A buyer asks an assistant who to hire in your category. It names two or three companies, cites a few pages, and the buyer contacts one of them. No list, no second page, no analytics entry telling you it happened. This is the outcome page for that problem: what it takes to be one of the names.
This is the hardest part to act on: there is no line in your analytics called searches that ended in a recommendation for a competitor.
They asked, they got two names, they contacted one. Nothing was clicked, nothing was tracked, and your traffic graph looks exactly the same as the week before. The only visible symptom is a pipeline that quietly thins.
Position three on a query that now returns an AI summary above the results, answered from three sources that are not you. Ranking is still worth having. It has simply stopped being sufficient on its own.
Every question a competitor answers first becomes a source for the next related question. Their presence compounds while yours stays at zero, and catching up later means arguing against a default the engine has already settled on.
These are the sentences buyers type into Google and into an AI assistant before they ever contact anyone. Whole questions, with a decision attached to the answer.
Six conditions. The first three decide whether you can be read at all; the last three decide whether you are worth quoting.
Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot all able to reach you, through robots.txt, through the firewall and through the CDN. This is the single most common failure and almost nobody chose it.
Several AI crawlers do not run scripts. If your text arrives after the script does, they fetch an empty page and move on to a source that loaded properly.
Structured data for your organization, services, locations, reviews and questions. It is the one place where you state what your company is in a form no machine can misread, and the alternative is letting it infer conservatively.
A question-shaped heading, the answer in the first hundred words, the evidence underneath. Engines quote passages, not pages, and a paragraph that only makes sense after reading the two above it will never be the quote.
Name, address, phone, founding date and services identical across your site, your profiles, directories, press and partner pages. Contradictions lower confidence, and a model with low confidence names somebody else.
Named authors, dated cases, real numbers, genuine reviews. Models lean on what they can verify and date. Undated, unattributed marketing copy reads as unverifiable, and unverifiable sources get left out.
The technical half moves within weeks of the next re-fetch. Being the named answer for competitive category questions takes three to six months, because it depends on published answers accumulating.
Your category questions run across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot, recording who gets named and which pages get cited. Usually uncomfortable, always clarifying.
robots.txt, firewall rules, CDN bot filters and rendering. Days of work, and the fastest movement in the whole programme.
Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, Review and BreadcrumbList, published site-wide rather than as a token on one page.
Not keywords: whole sentences, the way people type them into an assistant, per market and per language. Ranked by buying intent rather than by volume.
One question per page, answered near the top, evidence underneath, a named person on it and a date. Written by our copywriters and reviewed by somebody whose name goes on the page.
Profiles, directories, maps, press and partner pages aligned to the same facts. Tedious, cheap, and it lifts every engine at once.
Dated cases with numbers, reviews collected on a schedule, named experts. This is what moves a model from mentioning you to recommending you.
The prompt set re-runs on a schedule. You see your share of answers per engine over time, next to the competitors appearing beside you, and we go after the questions where somebody else is still the default.
The difference is rarely who is better at the job. It is who is legible.
Search and AI visibility is the channel with no media cost attached, which is why it changes the shape of a business rather than just its month.
7x more leads and over €1,000,000 in extra revenue, with organic visibility carrying a large part of it.
“One single email campaign brought in €300,000 in extra revenue.”
Hans Josten, owner at Batisol
800 extra quote requests from pages built to answer what buyers were already asking.
6,000 leads and €4.5 million sold online, with buyers arriving already qualified.
€490,000 in three months and the Beurs Wonen Visitor Award.
Start with the free scan: a score out of 100 across eight signal groups, with the fixes in order, by email. Or book your free call and we will run your own category questions live across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot and show you who gets named instead of you, and why.
We take on a limited number of clients per month, because the work is hands-on.
Fill in the form and we’ll get back to you within one business day.
We’ll get back to you within one business day to plan your call.