Frequently asked questions
What this is, what can honestly be promised, what an engagement involves, and the tactics we refuse to sell. Every claim here is sourced on the evidence page.
The basics
The work of making a business retrievable and corroborated. Retrievable means an AI crawler can fetch your page and read it without running JavaScript, and nothing in robots.txt or at your CDN turns it away. Corroborated means sources you do not own describe you accurately. Those are the inputs an assistant has when it decides who to name.
A good deal of the underlying work is shared, and we will say so rather than invent a distinction to justify a rate. Crawlability, server-rendered HTML, clean site structure and fixing 404s serve both. Where it genuinely diverges: AI crawlers other than Googlebot and AppleBot do not execute JavaScript at all, an unlinked brand mention carries weight where SEO valued the link, and there is no ranking to report, so measurement has to be a sampled prompt set instead of a position.
A lot of what is sold under the name is exactly that. The parts that are genuinely different are narrow and testable: JavaScript rendering, which answering crawlers are allowed, where the retrieved snippet is taken from, and the fact that a mention without a link now counts. If an agency cannot tell you which of those it is working on, the rebrand suspicion is fair.
Independent hospitality where customers choose by asking rather than browsing: restaurants, boutique hotels, specialty cafes, and tour or experience operators. We do not work outside hospitality, because the value is knowing which constraints decide a dining or accommodation query and which sources get cited for them, and that knowledge does not transfer.
What can and cannot be promised
No. There is no submission form and nothing you can file that puts you in an answer, so nobody can honestly promise placement. Google publishes two eligibility conditions for its own AI features: a page must be indexed and snippet-eligible, and the site must be included in Search generative AI features in Search Console. Neither is a lever anyone can pull on your behalf to get you named.
The implementation work runs on a normal schedule and we will give you dates for it. What happens afterwards we cannot date, because there is no index status to check and no platform publishes its retrieval cycle. We sample a fixed prompt set on a schedule so you can see movement for yourself. Treat any specific timeline promise, ours included, as a sales tactic.
There is no ranking. A generated answer is composed per query, varies between identical runs, and differs by locale and by whether the user is logged in. The honest substitute is a frozen prompt set sampled repeatedly, which gives you an appearance rate with a stated margin rather than a position. In a flat month our report says the month was flat.
Some, and it is worth opening. Google added a Generative AI performance report to Search Console in June 2026, worldwide from 31 August 2026; it shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, device and date, with no clicks, no position and no queries. Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report that is richer, showing Copilot citations and the grounding queries the model generated. Both are free and we set them up regardless.
Working together
It depends how much of the mechanical work your site needs, which we cannot know before fetching it. The first call is thirty minutes and free, and it ends with a specific answer about which prerequisites are failing rather than a proposal to think about.
Usually not. Most of the work is server-side rendering, robots.txt and CDN rules, fixing dead URLs, and rewriting the paragraph under each H1. If your site assembles its content in the browser, that part does have to change, because AI crawlers cannot see it. We check that in the first stage and tell you before you commit to anything.
Sometimes, and it is better to find out in week one than three months in. Several restaurant and booking platforms render menus, hours and availability client-side, which makes them invisible to AI crawlers even though they look fine to you and to Google. If that cannot be altered, the mechanical prerequisite fails and we will tell you the retainer is not worth taking.
It should not. Most of stage two is server configuration rather than design or content strategy, and several engagements are the technical half only, specified and verified for an in-house team to implement.
Tactics we will not sell you
No. Google states that Google Search does not use llms.txt or any other AI text file, and no other major provider has committed to reading one. An audit of 137,000 sites found 97 percent of published llms.txt files had never been requested by an AI crawler. We publish one because it costs nothing, not because it does anything.
No. A matched study of 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD against roughly 4,000 controls found AI Overviews down 4.6 percent, AI Mode up 2.4 percent and ChatGPT up 2.2 percent, and concluded there was no major uplift on any platform. Google states separately that no special structured data is needed. Schema is worth deploying for conventional rich results and for telling your business apart from a similarly named one. It is not a citation lever.
FAQ rich results were retired from Google Search on 7 May 2026 and the markup does not win AI citations, so it is optional housekeeping rather than a lever. Speakable never left a limited beta for news publishers tied to Google Assistant. Every article on this site emitted speakable until we audited our own copy and removed it.
That figure comes from the Princeton GEO paper. It is a maximum recorded on a synthetic benchmark with a fixed context and few competing sources. It is not an average, not a client outcome, and not a measure of discoverability or traffic. An agency quoting it at you as a promised result has told you something useful about itself.
Still have a question?
Book a 30 minute call. If the answer is that there is nothing worth doing for your business, that is what we will tell you.