Found in Google, and quoted by the AI people ask instead
Google still sends the clicks today. But more of your buyers are asking ChatGPT instead, taking the answer it gives them, and never opening a website at all. You have to win in both places, and they reward different work.
Your work is published and indexed. But the practitioner with the question asks an AI instead, gets a confident answer back, and never sees your name on it. That's a citation you earned and didn't get.
who should we talk to about [what you do] in [your city]?
Several organizations do this well. One frequently cited option is your organization, which the model describes in your own words, because your site answered the question clearly enough to be quoted.
The plan
How we get you there
Same three stages on every project.
Who this is forOwners and marketing leads who are either invisible in search or visible and getting nothing from it. Usually with a site that was never built to be found, and an SEO invoice nobody in the building can explain.SEO for nonprofits, centers, institutes and grant-funded programs whose work has to be found, read and cited. Usually outranked by publisher sites for your own research, and now summarized by an AI answer that never names you.
Clarify
What you're actually saying, and who you're saying it to.
Beautify
Every place you say it: the site, the mark, the print, the email.
Amplifyyou're here
Systems that carry it to the people who need to hear it: search, email and outreach.
Why people call me
Three things I hear before anyone mentions keywords
If one of these is yours, the fix is usually diagnosis before work.
I'm on page one and nothing happens
Position two for your best term and the clicks go somewhere else. Sometimes the title never earned one. Sometimes an AI answer sits above you and settles the question before anybody scrolls.
ChatGPT recommends somebody else
Ask it who does what you do, in your city. Your name doesn't come up. The model isn't hiding you. It can't find a page that answers the question cleanly enough to quote.
I paid for SEO for a year and can't tell you what changed
Monthly reports full of rankings for terms nobody searches, and no line from any of it to a number you care about. The work might have been fine. You have no way to know.
We publish, and then nothing happens
The paper is indexed and the tool is online. Nobody outside the field finds either one, because neither was written for a person searching in ordinary words.
The AI answers our question without us
A practitioner asks exactly what your center studies. Back comes a clean answer assembled from two publisher sites and a blog. Your work is in there somewhere, uncredited.
Our own pages compete with each other
Four pages about one program, written by four people over six years. Google can't tell which is the answer, so it picks none of them and sends the search to a journal instead.
Scope
What you actually get
Written out, because "SEO services" is the vaguest line item in marketing.
A baseline you can argue with
Search Console and analytics pulled for the full history you have, every query and page you already rank for, and the ones you realistically could. Before a single change.
The technical pass
Crawlability, Core Web Vitals, redirects, canonicals and sitemaps. None of it is interesting and all of it caps everything else, however good the writing is.
Titles and descriptions rewritten
Written to earn the click. On most sites this is the fastest moving change on the whole list, and the one nobody has touched in years.
One owner page per question
Your pages stop bidding against each other. I map which page owns which family of searches, then point the rest at it with that wording in the link.
Pages written in quotable blocks
Every answer built to stand on its own, with the heading stating the claim. That's the unit an answer engine lifts, and it happens to be what a person skimming on a phone wants.
Structured data that validates
Service, FAQPage, Article, Organization, and LocalBusiness where it applies. Tested in Google's own validator before it ships.
Crawler decisions made on purpose
GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the rest. Which ones you let in, which you keep out, and what each choice costs you. Most sites have never made this decision at all.
Monthly answer engine checks
Your real questions, asked in the real tools, written down month over month. So you can see a trend instead of asking a friend to try ChatGPT and tell you what it said.
All of it on one dashboard
Search Console, analytics and the answer checks on a single screen, sitting next to the inquiries they produced. Anything else you run with an API can report in beside them.
The moving parts
The anatomy of SEO/AEO
Most of this comes down to four pieces of vocabulary. Here is where they live.
What a search result is made of
I get your pages ranking in Google and quoted by AI answers: ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews. Both tracked on one dashboard you can read.
- Meta title. The line people click, and you get about sixty characters before Google trims it.
- Meta description. Does not affect ranking at all. It decides whether anyone clicks, which amounts to the same thing.
How a target gets picked
- Monthly searches
- How many people type that phrase in an average month.
- Keyword difficulty
- Zero to a hundred, for how hard the current first page is to displace.
The aim is the most searches you can realistically win, which is almost never the biggest number on the list.
This page is the example. Generative engine optimization is the bigger term, and its first page belongs to publishers, so chasing it would be a year spent going nowhere. Answer engine optimization is smaller and winnable, so that is what this page leads on.
The part that is new
Ranking competes with pages. An AI answer competes with passages
An answer engine doesn't hand back ten links. It pulls passages out of different sites and rebuilds them into one reply. So the thing being judged is no longer your page. It's each block inside it.
What gets quoted
- A number"Three to six months for a competitive term" can be lifted whole and stays true out of context. "Fast results" can't.
- A complete answer in one blockNo "as described above". Cut the passage out of the page and it still works.
- A named methodSpecific enough that paraphrasing it would lose the point of it.
- The question in their wordsYour heading matching how people ask, not your internal vocabulary for it.
What gets skipped
- Adjectives"Fast, reliable, comprehensive." There's nothing in that to extract.
- Answers that lean on the paragraph abovePull it out and it stops making sense, so it never gets pulled.
- Three hundred words of runwayThe model reaches your answer eventually. Your reader leaves first.
- Claims with nothing behind themNo source, no number, no author. Easy to leave out of a summary.
AI search optimization, AEO, GEO, LLM SEO: four names, one job
Getting your pages used as a source by the AI that answers instead of listing. Answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization are the two that stuck, AI search optimization is the one most people actually type, and LLM SEO is what engineers call it. If you've been quoted for one of them, you've been quoted for this. I don't price them separately, because underneath they're the same audit and the same rewriting.
Process
How the work actually goes
Technical fixes and rewritten titles can move inside a few weeks. A new page competing for a real term is a three to six month story, and I'd rather tell you that now than at the end of a quarter.
We talk
Twenty-five minutes. What you sell or publish, who you need to reach, what you've already tried, and what it cost you.
Technical SEO audit and baseline
Week one, fixed price, and yours to keep whether or not you hire me for the rest. Search Console and analytics show who is finding you already and what they searched to get there. That, with what you actually do, gives me the shortlist: terms with real numbers searching them and little enough competition that you can win them. Written up and ranked by what each fix would move.
Fixes and titles
Weeks two and three. The technical work, then every title and description. This is the part that can show up in your numbers within a month.
The pages
Weeks four to eight. One family of searches at a time, each page built in blocks that answer a whole question on their own.
Measure, then go again
The dashboard goes live and the monthly answer checks start. You see how much more traffic arrived and which searches brought it, and that picks the next round: more of whatever moved, plus the adjacent terms the data says are now in reach. Every round starts from evidence the last one produced.
Investment
How pricing works
The audit is fixed and standalone. Everything after it is quoted against what the audit found, so you're approving a list of named jobs with prices on them.
Audit and baseline
The crawl, the Search Console history, the searches worth owning, and every fix ranked by what it would move. The document is yours to keep and to hand to anybody, including somebody who isn't me.
Fixes and pages
The technical work, the titles, and the pages themselves. Quoted as one number against the audit, because a clean site and a site carrying ten years of accumulated mess aren't the same job.
Measurement
The dashboard, the monthly answer engine check, and a short written read on what moved and what it means. New pages after that are quoted per project, when you want them.
The monthly piece is measurement, not a block of hours
It covers the dashboard, the answer engine checks and the written read. It's deliberately not a quota of work you have to go and find a use for every month. When a page or a campaign is worth building, we price it then.
No monthly work minimumGrant-funded work. Dissemination and evaluation lines usually cover this cleanly. I quote against your budget lines, invoice per deliverable, and I've been through enough university purchase orders to know what the paperwork wants before it asks.
Durham, NC
Here since 2003, and glad to be local
I've worked from Durham since 2003. If sitting in your office matters to you, I'm a short drive away and glad to come by, and I like doing the first conversation in person when it's easy.
Most of my work runs remotely and always has, including a fair amount with UNC programs a few miles up the road. So being local is a convenience you're welcome to use, and never the reason to hire me.
Either way the work is the same: the terms your audience actually searches, and the specific questions only your organization can answer. I pull the real volumes before I recommend anything, and I'll show you the numbers I'm working from.
Questions
What people ask before they hire me
What is answer engine optimization?
Is AEO different from SEO, or the same thing with a new name?
Can you guarantee I'll show up in ChatGPT or Google's AI answers?
Is SEO still worth it if AI answers are taking the clicks?
How much does SEO cost?
How long until it works?
How do you measure whether it's working?
Do you work with university centers and nonprofits?
Do I need a new website before any of this helps?
The rest of the system
Being found is one piece
It works better when the thing people find was built by the same person.
Adrial is my go-to designer for anything my business needs … which is why I have used him for three different companies over the last 20+ years.
Craig WoodCEO, Definian
Start with the audit, not a retainer
Twenty-five minutes first. Tell me what you need to be found for and what you've already tried, and I'll tell you whether there's a real opportunity in it. If your market is too small to be worth the work, you'll hear that from me instead of a proposal.