How is this different from SEO?

SEO is about ranking a page so someone clicks it. This is about being one of the three companies an AI names when nobody clicks anything. Some of the work overlaps. The goal doesn't.

Is this just SEO with a new name?

No. Half of what decides an AI answer is off your website entirely: your profile, your reviews, the directories in your trade, the articles someone else wrote. The usual website audit never looks there.

What changes on September 15, 2026?

One of the biggest hosting and security companies is changing a default setting. From that date its protection can block AI assistants, and in some cases Google itself, from reading your pages. Nobody gets told when it happens to them.

What did Google start reporting in June 2026?

Visits that arrive from AI answers, pulled out into a report of their own. Before that they sat buried in your normal search numbers with no way to separate them. It does not fill in the past, so your history starts the day you switch it on.

Does any of this matter if I'm mostly word of mouth?

Word of mouth still ends in a search. Someone hears your name, asks an AI whether you are any good, and reads what it says. If the answer is thin or wrong, the referral dies there.

What do you actually change on my site?

Twenty-one specific things, in four groups. Whether an AI can reach your pages at all. How those pages are written. Your profile and the listings that sit off your site. And the measurement. You get the full list, item by item, on the call.

What do you need from me?

About two hours in total. One call, read-only access to your site and analytics, and one person who can answer questions about what you actually sell.

How long does it take?

The free report runs itself in about five minutes. Essentials takes ten days, Foundation four weeks, and Rebuild depends on how big the site is. You get the timing on the call, before you pay.

Do you need access to my website?

For the report, no. We can do all of it from the outside. For the fixes we need either access or someone on your side who can apply them, and we will tell you which items you can do yourself.

What if my site is on Wix, Squarespace or WordPress?

All three are fine. Most of the twenty-one items are content and settings, not code. Where a platform genuinely blocks something, we say so on the call rather than after you have paid.

Do you write content?

We rewrite what is already there so an AI can quote it, and we write the missing answers to the questions your buyers ask. Foundation includes three months of articles on top of that. What we don't do is publish for volume: a post nobody asked for is a post nothing quotes.

Essentials is $1,600 and Foundation is $5,000, one-time. Cadence is the monthly plan, $390 a month, cancel any time. All of it is on the pricing page. Rebuild carries no figure: two locations and fourteen are not the same job, and a price given before anyone has seen the work is one we would take back.

Can't I just do this myself?

Partly, yes, and we will tell you which parts on the call. Three of the twenty-one items take an afternoon each and you do not need us for them. The slow part is working out which questions your buyers really ask, and which fixes matter in which order.

You're new. Why should I trust you with this?

You shouldn't, on our word alone. So we made it checkable. The test at the top of this page runs on an AI we do not control. You can run the free report right now without speaking to anyone, and a full sample report is public. Look at those first.

What if AI never names us anyway?

That can happen and we'd rather say so. Nobody controls what these systems say. Anyone guaranteeing you a place is either lying or doesn't understand how they work. What we can do is make sure nothing on your side is what's stopping it.

You do: the report, the changes, the tracking. None of it is locked to us and no subscription is required. Cadence, the monthly plan, is the one thing billed on a repeat, it is optional, and you can cancel it any time.

What's the guarantee?

Everything on your list, or you don't pay for it. The free report produces the list; if we can't complete an item on it, that item comes off the invoice. We guarantee our work, never what an AI decides.

What happens on the call?

Twenty minutes. Run the free report first and we'll have read it too, so we open with what it found rather than with questions. You leave knowing which tier you need, and whether you need one.

← All research

Pilly leans over a shop counter and hands a small bag to the first of a line of small robots waiting on the other side.

An AI agent can now legally shop on your website

A US federal appeals court, 4 August 2026: "the Assistant is a tool, not a person."

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals · August 24, 2026 · 3 min read

In March 2026 Amazon won a court order blocking Perplexity’s shopping agent from making purchases on Amazon on behalf of logged-in users. It looked like the moment the door closed on agentic commerce.

On 4 August 2026 a federal appeals court, the Ninth Circuit, threw that order out.

The reasoning matters more than the outcome:

“It is the user who ‘accesses’ Amazon’s computers, with the help of the Assistant to carry out specific acts on Amazon.com.”

and

“the Assistant is a tool, not a person”

The judges found Amazon unlikely to win by invoking the federal computer-fraud law. They were careful to leave the other road open, the one that runs through contracts: “This outcome does not impair Amazon’s ability to regulate access to Amazon.com via private terms of service for its users.” But the criminal route is shut.

Translated: keeping an AI agent off your site is now a matter of your terms of use and your technical setup, not of criminal law. And more to the point, agents that actually buy things have stopped being hypothetical.

Google’s AI Mode books restaurants, appointments and event tickets through named partners: OpenTable, Resy, Tock, Ticketmaster, StubHub, and for service businesses Booksy, Fresha and Vagaro. At I/O 2026 Google announced expansion to local experiences and services in the US, including Google phoning businesses on a searcher’s behalf for home repair, beauty and pet care. Whether those calls can reach you is the owner’s decision, made in their own profile settings.

That last one deserves a second read. For a whole category of local business, the “customer” placing the first call may be a piece of software, and the settings that decide whether it gets through sit in a profile most owners have not opened in two years.

So what does a small business actually need to be reachable by a transacting agent? As of today, four things, and the fourth is where it usually breaks.

Be on a booking platform an assistant already integrates with. Booksy, Fresha, Vagaro, OpenTable, Resy, Tock. For most local service businesses this is the only route that exists right now, and it is not a technical project. It is a decision about which platform you use.

Keep the Google Business Profile complete, current, and correctly configured for calls. That is the surface Google’s calling agent uses. Hours including holidays, services listed, and the call-handling settings actually reviewed.

An orderly product list, if you sell goods. With Google you go through Merchant Center. With OpenAI, for now, you apply and wait to be accepted.

Do not block user-triggered agents at your firewall. ChatGPT-User, Perplexity-User and meta-externalfetcher all state that the instructions file may not apply to them, because a person initiated the request. What actually stops them is the service protecting your site, and that is what ends a purchase halfway through, silently, with no error anyone sees. Note that Claude-User behaves differently: Anthropic commits to honoring the instructions file for it.

And the honest part. Plugging straight into the systems these agents buy through is not realistically available to a small business without a platform partner. OpenAI’s product feed onboarding is “currently available to approved partners” and requires an application. Google’s simplified onboarding through Merchant Center is described as “rolling out over the coming months” with no adoption figures published. Anyone selling you a direct protocol integration today is describing something you cannot buy.

One more open question, and nobody has answered it. Claude in Chrome became available to everyone on 26 August 2026: an agent that reads pages, clicks links, fills in forms and uses the logins a person is already signed in with. Anthropic publishes no name you could recognize it by, no site-owner controls and no guidance on the instructions file. If it visits your site, you currently have no documented way to identify it or to say no. That is a genuine gap, and we would rather flag it than pretend the picture is complete.

An AI agent can now legally shop on your website

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Now find out where your own business stands.

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