Sanctum: From 16.7% to 47.5% AI Visibility in 6 Months

Executive Summary

The Challenge: Sanctum powers a significant share of Solana's liquid staking infrastructure, but their AI search visibility sat at just 16.7%, far below their actual ecosystem presence.

The Solution: Sanctum partnered with Gauge to map their competitive landscape across AI search, identify visibility gaps, and execute a data-driven content strategy supported by Ask Gauge.

The Results: In six months, Sanctum's AI visibility grew from 16.7% to 47.5%. They are now the 5th most cited domain in Solana liquid staking, cited in 25.6% of all AI answers, with two pages ranking as the 6th and 7th most cited URLs in the category.

About Sanctum

Sanctum is the infrastructure behind a massive share of liquid staking on Solana. They co-built the SPL Stake Pool Program, power over 1000 liquid staking tokens, and provide the liquidity layer that lets users swap between any LST on the network. Four of the top 10 largest liquid staking tokens by total SOL staked, including JupSOL, bbSOL, fwdSOL, and INF, were built on Sanctum's infrastructure, representing roughly 9.8M SOL and around 15% of all liquid staked SOL.

Their partners include Bybit, Jupiter, Crypto.com, Drift, and Backpack. Their flagship product, INF, outperformed JitoSOL by 25% across all of 2025. Blockworks reported $5.9M in annualized revenue. Most recently, Sanctum launched a mobile app on Solana Seeker, bringing liquid staking to a consumer audience with a focus on passive yield, daily rewards, and easy withdrawals. By any on-chain measure, Sanctum is one of the most important protocols in the Solana ecosystem.

But when someone asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini about Solana liquid staking, Sanctum was barely part of the answer.

19.3% visibility. That was the starting line. A protocol powering this much of the ecosystem was significantly underrepresented in AI search.

For this case study, Gauge had the chance to speak with Sanctum's Head of Marketing, who led the partnership from day one. The quotes throughout this piece are from him.

The Gap Between Reputation and Discovery

This is the paradox that a lot of infrastructure companies face. The more embedded you become, the more others build on top of you, the easier it is to get lost beneath the surface. Sanctum wasn't a startup trying to find product-market fit. They had Binance, Jupiter, Bybit, Drift, Crypto.com, Backpack, and NASDAQ-listed companies building on their rails. They had $5.9M in annualized revenue. They had the highest-yielding LST at any meaningful scale on Solana.

What they didn't have was the AI search presence to match.

Sanctum's Head of Marketing saw it clearly. The next generation of users and partners weren't going to discover Solana liquid staking through a crypto Twitter thread or a Discord alpha call. They were going to ask AI. And when they did, Sanctum needed to be the answer.

"We were nowhere near our two top competitors in AI search, despite having a dominant brand in the space. I knew the gap was massive, and I knew there was a real opportunity to close it"

The problem was knowing where to start. AI search optimization was still the wild west. No established playbook, no reliable data on what models were citing or why. Sanctum needed more than a content calendar. They needed a map of the battlefield.

Why Sanctum Chose Gauge

Sanctum's Head of Marketing had no love for agencies.

"I generally don't like agencies. Especially SEO agencies. Most of them charge high rates for basic, tool-driven services that anyone with a subscription could do themselves. I wasn't looking for that"

Gauge stood out for one reason: the proprietary platform. Not a wrapper on third-party tools. Gauge built something purpose-built for AI search, tracking visibility across LLMs, mapping citation patterns, and benchmarking against competitors prompt by prompt.

Gauge is built to track how AI models discover, evaluate, and cite content. After reviewing the case studies and seeing results from real companies, Sanctum's Head of Marketing felt confident in the decision to move forward.

Inside the Partnership

The engagement started with a full landscape assessment. Gauge configured hundreds of targeted prompts across the Solana liquid staking category and gave Sanctum something they'd never had before: a clear, data-driven picture of where they stood in AI search, and where they didn't.

Competitive Analysis

Sanctum dominated Solana liquid staking infrastructure in reality, but competitors with a fraction of their ecosystem significance were winning prompts that Sanctum should have owned. The platform revealed exactly which topics and queries were driving those competitor citations.

But the data also revealed something encouraging: Sanctum had the domain authority and the content foundation to win. The pieces were there. They just needed to be aimed at the right targets.

The platform's most powerful feature for Sanctum's team turned out to be competitive benchmarking.

"The competitor metrics are what make it click. When I'm talking to our technical founders and I can show them exactly where we stand versus the competition, it makes it very clear why this matters. You don't have to explain the value of brand visibility in the abstract. The numbers speak for themselves"

Technical GEO Audit

The Gauge onboarding process also surfaced technical issues on Sanctum's website that had been quietly holding them back. Fixing these became a force multiplier. Strategic content paired with a technically sound site accelerated the results far beyond what either would have achieved alone.

"The onboarding wasn't just about content strategy. Gauge identified real technical issues on our site that were holding us back, and I think that's a huge part of why we saw progress so quickly"

Ask Gauge

A major accelerant was Ask Gauge, the platform's built-in AI agent. Rather than manually sifting through data to figure out what to write next, Sanctum's Head of Marketing could lean on Ask Gauge to do the heavy lifting. The agent analyzed everything in the platform, identified the largest visibility gaps, and drafted content ready for review. What used to be a time-consuming process of researching, strategizing, and writing became something that could be executed on quickly and confidently. Ask Gauge turned Gauge's data into a content engine, helping Sanctum keep pace with the volume of opportunities the platform was surfacing.

White Glove Service

As the strategy took hold, the process became genuinely collaborative. Sanctum's Head of Marketing didn't just receive deliverables. The partnership built a real understanding of what AI models reward, what content formats drive citations, and how GEO and SEO work as connected disciplines. Over time, this led to enough internal confidence to expand Sanctum’s written content efforts to a wider range of topics, and to even recommend Gauge to other teams in the industry.

Gauge's case studies had set high expectations going in, but watching similar results materialize for Sanctum, competing against some of the most recognized names in crypto, exceeded what anyone thought was realistic.

"Honestly, I was surprised how fast it happened. The case studies got me excited, but I tried to stay realistic. And then we just started seeing the numbers move"

The Results

Sanctum's AI search visibility grew from 16.7% to 47.5% in just six months.

They are now the 5th most cited domain in the entire Solana liquid staking space, appearing in 25.6% of all AI answers across major LLMs.

Two individual Sanctum pages rank as the 6th and 7th most cited URLs in the category, each cited in over 9% of all AI answers.

To put that in context: Sanctum now shows up in AI search results more often than most of the protocols they provide infrastructure for. The protocol that powers liquid staking behind Binance, Jupiter, and Bybit is no longer just the backbone. It's the name that AI models trust and cite when users come looking for answers.

The gap between reality and discovery has closed.

What This Means

Sanctum was never a company that needed to prove its product. The infrastructure speaks for itself. $5.9M in annualized revenue, 200+ LSTs powered, the highest-yielding LST at meaningful scale, and a partner list that reads like a who's who of Solana. The challenge was making sure the rest of the world could find that story.

AI search is where that discovery is shifting. When the next institutional treasury manager, the next exchange operator, or the next DeFi builder asks an AI about Solana liquid staking, Sanctum now shows up. Not as a footnote, but as a category leader. And that's exactly where they belong.

Want to achieve similar results? Gauge's proven methodology has helped protocols like Sanctum and companies like Vellum dominate their categories in AI discovery. Schedule a demo to learn how Gauge can transform your visibility.

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