database of over 25,000 technical creators we've been assembling for the last 5 years to find the best fit at the best value for you.

Finally, we get you placed (placed means live): in thought-leader blogs on dev.to and Medium, threads on X and LinkedIn, or in the next trending YouTube video. When we're done, your brand and your solution are appearing in the conversations your buyers and their agents are having about the problem you solve.

When engineers ask, your brand should be the answer.