Meridian Capital Group

Meridian Capital Group is a mid-market private equity firm. They don't need mass-market visibility — they need to appear credible and findable to a specific set of buyers: CFOs, investment bankers, and business owners considering a recapitalization. Increasingly, those buyers use AI assistants to do initial research on potential capital partners.

Their AI visibility score of 31/100 was holding them back in a category where credibility signals matter enormously. AI engines were citing two competitors consistently for queries like "middle market private equity firms" and "growth capital for $10M-$100M businesses" — queries Meridian should own. The firm's website had strong content but zero structured data. No Organization schema, no financial product markup, no FAQ schema on service pages.

The CMO had avoided schema work for years, viewing it as a developer task with unclear ROI. A BrandCited audit quantified the gap for the first time.

The entire program ran for six weeks and required no new content. The existing website had the substance AI engines needed — it just wasn't formatted for machine readability.

BrandCited's audit prioritized four schema implementations: Organization (with founding date, jurisdiction, and area served), FinancialProduct on each service page, FAQ schema pulling from the firm's existing FAQ content, and BreadcrumbList for navigation hierarchy. The development work took 18 hours total across three sprints.

In parallel, the CMO approved one structural change to each service page: adding a 150-word "What we do" summary at the top of the page, formatted as a direct answer to the query an AI engine would receive. No claims were added or changed — the language came directly from the firm's existing materials.

Six weeks after the schema went live, BrandCited's tracking showed citation rate climbing week over week.

Meridian's AI visibility score reached 78 within 10 weeks of starting the program. Citation rate for their target queries increased 200%. For three specific queries — "middle market private equity", "growth capital $20M-$100M", and "minority recapitalization" — Meridian moved from absent to cited in the top three responses across ChatGPT and Perplexity.

The business result came quickly. Within 90 days of the program launch, the firm received two inbound inquiries from business owners who mentioned they'd found Meridian through an AI search. Neither had come through Google, LinkedIn, or the firm's existing referral network. One became a serious conversation within six weeks.

For a firm where a single deal generates millions in fees, the ROI on a six-week schema project is straightforward. The CMO now runs BrandCited monitoring as a standard part of the quarterly business review.