😻 Maeva Cifuentes

SEO & GEO for B2B SaaS // Coaching for women in service businesses

I run Flying Cat, a B2B SaaS-focused SEO and content consultancy. We specialize in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and bottom-funnel content strategy, with deep expertise in international SEO when clients need to expand into French, German, Italian, and Spanish markets.

We've worked with ActiveCampaign, Hotjar, Klaviyo, Mixmax, D2L, Leapsome, Ivalua, and CoVet.

After a decade running a translation agency, I built Flying Cat on a simple premise: senior strategists should stay on accounts. No junior handoffs. No templated playbooks. I run the strategy, my team executes. We work directly with marketing leaders who need revenue from search, not just traffic.

📍 I post about SEO, GEO, AI visibility, and building a service business you actually want to run.

WHAT CLIENTS HAVE SAID:

"Flying Cat's approach led to a significant increase in monthly revenue and contributed to our rapid growth." - Rob Hartman, former Creative Director, Operto Guest Technologies

"Together, we were able to increase our yearly organic traffic by 700%. 56% of our traffic was coming through the blog. It was such a smooth partnership and really felt effortless on my side." - Molly Holcutt, Content Manager, Livestorm

"Within two quarters, we were able to drive an additional 80k visits to the website." - Joe Baugnet, Global SEO, ActiveCampaign

I also coach women who run service businesses. If you do excellent work but keep getting treated like a vendor, underpaid, over-explained-to, stuck in execution mode, I can help. My program teaches you how to position yourself as a strategic partner and have the client conversations you've been avoiding.
Follow @purposefulliving.co on Instagram for more on that.

maeva@flyingcatmarketing.com
🌐 @maevaeverywhere

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Content Marketing • Content Strategy • Content Agency • Content Marketing Agency  •  SEO Agency  •  AEO Agency  •  GEO Agency  •  SEO Consultant  •  AEO Consultant  •  AISEO Consultant

Angel Investor & Marketing Advisor

Investor and shareholder. Also, as fractional Head of Marketing/Marketing Advisor, I'm diversifying Spitche's revenue streams and acquisition channels, focusing on organic inbound growth.

Maeva Cifuentes

2025 was the year of the Snake: shedding, transformation, starting anew. That's exactly what I did. 2026 is the year of the Horse. Moving forward, action, speed. That's what's in the cards for me.


While I felt like I fell behind and maybe got a bit lost last year, I realized over my two-week break that it was necessary. To shed the old me, mourn her, and wait for clarity on what's next.

The thing I lacked was commitment. Not just to my health and wellbeing, but to manifesting goals I've held for years. Commitment to stop comparing myself to anyone but past me. And commitment to showing up for my network, not just lurking, but contributing.

This is the year I:

- Help female consultants reach the multiple 6 figure years they've been chasing
- Only work with tech clients who genuinely want to grow and are willing to get creative, not ones who see search and AI as a box to check
- Only partner with A-players who are driven by impact, not just a paycheck
- Actually create. Not half-ass it like I have been for years.

My word for the year is commitment. What's yours?

If you're a female consultant looking to grow your business and feel fulfilled in your work, give me a 🔔. What I'm building this year is going to be worth your attention.

🔥 Organic growth advisor for forward-thinking companies

Everyone's telling you to pivot to AI search.
I ran the numbers. The math doesn't work. At least not yet.


Google sends 345x more traffic to websites than ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity combined. That's not my opinion. That's Ahrefs analyzing tens of thousands of sites.

AI traffic does convert better. Significantly better. Seer Interactive found ChatGPT visitors convert at 15.9% versus 1.76% for Google organic. That's a 9x advantage.

Sounds like you should drop everything and optimize for AI, right?
Let me show you what actually happens when you do the math.

Take a B2B SaaS with 50,000 monthly organic visits.

Google organic contribution: 50,000 visits × 1.76% conversion rate = 880 conversions per month.

Current AI contribution (AI represents 0.19% of traffic where Google represents 42%): roughly 226 visits × 15.9% conversion rate = 36 conversions per month.

Google delivers 24x more conversions than AI. Not 2x. Not 5x. 

Twenty-four times more.

Let's say AI traffic 10x's. 2,260 visits × 15.9% = 359 conversions. Still less than half of what Google delivers today.

For AI to simply match Google's current conversion contribution, you'd need 5,535 AI visits per month. That's 24.5x growth from current levels.

Now here's the opportunity cost nobody's calculating.

You shift resources to AI optimization. Organic gets neglected. Traffic slips 20%.
Google: 40,000 visits × 1.76% = 704 conversions. You lost 176.
Meanwhile, your AI efforts pay off and traffic doubles. AI: 452 visits × 15.9% = 72 conversions. You gained 36.

Net result: negative 140 conversions.

Here's where I'll push back on myself.

AI search is the future. Zero-click is accelerating. AI Overviews already appear in 13% of queries and climbing. Companies that ignore it entirely will wake up in three years wondering where their visibility went.

You should be optimizing for AI. You should understand how citations work, how LLMs synthesize answers. This matters and it will matter more.

But your pipeline doesn't run on what might work in 2027. It runs on what converts in Q1 and Q2.

The question isn't AI or SEO. It's allocation.

If you're spending 80% of your resources chasing AI visibility and 20% maintaining organic, you've got it backwards. Protect the engine driving revenue today. Allocate proportionate effort to what will drive revenue tomorrow.

The good news is these aren't separate bets. The fundamentals that drive organic rankings are the same fundamentals that get you cited in AI. Structure content clearly, build topical authority, earn third-party validation.

Track AI as a channel. Watch it grow. But don't sacrifice your primary revenue driver for a channel delivering less than 1% of traffic today.
AI search will compound. Organic search still pays the bills. Get the ratio right.

What's your current split between SEO and AI optimization efforts? 80/20? 50/50? Something else entirely?

The "women have it harder" narrative is why you're still charging the same rates as 3 years ago.

Yes, the system wasn't built for us. That's real.

But here's what I see happening: women trying to force themselves into that system, getting angry when they don't fit, and then staying stuck in that anger instead of building something that actually works for them.
I've watched this play out so many times.

She starts her business. She's talented. She does great work.

Then she notices her male competitors charging more. 

Getting bigger clients. 

Being taken more seriously. 

They're steamrolling calls while she waits for her turn to speak. 

They're landing the strategic projects even though she's more competent. 

They're getting promoted while she's getting praised for being "so reliable."

So she tries to match their energy. Talks tougher. Works harder. Proves herself over and over.

And when it still doesn't work, she gets resentful. She reads articles about pay gaps. She vents to her friends about how unfair it is. She's right about all of it.

But she's still charging the same rates.

But something needs to shift... and when it finally does...

She stops trying to compete in a game that wasn't designed for her. 

She stops forcing herself into a mold that doesn't fit.

She stops trying to be the loudest in the room and starts being the most prepared. 

She stops steamrolling back and starts owning the room in her own way.

She stops chasing every opportunity and starts positioning herself for the right ones.

She stops overdelivering and starts making sure clients actually see the value she's already providing.

She raises her prices.

She stops overexplaining, and starts cheerleading for herself.

The clients who used to treat her like a vendor start treating her like a partner. Or they leave and better ones come in.

The system wasn't built for you. That's true.

So stop trying to win inside it. Build your own.

Keyword research tells you what people asked Google 3 months ago. 
I wanted to know what they'll ask ChatGPT next week.



So I built a tool that extracts questions from sales calls.

My thinking: by the time a question shows up in keyword research tools, every competitor can see it too. But the questions prospects ask on sales calls haven't been typed into anything yet. They're pre-prompt intelligence.

And in my experience, they sound completely different from search queries.

Nobody on a sales call says "best procurement software 2024." They say things like "we need something that integrates with our existing ERP but doesn't require IT involvement to set up, and ideally handles compliance reporting for our German subsidiary."

I've found that specificity (the constraints, the context, the actual situation) is what people bring to ChatGPT. And it's what LLMs tend to cite, because they're trained on how humans talk, not how SEOs write.

One client went from 162 daily brand mentions in LLMs to 402 after we shifted their content strategy to match this language.

The methodology is to pull questions from sales recordings, categorize by buying stage, then group them by intent. 

If multiple questions share the same underlying problem, weave that language into an existing page. If a question represents a distinct use case or buying scenario you haven't addressed (especially one that keeps coming up) that's probably a new page.

Other sources I've found useful: demo request forms (the "tell us more" field), webinar Q&As, support tickets. Anywhere customers describe problems in their own words before they've learned your marketing language.

Keyword tools show you where search behavior has been. Sales calls show you where it's going.

I'd love to know what first-party data sources you're pulling from for content ideas—drop them in the comments.

I've spent the last few months obsessing over one question: why do some brands get cited by LLMs while others remain invisible?

The answer comes down to whether AI systems actually know who you are.

When you ask ChatGPT "what's the best CRM for small businesses," it doesn't just scan webpages for keywords. It tries to understand which companies are real, credible players in that space. It looks for what the industry calls "entities" — basically, whether your brand exists as a recognizable thing in the machine's understanding of the world, not just words on a website.

Google's Knowledge Graph contains 500 billion facts about 5 billion "things" — people, companies, places, concepts. When AI systems need to verify whether your brand is legitimate, they check whether you exist in these knowledge bases, whether multiple trusted sources agree on who you are, and whether your information is consistent everywhere it appears.

The research is striking.

Princeton's GEO study found brands with proper entity signals achieved up to 40% higher visibility in AI answers. Wikipedia presence alone accounts for 47.9% of ChatGPT's top citations. Pages with schema markup are 3x more likely to earn AI citations according to BrightEdge.

And 88-92% of AI citations come from sources you don't own — Reddit, G2, YouTube, industry publications. That's where your entity gets validated or ignored.

Jason Barnard estimates you need approximately 30 corroborating sources agreeing on basic facts about your brand before AI systems treat you as a stable entity. That's 30 different authoritative places confirming your company name, what you do, and who you serve — all saying the same thing.

The practical takeaways for building a stronger entity:
Your website needs a dedicated "entity home" — an about page that clearly states who you are, what you do, and who you serve. This becomes the source of truth other platforms reference.

Schema markup with sameAs properties linking to Wikipedia, Wikidata, LinkedIn, and Crunchbase creates a "network of corroborating signals" — code that tells machines "this company here is the same entity as that company there."

NAP consistency (name, address, phone identical everywhere) sounds basic, but inconsistencies cause "entity fragmentation" — AI treating you as multiple separate companies.

Your content should position your brand within the broader ecosystem of related entities. Reference industry frameworks, adjacent concepts, and authoritative sources. AI interprets this as your brand belonging to that semantic neighborhood.

Entity building takes 6-12 months, not weeks. Stable recognition typically appears weeks 9-16.

If you've done any entity optimization work, I'd love to hear what's actually moved the needle for you.

Your site ranks #1 on Google.
But ChatGPT doesn't know you exist.


This isn't a hypothetical. Seer Interactive studied 500+ SearchGPT citations and found only 56% correlated with Google rankings. The other 44% came from sources traditional SEO would never prioritize.

Ahrefs analyzed 75,000 brands and found backlinks correlate just 0.218 with AI visibility, Domain Rating hits 0.326, while brand mentions across the web reach 0.664. From what I'm seeing, three decades of "build more links" wisdom is getting inverted.

Kevin Indig's research of 7,000+ citations makes it even starker: the top 10% most-cited pages in AI platforms have less traffic, fewer keywords, and fewer backlinks than typical SEO winners.

The sites winning in ChatGPT aren't always the ones winning in Google.

LLMs don't use PageRank. They don't crawl your link graph. They pattern-match on entities, freshness, and whether your brand shows up in places they trust. 

76.4% of ChatGPT's most-cited pages were updated in the last 30 days, 

47.9% of its top citations come from Wikipedia, and Perplexity pulls 

46.7% from Reddit. I suspect most guest post backlinks don't even register.

The Princeton GEO study tested what actually moves visibility: adding expert quotations boosted it 40%, statistics added 30-40%, and citing credible sources averaged +27%—though sites ranking 5th or lower saw +115% gains.

That last point is worth sitting with. Lower-ranked sites see bigger gains from optimization than market leaders. The window is open for brands willing to move now.

AI traffic converts at 3.76% vs 1.19% for organic search. Gartner predicts traditional search volume drops 25% by 2026.

The mindset shift I keep coming back to: SEO was about proving authority to an algorithm. GEO is about being recognizable to a language model. 

Links built authority. 

Mentions build recognition. 

And right now, AI rewards recognition over authority.

The brands treating this as a brand-building problem (not a link-building problem) are the ones I expect to pull ahead.

Stop "letting the work speak for itself." It can't talk.


I don't know who told us that if we just do great work, people will notice. But it's one of the most damaging things women in business believe.

You keep your head down. You deliver. You go above and beyond. You assume that someone, somewhere, is paying attention and keeping track.

They're not.

Your client is dealing with 47 other things. Your point of contact is trying to hit their own goals. The exec who hired you forgot what you delivered last quarter because three new fires started since then.

Meanwhile you're sitting there wondering why you're not getting referred, why you're not being brought into the bigger conversations, why they hired someone else for the strategic project when you've been doing great work for them for two years.

This is why.

You did the work. But you never made sure anyone remembered it.
I had to learn this the hard way. I used to think self-promotion was for people who weren't actually good at their jobs. Like if you had to talk about it, it probably wasn't that impressive.

Turns out the people getting the big projects, the referrals, the premium rates? They're not better than you. They're just better at making sure people know what they did.

So now I treat visibility like part of the job. Not optional. Not "if I have time." Built in.

Monthly check-ins where I recap what we accomplished. Quick messages connecting results back to work I did months ago. Presentations I build without being asked because I know no one else is going to summarize my impact for me.

It felt weird at first. Now it just feels like running a business.

Your work is great. But if no one remembers it, it doesn't count.

Start talking.

I spent weeks digging through every major study on how ChatGPT decides what to cite.


Between SE Ranking's analysis of 129,000 domains and tracking 680 million citations, the picture is finally clear.


A single factor drives 55% of the decision.

It is called Content-Answer Fit.

This is the "secret sauce" of AI visibility.

It happens when your writing mirrors the exact way an AI naturally explains a topic.

ChatGPT is essentially looking for the "ideal" answer it would have written itself from scratch.

To understand this, think about how you search for a recipe.

You don't want a long story about a childhood trip to Italy.

You want the ingredients, the steps, and the temperature.

Content-Answer Fit means you provide that same utility for any topic.

If the question is "How does inflation work?" your content should provide:

1. A one-sentence definition that a fifth-grader could understand.
2. A breakdown of the three main causes.
3. A clear example of the impact on a household budget.

When you structure your page this way, the AI sees your work as a "pre-processed" answer.

It doesn't have to work hard to summarize you, so it chooses you as the trusted source.

The architecure of the page is the second half of the battle.

- Start with the answer. Don't make the AI (or the reader) hunt for it.
- Use clear subheadings that match the logical flow of a conversation.
- Use short, declarative sentences that state facts plainly.

End with a summary or a "key takeaways" list.

When your content is built this way, the AI treats your page like a partner rather than just a data source.

The rest of the winning strategy comes down to these specific data points:
1. Expert Quotes: Pages with these see 4.1 avg citations, a 71% jump.
2. Statistical Density: Including 19+ stats nearly doubles your chances of being picked.
3. Freshness: Content updated in the last 3 months gets 6.0 citations vs. 3.6 for stale posts.
4. Speed: Pages that load in under 0.4 seconds are 3x more likely to be cited.

We can also stop worrying about these myths:
- LLMs.txt files and FAQ schema actually showed zero or even negative impact in the data.
- Keyword stuffing is still a misatke that reduces your visibility by 10%.

To compete with the giants like Wikipedia and Reddit, you need to focus on 2 things:

1. Deep, data-backed evidence (the "what").
2. Perfect structural alignment (the "how").

I am curious to hear your take on this shift from keywords to "answer structures."

Do you think this makes content better for humans, or are we just writing for the bots now?

LLM Source Selection Hierarchy

This client jumped from position 70 to #1 on a keyword with 86 difficulty.
Not a typo. Seventy to one.
Let me back up.


They came to us stuck in one of the most brutal B2B SaaS categories I've seen. Their competitors had 5,000+ backlinks, domain ratings pushing 80, and had been building authority for over a decade.

Old them worried constantly about the market leader. They were ranking, sure, but never for the keywords that actually drove pipeline. Every sales call, prospects would say "we're also looking at [competitor]" and they'd have to fight for positioning.

We started by mapping the full competitive landscape and found something interesting. The market leaders were so focused on obvious software terms, they'd left actual gaps. High-intent keywords nobody was even trying to rank for.
So we built topic clusters around those gaps. Wrote the briefs. Wrote the content. Built links to the pages that mattered. Ran technical audits and cleaned up the site. No fluffy top-of-funnel posts—every piece had buyer intent baked in.
Then we waited. (SEO is patient work.)

One keyword went from position 70 → #1.
Another from 14 → #1.
Multiple new #1 rankings on keywords with KD 50-86.

Now when prospects hop on calls, they're saying "I found you searching for [specific solution]." They're showing up as the obvious choice, not another option in a crowded market.

Traffic stayed steady around 20K/month. But traffic value kept climbing quarter over quarter. In my experience, that's usually the sign you're capturing the right searches—not just volume, but the ones where buyers actually make purchasing decisions.

We ran the full engine: competitor analysis, topic cluster strategy, content briefs, writing, link building, technical fixes, and quarterly business reviews to keep it all on track. It compounds when everything works together.

If you're a B2B SaaS in a brutal category and your current SEO partner keeps saying "it takes time" without movement on money keywords, DM me. I'll tell you if your strategy is actually working or just burning budget.

I analyzed 16,346 AI citations across 3,000 sources to find out what actually drives visibility in ChatGPT and Perplexity.



I tracked citation patterns for three brands across HR tech, learning management, and procurement software using Peec.ai data from commercial-intent queries. The kind that lead to demos and deals.

The headlines:
→ Listicles dominate: 53% of all citations (from 46% of sources)
→ Third-party controls visibility: 97.8% of citations from domains you don't own
→ Product pages underperform: 3.5 avg citations vs 6.3 for listicles
→ Being mentioned lifts performance: +46% more citations when brand appears
→ Freshness signals work: +28% lift for putting the year in your title

Listicles capture 52.9% of all AI citations averaging 6.3 per source. Articles come in at 20% with 4.8. How-to guides at 8.1% with 4.5. Discussion threads (primarily Reddit) represent 4.8% but punch above their weight at 6.4. Product pages sit at 4.2% with only 3.5.
LLMs are structurally biased toward numbered lists when answering buyer questions.

Among high-citation sources (20+ citations), 77% are listicles, 69% don't even mention the target brand, and they average 6.5 competitors mentioned per page. The sources driving AI visibility are category-level content—not brand-specific.

Industry and niche sites dominate at 92.8% of citation volume. Reddit contributes 4.3%. Review sites like G2 and Capterra account for 1.9%. Major publications—Forbes, TechCrunch—combine for 0.6%.

Niche industry sites drive 158x more AI citations than major publications.

This points to a fundamental shift in how B2B buyers discover software.

AI functions as an editorial curator. When someone Googles "best LMS software," they get blue links and decide for themselves. When someone asks ChatGPT, the AI has already decided-synthesizing third-party editorial consensus into a shortlist.

That's why 97.8% of citations come from content you don't own. Your website barely registers. AI surfaces what other people say about you.

GEO is closer to analyst relations than content marketing. The brands that win will treat third-party editorial placement as a distribution channel. 


What's the last listicle you pitched to get your brand included? Or is that not even on the radar yet?

You're overdelivering and then resenting your clients for not noticing.

You go above and beyond. You catch things before they become problems. You do work that wasn't even in the scope because you saw it needed to be done.

And then... nothing. No acknowledgment. No thank you. They just move on to the next request.

So you start keeping score. You get a little bitter. You vent to your friends about how your clients don't appreciate you.

But actually... your clients aren't ignoring your value. They literally don't know it exists.

They don't see the fire you put out before it spread. They don't know about the extra hours. They have no idea you saved them from a mistake they almost made.

Because you never told them. You just did the work and expected them to somehow feel it.

I used to think telling clients what I did was... gross. Like if I had to point it out, it didn't count. The work should speak for itself, right?

No. The work can't speak. It has no mouth.

You have to be your own cheerleader like it's your job. Because it literally is.

Here's what this looks like in practice: you notice that traffic from that landing page you rebuilt three months ago is up 40%. You assume your client saw it too. They didn't. They're not tracking it. They have no idea.
So you send a quick message. Not a novel. Just a few lines.

"Hey—remember that landing page we rebuilt in Q1? Just noticed it's up 40% in conversions since launch. That's roughly $80k in pipeline you didn't have before. Thought you'd want to know."

That's it. Connect the result to your work. Translate it into something they care about.

It feels awkward at first. You'll think you're being annoying or braggy. 

You're not. You're just making the invisible visible.

Your clients aren't mind readers. And your resentment isn't a sign that they're bad clients. It's a sign you've been doing great work in the dark and you're tired of it.

So turn the lights on.

The difference between women who get treated like vendors and women who get treated like strategic partners.


I've seen incredibly talented women get treated like order takers. And I've seen women with half the skill set get invited into the strategy room.
The difference is how they show up.

The vendor waits to be told what to do. The partner comes with a point of view.

The vendor sends deliverables. The partner sends deliverables with context on why it matters and what should happen next.

The vendor says yes to everything and then resents the client later. The partner pushes back when something doesn't make sense, offers an alternative, and the client respects her more for it.

The vendor hopes someone notices her work. The partner makes sure they do.

The vendor shows up to calls ready to listen. The partner shows up with an agenda, a perspective, and questions that make the client think.

The vendor undercharges because she's afraid they'll say no. The partner quotes with conviction because she knows what she's worth and she's not apologizing for it.

Clients treat you the way you train them to treat you.

This is the shift I want to see happen for the women in my network.

Before:

- Clients see you as tactical, not strategic
- You're not included in the big-picture conversations
- You do great work but no one seems to notice
- You hold back in senior conversations and second-guess yourself before speaking up

After:

- Clients ask for your opinion before making decisions
- You're included in calls with their leadership team
- - They introduce you to other teams because they trust your judgment
They stop questioning your rates because you've already proven you're worth it

Nothing changed about your skills. Everything changed about how you positioned yourself.

Loren Jaffe

SOCi, Inc.

Localized AI digital marketing at huge scale across search, social and reputation.

Director, Selling Effectiveness

Copilot

Advisor

The Sales Collective

Bloomreach

eCommerce personalization with CDP automation for B2B.

Director, Global Sales Enablement

CSO - Chief Sabbatical Officer

Career Break, EMEA and SE Asia

Adobe

Enterprise Account Executive

Marketo, an Adobe Company

Strategic Accounts

Enterprise customer data management, context driven marketing platform and unified commerce processes for omni-channel marketing to eCommerce.

Senior Client Executive, Hybris

Brightcove

Director, Central US

Webtrends

WebAnalytics, Marketing Intelligence, Digital Marketing Optimization.  Named and target accounts in Central US, Southeast US and West Coast.

Sales Director

People will forget what is said, and what is done, but not how they feel.  Be authentic.  This is the essence of customer intimacy.  Leading technology companies understand this maxim. I have 25 years of domain expertise in early stage and high growth technology companies, in-field and executive sales and management roles, and sales enablement leadership roles, helping  customers and employees adapt to new technologies and improve their business outcomes.

Director, Selling Enablement

The only digital marketing platform for multi-location brands. Scale reach and engagement across hundreds of channels and thousands of locations with brand control and local execution.

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