Take a quick scan of Clay’s site, and you might notice something interesting in the footer…
They include a list of top customers, directly linked to case studies.
Most SaaS companies have case studies if you dig for them. But is there any upside to putting them in the navigation itself?
So I ran a test.
I typed: “What notable brands use Clay?” → 100% of the sources cited were Clay.com (and the brands featured in that footer list).
Then I ran the exact same prompt for other major companies.
HubSpot (tons of customer stories, none in navigation) → It cited IT Technology, Story Collaborative… HubSpot.com didn’t appear until the 5th attribution.
DocuSign → Same pattern.
Typeform → Same pattern.
My first assumption: “Maybe this is just domain authority. If you have customer stories anywhere on a high-DA site, LLMs will surface them.”
But apparently not.
Some very high-authority SaaS sites with customer stories buried 2–3 clicks deep get cited far less often than Clay, who puts theirs one click from home (in the global nav/footer).
That’s the part that caught my attention.
My working theory: LLMs overweight structural prominence.
If customers are linked site-wide (global navigation/footer), LLMs treat them as semantically important, similar to how Google prioritizes nav-linked pages.
Talking to some AEO/SEO experts in my network, I see there has been a decent amount of content published here.
This study, published in August 2025, shows footer prominence in LLMs.
Now, the idea of navigational links being beneficial to search placement has been discussed in conventional SEO for some time; this basic article on site structure from SEMrush notes the importance.
But more and more people are seeing these same variables apply to LLM placements.
This strategy from Clay is a low-lift test you can do to see how it impacts your placements for key phrases.
Disclaimer: LLM citing behavior is not perfectly deterministic. If I try five variants of the same question, some brands give different results. Also, each LLM instance is customized. One executive noted to me that when he asked this question his response was around the material Clay. So results may vary, but the evidence seems solid from testing (and talking with others testing) that LLMs prioritize nav-linked pages in responses
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