SEO and AI search optimisation.

What monthly SEO is, and is not

A well built site picks up traffic on its own. A well built site with someone working on it every month picks up considerably more. Monthly SEO is that second thing: research into what your market types, new pages and articles written to target it, the authority work that puts a local business above the national suppliers on the same search, and a report each month on where you sit.

It is continuing work, not a one-off, which is why it is quoted separately from a website build. Every site we build already carries the foundations: page titles and descriptions, structured data on every page, answer-first opening paragraphs, FAQ sections with schema, and internal links written with the place name in them.

Why AI search is part of the same job

A growing share of your customers no longer search. They ask. Published studies put it plainly: Ahrefs found 28.3% of the pages ChatGPT cites most have no organic Google visibility at all, and SOCi found a 45% overlap between the businesses winning the map pack and the businesses appearing in AI answers. The work that earns a search ranking and the work that earns a mention in an answer overlap heavily, so we sell them as one service and report them on one page.

A standard SEO audit misses the first AI problem entirely. Some hosts and CDNs sever the connection to AI agents at the server, silently, with nothing in robots.txt to show for it. We have found exactly this on live client sites, and it is the first thing we test.

How the engine sweep is run

Thirty to forty prompts are written for your business and your market across six intent tiers: branded, category, problem-first, comparison, transactional and objection. Each prompt runs in Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT with search, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Microsoft Copilot, plus a de-personalised Google and Bing baseline. Every prompt runs three times in separate incognito sessions, because engines are non-deterministic and we report how often you appeared, not whether you appeared once.

For every prompt we record whether you were named, whether you were cited with a link and to which page, who was named instead, what the engine said, and whether that is correct. Being described with a service you dropped, an old phone number or the wrong suburb is worse than being absent.

When we would not sell it to you

If there is nothing useful to optimise towards yet, we say so. A new business with no reviews, no sold results and no body of work on the page has nothing to rank with, and paying a monthly fee to chase forty searches a month is not a good use of the money. Revisit it once there is a run of work behind you.

The same applies to the wrong terms. A term with no town on the end can be typed by someone in Perth. We aim at the searches that are yours to win.

What the report looks like

Positions per keyword compared across dates, with an explanation of why each one moved. A branded search section, because people who have heard of you search for you by name. An AI section with the sweep results and a scorecard per engine, so the same test can be run again next quarter. And one recommended next action, not a list of forty.