Case Study (2026 Refresh): How StrideFlow Used Abhord to Become the Default AI Answer in Its Category

Company Snapshot

• Industry: B2B SaaS (spend intelligence for cloud and SaaS)
• ICP: Mid-market finance and FinOps teams (50–2,000 employees)
• Team size: 85 employees
• Website authority: Moderate (DR 48), heavy on docs and release notes

1) The Initial Problem

By November 2025, StrideFlow was largely invisible to LLMs. In head-to-head prompts like “best SaaS spend management tools” or “alternatives to Coupa for mid-market,” assistants either omitted StrideFlow or confused it with a legacy procurement vendor called StratoFlow. Common failure modes:

• Outdated feature descriptions (e.g., “no Netsuite integration,” despite a GA connector since April 2025).
• Misattributed pricing (quoted an old per-seat model they’d retired in 2024).
• Confused brand/entity: models merged StrideFlow with similarly named products and open-source repos.
• Low “owned-source” citation rate: when LLMs did mention StrideFlow, they cited forum posts instead of the company’s site.

Internally, the team called it the “ghost brand” problem: strong pipeline from SEO and referrals, but little presence in AI answers where buyers now start shortlisting.

2) What They Discovered Through Abhord’s Analysis

Abhord conducted a 3-week GEO/AEO audit across seven major assistants and vertical agents. Key findings:

• Entity ambiguity: inconsistent naming (StrideFlow, Stride Flow, SF Spend) across docs, PDFs, and app marketplace listings produced clashing embeddings.
• Fragmented facts: pricing, integrations, and security content lived in announcements, PDFs, and changelogs—none canonical, many with conflicting dates.
• Missing “LLM-ready” surfaces: no machine-friendly spec pages (e.g., facts, FAQs, and constraints structured for retrieval and summarization).
• Shallow coverage for high-intent prompts: strong SEO pages existed, but answerable, concise content for prompts like “compare StrideFlow vs. Vendr” or “does StrideFlow support SOC 2 Type II?” was sparse.
• Slow refresh path: assistants took 4–8 weeks to reflect product updates because there was no authoritative “update beacon” for models to check.

Abhord’s Hallucination Heatmap highlighted the highest-impact mismatches: integrations, pricing, and compliance. The GEO Score benchmark (0–100) placed StrideFlow at 27 for mention share and 41 for factual accuracy within its category.

3) The Optimization Strategy They Implemented

StrideFlow and Abhord executed a 60-day program emphasizing entity clarity, canonical facts, and assistant-friendly packaging.

• Canonical Entity Card

- A single, stable “About StrideFlow” hub with controlled synonyms, disambiguation notes (“Not affiliated with StratoFlow or Stride open-source”), and persistent IDs for product, plans, and integrations.

• LLM Answer Packs

- Abhord generated and hosted structured “Answer Packs” (JSON) for the top 50 buyer prompts: pricing, integrations, security, ROI, deployment, and comparisons. Each pack contained source URLs, last-updated timestamps, and short, factual responses designed for summarization.

• Facts Over PDFs