What has to be true before a page can be found
- Crawl
robots · sitemapReady - Render
server HTMLVerified - Index
canonical · hreflangStructured - Understand
schema.orgMapped - Answer
llms.txtObservable
06 / Capabilities
Search & Performance
Technical SEO, answer coverage and speed work — so the system is found by people, crawlers and answer engines alike.
Part of — 04 Scale
What it is
Search and performance work makes a site retrievable and fast. It covers the technical foundations crawlers rely on, the structured content that answer engines and language models read, and the Core Web Vitals work that decides whether a visitor stays long enough to read any of it.
The mechanism
Visibility is an architecture before it is a ranking.
A page is crawled, rendered, indexed and understood as an entity before any engine can rank or quote it. Each step is built into the site, and the content is organised so that search and answer engines read the same structure a person does.
The company, described as things
- The company
OrganizationStructured - Each capability
ServiceMapped - Each project
CreativeWorkMapped - Each note
BlogPostingStructured
How a topic is covered
Topic
- Capability page
- Definition
- Questions answered
- Notes
- Arguments
- Comparisons
- Work
- Evidence
- Related capabilities
Who it is for
- Companies with good content that does not rank or get cited
- Sites that lost visibility after a migration or a redesign
- Teams whose mobile performance is failing real-world field data
What usually breaks
- A migration dropped URLs, redirects or metadata and nobody noticed for a quarter.
- The pages answer no question directly, so nothing can quote them.
- Field performance is bad on mobile, and lab scores hide it.
What we change
01
Fix retrieval before you write more
Crawlability, canonicals, hreflang, status codes and the sitemap first. Publishing into a broken foundation wastes the content.
02
Write answers, mark them up
Each important page answers its question in the first screen, in plain language, backed by structured data that matches what is visible.
03
Optimise for the field, not the lab
Real p75 LCP, INP and CLS on real devices. Lab scores are a development tool, not the objective.
Deliverables
- Technical audit with a prioritised, costed fix list
- URL, canonical, hreflang and redirect architecture
- Structured data implementation matched to visible content
- Answer and entity coverage map per page
- Performance budgets and a Core Web Vitals plan
What it does not do
- We do not guarantee a ranking, a featured answer or a citation in an AI result. Nobody can, and anyone who does is selling something else.
- We do not buy links, spin content, or use any technique we would not happily describe to the search engine reading it.
- We do not control hosting, or the third-party tags a marketing team adds later, and both move field performance. Where the limit sits outside our work, we name which one it is.
Process
01
Audit
Crawl, index coverage, structured data, metadata, redirects and field performance, read as one picture.
02
Foundation
Fix retrieval problems first, in priority order, with each fix verified.
03
Coverage
Map the questions the business should be the answer to, and close the gaps.
04
Monitor
Search Console, field vitals and structured-data validity, reviewed on a schedule.
Questions
Is generative engine optimisation different from SEO?
It shares the foundation and changes the emphasis. Answer engines and language models favour content with a clear entity definition, factual statements, concise answers near the heading that asks the question, and structured data that agrees with the visible page. Most of that is good SEO practice made stricter.
Can you guarantee rankings?
No, and nobody honestly can. We can guarantee the technical foundation is correct, that the content answers the questions the market is asking, and that both are measured so the effect is visible.
What performance targets do you work to?
Field p75 LCP at or below 2.5s, INP at or below 200ms, CLS at or below 0.1, with route-level transfer budgets agreed before the build. Lab scores are used during development, not reported as the outcome.
—Start
Have a system worth building?
Tell us what the business needs to do. We will tell you what it takes to build it, and what it takes to keep it running.