Search Presence & SEO

SEO helps your pages get discovered and ranked. Search presence includes the other places customers discover and evaluate your business.

Think of someone who needs a service. They search on Google, look at the reviews on a map, watch a short video of the work, read what another website says about you, and perhaps see an answer written by AI at the top of the results. Each of those is a place where they can find you, and a place where they decide whether to trust you.

It helps to keep four things apart:

• Website discovery and ranking. Whether search engines can find, read and show your pages. This is what SEO (search engine optimisation) works on.
• Reputation evidence. What customers and other websites say about you: reviews, mentions, case studies, links.
• Discovery across platforms. The places beyond your own website where people come across you: maps, video, social media, directories and AI answers.
• Business results. Enquiries, bookings and sales. Visibility is worth something when it leads here.

None of this makes SEO obsolete. Your website is a source many of these places read from, and the one place where you decide what is said. Search presence adds the rest of the picture to it.

A simple way to organise the work is four pillars. They are a teaching framework, not four official categories of Google’s ranking systems.

Website health

Can search engines find, read and understand the site? Search engines discover pages by following links (crawling), then store the pages they can use so that they can appear in results (indexing). Google’s own minimum is short: the page must not be blocked, must work, and must have content that can be indexed, and even then indexing is not guaranteed (Google Search Central). Beyond that minimum, a page should work on a phone, load without long waits, carry a title that says what it is about, and be linked from the other pages it belongs with.

Example: a clinic’s booking page still carries a setting from its development, telling search engines not to index it. People who already have the address can book; nobody searching ever finds the page.

Useful content

Do the pages answer real customer questions? Google says its ranking systems are designed to prioritise helpful, reliable information created to benefit people, and it looks for content that shows experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, of which trust matters most (Google Search Central). In practice that means clear details about each service or product, examples from your own work, and facts that are still true.

Example: a cleaning company explains what a deep clean includes, how long it takes for a two-bedroom flat and what the customer needs to prepare. It answers the questions customers were going to ask anyway.

Trust and reputation

Is there credible evidence about the business? Links from relevant websites, genuine reviews, case studies and independent coverage are all evidence that someone other than the business itself stands behind it.

Example: a builder shows photographs of finished projects, has reviews from customers who can be contacted, and is listed by a trade association. A stranger has several reasons to believe what the website says.

Digital visibility

Can people find the business beyond its own site? Local listings, useful video and social content, relevant third-party websites and AI answers all reach people who would never have typed your web address.

Example: a furniture maker posts a short video of a joint being cut. It is shared in a woodworking forum, and people who were not looking for a furniture maker find one.

An attractive website covers part of the first two pillars. On its own it cannot provide the evidence in the third or the presence in the fourth: those come from customers, from other websites and from the platforms people already use.

One customer, one need, and several places to look. Choose a path to see what the customer finds there, and one thing you can do about it.

Google’s organic results, Google Maps and the wider web, AI answers included, do not work the same way. The table compares what is known about each and labels how strong the evidence is. It is not a complete list of ranking factors, and AI platforms each work in their own way: they share a column here only so they can be compared with search.

Google Maps in plain words

Google says local results are mainly based on three things: relevance, how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for; distance, how far the business is from the person searching; and prominence, which Google also calls popularity: how well known the business is, including how many websites link to it and how many reviews it has. More reviews and positive ratings can help a business’s local ranking, and there is no way to request or pay for a better one (Google Business Profile Help).

A Business Profile is only for a business that makes in-person contact with customers during its stated hours, at a place they can visit or by travelling to them. Online-only businesses are not eligible (Google Business Profile Help), and a rented mailing address the business does not work from is not an eligible location (Google Business Profile Help). Deciding that your business does not qualify is a correct outcome, not a failure.

Page experience

A site that is easy to use and quick to load is worth having for the people who use it, and Google says its core ranking systems look to reward content that provides a good page experience. Good scores do not guarantee a top position: Google says it always seeks to show the most relevant content, even when the page experience is poorer, and that chasing a perfect score only for SEO may not be the best use of your time (Google Search Central).

In May 2025 Ahrefs, a company that makes SEO software, published a study of which measures of a brand go together with how often Google’s AI Overviews mention it. AI Overviews are the summaries written by AI that appear in some Google results.

Branded link text, which Ahrefs calls branded anchors, means a link whose clickable words contain the brand’s name. Branded searches here means how often people search for the brand’s name each month.

Brands that are already well known tend to score well on several of these measures at once, so the measures can rise together, and a study of this kind cannot separate what each one does.

Backlinks remain part of Google’s organic ranking systems: Google describes PageRank, one of its systems for understanding how pages link to each other, as part of its core ranking systems (Google Search Central). Their lower figure here comes from a study of AI Overviews, and does not show that they are unimportant.

What it suggests for a business is modest: being talked about by name across the web goes together with being mentioned in AI Overviews. There is no special setting to switch on. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that the usual SEO fundamentals still apply (Google Search Central).

TULUS describes a customer’s way to a business in four steps. They describe the customer’s journey, not a ranking formula that Google publishes.

• Found: can customers discover you?
• Understood: is the offer clear?
• Trusted: is there credible evidence?
• Chosen: is the next step easy?

Two fictional agencies, as a teaching example. Agency A has a fast, attractive website with descriptive page titles, and little evidence anywhere else. Agency B has the same, and also publishes real case studies and helpful explanations, has reviews from customers who can be named, links from relevant websites, and a few useful videos.

Agency B gives people more ways to discover it and more reasons to choose it. That does not guarantee it outranks Agency A for every search: a search for something only Agency A offers, or near where only Agency A works, can still go to Agency A.

How TULUS works on each of the four is described on the page about Search Presence Engineering.

Visibility is a means. These are the questions worth asking, and what to measure for each:

Non-branded clicks are visits from searches that do not include your business name: often people who did not know you before.

Track the same useful searches and the same locations over time, so that one month can be compared with the next. A single keyword’s position is not the measure of success: it changes with place, device and day, and a business is found through many searches, most of them small.

AI answers vary from one try to the next. If you sample them, write down the question you asked, the platform, the date and the sources the answer cited.

Some of it is now reported for you. Google Search Console has a Generative AI performance report that shows how often links to your site were shown in AI Overviews and AI Mode; the same data is also part of the web search totals in its Performance report (Search Console Help). Bing Webmaster Tools has a report, AI Performance, introduced as a public preview in February 2026, of how often a site is cited in Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries (Bing Webmaster Blog).