A client asked us last year why their enquiries had held steady while their traffic fell by a third. The answer turned out to be that a good number of their buyers were no longer arriving at all — they were asking an assistant instead, getting an answer, and only visiting once they had decided.
That is not a search problem in the way anyone means it. Their rankings were fine. What had changed was that a layer had appeared between the buyer and the site, and nobody at the company had ever read what that layer was saying about them.
Ask it yourself, first
Before anything else, open the four assistants your buyers actually use and ask each of them the question a buyer would ask. Not “what is [company]” — that is a question someone asks who already knows you exist. Ask the question that comes before you: who does X for Y in Z.
Two things usually happen. The first is that you are not mentioned. The second, which is worse, is that you are mentioned and the description is three years old, or belongs to a competitor, or is assembled from a directory listing somebody filled in badly in 2019.
- Ask the category question, not the brand question.
- Ask it in all four, because they disagree more than you would expect.
- Write down the source it cites, if it cites one. That source is your actual problem.
The assistants are not making it up. They are quoting somebody. The work is finding out who, and whether that somebody is you.
What actually changes the answer
Very little of what an SEO retainer normally does. Ranking for a term does not put you in an answer; being the clearest, most quotable source on a question does. In practice that has meant three things on the projects where we have moved it:
- Answer the question on the page, in the page. Assistants quote pages that state a claim plainly and then support it. A page that builds to its point over eight paragraphs gets skipped.
- Fix the sources they are already citing. Directory entries, old press, a Wikipedia stub, a review site. Cheaper than any content programme and it changes the answer faster.
- Publish the numbers you are willing to stand behind. Specific, checkable, dated. Vague claims do not get quoted because there is nothing to quote.
None of this is a replacement for search. Both layers exist and will keep existing. But one of them is currently describing your company without your involvement, and the cost of finding out what it says is twenty minutes.
Where to start
Ask the four questions. Write down what comes back and what it cites. If the citations are wrong, that is a week of work and not a project. If you are absent entirely, that is a longer conversation — but at least it is the right one, and you will be having it about the thing that is actually happening rather than about your rankings.