A three-week diagnostic of Relay's visibility inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — benchmarked against Asana, Monday.com, and ClickUp. Plus a prioritised 90-day plan to close the gap.
Across the five engines tested, Relay's visibility is weakest exactly where it matters most commercially. On Google AI Overviews — which now renders above the traditional blue-link results for 77% of commercial queries in this category — Relay appears in 4% of responses. Asana appears in 58%.
The pattern is consistent: where an engine leans harder on authoritative web citations (Google, Perplexity), Relay drops. Where an engine leans on training-data recall (ChatGPT, Claude), Relay performs better — but still roughly a third of Asana's share.
This is structurally fixable. Relay is not fundamentally absent from the web; it is under-weighted by the specific source types these engines trust. Section 03 maps the citation economy behind this.
When buyers ask AI descriptive questions — "what is a project management tool", "what features do PM tools have" — Relay is included 19% of the time. Acceptable; not great.
When buyers ask AI decisive questions — "which PM tool should a 20-person marketing team pick", "what's the best Asana alternative", "cheapest Monday.com competitor" — Relay's share drops to 4%. These are the prompts that convert.
This is a pattern we see repeatedly. A brand has enough general-category mentions to be "known" but lacks the specific comparison content, use-case pages, and third-party recommendation signals that engines draw on to make a recommendation.
| Prompt | Stage | Runs | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| "best project management software for a 20-person marketing agency in 2026" | Decision | 15 | 0 / 15 |
| "cheaper alternatives to Asana for small teams" | Decision | 15 | 1 / 15 |
| "project management tools with creative review built in" | Consideration | 15 | 6 / 15 |
| "what are the features of a modern PM platform" | Awareness | 15 | 11 / 15 |
| "monday vs asana vs clickup which is best" | Decision | 15 | 0 / 15 |
| "project management software for creative agencies" | Consideration | 15 | 5 / 15 |
We tracked every URL cited inline by the five engines across your 2,250 logged responses. Three source clusters dominate: user-generated communities (Reddit, Quora), review aggregators (G2, Capterra, TrustRadius), and reference infrastructure (Wikipedia, Wikidata).
Monday.com's AI dominance in this category is not a content-marketing story. It's a Reddit story. Monday is discussed in 340+ threads in r/marketing, r/projectmanagement, and r/agency — with positive sentiment in 71% of them. Relay appears in 11 threads. That is your single largest earned-media gap.
G2 and Capterra are the second lever. Asana has 9,400+ reviews on G2. Relay has 140. Engines treat review volume as a trust signal; this is why Relay is described as "newer" even when the product is mature.
We extracted the narrative framing each engine attaches to each brand. These are the positioning themes the AI has crystallised from the web — and will repeat to buyers until you change them.
AI engines don't invent authority — they inherit it. The sources an LLM trusts are disproportionately the same sources that rank well on Google, link densely to each other, and show up as review aggregators. If you're losing on those signals, you're losing on AI too. We pulled the four brands' search-authority data to show the exact scale of the gap.
| Brand | DR (Ahrefs) | Organic / mo | Ref. domains | Ranking kw | AI SoV |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Relay YOU | 42 | 18K | 3.2K | 1.2K | 11% |
| Asana | 91 | 4.2M | 142K | 480K | 47% |
| Monday.com | 88 | 3.5M | 98K | 380K | 29% |
| ClickUp | 85 | 2.8M | 72K | 290K | 22% |
Across the four brands, Domain Rating and AI Share of Voice correlate at r = 0.89. Roughly 79% of the variance in AI visibility is explained by SEO authority alone. That is the single most actionable fact in this report.
It means two things. First: Relay cannot out-content its way to AI visibility without also closing the authority gap. The Reddit programme, the G2 review drive, the trade-press campaign — these aren't nice-to-haves; they're how Domain Rating climbs, and climbing DR pulls AI Share of Voice with it.
Second: the remaining 21% is what you can do differently. Entity schema, /compare/ pages, owning a narrative frame, Wikipedia presence. These don't move DR much but they move AI SoV disproportionately. That's why they top the roadmap.
We audited 30 priority pages on relay.com against the structural signals LLMs actually use to understand and cite a brand: schema markup, entity clarity, semantic HTML, fact density, canonical phrasing, and knowledge-graph presence.
The aggregate score — 52/100 — sits in the middle of the category. None of the issues are fatal; most are standard fixes that a technical SEO team will recognise. The single biggest lift is Organization and SoftwareApplication schema with complete sameAs references — currently absent — which directly affects entity recognition across all five engines.
Competitor-comparison pages are the second lift. Monday runs 140+ /compare/ pages. Relay runs 2. Engines cite /compare/ pages heavily for decision-stage prompts.
The roadmap is ordered by impact-per-unit-effort, not by category. Every action carries an expected contribution to share of voice, an effort estimate, and a clear owner. Five are quick wins deliverable inside 30 days. Actions 11 and 13 are pure SEO plays — they won't show in AI responses for 60–90 days but they lift Domain Rating, which pulls AI visibility with it. The combined modelled lift is 11% → 24% share of voice inside 90 days.
This roadmap is yours whether we implement it or you do. If you want to execute it with us, the three retainer options at the back of this report spell out what that looks like.
The 14 actions in the roadmap are deliverable by Relay's in-house team, by your existing agency partners, or by us. If you want us to run it — and roughly half of our audit clients do — the three options below are how we scope the work.
AI engines are crystallising their category narratives right now. The brands they decide are "the ones to recommend" in the next 18 months will compound for years afterwards. This is a one-off moment.
Asana owns "enterprise." Monday owns "flexible." The narrative slot Relay could own — "built for creative review" — is unclaimed, for now. It won't be in 12 months.
Share-of-voice gains compound: more mentions feed more citations feed more mentions. A 3-point lift in quarter 1 typically becomes 9-12 by quarter 4. Early execution dominates late execution.