AI Search Optimization

Google's AI Overviews now sit on more than half of searches, and buyers increasingly ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for a recommendation instead of scrolling results. Those engines don't rank ten links; they name two or three businesses. Either you're in the answer or you don't exist.

The signals that get you named are different from classic SEO. Brand mentions across the web correlate about three times more strongly with AI citations than backlinks do, so the work is entity building, not link buying.

AI engines need to understand who you are before they can recommend you. We build that legibility: consistent structured data on every page, profiles that all point at each other, directory listings the engines already cite, and crawler access configured so the bots that feed AI answers can read your site at all. Many sites block them without knowing it.

AI engines quote self-contained, factual passages with a clear author and a date. We restructure your key pages into answers an engine can lift whole: direct definitions, real numbers from your own work, and questions phrased the way your customers ask them.

Then we track it: monthly checks of what ChatGPT, AI Overviews and Perplexity say when someone asks for your service in your market, so you can watch your name start appearing.

This is for businesses that already rank reasonably well and are now losing the buyers who never see a results page at all: the people who ask ChatGPT or Google's AI answers for “a good foundation repair company near me” and take the two or three names they get. It suits high-ticket, high-trust trades where a buyer researches before calling, and established businesses with reviews, a real site and some presence off it, because the engines recommend entities they can verify. If you have those and your name is missing from the answers, this work moves you in.

It is not where to start if you have no reviews, a thin site and no profile history. The engines have nothing to verify, so we would be building a reputation from zero, and SEO and the Business Profile do that faster and cheaper first. It is also not a channel for emergency trades where nobody researches a burst pipe; local SEO and pay-per-lead ads own those moments. Google's own guidance on AI features says there is no special markup that wins a spot; the same helpful, well-structured pages are what get used. Check the industry pages for how research-heavy your trade's buyers are before deciding.

Week one is the baseline: we ask the engines the questions your customers ask, in your market, and record exactly who gets named and why. You see that list on the first call, and it sets the target. We also check whether your site even lets the AI crawlers in, because many do not, and fix that the same week. Week two is the entity work: structured data on every key page, profiles that all agree with each other, and the directories the engines already cite, all in accounts that stay in your name.

Weeks three and four, the first pages are restructured to be quotable: a plain answer at the top, real numbers from your own work, and questions phrased the way customers phrase them. By day thirty the crawlers can read you, the entity is consistent, and the first monthly report compares what the engines say now with the week-one baseline. That comparison runs every month from then on, alongside the daily checks that watch for anything that breaks the setup.

The clearest example is a wedding and event venue in Lincoln whose site was built from the first line to be quoted: every page leads with a plain “short version” box that answers the question before the detail. From launch it went to 718 Google clicks a month, and that box is the same structure AI engines lift into their answers. The entity and schema work we do on established businesses builds on exactly that pattern, which is why we pair this service with content built to be quoted rather than selling it alone. We report what the engines say by name every month, so you never have to take our word for whether you are in the answer.