SEO and answer engine optimisation
Technical repair, pages that deserve to rank, and the structure that gets a business named inside an AI answer. Judged on enquiries and sales rather than on a screenshot of a ranking.
The person on the call is the person who would do the work.
A note from us: more and more searches now end with an answer on the screen and nobody clicking anything. Ranking first is not the whole job any more. The job is being what the answer is made of. Give us six months and you will know which searches you own and what they are worth.
Where the answers get given
The same work underneath. What changes is whether a person or a model is the one reading the page.
SEO and AEO
Answer engine optimisation is being sold as a separate product almost everywhere, usually at a separate price. Most of it is the work good SEO always was, done with the knowledge that the reader might be a model rather than a person.
The classic half. A site a search engine can crawl and understand, pages built around what people actually type, and enough reputation elsewhere for those pages to be trusted.
The newer half. Being the source a model reaches for when it writes the answer, and being named in it rather than buried in a list of links underneath.
You are not paying for it twice. The technical work, the content and the reputation feed both, and where the two genuinely diverge is small enough to sit inside one piece of work rather than two invoices. Anyone quoting you separately for AEO should be asked what specifically is different, and the answer is worth hearing before you sign.
Where we come in
Different businesses, different words, and underneath them the same thing: search is still working, just not in the way the reporting was built to show.
Positions look much the same and the impressions are holding up, but fewer people are arriving. Very often the page is still winning and the click is simply not happening, because the question got answered before anyone had to leave the results. That is a real problem, and it is a different problem from a penalty.
Branded search flatters every report ever written. People who already know you were going to find you regardless, and counting them as a win hides the fact that nothing is bringing in anybody new. Strip the brand terms out and the honest picture usually appears in about a minute.
The posts were written for a keyword tool rather than for a customer, published on a schedule nobody asked for, and they answer questions your buyers were never asking. The fix is rarely more posts. It is usually fewer, better ones, and the courage to delete a lot of what is there.
What the work is made of
Take all of it or take the pieces you are missing. Plenty of clients have the writing covered and want the technical work and the measurement, which is a sensible way to spend the money.
Crawling, indexing, speed, redirects, duplication and everything else that quietly stops good pages from counting. It is the least interesting part of the job and it is where the quickest wins usually sit, because most sites are carrying two or three faults nobody has looked at since launch.
Research into what people actually search, what they mean by it and which of those questions your business can answer better than anybody. Then one strong page per real question rather than nine thin ones competing with each other for the same phrase.
Clear headings, direct claims, facts stated once and consistently, and structured data that describes the business properly. A page that hedges every sentence is hard to quote, and a page that cannot be quoted does not appear in the answer.
Mentions, citations and coverage on the places that get read and cited by everything else: the trade press, comparison pages, review sites, communities and video. This is the slow part, it cannot be bought by the hundred, and it is the part that decides how much anything else is worth.
Where it applies: the Google Business Profile, opening hours and addresses that agree with each other everywhere, product feeds, review collection, and location pages that are genuinely different rather than one template with the town swapped out.
Analytics and Search Console set up so the numbers mean something, branded and unbranded separated, and a monthly page in plain English covering enquiries, sales and where they came from. Rankings appear, well down the page, as a means rather than an end.
We run this on our own properties first. The in-house ventures are built and optimised the same way, so nothing on this page is theory we have only ever tested on somebody else's site.
AI and search
Search has not stopped. What has changed is that a large share of it now ends with a written answer rather than a list of choices, and the businesses named inside those answers are the ones being considered. The work that gets you named is mostly the work that always got you ranked, which is the good news, but the way it is measured and the way it is written both have to change.
How we use AI across the agencyBeing described as leading, trusted and innovative gives a model nothing to work with. Saying what you do, for whom, where, since when and at what price gives it something it can repeat. Specifics get quoted, and vagueness gets skipped.
Models lean heavily on sources they consider reliable, and on communities and comparison pages where products get discussed by name. Being absent from those conversations is now a visibility problem, not just a public relations one.
AI has made it trivial to publish forty articles a month, which is exactly why forty articles a month no longer distinguishes anybody. We use the tooling for research, drafting and the tedious middle of the job, and we publish far less than we could.
A named person edits and approves everything published on your site. Search engines have got noticeably better at recognising work nobody bothered to check, and so have readers, who tend to be less forgiving.
How it runs
Search moves slowly enough that a short test proves nothing, and no business should be tied in for a year to find out whether it is working. Six months is where those two meet.
Technical crawl, content review, competitor and citation check, and a look at what search already brings you once the brand terms are taken out. It ends with a shortlist of what to fix, in the order the return says, not the order the tools listed them.
Technical faults cleared, weak pages merged or removed, the important pages rewritten properly and structured data put in place. Boring, unglamorous and usually where the first movement comes from.
New pages for the questions worth owning, and work on getting the business talked about somewhere other than its own website. Results start compounding here, and the graph stops looking flat.
What moved, what it brought in, what is worth continuing and whether search is where your next pound genuinely belongs. If it is not, we will say so, because a client who leaves in month nine costs us more than an honest answer in month six.
Most people start with the first one. Nobody is asked to sign for a year to find out whether this works.
The audit, the repairs, the pages and the reputation work, done in that order with a written answer at the end.
A fixed piece of work for teams who have the people to carry it out and want to know what to point them at.
Search running continuously alongside the site, the content and the social work, planned as one thing rather than four.
We do not sell links by the dozen and we will not promise a position, because nobody who is honest can. What we will promise is that you know what is being done, why, and what it changed.
What we measure
Positions move daily, differ by device and location, and a first place on a phrase nobody searches is worth precisely nothing. Reports built on them look busy and settle no arguments, which is roughly why so many businesses have stopped reading them.
So we agree at the start which numbers the decisions get made on. Usually that is enquiries and sales from search once branded traffic is set aside, cross checked against your own system rather than governed by a tool we happen to pay for. Once that is settled the meetings get considerably shorter.
If we cannot tell you what search brought in, we have not measured it. We have just described it.
Before you ask
Partly. The foundations are identical: a site that can be crawled, pages that answer a real question and a business other sites are willing to mention. What is genuinely different is writing so a claim can be lifted cleanly, keeping your facts consistent everywhere they appear, and tracking whether you turn up in answers at all. That is a layer on top of good SEO rather than a replacement for it, which is why we sell it as one piece of work.
Technical fixes can move things within weeks, occasionally days, because you are removing something that was holding good pages back. New content and new mentions take longer, generally three to six months before the pattern is clear. Anyone promising a transformation in thirty days is either counting branded traffic or about to do something you would rather they did not.
No, and neither can anybody else. We can tell you which phrases are realistically winnable given your site and your competitors, what it would take, and how long it should be before you see movement. If a phrase is not worth chasing we will say so rather than sell you six months of trying.
Either works. We write it where you would rather not, working from interviews with the people in your business who actually know the subject, because that is what makes a page worth reading. Where you have a writer already we brief them, edit, and handle the technical and structural side. Plenty of clients take the second route and it is usually the cheaper one.
No. Bought links are cheap for a reason and the risk sits with your domain rather than with the agency that placed them. We work on mentions and coverage that would exist whether or not search engines counted them: trade press, comparison and review sites, communities, partners and suppliers, and content genuinely worth citing. It is slower and it does not get taken away later.
We can make it considerably more likely and we can show you whether it is happening. Nobody controls what a model says, and any agency claiming a guaranteed placement in an AI answer is describing something that does not exist. What works is being clearly described, consistently referenced elsewhere and easy to quote, and that is what the work does.
It depends on the size of the site, the state it is in and how much writing is involved, so we quote after the first call rather than putting a package price on a website. You get the scope and the number on a single page before anything starts, and it does not change unless you agree to it.
Also worth a look
Getting found is one step. Everything that happens after it is being done by something else on this list.
Book a call
Open Search Console on the screen and we will go through it with you. You will leave with at least one thing worth fixing this week, whether or not you ever hire us.
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