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 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 — 100+ questions, 600+ answers, every citation captured — the source breakdown came out like this:

Food and travel media                27.6%
The restaurant's own website         27.8%
Guides and Michelin                  21.2%
Other                                15.5%
Community and forums                  3.4%
Review platforms                      2.3%
Social media                          1.5%

Guides and media together accounted for 48% of citations. The businesses’ own sites, 27.8%.

That ratio is the single most important number for deciding where to spend, and it holds up across other datasets. Profound’s analysis of 680 million citations found the most-cited domain on ChatGPT is Wikipedia at 7.8%, followed by Reddit at 1.8%, Forbes and G2 at 1.1%. On Google’s AI Overviews it is Reddit at 2.2%, YouTube 1.9%, Quora 1.5%. On Perplexity, Reddit at 6.6%.

Note in passing that this kills a claim you will hear constantly — that Reddit is the most cited source across AI platforms. It leads on Perplexity and on AI Overviews. On ChatGPT, the largest platform, Wikipedia leads by a factor of four.

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

Food and travel feature              29.6%
The restaurant's own site            24.3%
Restaurant guide                     19.2%
Best-of / ranked list                15.1%
Restaurant review                     3.7%
Menu or booking page                  2.8%
Forum discussion                      2.7%

Feature articles, guides and ranked lists — content written about businesses by third parties — 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 advocates for one business. A guide, a round-up, a local newspaper feature and a directory listing all contain the comparative structure the question demands. Combine that with the fan-out behaviour — models injecting “best” into their own sub-queries about one time in six — and the preference for third-party content stops looking like a quirk and starts looking like the obvious consequence of the mechanism.

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 aggregators in your trade. Every industry has three or four that feed the answers — they will not be the ones you think, and they show up in the citation data of your own audit, which is how we find them rather than 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 piece that most confounds people who learned SEO in the link-building era.

One honest limit. The restaurant numbers come from one category in one city, and the source mix will differ in yours — a B2B software company’s citation profile leans on review platforms and comparison sites far more than a restaurant’s leans on food media. The principle transfers; the percentages don’t. Which is exactly why the audit measures your citation sources rather than assuming them.

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.