Niche or generalist: what a consultancy can state, and how to test it

Do specialist consultancies get named more often than generalists?

We do not know, and nothing we have measured says either way. Our audit's probe put one buyer question per business to Claude, once, with web retrieval on, and recorded whether each of 9,240 businesses across 40 trades was named; 14.9% were. It did not sort firms into specialists and generalists, and it has no cut for consulting firms. A claim that niche firms win in AI answers is not one this site can support.

What can be said is narrower, and it concerns what pages state. No operator documents how its assistant selects the firms it names. An answer can accurately connect a firm to a problem only where something states that connection: the firm's page for the problem, a talk a partner gave on it, a case written about it. That holds for a boutique with one specialty and for a firm with six. A generalist that gives each problem it has solved a page with its record has stated as much about each of them as a specialist states about its one.

So the useful question for a partner is not niche against generalist. It is which problems the firm can back up with a record, and whether the site says so, problem by problem.

What counts as a specialty for a consultancy?

A specialty is a problem the firm has solved repeatedly, sometimes across industries and sometimes within one: [problem] for [industry] companies of [size band]. It is not a capability such as "operational excellence", which could describe any firm, and it is not an industry on its own, such as "healthcare", which says whom the firm serves but not what it fixes.

The test is in the firm's own records. Can the partners list the engagements where this problem was the main scope, count them, give the years, and say who led each? If they can, it is a specialty, and the page can state the count. If the list is short and the interest is strong, it is an interest. The honest place for it is a line on the services page, and perhaps an article on how the firm would approach the problem.

Stated with its record, a specialty is the consulting form of a unique selling proposition: a claim a reader can check, rather than a slogan a reader has to take on trust.

What a specialty page states, and the record behind each fact

The record row is the one only the firm can write, because it needs the engagements behind it. Write down how the count was made: which engagements qualified, whether a follow-on for the same client counts once or twice, and the date the count was taken. Change the count on a set date each year, not whenever a higher number would read better.

The cases row depends on each client's approval, and the article on confidential cases covers what can go into a case when the client cannot be named. The rest of what the site states, from the homepage to the contact page, is on the page for consulting firms.

In the markup, each specialty is a Service node with serviceType in the clients' words, audience for the industry and size, the firm as provider, and subjectOf pointing at the case pages about it. Each partner who leads the work is a Person whose knowsAbout names the problem. schema.org defines all five properties, and none of them should state anything the page does not.

Which problems get a page: the record and the capacity, not the search volume

Decide with two things the firm knows and no keyword list shows: the record, and whether the partners who lead that work can take another engagement of it in the coming [months].

Search demand answers a different question: what people ask, not what the firm can back up. A page for a problem the firm has not solved, written because people ask about it, is a claim with nothing behind it. Google's guide to generative AI search says that creating separate content for every variation of how people search, primarily to manipulate rankings or AI responses, violates its scaled content abuse policy, which its spam policies define as many pages generated mainly to manipulate rankings rather than to help people.

The same caution covers a page per industry that repeats one text with the industry name changed. A page per city with only the city swapped has a name of its own in the same policies: pages aimed at particular regions or cities that funnel users to one page are listed under doorway abuse. The problems that do not get a page still belong on the site as a line each on the services page, so that an operator who asks about one finds a sentence about it.

Testing a specialty page before and after

A specialty page is a change the firm can test, as long as the test is in place before the page goes up. It is not an A/B test, since there is no second copy of the web to show half the operators. It is a before-and-after reading with a comparison, run on the panel the firm already keeps, which AI visibility for management consultancies sets out. The test adds three things to that panel.

1. A dated group: [number] questions for the specialty, written the way operators ask about that problem, added to the panel as a group of their own with the date they joined it.
2. A baseline for that group, taken before the page exists: named, recommended, first, who else, and what each answer said the firm does for that problem.
3. A comparison group: the questions for a specialty whose pages will not change in the same months, read at the same times.

Then publish, keep other changes to the site small while the test runs, and read both groups on the same questions at each reading, as our methodology sets out.

Read the table as a list of what you are entitled to conclude. The strongest row is still a finding about one firm's questions over a few months. It is not evidence that niche firms beat generalists, and it should not be quoted as if it were. Reading who is named instead is a small competitive analysis in its own right, and whether any movement is larger than the variation between runs is the question how to measure AI visibility answers.