Beds.ie · E-commerce
From 672 to 7,781 organic clicks a month
672 → 7,781
Organic clicks / month
Growth · AI optimisation
AI optimisation
By SimonMeasured 4 September 2026
People increasingly ask ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity instead of scrolling results. AI optimisation is the work of making your business the answer those systems give — and of being honest about which parts of it can be measured.
Inside a growth block
from £250 /month
A block of hours spent on whatever moves the business — this, and everything else on the growth list. No percentage of your ad spend.
No minimum term. Move up, move down or stop whenever you see fit.
How the growth blocks workWhat you get
What the hours go on.
Entity clarity: who you are, where you are, what you do — consistent everywhere AI systems read
Structured data that machines can quote, and none that the page does not support
Content written to be cited: direct answers, specifics, sources attached to figures
Google Business Profile, directories and citations kept accurate — the inputs these systems trust
A monthly check of fixed questions against the major assistants, with the transcripts kept
Measured, not claimed
What it did for Beds.ie.
A 17,000-product furniture retailer that was effectively invisible in search. Five months of retainer work on catalogue structure, product data and technical SEO took Beds.ie from under 700 organic clicks a month to nearly 8,000 — and monthly revenue more than tripled over the same period.
672 → 7,781
Organic clicks / month
+1,058% · April vs August 2026, full calendar months
Source: Google Search Console via the client's own database
What actually changes, and what does not
Most of this is SEO with the emphasis moved. The page still has to be crawlable, fast and rendered — an assistant cannot cite a page it could not fetch — and authority still counts, because systems that cite sources prefer sources other people already trust.
Five things are genuinely different, and they are the work:
- The unit of value becomes the sentence, not the page. A generated answer lifts a claim, so every important statement has to survive being removed from its surroundings. "It depends on your requirements" is useless out of context; "a small business website in the UK costs £500 to £5,000 to build in 2026" is a sentence that can be carried.
- Sourced facts get quoted, because they are safer to quote. A model repeating an unsourced number is taking a risk. A model repeating "94.5% of 17,233 items, from a Merchant Centre sync log read in September 2026" is repeating something that carries its own defence.
- Consistency across the whole web matters more than on-page factors. These systems assemble an understanding of a business from everywhere it appears. Contradictions between your site, your Google Business Profile and a directory listing from 2021 do not make you confusing — they make you low-confidence, and low-confidence means not mentioned.
- There is no position one. You are in the answer or you are not, which makes progress lumpy and reporting genuinely harder.
- First-hand material is disproportionately valuable, because these systems already have everything general. Your measurements and your outcomes are the one thing they cannot get elsewhere.
What we can show, and what we will not claim
On 4 September 2026 I read fourteen live UK search results across the queries this studio cares about. Eight carried an AI Overview. Every "what is", "how much" and "…uk" query had one; the transactional local queries — "web design manchester", "seo agency manchester" — did not, and carried a local pack instead.
The encouraging finding for a business of this size: on the cost and AI-SEO queries, the AI Overview cited small UK studios rather than the large SEO tools. Clear, dated, first-hand pages appear to compete well above their weight in that format.
The same applies to llms.txt, which is currently sold hard by a lot of people. This site ships one, generated from its own route data. As of September 2026 no major provider has publicly confirmed reading it, and the guide here says so. It costs an hour, so it is worth doing; it is not worth a line on an invoice.
What the hours actually go on
- Foundations first. Crawlable, fast, rendered, structured. Everything below this line is wasted if a page cannot be fetched and understood.
- Entity clean-up. One business name, one description, one address, one founder — identical across the website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and every directory. Going back through the old listings is dull, and it is usually where the surprises are.
- Rewriting key pages to lead with the answer, in the first hundred words rather than after the scene-setting.
- Attaching a source and a date to every published figure, in the sentence rather than in a footnote.
- Publishing the things only you know: your measurements, your outcomes, and what went wrong and what it cost.
- Structured data that matches what the page says — and removing any that does not, which is more common than you would hope.
- The monthly check, with transcripts kept.
Six of those seven improve classic search as well, which is the honest argument for doing them regardless of how AI search settles. There is no version of the future in which clear, sourced, first-hand, technically sound pages turn out to have been a mistake.
Locally
Working in Greater Manchester.
The local dimension of this is more concrete than it sounds. Ask an assistant for a web designer in Manchester and the businesses it names are overwhelmingly the ones with a strong, consistent local presence — the same signals that decide the map pack, read by a different system.
So for a Greater Manchester business, the first AI optimisation job is almost never on the website. It is making sure the business is described identically wherever it appears, and that the Google Business Profile is complete and reviewed. That is cheap, it is checkable, and it moves both systems at once.
It is also worth knowing what a language model currently says about your business before spending anything. It is usually not what you would have written, and occasionally it is confidently wrong in a way that has been quietly costing you enquiries.
Written by Simon, who does the work.
Also inside the growth block
The rest of the growth list.
All of these sit under the growth block, where the pricing and the process are the same whichever you pick.
Technical, local and content SEO with the results measured in Search Console rather than a slide deck. Beds.ie went from 672 to 7,781 organic clicks a month in five months.
Catalogue structure, product data and shopping feeds — the three things that decide whether a large store is visible. Beds.ie went from 672 to 7,781 organic clicks a month in five months, with 94.5% of a 17,233-item feed approved.
The map pack sits above every other result on a local search, and getting into it is mostly not a website job. This is the work that decides it.
Crawlability, structure, index coverage, speed and structured data — the half of SEO that is engineering, and the half where the largest untouched gains usually are.
Search and Shopping campaigns managed inside your growth block — not for a percentage of your spend. Agencies commonly take 10–20% of what you spend to manage it, and up to 40% on small accounts; the hours cost the same whatever your budget.
Facebook and Instagram campaigns — creative, audiences, tracking and reporting — managed inside your growth block, with artwork done in-house rather than billed separately.
Watching what people actually do on your site and removing whatever stops them getting in touch. Vehicles 2 Lease report form conversion moving from roughly 1% to roughly 4%.
Planned, designed and posted for you — as part of the growth block, so it serves the same goals as the website and the ads instead of running as a separate hobby.
GA4, Search Console, Google Ads and Meta conversions set up properly and reconciled, so every other decision is made on real numbers.
Paid search, Shopping and paid social managed inside a growth block. The fee does not move when your budget does, which is the whole point.
A list of what is wrong, in the order it is worth fixing, with the reason each one matters. Not a 90-page PDF from a tool with the logo changed.
The only audience you actually own. Everything else is rented from a platform that can change the rules on a Tuesday.
Pages written to answer a question somebody is actually asking, in a volume the business can sustain. Not a blog nobody reads, published fortnightly forever.
A genuine performance channel for some products and an expensive way to make content for most. Which one you are depends on the product, not the budget.
The most precise B2B targeting available anywhere, at the highest cost per click of any mainstream platform. Both halves of that sentence matter.
Straight answers
Questions people actually ask.
Is this different from SEO?
It overlaps heavily — the technical foundations are shared — but AI systems weight things differently: entity consistency, quotable specifics, structured data and first-hand evidence matter more than keyword density. It is SEO with the emphasis moved, not a separate discipline with a separate retainer.
Can you measure AI visibility?
Only coarsely, and this page will not pretend otherwise. AI referral traffic shows up in analytics, and we ask a fixed set of questions of the major assistants monthly and keep the transcripts. There is no score, because no score I have seen is reproducible.
Does llms.txt work?
Unproven. It is widely adopted by publishers and, as of September 2026, no major AI search provider has publicly confirmed reading it. This site ships one because it costs an hour and is harmless — not because there is evidence it brings traffic.
Is this a separate service?
No — it is one of the things the growth hours go on, alongside SEO, ads and conversion work. Whichever will move your business furthest that month.
What is the first thing I should do?
Make your business details identical everywhere they appear, and complete your Google Business Profile. It is free, it takes an afternoon, and it moves both AI answers and the local map pack at the same time.
Tell me what growth would look like.
Send me the site and what you are trying to achieve this year. I will tell you honestly which block makes sense and what the first month would go on.