Orange Marketing
Orange Marketing has won a Platinum Pinnacle Award in the AI-Powered Marketing Innovation category of the 2026 Pinnacle Awards for Marketing & Communications, recognizing our work helping B2B companies get found by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
The recognition centers on Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), the practice of making sure a brand appears in AI-generated answers rather than just traditional search results. When organic traffic began declining across our client base in 2024, we were among the first agencies to identify AI-mediated discovery as a cause and build a system for tracking and improving it.
How the Methodology Works
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Our approach has three components:
- AI Trust Signals. A powerful tool that checks how clearly a client's website can be interpreted and evaluated by AI systems.
- Monthly prompt testing. We run real buyer-language prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity to see how each engine surfaces (or skips) a client's brand.
- AI referral tracking. We set up AI referral tracking across client HubSpot portals as soon as the feature became available, so every result ties back to a specific action instead of a guess.
When AEO first emerged, there was no established playbook to follow, just a flood of conflicting opinions from self-proclaimed experts. Our response was to build our own: researching the tactics circulating in the market, testing the ones that seemed sound against our own clients' sites, and keeping only the tactics that produced results. That process became the backbone of two playbooks we later published for the wider B2B community, one on AI tips for sales teams, the other on AEO for marketers, along with our guide, Marketing to AI: Your New Audience, that went on to win a Gold MarCom Award.
Beyond the Numbers
"We didn't want to just talk about how AI was changing marketing," said our CEO Rebecca Gonzalez. "We wanted to decode what these systems reward, prove it works with our own numbers, and then teach other B2B marketers how to do it too."
That educational component was a key reason we stood out to the judges. Rather than treating our methodology as a proprietary edge, we turned it into a set of open resources: playbooks and guides that distill what works, along with four live AEO briefings we've hosted to walk marketers step by step through how AI systems read, verify, and rank brands. Our weekly blog tracks AI and AEO developments and keeps that guidance current as the platforms continue to change, offering the kind of information smaller B2B companies and nonprofits often cannot afford to get from a consultant.
Sharing What We Learn
That same commitment to practical B2B education extends beyond AI and AEO. As the channels marketers rely on keep changing, Orange Marketing continues to bring in experts, test what works, and share what B2B teams need to know.
This Thursday, we're turning our attention to another challenge affecting B2B marketers: email deliverability. Join Orange Marketing and ZeroBounce for Inbox Denied: What's Really Blocking Your B2B Email and How to Fix It, a live Ask Me Anything session where we'll answer questions about why B2B emails aren't reaching the inbox and what marketers can do about it. Please join us and bring your questions. We'd love to help!
