01SEO
SEO agency work: the channel everyone is writing off is still the gateway
SEO from $900 a monthTechnical health, content that covers a query family, and authority earned rather than bought.
Searlixa runs SEO as the base layer under everything else. It earns demand in its own right, and it remains the single strongest predictor of whether a brand gets cited inside AI answers.
Quick answer
SEO is the base layer under everything else. It earns demand in its own right, and it remains the single strongest predictor of whether a brand gets cited inside AI answers.
Search demand for the term fell roughly 30% year on year to May 2026. The performance data points the other way: traditional top-three pages appeared in AI citations 98.9% of the time.
Key takeaways
- Publishing stopped working as a strategy. Ahrefs found 1.74% of new pages reach the top ten within twelve months, down from 5.7% in 2017.
- Consolidation is usually the first move. Most sites have three or four pages competing for one intent.
- Build around query families, not keywords. 43.3% AI top-ten rate for pages serving eight or more queries against 15.5% for one.
- No exact-match anchor quotas. Link count showed almost no independent effect on position.
- Schema is description, not a lever. Mark up what is visibly true, validate it, move on.
- Abandoning SEO to chase an acronym is how companies lose both channels at once.
Definition
SEO is the practice of earning visibility in search results by making a site retrievable, understandable and worth surfacing. Google's own 2026 guidance states that optimising for its generative AI features is optimising for search, which makes SEO the foundation of AI visibility rather than a competing discipline.
Why we lead with the evidence
Search demand for the term "SEO" fell roughly 30% year on year to May 2026, the first sustained decline in four years. It is fair to read that as a category losing confidence.
The performance data points the other way.
| Traditional position | Appeared in AI citations | Read |
|---|---|---|
| Top three | 98.9% | Ranking is close to an automatic pass into the citation pool |
| Top ten | 90% | Page one still carries most of the benefit |
| Outside top ten | 49.3% | Citation without ranking is possible, just less likely |
| AI citations not in traditional top ten | 55.2% | Which is why ranking alone is no longer a strategy |
Ranking is no longer sufficient. But abandoning it to chase a newer acronym is how companies lose both channels at once.
Verified Published third-party research. Sourcing and limits: our measurement standard.
What we do differently
Depth before volume
Ahrefs tracked one million newly published pages for twelve months: 1.74% reached Google's top ten, down from 5.7% in 2017. Publishing is close to a losing strategy on its own. We deepen what exists before adding anything new.
Query families, not keywords
Pages serving eight or more related queries reached the AI top ten 43.3% of the time, against 15.5% for single-query pages. We build pages around a family of related intents, which is also why we resist one-page-per-keyword architectures.
Consolidation as a first move
Most sites we look at have three or four pages competing for the same intent. Merging them usually produces more movement than anything we could publish. It is unglamorous and it works.
Answer-first structure
Pages that introduce their topic within the first 100 words were cited at 22.1% against 8.7% otherwise. This helps readers and happens to be the strongest structural signal measured.
Specificity over authority language
Named entities, dated figures, stated sources. The most factually specific pages outperformed the vaguest consistently. Confident but unsourced prose does nothing.
What we will not do
- Page-count programmes. A 200-page content calendar on a domain with no authority is a plan to publish 196 pages that never rank.
- Exact-match anchor quotas. Internal linking should express real relationships. Median internal link count on AI-cited pages was 12, and link count showed almost no independent effect on position.
- Schema as a ranking lever. Mark up what is visibly true, validate it, move on.
- Reporting on rankings alone. Position without traffic, and traffic without pipeline, are both easy to make look good.
Where SEO sits in the wider programme
Technical work removes the blockers first. AI Search adds the measurement layer that SEO reporting cannot give you. Entity work handles how machines resolve who you are. Most clients need two of the four, not all of them, and the baseline establishes which.
If traffic has already fallen, diagnose the cause before commissioning anythingdisplacement and ranking loss look identical in analytics and need opposite responses.
02Common questions
What buyers ask about SEO now
Is SEO still worth investing in?
Yes, and the evidence is stronger than the sentiment. Traditional top-three pages appeared in AI citations 98.9% of the time in 2026 research. Ranking is no longer sufficient, but it remains the single strongest gateway into AI answers.
Should we publish more content?
Usually not. Ahrefs tracked one million new pages and found 1.74% reached the top ten within twelve months, down from 5.7% in 2017. Deepening what you have beats publishing, and consolidating competing pages often beats both.
How many internal links should a page have?
There is no quota worth chasing. Median on AI-cited pages was twelve, and link count showed almost no independent effect on position. Link where the relationship is real and vary the anchor text naturally.
Does schema markup improve rankings?
It clarifies meaning; it is not a growth lever. No schema type showed a consistent independent citation advantage in 2026 research, and Google states no AI-specific schema is required. Implement it correctly, then spend the effort elsewhere.
How long does SEO take on a new domain?
Three to six months of suppressed results, six to twelve for meaningful movement, and twelve to eighteen in a contested B2B category. Anyone promising faster on a new domain is describing something we have not seen.
What is the first thing you would change?
Usually consolidation. Most sites we look at have three or four pages competing for one intent. Merging them tends to produce more movement than anything new we could write, and it costs less.
Sources
Every figure on this page comes from one of the following. Where a claim is ours rather than a source’s, it carries an evidence label instead.
- Rankability — State of AI Search, 1,645 AI citation observations across 31 topics, 2026. Source for the 24.1% cross-platform overlap, the 73.5% ChatGPT exclusive citation rate, the 22.1% vs 8.7% first-100-words finding and the 43.3% vs 15.5% query-breadth finding. Independent study
- Ahrefs — new-page study, one million URLs first crawled September 2023, tracked twelve months. Source for the 1.74% top-ten figure, down from 5.7% in 2017. Independent study
- Google Search Central — Optimizing your website for generative AI features (published 15 May 2026, updated 10 July 2026). Source for the llms.txt, chunking and AI-schema positions, and for the statement that generative features run on core ranking systems. Primary
- Searlixa sampling across client engagements. Any figure drawn from this carries an Observed label with its sample size and date. Our own
Ask an assistant
Hand this page to an assistant and ask it to summarise or challenge the argument. If it gets something wrong about us, that is itself a useful finding.
→What you are buying
SEO services: what is included
The list below is what an SEO engagement produces in a month. Not a strategy document — work that lands on the site.
- Technical audit: crawl, render, index and Core Web Vitals, with a prioritised fix list
- On-page work across your priority pages, written not templated
- Cannibalisation check and consolidation plan where pages compete
- Content built around a query family rather than a keyword
- Earned placements, pitched to publications that already cover your category
- Monthly report with sample sizes and evidence labels on every figure
Who this is for
Businesses that already rank for something and cannot work out why it stopped growing, or that have never had the technical layer looked at properly.
Who it is not for
Anyone wanting a guaranteed position by a fixed date. Nobody controls that, and an agency that says otherwise is selling you the part they cannot deliver.
From $900 a month. That covers one market and one query family. Two markets and a full on-site programme sit at the tier above. SEO and AI visibility pricing is published in full.
We start with the audit because the technical findings are usually cheaper to fix than anything else on this page, and they block everything else until they are. The $99 SEO and AI visibility audit comes back in three working days, and the fee comes off your first invoice if you continue.