61% is the share of AI chatbot answers that mentioned Ameresco this year when the company ran the 50 prompts it tracks — questions a prospective customer or investor might ask, such as “What are the top energy infrastructure providers in the US?” The same tracking returned 43% in 2025, the company says. The 18-point move, as Ameresco described to Business Insider’s CMO Insider, started with an exercise in self-retrieval: CMO Leila Dillon asked ChatGPT and other answer engines to describe her own company, and the answers called it a cleantech or renewable-energy business — lines Ameresco still operates in but no longer leads with — or cited smaller projects from years ago. The actual business of the publicly traded company is energy infrastructure: power for the AI buildout, plus military bases and municipal facilities. “It was quite horrifying,” Dillon said. “We were like, ‘That’s not at all who we are.’”
She is not alone in checking. In a January survey from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, 73% of US brand and agency buyers said they planned to devote more time or resources to optimizing content for AI-generated answers in 2026 than last year. In an April survey of US marketing professionals by Semrush, a search-visibility platform, 30% of marketers said AI search tools had described their brands inaccurately. The churn has produced a cottage industry of GEO consultants promising fixes, though Dillon’s own behavior explains the urgency: “I used to Google everything that I wanted to know about. I barely use Google anymore. I use Copilot, and I get better results.”
47 things to fix
In January 2025, Dillon’s team and its PR agency, Greenough, began auditing how often Ameresco appeared in AI-generated answers to those 50 prompts on platforms including ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. The prompts were built around the questions investors and prospective customers — people from universities and utilities among them — might actually ask. The audit identified 47 areas for improvement, spanning how Ameresco described itself across its website, social media, press releases and executive communications. “You name it, we were doing it wrong,” Dillon said.
The fixes were mechanical. The corporate boilerplate changed from “a leading cleantech integrator specializing in energy efficiency and renewable energy” to “a leading energy infrastructure company,” carried through all marketing and communications. Awards submissions now lead with power infrastructure projects, and each win gets a press release distributed on wire services and in trade publications. Ameresco introduced Q&A-style content formats designed to be easy for chatbots to interpret, built audience-specific material for groups like data center operators and school facilities managers instead of generic marketing, launched a video series called Energy Benefits Unlocked, and began quarterly visibility audits across the 50 prompts with competitor comparisons.
What the company measured
The content groundwork preceded a new corporate brand identity rolled out in July, organized around two pillars: power infrastructure, and buildings and public infrastructure. Ameresco says organic website traffic rose 50% in the 12 months to June 2026. Dillon says it is still too early to assess precisely how those gains translate into business results, though she believes the GEO work is helping the marketing team hit targets more quickly. Both the traffic figure and the mention rate are company-reported; the business effect, by her own account, is not yet measured. Ameresco reports third-quarter earnings on November 9.
The maintenance never stops, because the target moves. Ameresco revisits its AI visibility scores regularly and has trained its marketing team, which swaps tips, tricks and “epic AI fails” in weekly meetings. “One of the main themes is that what happened last week is not what you’re going to get this week; it’s changing that quickly,” Dillon said. “You don’t just update your website and say: Done, woo, all set.” On the vendor landscape, her read is blunt: “There’s no one shot that fits all to solve that for you.”
One methodological point hangs over the headline numbers. Chatbot answers to the same prompt vary run to run, and Ameresco discloses the prompt count — 50 — but not how many times each was run or how the 61% and 43% were aggregated. With a sample that size, a few prompts flipping could account for much of the gap, or none of it. The November 9 earnings call offers a cleaner test: whether appearing more often in a chatbot’s answer corresponds to anything in the pipeline a CFO will sign.