CASE STUDY ·
From 18% to 50% of AI answers, and +20 points inside Google's AI Overviews.
How Decodo became a top-three recommendation in four months.
Category: Residential & ISP proxies · Engagement: January–June 2026
The numbers
| BEFORE | AFTER | |
|---|---|---|
| Visibility in AI answers | 18% | 50% |
| Visibility in Google's AI Overviews | 50% | 70% (+20 points) |
| Brand mentions across tracked conversations | 18 | 106 |
| Times named as the recommended pick | 0 | 8 |
| Position among 102 tracked brands | outside the top tier | #3, and the fastest riser in the category |
Measured across 210 buyer conversations spanning 30 real questions, four buyer personas and the major AI model families. Same questions, same method, four months apart.
The challenge
When an engineer wants a proxy provider, they no longer start with a search box. They ask Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews, "best residential proxy for scraping", "Bright Data alternatives", "Bright Data vs Oxylabs vs Decodo".
In February 2026, Decodo barely featured in those answers. It appeared in just 18% of them, and was never the provider the model actually recommended. In a category where two rivals owned the conversation, Decodo was effectively absent from the place buyers now make up their minds.
What Yard did
We put Decodo into the third-party content those models already pull from.
Over the engagement we commissioned 16 pieces of video from independent technical authors and influencers, hands-on scraping tutorials, real data-collection workflows, and direct provider comparisons that showed Decodo doing the job engineers actually care about. Not brand films. Practical, credible content from people engineers already trust. Every piece approved by Decodo before it went live.
The result
Four months on, Decodo appears in 50% of AI answers, up from 18%. Mentions across tracked conversations climbed from 18 to 106. And the brand went from never being recommended to being named as the pick eight times, the shift from "mentioned" to "chosen".
Decodo now sits third of 102 brands tracked in the category, the biggest gainer in the top five while rivals slipped backwards. The gains were broad, not lucky: visibility rose double digits across every buyer persona and every topic that matters in the category, from anti-blocking strength to pricing transparency. And on Google's AI Overviews, the AI answer engineers see at the top of the results page, and the surface marketing leaders ask about most. Visibility rose 20 points, from 50% to 70%.
Why it worked
AI doesn't recommend what a brand says about itself. It recommends what the wider ecosystem says. Decodo is now referenced across 237 independent domains, and 96% of what AI pulls about them comes from that third-party content, not their own site. Breadth across many independent, credible sources is what moved them from being cited to being recommended.
The clearest single proof: one of the videos Yard commissioned is now the source Google's Gemini cites when a buyer asks "Bright Data vs Oxylabs vs Decodo", the highest-intent question in the category, framed around Decodo's two largest rivals. The content we placed has become the content the model trusts.
"Yard took our visibility in AI answers from 18% to 50% in four months, and got us named as the recommended pick where we'd never appeared before. They don't just track visibility... they build the content that actually moves it."