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 drops one pale blue block into an open blue crate that is already almost full of blocks arriving from above.

Most of what an AI says about you was written by somebody else

Your own website is roughly a quarter of it. Here is where the rest comes from.

multiple citation datasets, 2025–2026 · May 13, 2026 · 3 min read

There is a reasonable assumption behind almost every conversation we have with a business owner: that improving the website is how you improve what an AI says about you. It is a reasonable assumption and it is about a quarter right.

When we studied one city’s restaurant market, with more than 100 questions, more than 600 answers and every citation recorded, this is where those citations came from:

Out of every 100 citations, where they came from
Food and travel media                28
The restaurant's own website         28
Guides and Michelin                  21
Other                                15
Community and forums                  3
Review platforms                      2
Social media                          2

Guides and media together made up nearly half of all citations. The restaurants’ own sites, a little over a quarter.

That ratio is the single most important number for deciding where to spend, and it holds up elsewhere too. Profound’s analysis of 680 million citations found the site ChatGPT cites most is Wikipedia, at nearly 8 citations in 100, ahead of Reddit, Forbes and G2, which sit around 1 or 2. On Google’s AI Overviews the leader is Reddit, then YouTube and Quora. On Perplexity, Reddit again.

Note in passing that this kills a claim you will hear constantly: that Reddit is the most cited source across every AI platform. It leads on Perplexity and on AI Overviews. But on ChatGPT, much the largest of them, Wikipedia is four times ahead of it.

And a second finding from the same restaurant study, which tells you what kind of page gets used:

Out of every 100 citations, what kind of page it was
A food or travel feature             30
The restaurant's own site            24
A restaurant guide                   19
A best-of or ranked list             15
A review                              4
A menu or booking page                3
A forum discussion                    3

Feature articles, guides and ranked lists, all of them written about businesses by other people, take almost two thirds of the citations between them.

Why this happens is not mysterious. A model answering “who’s the best X in Y” is looking for something that already compares options. Your website compares nothing. It argues for one business. A guide, a round-up, a local newspaper feature or a directory listing all set businesses side by side, which is exactly what answering the question requires. Add what the models do to the question itself, slipping “best” into their own sub-questions about one time in six, and the preference for other people’s pages stops looking like a quirk and starts looking inevitable.

The strategic implication is awkward for anyone selling only website work, ourselves included, and we would rather say it than have you find out later. If we rebuilt your site perfectly and did nothing else, we would have improved something that accounts for roughly a quarter to a third of what a model reads about you.

So what is the other work? Four things, in the order we find them broken:

Your profile and listings. Not glamorous. But an out-of-date category, a pin in the wrong place or an unfilled services field are the most common failures we see, and they are the cheapest to fix.

The directories in your trade. Every industry has three or four that feed the answers. They will not be the ones you expect, and they turn up in the citation data of your own report, which is how we find them instead of guessing.

The “best in town” articles. These are earned, slowly, and it is the longest-running item on any plan we write. It is also, per the numbers above, where the largest single share of citations lives.

Being named without a link. Models count your business name appearing next to your category and your city in ordinary prose. The link is optional. The mention isn’t. This is the part that most confuses people who learned to get found back when links were the whole game.

One honest limit. The restaurant numbers come from one category in one city, and the mix will look different in yours. A software company gets cited through review and comparison sites far more than a restaurant gets cited through food writing. The principle carries over, the numbers do not. Which is exactly why the report goes and measures where your citations come from instead of assuming.

Most of what an AI says about you was written by somebody else

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Your free scan is a starting point. The walkthrough is where it turns into a plan.