Price a website

Search · SEO, GEO, AEO

Being found

We don’t sell SEO, and we’d rather explain why than let you assume we can’t do it. Most of this industry either ignores search entirely or sells it as a monthly package with a graph attached. Our position is duller: it isn’t a separate product, it’s a property of a site that was built properly. Here is what that means, in full, including the parts we can’t promise.

Three acronyms, one job

They get sold as three services. They are three views of the same underlying work.

SEOSearch engine optimisationthe original
Ranking in a list of links on Google or Bing. It rests on technical foundations, a structure that makes sense, content that genuinely matches what someone searched for, and links other people chose to give you.
GEOGenerative engine optimisationnewer
Being cited correctly when an AI tool answers a question. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews summarise sources; being one of them needs clear structure, accurate markup, and facts stated plainly enough to be quoted without being mangled.
AEOAnswer engine optimisationoverlaps with GEO
Getting pulled into a direct answer, a featured box or a voice assistant’s reply. In practice this means content shaped like a question and its answer, rather than three paragraphs of preamble before the useful sentence.
SEOa ranked link
GEOa cited summary
AEOa direct answer
the same work underneathclear structure · content that answers the question · technical hygiene

Anyone quoting you for three separate services has noticed the same thing and decided not to mention it.

Why the shortcuts are a liability

This is a risk disclosure, not a moral position. We don't care how anyone else works; we care what it would do to your site.

There is a whole market in automated ranking: tools and agencies that generate content at volume and build links by trading them in networks. Cheap, fast, and it sometimes works for a while, which is exactly what makes it sellable.

It is also, in both halves, against Google’s published spam policy. Not by interpretation. By name.

March 2024

Both practices named in policy

Google’s spam policy overhaul. The test it set is manipulation, not authorship: content produced at scale to game rankings is a violation whether a person or a machine wrote it.

scaled content abuselink spam

15 May 2026

Extended to the AI surfaces

The same policies confirmed to govern AI Overviews and AI Mode, not just the blue links. A clarification rather than a new crackdown: no new categories were added, but the direction only points one way.

AI OverviewsAI Mode

Both checked against Google’s documentation, July 2026.

Using AI isn’t the problem. Using it to mass-produce pages nobody needed is.

We use an AI tool ourselves, and say exactly where, which is the same standard we’re holding anyone else to here.

So the reason we won’t do it isn’t that it’s tacky. It’s that the downside lands on you, months later, as a site that quietly stops appearing, and we’d be the ones who put you there.

What volume tactics ship

  • Hundreds of near-identical pages, generated in bulk
  • Keywords placed where a human answer should be
  • Links traded with other sites doing the same thing
  • A directory listing on sites nobody reads
  • Wording tuned for a crawler, read by nobody

What we ship

What it looks like instead

Concretely, and mapped to where in our process it actually happens.

Three things we actually do about search, and where in the process each one happens. None of them is a line item you can buy separately.

In every build

Structure and markup, as standard

Semantic HTML, a sensible page hierarchy and schema describing what each page actually is. It is in every Foundry build at no extra cost, because a site without it isn’t finished.

See the builds

In the writing

Content that answers the question

Pages written to answer what someone actually asked, in the order they asked it. That is the whole of what GEO and AEO reward, and it is also just better writing.

How content gets made

Over time

Technical hygiene that doesn’t decay

Dependencies, performance and crawlability drift the moment nobody is watching. Aegis and your care plan keep them from drifting, which is why this lives in a retainer rather than a one-off project.

Styx and Aegis

and the one thing we will never do

Buy or trade links

Links are earned or they don’t exist. We’ll help you deserve them, and we will not buy them, swap them, or enrol your site in a network that does it on your behalf. If a quote you get elsewhere includes a number of links per month, that is what it’s describing.

None of the three above is a line item, which is the point. Search visibility isn’t a thing you buy once and own; it decays. That’s why it sits inside the care plan rather than being sold as a package that finishes.

If you’re a local trade, here’s the honest version

Plumbers, electricians, garages, anyone whose customers search “near me”.

This section is for local and transactional businesses. SaaS, e-commerce and content-driven sites: sections 01 to 03 are yours, not this one.

Mostly good news: this page barely applies to you. What decides whether someone finds you is your Google Business Profile: your rating, how many reviews, how recent, and whether the details are right. That holds on Maps, in search, and when someone asks an assistant for a plumber nearby, because for that question these tools read structured business data, not your website’s wording. No amount of clever copy outranks a competitor with four times your reviews.

Which puts the deciding factor somewhere we can’t reach. Reviews come from doing good work and asking for one, and automating that would be the manipulation the rest of this page is about.

Ours, in every build

The technical side

Structured location data standardSchema markup standardMetadata, done right standardFast on a phone standard

Costs younothing extra

Yours, and only yours

The reviews

Do the job well youAsk them to review it youKeep the listing accurate youReply to the bad ones you

Costs youasking, every time

That’s the whole of it, and it’s simpler than this industry has any interest in making it sound.

What we can’t promise

The section that decides whether you believe the rest of the page.

Nobody can guarantee a ranking. Not us, not anyone quoting you a position. The results are Google’s to decide, they change them constantly, and any agency promising a specific place is either guessing or describing a search nobody performs.

Organic search is slow. Months, not weeks, and slower in a competitive trade. If you need traffic next week, that is paid advertising, and we will tell you so rather than sell you something that can’t work in the time you have.

We won’t report numbers we don’t control. We can tell you the site is technically sound, structured properly and genuinely answering questions. We can’t tell you that caused a rise, because we can’t separate our work from your market, your competitors and whatever Google changed that month.

Ask the sceptical version

Press us on it.

If you’ve been sold search before and it went badly, that is a reasonable thing to bring to a conversation. Bring the old report: hello@page-flow.co.uk