About Shortlisted
A small consultancy doing one thing: making sure that when an AI is asked which vendor to use, our clients are among the names it gives.
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What is Shortlisted? Shortlisted is an answer-engine visibility consultancy founded in 2026 and based in Nairobi, Kenya. It measures how often ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews recommend a brand — using a published prompt panel with reported variance — and then does the citation, entity and content work that changes the result. Clients are mid-market SaaS and e-commerce companies in the United States and United Kingdom. Pricing runs from $1,500 for a one-off audit to $6,000 per month.
Why we exist
Buyers stopped starting with a search results page. They ask an assistant which tool to use, and it names three. Everyone else is eliminated before a human has looked at anything.
A published 2026 benchmark found that 44% of B2B SaaS companies are effectively invisible in that moment. Most of them do not know it, because the metrics they already track — rankings, sessions, impressions — cannot see it. The discipline that would fix it sits between SEO, PR, content and community, which is precisely why no one owns it.
What makes us different
Not the tactics. Any competent operator can place a comparison article or clean up structured data. The difference is the measurement, and specifically that ours is auditable.
The industry's default metric, AI share of voice, has a hidden denominator: the prompt space is infinite, every vendor samples arbitrarily, and the resulting percentage cannot be reproduced or checked. We publish our prompt panel in every report, run every prompt at least five times per engine, report variance bands rather than single numbers, and stamp each data point with the model version that produced it.
Those are constraints, not features. They make our numbers smaller and our claims narrower. They also make them true, which is the only durable position in a category that is going to have a credibility reckoning.
How we work
- Published pricing. Every rate is on the pricing page. No discovery call required to learn a number.
- A free finding first. We show you a real prompt and a real answer before you spend anything.
- Agreed success metrics. What counts as working is written down before work begins.
- Disclosed community participation. Always. We will end an engagement rather than astroturf.
- We say no. If a tool licence would serve you better than a retainer, we will tell you on the first call.
Where we are
Nairobi, Kenya. East Africa Time (UTC+3) covers the entire European working day and every US East Coast morning, and we hold two fixed call windows so scheduling is never a negotiation. We invoice in US dollars.
We mention location plainly because hiding it would be both pointless and inconsistent with everything else on this site. At this price point you are buying a method and a named practitioner, and both are on the table for inspection.
What we will not do
- Guarantee inclusion in AI answers. Nobody controls third-party model behaviour. Anyone promising this is misrepresenting the mechanism.
- Claim revenue attribution. The link from an AI answer to a closed deal is unsolved industry-wide. We measure Recommendation Rate and say so.
- Run undisclosed community campaigns. Not for any fee.
- Compete below $3,000 a month. Below that you are buying a dashboard, and you should buy the dashboard directly.
The honest framing
This category is eighteen months old and moving fast. Every established SEO agency is adding an AI visibility line item, the tooling layer is consolidating, and some of what everyone believes today will turn out to be wrong. We would rather be the firm that publishes its method and revises it in public than the one that projects false certainty and quietly changes the dashboard.
See the work before you buy any of it
One real buyer prompt for your category, the verbatim answer, and the one thing we would fix first. Free, and no call required.