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Bland Tax Diagnostic · 21 Days

How interchangeable is your brand with your competitors in the eyes of AI?

The Bland Tax Diagnostic is a 21-day engagement that scores your brand against your five closest competitors across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. We accept three companies per cohort.

Apply for a diagnostic slot
Three spots. $3,500. Closing Friday, May 1, 2026.
The Problem

Your AI-generated content is making you invisible. You are paying for it.

In 2025, Wynter surveyed marketing leaders at B2B SaaS companies above $50M ARR. 94% of them admitted, on the record, that their brand sounds exactly like their competitors. Same words, same frameworks, same proof points, same blog calendar. The category they spent years trying to define has collapsed back into a single voice. Their voice is one of many speaking it.

Andrew Warden, CMO of Semrush, named the cost of this sameness at Adobe Summit on April 21, 2026. He called it the Bland Tax. When ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini encounter same-sounding brands in a category, they collapse them into a single composite answer with attribution stripped. The buyer asks a question. The AI answers with the average. Generic brands functionally disappear from the answer because there is no signal strong enough to pull them out of the average.

The mechanism compounds. Better content trains better composites. The more polished your blog, the cleaner your input becomes for the next round of synthesis, and the more invisible you get inside it. The Princeton GEO paper at KDD 2024 showed the inverse holds too: distinctive vocabulary boosts AI citation rates by up to 40%. The marketing teams getting cited are the ones who broke convention. The marketing teams losing visibility are the ones who got better at convention.

This is why the Bland Tax is the most expensive line item that does not show up in any P&L. It is the cost of writing content that sounds correct, professional, and identical to the 47 phrases every other vendor in your category is also writing this quarter.

You are not losing to competitors. You are losing to the average of competitors.

What You Get

Five deliverables in 21 days.

The diagnostic produces specific, structured outputs designed to be reviewed by a marketing leader and acted on by a content team. No fluff, no slide decks, no executive summaries that say nothing.

Deliverable 01

The Bland Tax Score (0 to 100)

A calibrated score benchmarking your brand against your five closest competitors across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. The score is the headline output of the diagnostic.

0-30 Distinctive 31-60 Category Average 61-100 Bland Tax Zone
Deliverable 02

Side-by-side prompt analysis

A document showing exactly where LLMs describe your brand and your competitors with the same words. We run 50+ buyer-intent prompts across all four AI engines and surface the overlapping vocabulary visually.

Deliverable 03

Attribution Leakage Report

A mapping of where your proprietary ideas, frameworks, or positioning appear in AI answers under someone else's brand name. This is often the most uncomfortable finding in the diagnostic, and the most actionable.

Deliverable 04

Weirdness Inventory

A curated list of specific vocabulary, numbers, and frameworks you could own that no competitor currently does. This becomes your distinctiveness toolkit and the source for the next 12 months of content positioning.

Deliverable 05

30-day action plan

A structured implementation plan to reduce your Bland Tax Score by 20 points or more, with weekly milestones and specific content and positioning changes. Built to be handed directly to your content team.

Why 3 Spots, Why $3,500, Why Now

This is not an audit. It is a diagnostic.

Most GEO and AI visibility audits run a fleet of prompts and tell you which ones include your brand. That is the easy half of the question. The harder half is whether AI describes you in a way that lets a buyer choose you. The Bland Tax Diagnostic answers the harder half. It is the only product we know of that measures distinguishability rather than presence.

Most agencies measure where you show up. We measure whether you are distinguishable when you do.

Presence is necessary but not sufficient. If ChatGPT mentions you in the same sentence as four other vendors using identical adjectives, you have presence and zero pull. Our methodology compares the language used to describe you against the language used to describe your competitors, prompt by prompt, engine by engine. The difference is what produces a buying decision.

Three companies because each diagnostic is 25 to 30 hours of senior practitioner work.

The work is built in service of the engagement, not packaged for scale. If you submit and we accept, you are working with the operators who built the methodology. There is no junior on a template, no offshore prompt-runner, no "we ran the same prompts on your domain" automation. The methodology only holds up when the analysis is done by someone who reads the AI outputs critically.

The May 1 deadline is the real deadline.

This page does not run a fake countdown. The cohort closes Friday, May 1, 2026 because that is when we move from intake to delivery. The next cohort runs in June, after we finish delivering this one. If May 1 passes and you missed it, we will tell you so directly and route you to the next intake.

Fit Check

Is this for you?

The diagnostic is built for a specific kind of B2B SaaS marketing leader. If you are not in that group, we will tell you in the application reply rather than take your money.

This is for you if

  • You are a B2B SaaS company at $5M+ ARR
  • You have invested in SEO or content marketing for at least 12 months
  • You have noticed competitors getting cited in ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity while you are not
  • You are willing to look at uncomfortable findings about your positioning

This is not for you if

  • You are an agency, freelancer, or sub-$5M ARR startup
  • You are looking for one-off content production
  • You want SEO for traditional Google search only, not AI search
  • You are not willing to make positioning changes based on the findings
Proof

What our work has produced.

Gumlet
Video Infrastructure SaaS
~23% of inbound revenue from AI search

Over the last six months of our Citation Engineering program, roughly 23% of Gumlet's inbound revenue traces back to AI search referrals through Mixpanel attribution. 137+ tracked AI citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. The share keeps climbing month over month.

REsimpli
Real Estate CRM
#1 ChatGPT recommendation

REsimpli became the #1 ChatGPT recommendation for real estate investor CRMs within 90 days of starting work with DerivateX. Three top-ranking ChatGPT positions. ChatGPT-attributed sessions up 54% in the same window. The category had no clear leader before. There is one now.

We scored 50 B2B SaaS brands across 1,400 buyer-intent prompts. The average score was 56.9 out of 100. 44% of surveyed brands scored below 50. The middle of the category is the most expensive place to live in AI search.

From the 2026 AI Visibility Benchmark Report, DerivateX

How It Works

21 days, 4 milestones.

Day 1
Application reviewed, kickoff scheduled

Your application is reviewed within 24 hours. Approved applicants receive a 30-minute kickoff invite, contract, and payment link.

Days 4-10
Prompt corpus + Bland Tax Score

We run 50+ buyer-intent prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. Bland Tax Score and supporting analyses are compiled.

Days 11-17
Attribution + Weirdness Inventory

Attribution Leakage Report and Weirdness Inventory built from prompt data plus a competitive content audit of you and your five closest peers.

Days 18-21
Action plan + delivery call

30-day action plan finalized. 45-minute delivery call walks through the full report with a live Q&A and your team.

Common Questions

Answers to what serious applicants ask.

We review every application within 24 hours. If you are a fit, we send a kickoff call invitation directly from apoorv@derivatex.agency. If we are not a fit, we send a short, kind decline with a free Bland Tax primer so you still get value from the time you spent applying.
It is below our typical retainer floor and represents about 10% of a typical annual GEO engagement fee. The price is set to filter tire-kickers without pricing out serious applicants. Diagnostic clients who continue into a 90-day implementation engagement get the $3,500 credited against the engagement fee.
We do not accept sub-$5M companies for the diagnostic because the methodology depends on having a real competitive set and existing content to audit. If you are earlier than that, we will recommend a different starting point in our reply, often the free AI Visibility Score framework.
No proprietary code or unreleased product data. We work from your public website, public competitor websites, and public AI engine outputs. The diagnostic is built on publicly available information that you currently do not have a structured view of.
A high score (61+) means you have substantial AI visibility upside. The 30-day action plan we build addresses the highest-leverage changes first. Most clients see measurable score improvements within 60 days of implementing the plan, and we re-score after 90 days at no additional cost.
Yes. The diagnostic is designed to be a complete deliverable on its own, but most diagnostic clients move into a structured 90-day implementation engagement afterward. The diagnostic credit applies to the engagement fee, so the diagnostic effectively becomes free if you continue.
Apply

Apply for a diagnostic slot.

Three spots. $3,500. Closing Friday, May 1, 2026.

Bland Tax Diagnostic

After submission, you will book a 20-minute discovery call directly. We confirm fit on the call before sending an invoice. No payment is collected through this form.

AI search is not a future risk. It is the channel where your buyers already start vendor research. The brands that look distinctive in AI answers in the next twelve months will own their categories for the cycle after that. The brands that do not will spend the next three years writing better content for someone else's composite.

Every other tax has a loophole. This one only has an exit.