SEO and AI search visibility
Buyers no longer only search. They ask. Some of them open Google, some open ChatGPT and increasingly the answer they see is assembled from several sources rather than being a list of links.
That changes what you have to do to be found and it has produced a great deal of confident nonsense about how to game it.
Here is what we actually do and what we will not promise.
What has changed and what has not
What has not changed
- Search engines and AI tools both need to be able to read your site, understand what you do and find you credible.
What has changed
- AI systems retrieve specific passages rather than whole pages, combine them and cite sources. A page that only makes sense if you have read the three paragraphs above it is a page that does not get used. A claim with no evidence behind it is a claim the system has no reason to repeat.
The other change is where the evidence comes from. When we test buyer questions in AI tools, the answer is frequently assembled from third party sources first, directory listings, guides, review platforms and then filled in with detail from company websites. Optimising only your own pages means competing for the second half of that answer.
What we actually do
Find out where the answers currently come from.
We test a defined set of real buyer questions, record which businesses get mentioned, which pages get cited and where those citations come from. That tells us what to work on rather than guessing from general industry studies about which platforms matter.
Write content around the questions buyers actually ask.
Structured so each section answers one question completely and can be understood on its own. This is the single highest value piece of work and the one most businesses skip in favour of publishing volume.
Fix the technical foundations.
Detailed below.
Build evidence outside your website.
Detailed below.
Measure it honestly.
Detailed below.
Content
We restructure existing pages and write new ones so they answer specific questions in a self-contained way. Descriptive headings that match how people ask. Direct answers near the top of each section. Specific detail rather than general reassurance. Evidence attached to claims.
We have done this work for clients, including a full audit of how a business currently appeared in AI tools followed by a rewrite of their site content into question-led structures. The measurable work is real. The outcomes take months and depend on factors nobody controls.
What we do not do is publish a hundred near identical articles. Volume without substance was a weak SEO strategy and it is a weaker AI search strategy, because there is no reason for a system to cite a page that says nothing specific.
Technical
- Pages that render content server side, so crawlers and AI systems can read them without executing JavaScript
- Clean heading structure
- Accurate titles and descriptions
- Sitemaps and canonicals that agree with each other
More details (3)Hide additional details
- Robots directives that permit the crawlers you want, including AI crawlers and block the ones you do not
- Fast loading and mobile usability
- Structured data where it genuinely describes the page
Evidence beyond your own website
This is the part most SEO proposals leave out and it is increasingly where the difference is made.
Research across large numbers of brands has found that visibility in AI tools correlates more strongly with how often a brand is mentioned across the web than with how many pages that brand publishes. Correlation is not proof of cause and those studies mostly examined established domains, so we treat it as a strong signal rather than a formula.
What we build around each substantial piece of client work:
- A detailed case study on your site
- A video explaining it
- Relevant industry coverage
- A client side mention where the relationship allows
- Genuine reviews describing what was actually delivered
How we measure it
Brand recommended
Whether you appear at all when a buyer question is asked. Measured by repeating a fixed set of neutral prompts on a schedule, recording the date, the platform and what was cited.
Website cited
Whether your pages are being used as the evidence behind the answer.
Description accuracy
Whether the answer describes your business correctly. This is frequently the most actionable finding, because a confident wrong description is a live commercial problem.
Qualified enquiries
Whether any of the above is producing business.
These are tracked separately, because collapsing them into one number is how agencies mislead clients. For Google search we use Search Console: impressions, clicks and queries by page. Where Bing Webmaster Tools exposes AI citation data, we use that too, because actual citation data beats repeatedly asking a chatbot whether it has heard of you.
What we will not claim
Who this suits
Suits you if
- You have genuine expertise or genuine client work to publish. Your buyers research before buying. You are willing to work on a horizon of six months and up.
Does not suit you if
- You need results this quarter, in which case paid media is the honest answer. Or there is nothing distinctive to say, in which case the constraint is the business rather than the marketing.
Common questions
Find out where you currently appear
Answer a few short questions to find the right starting point, or explore the Growth Audit.