What was broken
The client is a professional coaching practice in Portugal. We are keeping the brand anonymous at their request, and every claim here is one we would repeat with them in the room.
When they came to us, they had already done the thing conventional wisdom says to do: hired a proper agency and paid proper agency money for a website. The site was genuinely pretty. It was also producing zero leads. Not few. Zero. Every client the practice had came from referrals and word of mouth; the expensive site was a business card nobody read.
The audit took an afternoon and the diagnosis was the same one we write about in our pillar piece on AI invisibility. The site was five pages of brand language: “transformative journeys,” “unlock your potential.” No page answered a question a prospective client actually asks. No pricing signals. No structured data at all. No dates on anything. Beautiful, and unreadable to machines.
Meanwhile the buyers had moved. People choosing a coach ask assistants things like whether coaching is worth it, what it costs, how to pick someone credible, who works with people in their situation. We ran those questions through ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. The practice appeared in none of the answers. The engines had literally nothing about them to work with.
What we changed
We did not redesign the brand. We rebuilt the site’s information architecture around a simple rule: every important page must be the best available answer to one real question a buyer asks. Four changes carried the result.
1. Answerable landing pages instead of brand pages
We mapped the questions people in the practice’s market actually ask before hiring a coach and built a landing page for each: question as the title, direct answer in the first paragraph, honest detail below, including the questions competitors avoid, like cost and what coaching cannot do. The vague brand copy moved aside; the answers moved in.
2. Structured data on every page that matters
Organization and Service schema describing what the practice is and offers, FAQPage markup on every landing page, all in validated JSON-LD. The site went from a wall of divs to something a retrieval crawler can parse in one pass.
3. Dated, methodical content on a schedule
Engines favor sources that look alive and specific: visible dates, regular publishing, concrete detail over adjectives. We set up a steady cadence of dated articles answering the longer-tail questions, in the practice’s own voice, and kept it running rather than launching once and going quiet.
4. Nothing hidden from machines
Every word server-rendered, no content locked behind click-to-expand JavaScript, clean headings, fast pages. LLMs do not run your scripts; what they cannot read does not exist. The rule was boring and absolute.
What happened
The visibility side we can verify ourselves, because we measure it the same way we measure our own market: run the buyer questions through the engines, log the names that come back. Today, the practice tops the AI recommendations for many coaching-related questions in its market. Ask the assistants the questions their buyers ask, and this practice is the name that keeps coming back, on questions where a year ago it appeared in nothing.
The business side belongs to the client, so we state it the way they state it: since the rebuild, their client base has grown roughly 10x. That is their reported number, not a screenshot from their analytics, and we are not going to dress it up with charts we did not produce. From zero leads to a practice that grew by an order of magnitude, with the website as the thing that changed.
What we like most about this result is how unmagical it is. No tricks, no loopholes, nothing that gets burned by the next model update. The site earned its position by being the most readable, most direct, most honestly informative source in its niche, which is exactly what the engines are trying to find. The same playbook transfers: we have written up how it applies to local businesses and B2B SaaS.
Want this for your business?
Two ways we do this for clients. AI-ready landing pages: we build the answerable, structured, machine-readable pages described above for your market, as part of our development services. And the AI Visibility Report ($1,990): before building anything, we run 40-50 of your buyers’ questions across ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity and hand you your current share of voice, the sources the engines cite in your market, and a prioritized plan. Ongoing tracking is $490/month.
Start with the audit →