Customer Story How Shipium's CMO turned AI search from a blind spot into a boardroom metric
Kris Gösser, CMO at Shipium, needed to understand how AI models were representing his company to enterprise buyers doing research. Here is how he built a GEO practice around Gumshoe and what that meant for the business.
557%
citation increase in under 4 months
Weekly
reporting cadence to board and GTM team
QoQ
visibility score growth every quarter
The Company
About Shipium
Shipium is an end-to-end shipping platform that helps large enterprises optimize and automate shipping within the supply chain. Their orchestration layer handles customer promise dates, order routing, and outbound shipping execution for companies like Gap and major 3PLs. On top of that sits an intelligence platform focused on AI-based analytics and agentic workflows, helping some of the biggest names in retail and logistics move faster with more confidence.
The Challenge
A flawed assumption about AI search
Like many CMOs, Kris initially treated AI visibility as an extension of SEO. If Shipium had solid fundamentals in place, the thinking went, those would carry over into AI search. That assumption quickly fell apart.
AI models are not like keyword rankings. They are probability machines. The same question yields different answers depending on the model, the product, the searcher's context, and accumulated memory. Optimizing for a single specific prompt was measuring the wrong thing entirely.
The deeper problem was that Shipium had no way to measure how they were performing across AI models at any meaningful scale. There was no benchmark, no way to track progress, and no signal that connected back to go-to-market strategy. With enterprise buyers increasingly turning to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to research and compare vendors, that gap had real consequences.
"It was sort of obvious in hindsight that these are actually way different types of channels that need to be tracked and optimized and have some sort of a plan around how we want to perform within it."
Why It Mattered
Enterprise buyers now research in AI chat
Shipium sells into enterprise B2B, where buying committees evaluate vendors before a single sales conversation happens. That research process, covering education, comparison, and competitive analysis, has traditionally happened across channels no vendor controls.
What changed is where that research flows. A growing portion of B2B buyer research now happens in AI chat. Not transactional queries, but exactly the education and comparison work that happens before any hand-raising moment with sales. For Kris, that made AI visibility a strategic priority, not an experiment.
The goal was not clicks. It was making sure Shipium was being fairly and accurately represented when buyers asked AI models to compare enterprise shipping platforms.
Why Gumshoe
The right model for the right problem
What stood out about Gumshoe was the commitment to a statistical approach from the ground up. Rather than testing isolated prompts, Gumshoe samples broadly across models, personas, and query permutations. The result is a view that reflects how AI actually behaves, not how it behaved in one specific test.
Equally important was the report structure. Kris could create reports tied to specific strategies: how Shipium ranked against a particular competitor, how they performed within a partner ecosystem, how the brand showed up around topics like AI-powered logistics or shipping analytics. Each report mapped directly to a go-to-market priority, and each one produced visibility and citation scores he could track and act on consistently.
"There is no strategy without intelligence, and I viewed Gumshoe as my intelligence tool to get started with my strategy."
How They Use It
A quarterly operating model built around Gumshoe
Weekly reporting from GTM team to board
Visibility and citation scores are the two core metrics, reported consistently week over week. The consistency is intentional: templates create trust. Changing the metric every quarter makes it impossible to infer causation. Gumshoe's clean, stable output made it easy to carry the same measurement from the weekly standup all the way to the board deck.
Competitive tracking by strategy
Each report is scoped to a specific competitive or strategic context: how Shipium ranks against a given competitor in a particular theme, or how the brand performs within a partner ecosystem topic. When a competitor starts winning a subject area, Gumshoe surfaces it. That signal feeds directly into quarterly planning.
Quarterly operating cycle: diagnose, plan, act
Each quarter, Gumshoe's diagnostics drive the strategy. One quarter it surfaced technical SEO gaps affecting bot indexing, and fixing those drove a stepwise lift in visibility scores. The next quarter, it identified content format gaps. Diversifying content types drove the next lift. Gumshoe is not just a reporting tool after the fact. It is the primary input to the quarterly plan.
Results
Stepwise growth, quarter over quarter
In less than four months of acting on Gumshoe's recommendations, citations of Shipium content across AI models increased by 557%. That came from two sequential moves: closing technical SEO gaps that were limiting bot indexing, then diversifying content formats to cover areas Gumshoe identified as underperforming.
The broader pattern Kris has built is one of compound improvement. Each quarter, Gumshoe's diagnostic surfaces the single highest-leverage action. That action gets executed, scores go up, and the next lever becomes clear. It is the same operating model that works for any marketing channel. The difference is that Gumshoe makes AI visibility measurable enough to actually run it.
557%
citation increase in under 4 months
2
sequential stepwise score improvements in consecutive quarters
Board
level GEO reporting cadence established
"Every AI prompt is basically its own little campaign now. Gumshoe showed us which personas and topics AI models associated with our brand, and we used that to create content that actually shows up in AI answers. Citations of content from our domain went up 557% in less than four months."
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