It is not enough to rank on Google anymore
SEO should bring you customers, not just traffic.
We are an SEO and AI-search studio working with clients internationally. We find the specific reason buyers are not reaching you, then build the pages that bring them in and turn them into inquiries.
AI OverviewYour site, ranking first
The first real result on the page.
The problem
You can be paying for SEO and still be invisible.
Three questions about your own website. If you are paying for SEO, you should be able to get an answer to all three.
Can Google even find your website?
Not whether you rank. Whether Google can open your pages at all. It usually breaks after a redesign, and a monthly report would not show it.
When someone asks ChatGPT for a supplier like you, does your name come up?
If a competitor comes up instead, that buyer never reaches you.
When did anyone last check?
You get articles, links, a report every month. None of that involves opening your website to check that Google can still find it.
We check the site before we tell you what it needs.
Most marketing budgets buy more of something: more articles, more ads, more links. All of it can arrive exactly as promised while the website underneath fails to do its job, because checking that is nobody's job.
Both of these clients were paying someone when we met them. Neither had been told what was actually wrong. So we look first, and what we recommend comes out of what we find on your site, not out of a package we sell to everyone.
Case one · The diagnostic
A site rebuild cut Google off from their pages.
EGMP International Corporation, a recruitment agency placing workers with employers across the Gulf. They were paying an agency for SEO every month, and every month the articles and backlinks arrived on schedule.
Meanwhile the site had been rebuilt, and Google was steadily losing access to it. That ran for months. Nobody checked, and nobody told them. The articles kept arriving the whole time.
When we came in, the first thing we did was look at the site itself. We pulled the daily history out of Search Console and plotted it by month.
Organic impressions by month
Google Search Console, July 2025 to June 2026
Toggle to see the raw Search Console screenshot this chart is drawn from. Same property, same date range, unedited.
87%
Fall in how often the site showed up in Google, from its September 2025 peak
5 of 5
New pages live, and Google has found all five
9 of 9
GCC employer searches with no comparable agency on page one
What we found
The rebuild changed the way the pages were delivered, and Google could no longer read them. It was never a content problem. No number of new articles was ever going to fix it.
What we built
We made the pages readable again, then added five new ones aimed at the searches employers actually use. Google has found all five. That list came out of their market, not out of a template we hand everybody.
That pilot was five pages, and it is built and live. We work with them continuously now, improving the rest of the site and watching it, so a drop like that one gets caught in days instead of months.
Case two · The build
The pages we built have brought in over 6,500 m² of project inquiries.
JS Wallmatrix supplies carpet, vinyl and wall finishes to commercial and institutional buyers. Their marketing budget went on ads, which bring people in only for as long as you keep paying for them. The site those clicks landed on had never been built to bring anyone in on its own.
So we started with the site itself. We were the first to work on it and the first to set up any measurement at all. Research told us which pages buyers were already looking for, and we built those, not the ones we would have guessed at.
- 80+
- Qualified commercial inquiries in five months, from a site with no search presence before
- 6,500 m²
- Of flooring and wall finishing quoted across those inquiries
- 33%
- Of leads landing on a product page come through pages we built for very specific searches
The closed loop
Keyword research didn't just pick terms, it specified which page types had to exist. Two mattered most: regional-price-list and local-installer. We built them, and a third of all leads that land on a product page now arrive on exactly those. Research to page to inquiry, with no gap in the chain.
And these are real buyers
- Engineering consultancyloop pile carpet2,482 m²
- Hospitalvinyl, supply + labour + delivery1,100 m²
- Retail pop-uppage we builtcarpet roll865 m²
- Auditoriumcarpet roll570 m²
- Provincial gov't session hallpage we builtpremium carpet175 m²
- National gov't agencypage we builtcarpet tiles100 m²
National and provincial government, a major oil corporate, engineering consultancies, hospitals and hotels, reaching well across multiple regions.
We still work with JS Wallmatrix month to month. We read what the data is telling us and keep improving those pages, so more of the right people find them and more inquiries come in.
Same blind spot, two different fixes.
That recruitment agency and JS Wallmatrix were both already paying for marketing when we met them. One had an agency producing articles and links every month. The other was paying for ads. Both were getting exactly what they hired someone to deliver. That is the trap in paying an agency to make more of one thing: whether the website underneath can actually carry it is nobody's job. One turned out to need a broken site fixed. The other needed pages that had never existed. We only knew which after we looked, and we have kept looking since.
What changed
You can be on the first page of Google and still lose the customer.
Google increasingly answers the search on the results page itself, so your buyer gets what they need without visiting anyone. In 2025, Pew Research tracked 68,000 US searches: when Google showed an AI answer, people clicked a result 8% of the time, against 15% when it did not. ChatGPT and other AI tools work the same way. So the first page is no longer the finish line. What decides whether you get found now is whether these tools can read your site at all, and whether they put you inside the answer.
AI search answers the question right on the page by pulling a few lines from the handful of sites it trusts most. Your buyer reads it and moves on, so a site can rank right below and still never be seen.
who should I hire to fix my site's search visibility?
A few firms handle this well. But here is what matters for your business: being named by ChatGPT is not the same as being linked. It names companies it remembers, and only the ones it links to actually send you a customer.
Sources
There is a second trap most businesses miss. These tools name companies far more often than they link to them, and a name your buyer cannot click sends you no one. Getting linked, not just mentioned, is what turns AI search into actual customers.
Most audits tell you where you rank. We check whether AI can find you and put you in the answer, because that is where your buyers now decide. It is the first thing we look at.
Method
Seven checks, each tied to evidence rather than opinion.
We run the same diagnostic every time, and every check exists because research supports it, including the one that told us to stop selling something.
Can AI answer a buyer using your pages?
Whether your pages answer the questions buyers actually type, in a form these tools can lift a clean answer from. If they can't, the engine answers from someone else's site.
Can search engines even reach your site?
Whether a rebuild, a platform change, or moved pages have quietly cut the engines off from your content. This is the expensive, invisible one: you keep paying while nothing new gets seen.
Do engines name you, or actually link to you?
Getting named is not the same as getting a link back. Engines name brands about three times more often than they link them, so we count the two separately. Only one sends you visitors.
When your category comes up, who gets named?
When an engine answers a buying question in your category, we track who it names, how often, and how often that name is not yours.
How fast do your pages load for real visitors?
How fast your pages actually load on a real phone, measured from real visits where we can rather than a lab score. Slow pages lose buyers before they read a word.
Can an engine pull a clean answer off your page?
Whether each answer sits right under the question it belongs to. When it does, an engine can lift it and credit you. When it's buried in the page, it gets skipped.
Is your schema worth paying for? Usually not.
Schema is the behind-the-scenes tagging some agencies upsell. We check it, then deliberately down-weight it. It's basic hygiene, not a way to earn AI citations.
Check 07 is the one that costs us a line to sell. Adding schema markup does not reliably earn you AI citations. Ahrefs tested it across 1.4 million prompts and found no relationship. We treat schema as hygiene, and we would rather be the studio that tells you that than the one that bills you for it.
Two rules we never break
We measure over multiple runs, never once
The sources AI engines cite churn 58–66% day to day. A single-shot measurement is noise dressed up as a number, so we run each prompt repeatedly across engines and report the average.
We only report what an engine actually returned
Our tooling refuses to write an AI-visibility claim unless a real engine measured it. If we couldn't measure it, the report says nothing about it rather than estimating.
About Strata
Founder-led, and accountable by name.
Strata is a web and search studio led by Dean Enriquez, a full-stack developer who builds and ships production systems end to end. We build online stores, inventory systems, and web apps, and we point all of it at one question: whether search engines and AI tools can find, read, and cite your site.
The two cases on this page are ours, start to finish. Hire Strata and you work with the studio that ran them, not a salesperson who hands you off.
That specialization sits on a real builder's background. Some of the work behind it:
- 14 branches · 2,000+ SKUs
- A live retail inventory system (KLGO), built solo and AI-amplified on production data, with row-level security and audit logging in the database itself.
- Enterprise audit systems
- Architected audit-control systems as a Site Reliability Engineer intern at Procter & Gamble: approval gating and a permanent trail over overrides that had gone undocumented.
- HL7 FHIR R4
- Senior engineer on healthcare documentation software (DiagnoAssist): structured SOAP notes and ICD-10 coding, built to the clinical data standard.
- 95%+ test coverage
- Client-hierarchy APIs and a data pipeline at ING Hubs, backed end to end by automated tests.
- Traced a drop of about 87% in how many people saw the client in Google back to a platform change, after it had quietly done its damage for months while the client kept paying for SEO and no one had checked.
- Built an interior-finishing site from nothing: research into what buyers actually search for decided which pages to build, and today about a third of all leads from the site arrive through those exact question pages.
What you get
You get the check before you get a bill.
Most SEO gets added on top of a site nobody checked first. A year of articles and backlinks cannot fix a site Google cannot reach. We have watched that happen: a search collapse that ran for months underneath work the client was still paying for, because nobody ran a diagnostic. So we check first, and we show you the check for free.
- Seven checks, each run more than once. What Google and ChatGPT pull from changes day to day, so one snapshot proves nothing.
- You get back the single worst thing we find, written in plain English.
- One clear problem, not a 40-page audit nobody reads.
- Yours to keep whether or not we ever speak again.
Then, only if the check finds something worth fixing
02The pilot
- Cost
- Paid
- Turnaround
- 2 weeks
- Five pages, chosen by what your buyers actually search for.
- Written so a person can read them and so Google and ChatGPT can find them. Both, not one at the cost of the other.
- Small on purpose. You see how we work before committing to anything bigger.
From the blog
We check the claims before we make them
Short notes on search and AI-search visibility, each one checked against the engines’ own documentation and peer-reviewed research rather than other agencies’ blog posts. Read them before you pay anyone to do this work, including us.
AEO
Answer engine optimization (AEO): what actually works, and what nobody has proven yet
AEO is mostly ordinary SEO with the answer made easy to lift. Here is the short list the evidence supports, the parts still unproven, and what we saw on a client’s own pages.
8 min read
Read the guideAI search
Do you actually need to do anything about AI search?
Less than you have been told, and something different from what you have been sold. Here is what the evidence supports, what it does not, and who says so.
7 min read
Read the guide
Questions
The things people actually ask.
Why not just keep running Google Ads?
Ads work, but you rent them. The day you stop paying, the leads stop, and the price climbs every year as more competitors bid on the same keywords. A page you build keeps earning after the spend is gone, and it is the only thing an AI engine can actually cite you from. We are not anti-ads. We think the strongest position is to own your search presence so you are not renting all of your visibility.
What if I don't know anything about SEO?
That is the normal case, and it isn't a problem. The site check comes back in plain English with one specific finding about your site, not a report full of jargon you'd have to learn to read. You don't need to understand search to understand "engines can't retrieve your product pages."
How is this different from the audits everyone offers?
Most audits tell you where you rank. Ours also tells you whether AI engines can retrieve and cite you at all, which is a separate question and increasingly the one that decides whether buyers find you. We also measure across multiple runs, because the sources these engines cite change 58 to 66 percent day to day.
Will you promise my traffic will go up?
No. We sell a diagnostic, not an outcome, and anyone promising you a percentage before they've looked at your site is guessing. If we take on the fixes afterwards we'll tell you what we expect and why, and we'll tell you when a result isn't attributable to us, as we've done on this page.
How much does this cost?
The site check is free, and there is nothing to buy after it. For paid work we quote after the check rather than before, because the honest number depends on what we find and how much of your site it touches. We would rather give you a real figure once we understand the scope than publish a range that turns out to be wrong for your situation. If the number doesn't work for you, the findings are still yours.
Do I have to buy anything after the free site check?
No. The site check is yours whether or not we ever speak again. It exists because a specific finding about your own site explains what we do far better than any amount of copy on a landing page.
What do you need from me to start?
Your domain. That is enough for the site check. For the full diagnostic, read-only access to Search Console makes the analysis considerably sharper: the collapse on this page was only visible through a daily API backfill.
Your free site check
Send us your site. We'll send back one specific problem.
No call required, and nothing to buy. Tell us your domain and we'll run it through the diagnostic and reply with the single worst thing we find, yours to keep whether or not we ever speak.
What happens next
- We run your site through the same seven checks on this page.
- You get the single worst thing we find, in plain English, within 2 business days.
- Nothing else happens unless you ask. No call, no follow-up sequence.
Or reach us directly
dean@stratasolutions.tech