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. A classic SEO audit never looks there.

What changed on September 15?

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

What did Google start reporting in June?

Visits that arrive from AI answers, broken out as their own report. Before June they were buried inside your normal search numbers with no way to separate them. It does not backfill, 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, all listed in plain language on the product page. Access and rendering, the wording of your pages, your profile and listings off-site, and the measurement.

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 a minute. 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, both on the pricing page in full. Rebuild carries no figure, because a two-location firm and a fourteen-location group aren't the same job and a number without a scope is one we'd have to take back on the call.

Can't I just do this myself?

Partly, yes, and we'll tell you which parts on the call. Numbers 2, 18 and 19 on our list take an afternoon and you don't need us. What takes longest is knowing which forty questions your buyers actually ask, and which fixes matter in what order.

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

You shouldn't, on our word. That's why the check at the top of the page runs on an AI we don't control, why our own audit is published in full, and why the sample report is public. Read those first, then decide.

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. Nothing is locked to us, there's no dashboard subscription, and there's nothing to cancel.

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 of the three tiers you need.

← 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 the Ninth Circuit vacated it.

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”

Amazon was held unlikely to succeed on its claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The court was careful to preserve the contractual route — “This outcome does not impair Amazon’s ability to regulate access to Amazon.com via private terms of service for its users” — but the federal computer-crime path is closed.

Translated: keeping an AI agent off your site is now a terms-of-service and technical question, not a criminal one. And more to the point, agents that actually transact 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 calling businesses on a user’s behalf for home repair, beauty and pet care, controlled through the Business Profile settings.

That last one deserves a second read. For a category of local business, the “customer” placing the first call may be a machine, and the settings governing whether it can reach you live 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.

A structured product feed, if you sell goods. Merchant Center for Google’s protocol; an application for ChatGPT’s.

Do not block user-triggered agents at your firewall. ChatGPT-User, Perplexity-User and meta-externalfetcher all state that robots.txt may not apply to them, because a person initiated the request. What actually stops them is the security layer at your edge — and that is what ends a transaction halfway through, silently, with no error anyone sees. Note that Claude-User behaves differently: Anthropic commits to honouring robots.txt for it.

And the honest part. Direct integration with the agentic commerce protocols 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 generally available on 26 August 2026 — an agent that reads pages, clicks links, fills forms and uses your existing logins. Anthropic publishes no user-agent for it, no site-owner controls and no robots.txt guidance. 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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