Rank on Google. Get quoted by the machines
Search stopped being a list of ten blue links. Most searches now end without a click, and a growing share of buying research happens inside an assistant that names two or three companies and moves on. We work on both problems at once: the rankings that still drive the majority of your qualified traffic, and the citations that decide whether you get named at all.
What actually changed
These are measured numbers with sources attached, because this category runs on recycled statistics that trace back to nothing. Where the research disagrees, we say so.
of US Google searches ended without a click to the open web in early 2026, up from 60% in 2024. Roughly 276 clicks per 1,000 searches now reach a website, down from 374.
SparkToro, June 2026the drop in how often people click a traditional search result when an AI summary sits above it. They also ended their session entirely on 26% of those pages, against 16% without one.
Pew Research Center, July 2025lower click-through rate for the top-ranking page on keywords carrying an AI Overview, measured against a forecast of the same keywords without one.
Ahrefs, February 2026, 300,000 keywordsconversion rate for visitors arriving from ChatGPT. That is second only to paid search at 7.8%, and ahead of direct, organic, social and email.
Similarweb, May 2026of US adults now use AI chatbots, up from 33% in 2024. About a quarter of adults use one every day.
Pew Research Center, June 2026sources cited per answer by ChatGPT versus Gemini, across 126 million analysed US prompts. Which engine you optimise for changes how many slots exist.
Semrush AI Visibility Index, June 2026What we do
Technical foundation
Crawlability, index bloat, site speed, internal linking and the structural problems that quietly cap everything else.
Entity and schema
Organization, Service, FAQ and Article markup so machines can parse who you are and what you sell without guessing.
Content that answers
Pages built around the questions buyers actually type and ask out loud, written to be quotable in a two-sentence answer.
Answer engine visibility
Tracking how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews describe your category, and where your competitors get named instead of you.
Local and map presence
Google Business Profile, citations and review velocity for businesses that sell inside a service area.
Digital PR and mentions
Earning the third-party mentions and links that both Google and the language models lean on when deciding who to trust.
What we will not sell you
The current AEO pitch is that you bolt on schema markup and the language models start quoting you. The best available causal test says otherwise. Ahrefs compared 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD against 4,000 control pages in May 2026 and found no meaningful lift in AI citations, with AI Overviews citations actually falling 4.6%. We implement schema anyway, because it earns rich results in classic search and it settles any ambiguity about your entity. We just will not price it as a shortcut to getting cited.
What does appear to move citations is duller and slower. Being an established entity the models already recognise, getting mentioned by sources they lean on, and publishing pages that answer a real question completely enough to be quoted in two sentences. That is the work.
How we work
Baseline
We measure where you rank, where you get cited, and where you do not exist at all. That includes running your category prompts through the major assistants and recording who gets named.
Fix the foundation
Technical debt first. There is no point publishing into a site that crawls badly, loads slowly, or contradicts itself in its own markup.
Build the answers
We write the pages that answer real buying questions in full, with the specifics, numbers and plain definitions that get quoted back.
Earn the mentions
Coverage, citations and links from sources that already carry weight in your category. This is the slow part and the part that compounds.
Measure both
Rankings and traffic on one side, assistant citations and referral quality on the other. We report on revenue from both, not on vanity positions.
AEO and SEO questions
What is AEO, and is it actually different from SEO?
AEO is answer engine optimization: getting your business named and cited in the answers that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews generate. It overlaps heavily with SEO, because those systems still lean on crawled pages, established entities and third-party mentions. The difference is the goal. SEO competes for a ranked link. AEO competes to be the source the machine quotes when no link gets clicked. Given that roughly 68% of US Google searches now end without a click at all (SparkToro, June 2026), optimizing only for the link is optimizing for a shrinking prize.
Does adding schema markup get me cited by AI?
Probably not on its own, and we would rather tell you that up front. Ahrefs ran a controlled test in May 2026 on 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD, measured against 4,000 control pages. AI Overviews citations went down 4.6%, while AI Mode and ChatGPT moved 2.4% and 2.2%, both statistically indistinguishable from zero. Cited pages do correlate with having schema, but the causal test does not reproduce it. We still implement schema, because it earns rich results in classic search and it removes ambiguity about your entity. We just will not sell it to you as an AI visibility strategy.
Is SEO dead now that AI answers everything?
No, but the scoreboard changed. Traffic from LLMs is still small, generally under 2% of referral traffic for most sites, so a business that abandons classic search today is trading a large channel for a small one. What has genuinely changed is that informational queries now convert to clicks far less often, so the value has shifted toward commercial and bottom-of-funnel pages, and toward being the cited source when someone asks an assistant for a recommendation. We plan for both at once.
How long does SEO take to work?
Technical fixes can move things within weeks. Content and authority compound over months. Most clients see meaningful improvement within the first 30 to 60 days on the technical and commercial pages, with the bigger gains arriving over a few quarters. Anyone promising you page one in 30 days on a competitive term is either redefining the term or lying.
How do you measure AI visibility?
We run a fixed set of category prompts across the major assistants on a schedule and record whether you are named, how you are described, and who gets named instead. That gets tracked alongside referral traffic from LLM sources in analytics. It is a newer discipline and the tooling is still immature, so we are explicit about what is measured reliably and what is directional.
Do you work with businesses outside of New York?
Yes. We are based in Brooklyn and work with clients across the United States. Local SEO work naturally skews toward businesses with a service area, but the technical, content and answer engine work is location independent.
Other services
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