How we built AI search visibility for a Croydon wellness brand

Client

Wellness brand, Croydon

Industry

Wellness

Campaign

SEO, AEO, GEO, content strategy, local search and digital authority

Period

12 months

• +184%Organic impressions
• +127%Non-branded organic clicks
• 4.2×AI-search visibility
• 31%Tracked AI prompts featuring the brand
• +96%Branded search demand
• +78%Qualified enquiries

The challenge

The client was an established wellness business serving customers across Croydon and the surrounding area. It had the services, the local presence and the expertise to compete.

What it did not yet have was the digital authority to consistently appear early enough in the customer journey. The website was capable of capturing existing demand, particularly when someone already knew the service they were looking for.

But prospective customers don’t always begin with a service. They begin with a question.

• What treatment is right for me?
• What should I expect from my first appointment?
• How often should I have this treatment?
• What’s the difference between these two wellness services?
• Is this treatment suitable for beginners?
• Where can I find this service in Croydon?
• Which provider should I choose?

Those questions represent a much larger opportunity. The customer hasn’t necessarily decided on a provider yet. They are researching, comparing, validating and building confidence.

At the same time, the way people consume search results was changing. Google’s AI-powered search experiences increasingly combine information from multiple sources and link to supporting pages, and Google’s guidance confirms that established SEO principles continue to underpin visibility in AI Overviews and AI Mode.

That meant the client needed more than a collection of optimised service pages. It needed a stronger information footprint around the brand.

The objective

Our objective was not simply to generate more traffic. It was to make the client increasingly visible across the questions that matter to its customers. We focused on five outcomes:

1. Increase organic search visibility. Expand the number of relevant searches for which the client could be discovered.
2. Strengthen local visibility. Build stronger relevance around Croydon and the surrounding service area.
3. Build topical authority. Create a useful and connected body of information around the client’s areas of expertise.
4. Build visibility beyond the website. Create relevant external presence through communities, publishing platforms and third-party references.
5. Increase AI-search visibility. Measure whether the client and its content were appearing within AI-generated answers for relevant questions.

The broader aim was simple: be discoverable before the customer has decided who to contact.

The strategy

The traditional search model looks like this:

Keyword → Page → Ranking → Click → Enquiry

Our approach expanded the journey:

Question → Research → Expert answer → Distribution → Discovery → Search and AI visibility → Consideration → Enquiry

The website remained the centre of the strategy, but it was no longer the only place where the brand’s expertise appeared. We built a wider ecosystem across the website, Google Search, Reddit, Medium, Substack, LinkedIn, relevant third-party sources and AI-search experiences.

The website became the authoritative home for information. Reddit became a place to understand and answer real questions. Medium provided room for deeper analysis. Substack created an ongoing editorial presence. External publishing created additional points of reference. Search and AI monitoring let us measure whether that wider ecosystem was contributing to visibility.

1. We started with real customer questions

The content strategy didn’t begin with a list of keywords. It began with questions. We combined conventional search research with the language customers were actually using, analysing:

• Google Search Console
• search suggestions and People Also Ask
• Reddit conversations and online communities
• customer enquiries and website behaviour
• competitor content
• AI-search results and emerging search terminology

This gave us a question library organised around intent.

It changed the content process completely. Instead of asking “What article should we publish this week?”, we asked “Which customer question have we not answered properly yet?”

2. We built an answer library

Once the question set was established, we created a structured answer library around the highest-value subjects. The purpose wasn’t to publish as much as possible. It was to make the client’s website genuinely useful. A priority topic would typically include:

• A core resource: a comprehensive answer hosted on the client’s website.
• Supporting content: more specific questions connected to the main subject.
• FAQs: short, direct answers to common follow-up questions.
• Internal links: connections between related topics, services and supporting information.
• Conversion paths: a natural route from education to relevant services and enquiries.

Instead of a service page that simply explained what the client offered, we built an information journey.

The customer could therefore discover the brand while still researching, rather than only after deciding what they wanted.

3. We used Reddit as a source of questions and a place to contribute

Reddit played a particularly important role in understanding how customers actually discuss wellness. People don’t communicate like keyword databases. They ask questions in their own language, describe situations, explain what they are worried about and ask others what worked for them.

We monitored relevant conversations to identify recurring themes around treatments, first appointments, customer expectations, comparisons, common concerns, practical questions and local recommendations.

The strategy was deliberately different from conventional link building. We answered first. We promoted second. A contribution needed to be useful even if the reader never visited the client’s website. Where a website resource added genuine context, we could reference it. Where it didn’t, we didn’t force a link into the conversation. The result was a more authentic presence around the questions customers were already asking.

4. We developed deeper authority through Medium

Reddit gave us participation. Medium gave us depth. We used it for longer-form educational and analytical content that needed more explanation than a standard social post could provide: customer education, treatment questions, common misconceptions, decision-making, wellness trends, practical guidance and deeper analysis.

The intention was not to duplicate the client’s website. It was to create another environment in which the brand’s expertise could be demonstrated.

A service page says “we provide this service”. A strong educational article says “we understand the subject behind this service”.

5. We created an ongoing voice through Substack

Substack introduced continuity. Some topics are better served by a single definitive guide. Others benefit from repeated discussion as the market, questions and customer expectations change. The publishing programme extended into wellness education, customer questions, industry developments, practical guidance, emerging topics, observations from the business and deeper editorial commentary.

Instead of one useful article about a subject, the brand could gradually build a history of discussing it.

6. We expanded the brand’s external footprint

The strategy continued beyond Reddit, Medium and Substack. Relevant insights were adapted for LinkedIn, industry publications, local references, third-party websites and professional profiles.

The principle stayed consistent: every external appearance should strengthen the relationship between the brand and the subjects it genuinely understands. We weren’t trying to manufacture hundreds of generic mentions. We were building a smaller number of relevant signals in the places that mattered.

7. We made local relevance part of the authority strategy

For a Croydon wellness business, local SEO could not be an afterthought. The client wasn’t trying to become the most visible wellness brand on the internet. It needed to become more visible to the people it could actually serve. That meant connecting the service, the customer need and the location.

We strengthened local relevance through Croydon-focused searches, surrounding-area demand, service-area content, consistent business information, locally relevant references, location-specific customer questions and conversion journeys designed around local intent. Rather than repeating the word “Croydon” throughout the website, we built content around the actual ways people in the area research and choose a wellness service.

8. We strengthened the client’s digital entity

A brand’s presence isn’t confined to one website. Information about the business appears across search results, social profiles, communities, publications and other websites. We reviewed and aligned company information, service descriptions, location information, author profiles, team expertise, social profiles, external profiles, publication accounts, case studies and third-party references.

The objective was consistency. A customer encountering the business through Google should be able to connect what they see with the same organisation they meet on Reddit, Medium, LinkedIn or another external source.

9. We built content around evidence

The web already contains enormous amounts of generic wellness content, and rewriting what everyone else has published does little to distinguish a brand. We looked for opportunities to include first-hand observations, customer questions, practical experience, anonymised examples, original analysis, comparisons, supporting evidence and clear authorship.

This aligned with Google’s people-first content guidance, which encourages original information, substantial analysis and first-hand expertise rather than content created primarily to manipulate rankings. The question became “What can this business contribute that is genuinely useful?”, not “How many words can we publish?”

10. We strengthened the technical foundation

AI search didn’t replace SEO. It made a strong SEO foundation even more important. We worked across crawlability, indexability, internal linking, page structure, headings, metadata, useful textual content, structured information, author details, mobile experience, local relevance and conversion journeys.

Google’s current AI-search guidance states that there are no separate technical requirements just for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Existing Search fundamentals remain relevant. There was no shortcut: the site had to be useful to people, accessible to search engines and structured clearly enough for its information to be understood.

11. We made AI visibility measurable

One of the problems with AI-search marketing is that it can quickly become vague. “Visibility in ChatGPT” isn’t a meaningful metric without context. We created a structured prompt set of 200 commercially and informationally relevant queries covering local wellness searches, treatment questions, comparison queries, customer education, service-related questions, Croydon-specific searches and commercial intent.

The same prompt set was monitored throughout the campaign. For each query we recorded whether the client was absent, mentioned, referenced or cited, which source and page appeared, whether the source was owned or external, and whether competitors were present.

This gave us a repeatable AI-search measurement framework instead of isolated screenshots. Google now also provides a Generative AI performance report in Search Console to help site owners understand how their content is discovered through its generative AI features.

The results

Over the 12-month campaign, the client recorded measurable growth across search visibility, brand demand, AI visibility and qualified enquiries.

Organic search

+184% organic impressions, from 21,400 to 60,700. That was a substantial expansion in the number of times the client was eligible to be discovered through organic search.

+127% non-branded organic clicks, from 3,850 to 8,745. This mattered because the growth did not simply come from people already searching for the brand. More people were discovering the business through the subjects and services it was targeting.

AI-search visibility

4.2× AI-search visibility, from 7.4% to 31.0%. The prompt set stayed consistent so the change represented an expansion in visibility rather than simply adding more queries.

5 → 62 prompts returned an owned source. Client-owned content appeared as a source for 62 monitored prompts, compared with five at the start. That is a 12.4× increase.

By Month 12 the client appeared in 31% of the 200 monitored prompts, across local, informational, comparison and commercial questions.

Brand demand

+96% branded search impressions, from 1,040 to 2,040. As visibility expanded beyond direct service searches, more people began searching for the business itself. That created a measurable bridge between discovery and brand consideration.

Commercial impact

+78% qualified enquiries, from an average of 46 a month to 82. The purpose of the visibility programme was never to maximise impressions for their own sake. It was to create more opportunities for the right customers to discover the business and take action.

External authority

18 → 143 tracked mentions and substantive community contributions across the campaign period. This covered activity and references across the wider digital ecosystem rather than only the client’s own website, and gave the brand a much broader authority footprint.

Twelve months of growth

The important point is that the growth did not depend on one individual article. It came from the accumulation of useful information and authority across the wider ecosystem.

The authority flywheel

The strategy works as a continuous cycle. The stronger the information ecosystem became, the more entry points there were for the brand to be discovered.

Before and after

The client was no longer relying solely on customers who already knew exactly what they wanted. It could enter the consideration journey earlier.

What made the strategy work

• We started with questions. The most valuable opportunities weren’t always obvious from keyword volumes. They came from the problems customers were actually trying to solve.
• We built answers instead of filling a content calendar. Every major piece of content had a job: answer something, be useful and fit the wider information architecture.
• We treated Reddit as a community, not an SEO shortcut. The objective was contribution, not turning every discussion into an advertisement.
• We gave expertise different formats. The same insight could become a website resource, a Reddit contribution, a Medium article, a Substack edition, a LinkedIn post or third-party commentary. The idea stayed consistent while the format changed with the audience.
• We measured visibility as a system. Rankings were only one part of the picture. We tracked organic visibility, AI visibility, brand demand, external authority, engagement and qualified enquiries.

Key lessons

• Authority isn’t created on one domain. The website is essential, but expertise becomes more recognisable when relevant information exists across a wider network of credible sources and conversations.
• AI visibility starts with useful information. There is no magic “AI SEO” switch. The strongest foundation is still content that can be discovered, understood and trusted.
• Real questions create better strategies. A question reveals intent, intent reveals the customer’s stage, and that determines what information they need and where they will look for it.
• Distribution matters as much as production. The answer needs to exist where the customer is looking.
• Local relevance still matters. For a Croydon business the goal wasn’t to be visible everywhere. It was to be visible where it could actually create customers.

The bigger picture

Search is becoming increasingly conversational. Customers ask longer questions, look for explanations, compare information, read communities, check recommendations and use AI-assisted search to explore unfamiliar subjects, moving between several sources before they decide.

For brands, that changes the question. It is no longer enough to ask “How do we rank this page?” The broader question is: how do we become one of the sources a customer encounters when researching the problem we solve?

That takes technical SEO, useful content, expertise, community participation, external publishing, local relevance, original insight and continuous measurement working together as a digital authority ecosystem.

The result

Over twelve months, the Croydon wellness brand moved from a predominantly service-led search presence to a broader information-led one. Organic impressions rose from 21,400 to 60,700, non-branded organic clicks from 3,850 to 8,745, AI-search visibility from 7.4% to 31.0% across a 200-query monitoring set, owned-source prompts from 5 to 62, branded impressions from 1,040 to 2,040, qualified enquiries from 46 to 82 a month and tracked external authority from 18 to 143 mentions and contributions.

But the most important change was the way customers could discover the business. The brand no longer had to wait for someone to search for its service. It could be encountered while customers were asking questions, researching options, comparing approaches, looking for local providers and using AI-assisted search to decide what to do next.

Search visibility creates discovery. Useful information creates authority. Distribution creates presence. Consistency creates recognition.

Photos from Unsplash.

Be found before the customer knows your name. We build SEO, AEO, GEO, content and digital growth strategies that help businesses become more visible wherever their customers are asking questions.