Seven parts of a business
an engine reads.
Generative engine optimisation is making a business machine legible, so that when a model assembles an answer it has enough verified material to name you rather than someone else. This is the specification we build to. It is ours to change, and it should change as we learn what the engines actually reward.
Presence
Available nowThe site is the primary source. Everything else corroborates it, so if the site is thin or unreadable there is nothing for the rest to point at.
- Content written to answer a question directly, in the first paragraph, before the qualifications.
- Clean, semantic markup. Headings that describe the section rather than decorate it.
- Server-rendered content where it matters, so an engine reading without JavaScript still gets the page.
- Speed and stability, because a crawler on a budget gives up on a slow site.
- One canonical URL per subject, and no near-duplicate pages competing to be the answer.
Measured by. Pages that can be crawled and parsed without error, and whether your own copy is what gets quoted back when the business is asked about.
More on Presence · £249 to start, then £49/monthProfile
Available nowEvery place the business is described as a record rather than as prose. An engine treats agreement as evidence, and disagreement as doubt.
- The Business Profile complete rather than merely claimed: categories, attributes, services, hours, products.
- Name, address and phone number identical everywhere, down to the punctuation.
- The directories and registers that actually get read, not a bulk submission to two hundred that do not.
- Trading names, former names and abbreviations reconciled, so an engine knows they are one business.
Measured by. Consistency across the record set, and whether the profile answers a direct question on hours, location and services without contradicting the site.
More on Profile · Included in the buildPerception
Assessed in the auditImagery is the part most businesses skip, and it is the part that turns a listing into somewhere a person recognises. It also carries data: location, interior, scale, condition.
- Google Street View interior and exterior capture, published to the profile.
- Virtual tours, so the premises are navigable rather than described.
- Photography that is captioned and dated rather than dumped.
- Video, held on the profile and the site, in a form that can be transcribed.
Measured by. Coverage of the premises, imagery freshness, and the engagement the profile gets against a business with none of it.
Where we are with itPre-launch. The approach is designed and the shoot is specified, but we have not yet delivered one for a client, so we do not sell it as a track record.
More on PerceptionProof
Available nowAn engine will not take a business’s word for its own quality. Third-party corroboration is the only thing that lets it say something evaluative and stand behind it.
- After a job, you put a first name and a mobile number in. One text goes out, from you, with a link to your Google listing.
- Volume, recency and rating together. An old five star average is weaker than a current four point six.
- No rating gate. We never ask how it went first and route only the happy answers to Google. There is nowhere in the software to record a rating, which is the cheapest way to never build one.
- Nothing offered in exchange, ever, and no asking for a good review. Your customer says what they actually thought.
- One ask per customer per three months, an opt-out in every message, and an opt-out that survives being entered again by mistake.
Measured by. Review volume and recency against your sector, and whether an engine can find something specific and credible to quote about your work.
Where we are with itWe show you how many people you asked and how many opened the link. We do not show you how many reviews you got, because Google does not tell anyone which review came from which link, and a supplier who claims otherwise is either guessing or gating. Before we can send for you, one line has to go on your booking form or job sheet saying customers may get a review text: a review request counts as marketing under UK rules, so the permission has to be recorded rather than assumed.
More on Proof · £79/monthProvenance
Assessed in the auditThe connective tissue. Structured data states the facts in a form that needs no interpretation, and the entity graph proves that the site, the profile and the register all describe one organisation.
- Schema markup for the organisation, its locations, services, people and reviews.
- sameAs links binding every profile back to the site, and the site back to every profile.
- A single canonical set of facts, held once and published everywhere from that one place.
- Machine-readable answers to the questions we know get asked.
Measured by. Structured data that validates, an entity an engine resolves as one organisation, and a knowledge panel that reflects what you published rather than what it inferred.
Where we are with itBeing built now, and being proved on ourselves first. Until the drift check runs and we can show you what moved since last month, it carries no price.
More on ProvenancePublication
Specified, not yet offeredModels lean on a small number of places they already trust. Being correct on your own site does not get you into the answer if the answer is assembled from somewhere else.
- The trade bodies, registers, industry press and local sources that carry weight in the sector.
- Accurate listings in them, maintained rather than submitted once.
- Written material substantial enough to be worth quoting, published where it will be read.
- Correcting the sources that already describe the business wrongly.
Measured by. Whether the sources an engine already trusts describe you, and describe you correctly.
Where we are with itSpecified and deliberately parked. It is the slowest of the seven and the least automatable, and we would rather say that than sell it thin. The half that is cheap and valuable, sweeping third-party sources for inaccuracies, is being built inside Provenance.
More on PublicationPerformance
Assessed in the auditThe part that stops this being an opinion. If we cannot show what changed, we are selling a belief.
- Tracking which engines name the business, for which questions, and how often.
- Watching what they say, because being cited inaccurately is its own problem.
- Tying every change we ship to a movement in that record.
- Reporting it in language that survives being repeated to your accountant.
Measured by. Share of answer over time. It is the only number here that judges the other six.
Where we are with itThe measurement is running on our own business first. We are establishing how much a model’s answer varies between runs before we put a number in front of a client and call it a result.
More on PerformanceFour stages,
in this order.
Audit
Score the business against all seven parts and show the working. The output is a gap map, and it is useful to you whether or not you buy anything else.
Foundations
Close the parts that block the others. Presence and Provenance first, because nothing corroborates a source that is not there.
Compounding
Proof, Perception and Publication over time. These are the parts that need repetition rather than a launch.
Reporting
Performance from day one, so the baseline exists before we change anything.
