Visibility in search engines and AI assistants. They cite you when someone asks.

Someone types your question into Google, or asks an AI assistant. They get a written answer with three or four names in it. This piece works to make one of those names yours, and to let you know whether it's happening.

This page covers a single piece of the system. The other pieces, and how we choose which one to start with, are on the services page.

People searching today get an answer, not a list

Clicks are coming apart from search, and it's been measured. The Pew Research Center tracked the real browsing of 900 US adults across 68,879 searches in March 2025: when an AI summary appears, people click on a result 8% of the time, against 15% when it doesn't.

The most important number is the third one: only 1% click on the sources cited in the answer. Readers take the information and move on, and the name that was cited is the only thing they take with them. That's why the citation is the result, and any traffic that follows is a side effect.

The same thing shows up from the publisher's side. Ahrefs compared 300,000 keywords, half with an AI summary and half without: the page in first position gets 34.5% fewer clicks when the summary appears above it.

Staying at the top and staying cited are two different jobs. The second doesn't bring visits; it means your name is already in the mind of the person who calls you.

What changes in practice

The people who call you change. Enquiries that come from a page answering a practical question are from people who already have that problem on their hands, and the conversation starts further along than with a vague enquiry from an ad.

The second change is that you stop depending on a paid channel. An indexed page keeps answering after the campaign is switched off, and what you've already spent on it doesn't recur every month.

The third is the hardest to accept: you become measurable. You know how many questions you show up for, which ones you're missing from and for how long, instead of assuming you're visible because you have a website.

You choose the questions, and they're specific

The work focuses on the practical questions buyers actually type, never on the broad category. A page aimed at an entire sector competes with everyone who has a budget and answers nobody, while a page that answers a precise question has far less competition.

Good questions have one thing in common: someone has already asked you them on the phone. The starting point is the enquiries you already get, written in the words the customer used, not the words in your price list.

Type of search	What happens	What you get
The categoryone or two words	People searching like this are still working out what they need, and they're up against businesses that have been paying for ads for years.	No useful result, and months spent chasing a ranking that won't come.
The practical questiona whole sentence	People searching like this have a real problem on their hands and are looking for how to solve it, right now.	Less competition, and the people who arrive are already thinking about buying something.
The company namewho you are	People searching like this have already heard your name from someone and are checking you're real.	The check goes well, and the deal doesn't stall on doubt.

What the system does, step by step

The work comes down to five steps, and each one leaves a trail you can look back at. None of them promises a ranking: they make sure the question you answer is written down somewhere in a form a machine can cite.

Step	What happens	What you get
The questionswhat you get asked	We gather the real enquiries you receive and turn them into a list of questions, written in the words of the people asking.	A list of topics people actually search for, instead of keywords picked at a desk.
The pagesone answer per question	Every question gets its own page, with the full answer in the first few sentences and the detail below, in passages that make sense on their own.	A page that answers even someone who reads just three lines of it, which is how machines read it.
Structured datawho you are, for machines	The company name, what it does, where it operates and its linked public pages are declared in a form software can read.	Your name stops being ambiguous, and people looking for you find you, not a business with the same name.
Consistencythe same name everywhere	Name, address and contact details are aligned across the website, public listings and profiles, because any mismatch counts as two different businesses.	Local searches stop splitting between two versions of the same business.
Measurementtwo dashboards	On one side, indexed pages, impressions and average position. On the other, a fixed list of questions put to an AI assistant every month.	You know whether you're showing up, where and since when, instead of guessing from your revenue.

Measuring AI assistants, which hardly anyone does

There's no Search Console for AI assistants, so the dashboard has to be built by hand, and it's the piece that holds everything else up. You set a list of questions, ask the same ones every month from a fresh session, and record whether the business appears, where, and in what words.

The fresh session isn't a detail. An assistant that already knows you because you were talking about it ten minutes earlier will mention you regardless, and that answer measures nothing. The same question, with no history behind it, is the only one that tells you anything.

The dashboard also tells you when to stop. Work with no exit condition drags on out of inertia, so you decide in advance how many questions need to change status by which month for the work not to count as a failure.

Mentions count, and nobody buys them

Ahrefs compared 75,000 brands with how often they appear in AI-generated answers. The strongest correlation of all isn't anything on the website: it's mentions on YouTube, at 0.737. Next come mentions of the brand name across the web, between 0.656 and 0.709, and branded anchor text, between 0.511 and 0.628.

Domain authority, which is what nearly all the consultancy in this space is sold on, comes in at between 0.266 and 0.326. These numbers should be read for what they are, and the authors say so themselves: “correlation isn’t causation”, meaning they may reflect brands that are already strong rather than a lever you can pull.

There's one practical consequence, and it moves the work off the website. Showing up where your line of work is discussed, with your name written out in full, counts at least as much as the page. Chasing fake mentions doesn't, and Google says so in the same guide.

What Google says not to do, in its own words

In its official guide to optimising for generative features, Google dismantles almost everything being sold today as AI optimisation. In its own words: “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search”.

On structured data the position is just as clear: it isn't required for generative features, and there's no special schema to add. It's still useful for what it has always done, telling a machine what the page contains, and that's what the system uses it for.

There's field evidence too. Across 1,885 pages that added structured data, compared with four thousand control pages, citations didn't go up: +2.4% on one feature and +2.2% on another, both indistinguishable from zero.

What goes out on its own, and what waits for a person

Everything that doesn't commit the business runs on its own: gathering questions, the monthly measurement, technical checks on the pages and flagging anything that breaks. They're repetitive jobs nobody looks at until they cause damage.

Nothing that gets published goes out on its own. Every page, every listing and every line with your name on it is read and approved by a person before it goes public. The full reasoning behind keeping a person in the loop is on our page about the principles we build by.

Same mechanism, different name in every trade

The mechanism is identical; the question isn't. It's worth looking at your own case, because that's where you see which question deserves a page.

Sector	The question that brings in a buyer	Where you see it
Food and agricultureand export	Which documents are needed to ship a sample to a particular country, and who signs them. The person typing that is about to send the shipment.	A typical day for a small food producer who exports
Restaurantsand bars	How to book, what's on the menu for someone with an intolerance, whether dogs are allowed. Questions people ask while deciding where to go.	A dinner service with the phone ringing unanswered
Hospitalityaccommodation and events	How many people the hall holds, which dates are still free in high season, what's included. Questions that come before a request for a quote.	The run-up to the season for a guest accommodation business

What this piece doesn't do

It doesn't promise a ranking or a citation. Nobody controls what a search engine shows, and anyone guaranteeing first place is guaranteeing something they don't own. What's guaranteed is the work, and the measurement that tells you whether it's paying off.

It doesn't buy mentions or sign the business up to directories that promise a link. Many free listings openly say they don't give a followable link, and the ones that matter have to be checked one by one before you spend time on them.

It doesn't write the content on its own. Producing the content, with human review stated openly, is a separate piece: sales copy and materials. And the page visitors land on is another piece again, the integrated digital storefront.

Questions and answers