CASE STUDY
Real ChatGPT citations.
Real pipeline.
Zero content work.
How growing email deliverability consultancy Formula Inbox published 80+ branded memos, earned sourced ChatGPT citations, and closed business from AI search — without the founder writing a word.
THE COMPANY
Formula Inbox: emerging as a leader in email deliverability consulting
Founded by Truitt Dill, Formula Inbox is emerging as a leader in email deliverability consulting. They audit sending environments, rebuild infrastructure, and run ongoing monitoring for $5–50M+ companies whose marketing, sales, and transactional email share one domain — and one reputation.
Day to day that means fixing the cascade that starts when cold outreach, list quality, or authentication goes wrong and inbox placement collapses. The work speaks for itself: 25+ clients, 50M+ emails managed, 90%+ inbox placement rates.
FORMULAINBOX.COM ↗
THE SITUATION
What Formula Inbox needed solved
Formula Inbox had many of the same marketing problems plaguing lean teams every week: AI search matters, capacity does not exist, and there is no clean signal to prove progress. For Formula Inbox it looked like this.
No time to create content
With the team closing deals, onboarding contractors, and running client work, content was not getting to the top of the priority list — but its importance was still understood.
AI search needed a strategy
Formula Inbox knew buyers were asking ChatGPT and other AI models to recommend email deliverability experts. The challenge: the team had no real strategy to show up in those answers and maximize the channel.
Other brands were winning
When the team tested the queries themselves, warming tools and thin listicles showed up — not qualified consultancies like Formula Inbox.
No clean way to measure it
So much of AI search was a black box, and referral traffic was limited. The team needed sourced proof beyond manual simulations: real citations, real traffic, and real buyers who said how they found the brand.
THE BUSINESS IMPACT
Pipeline was hiding in AI answers. The context existed — the content did not.
Formula Inbox runs on new business meetings, with a goal of doubling weekly activity. Buyers were already asking AI for deliverability experts. When the answer listed warming tools, thin listicles, or other consultants instead of Formula Inbox, that was a meeting that never materialized.
The demand was real. Prospects had shared that they found Formula Inbox through ChatGPT queries about boutique email deliverability firms — but nothing systematic was in place. The channel was working by default. It needed to work for Formula Inbox by design.
THE SOLUTION
Ensure AI got the memo about Formula Inbox’s capabilities
Context Memo deployed a dedicated memo site at ai.formulainbox.com, built on the context already living on formulainbox.com. A subdomain, so the main site carries no risk. The platform learned the brand’s voice, simulated buyer prompts and logged the results, prioritized content opportunities, and published factual, grounded, structured reference content AI engines would cite — in Formula Inbox’s established tone.
Aside from reviewing some of the initial content, a 30-minute weekly call, and a login every week or two, Formula Inbox took a hands-off approach so the team could focus on closing deals. No content calendar, no reviewing every piece. Once trust in the system was established, the pipeline identified what content was needed and published it based on market signal — without anyone writing drafts.
A PUBLISHED MEMO — STRUCTURED, FACTUAL, WRITTEN TO BE CITED
HOW IT WORKS
More detail on how the process worked
Focus on brand context, not AI-generated slop
The platform learned Formula Inbox's positioning and other strategic components — core services, ICP, proof points, and what Formula Inbox deliberately does not do.
Map the prompts, personas, and intent stages
Buyer-intent prompts around email deliverability consulting were mapped and simulated — the questions their $5–50M buyers ask ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI models.
Publish on autopilot, with agentic QA
Citation-grade memos ship to ai.formulainbox.com on a two-a-day cadence. An agentic quality gate checks for redundancy and quality standards before anything publishes.
Find other sources of context with Granola
Granola.ai transcribes the team's virtual calls, and Context Memo mines them for real problem statements — then combines those with brand context to create net-new content. Real customer language feeds the engine without Formula Inbox writing anything.
Prove it with signal, not just simulations
AI crawler fetches, search console and analytics traffic, and real-time citation activity land in one dashboard — a holistic picture of performance, with automated email and Slack notifications surfacing the most important insights daily.
BRAND CONTEXT — POSITIONING, PROOF POINTS, AND WHAT FORMULA INBOX DELIBERATELY DOES NOT DO
GRANOLA → INSIGHT WORKBENCH — CALLS BECOME CONTENT WITHOUT A WRITING QUEUE
THE STACK
Integrations that bolster the stack
Calls go in as raw material. Search, analytics, and AI-bot data come back as proof. No weekly reporting deck.
Branded search volume as a lagging indicator of AI-driven awareness
Human traffic and AI referral clicks on the memo subdomain
Copilot and Bing AI citation impressions
Sales and client calls mined into content — no writing required
Visibility digests delivered where the team actually works
AI bot tracking on the corporate site via a self-hosted worker
THE RESULTS
Real data: sourced ChatGPT citations, AI fetches, and attributed pipeline
ChatGPT User fetches are sourced citations — real people in real AI sessions pulling Formula Inbox pages into answers. Across 80+ measured memos, 88.2% have earned real pickup. Total AI engine fetches include crawling and retrieval across providers. We do not treat synthetic scan counts as the same signal.
PERFORMANCE — DAILY AI FETCHES BY PROVIDER, LAST 30 DAYS
FROM THE FOUNDER
“We closed a new deal from AI search last week and have more in the pipeline thanks to Context Memo. They are on the front lines figuring this new channel out, and we’re thrilled to be a partner.”
TRUITT DILL — FOUNDER, FORMULA INBOX
WHAT’S NEXT
What’s next for Formula Inbox?
ChatGPT paid ads
OpenAI's ad platform is in beta. Formula Inbox is lining up an early-mover trial on bottom-of-funnel queries before competitors show up.
Call tracking & dynamic offers
Phone routing and dynamic offers so every lead from an AI answer gets captured, attributed, and converted — not just counted.
Conversion optimization
With visibility established, focus shifts to converting the traffic: pricing content, sharper CTAs, and attribution on every booking.
YOUR TURN
Join Formula Inbox and many others.
Same starting point: no spare hours, AI search as a black box. Four months later — sourced ChatGPT citations and deals that trace back to the channel.