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AI Search Authority · For Service Businesses

Be the business AI recommends.

Right now, someone nearby is asking AI for the best business like yours. It names one. If it isn't you, you weren't beaten by a better business. You were beaten by a better-trusted one. Attrio makes you the name AI trusts, so customers find you first.

Running paid ads? Building this authority makes them cost 61% less, because the search engines reward the businesses they already trust.

AEO Get named in AI answers GEO Be the AI's pick Entity Become a name AI knows Schema Speak the AI's language
Attrio Authority Terminal™
Organic + AI · Across the book
New customers won
0+
▲ 28% vs. prior quarter
Of AI answers name our clients
0%
ChatGPT · Gemini · Google · +5 more
AI citations earned
0
▲ 34% vs. prior 90 days
Avg. authority index
0/100
avg. 31 when clients start
Top movers across the bookLast 90 days
IndustryAI answer shareCustomers won
Med Spa & Aesthetics88%742
Home Services81%596
Dental & Ortho79%508
Legal74%417
Roofing & Exteriors71%361
Auto & Collision63%302
Wealth & Advisory58%274
Foundation statusAcross the book
Structured data / schemaDeployed
Google Knowledge GraphVerified
Core Web VitalsAll passing
Cited in AI answers8 engines
Citation velocity+273 / mo
Authority index74 / 100

Built for businesses that measure in won customers

Med SpaHome ServicesDentalLegalWealth AdvisoryAuto
01 · The Thesis

Ads stop when you stop paying.
Authority keeps working.

Every month you pay for ads, you're renting customers. The day you stop, they're gone. Authority works the opposite way: once the AI engines know and trust your business, they keep naming you, and customers keep coming, without paying for each click.

Monthly won customers · 24-month horizon
Rented (paid) Owned (authority)
The budget is running. Paid delivers fast, then plateaus. You rent every customer at full price, every month, forever. Authority starts quietly, then compounds past it.
Pause the ad budget
The simple version

Turn the ads off, and the phone stops ringing that week.

i

Ads have no memory. The instant you stop paying, you disappear. Every customer you won last month was rented, and the rent is due again this month.

ii

Authority keeps paying you back. A page that earns its spot, a business the engines trust, a mention inside an AI answer. These keep bringing customers long after the work is done, for free.

iii

And it makes your ads cheaper too. A business the engines already trust pays less for every ad it runs, because relevance is rewarded. Ads on a weak foundation simply cost more.

The principle

Authority is the only kind of marketing that grows in value.

02 · The Hidden Tax

A weak website makes every ad cost more.

Here's what most owners never realize: two businesses can bid the exact same amount on Google and still pay different prices per click. Google charges the trusted, faster site less, and the weak one more. So a weak website costs you twice: once to fix it, and every day you overpay for ads until you do. Move the slider to see it.

Without the foundation

The Rented Business

No entity authority · thin pages · slow site · no schema
$135blended cost per visit
  • Pays $147 for every single click it gets
  • Just 8% of visits arrive without a charge
  • Leads stop the day the budget stops
vs
On an Attrio foundation

The Owned Business

Recognized entity · deep authority · fast site · full schema
$15blended cost per visit
  • Pays $58 per click. 61% less for better placement
  • 74% of visits arrive at no cost at all
  • Keeps signing clients with the ads switched off
Attrio foundation
Blended cost per visit
$15
Thin foundation · $135Attrio foundation · $15
← drag to set your foundation strength →
Paid cost per click
$58
Visits you don't pay for
74%
Relevance quality
92 / 100

Two effects compound. Relevance drags the price of every paid click down, and authority delivers the majority of your visits without a click charge at all.

03 · The Frontier

People used to Google you.
Now they ask AI.

Your customers stopped scrolling ten blue links. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google's AI, and it hands back one or two names. If yours isn't one of them, you never even got to compete. This is the new front door, and most of your competitors don't know it exists yet.

i
Era I · Directories
The listing
Yellow pages, then service directories. Presence was the whole game. Be listed, be findable. Authority meant a bigger ad in the book.
ii
Era II · Search
The ten blue links
SEO won the decade: keywords, backlinks, rankings. Necessary, mastered by many, and now merely the entry fee. Page one no longer means seen.
iii
Era III · Answer engines
The cited source
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews answer directly, and name a source. Businesses engineered to be that source win the customer before a link is clicked. This is where Attrio builds.
See it live

The same question, with and without an engineered foundation.

AI Answer Engine · preview
Try a question your next client would ask
Cited sources
04 · The Record

Ten businesses that stopped paying for the same customers twice.

Different industries, same story every time. We build the foundation, the AI engines start naming them, and the cost to win a new customer drops through the floor, ads on or off.

10
Businesses rebuilt
$1.7M
Annual ad spend retired
70%
Average AI answer share
14
Days to live attribution
i
Med Spa & Aesthetics · Dallas–Fort Worth

The business that cut spend 78% and grew

$41K $9K
Monthly ad spend, with more won customers
The situation

Six figures a quarter went to “botox near me” clicks. Pause the campaigns for a week and the phones went silent. Nothing the business had built belonged to it.

What Attrio built

Entity verification and disambiguation from three similarly-named clinics, a full treatment-and-service-area content architecture, review-and-result schema across every procedure, and AEO answer blocks for the questions patients actually ask before booking.

+22%
Won customers, next quarter
340
Local queries ranked
68%
AI answer share
ii
HVAC & Home Services · Phoenix

The business the city calls first

0 71%
AI answer share in seven months
The situation

The business was pouring $18,000 a month into paid search while clients asked ChatGPT about their charges at 2 a.m. and got directory listings. The business didn't appear in a single AI answer across its own city.

What Attrio built

Service-level content for every treatment the business offers, structured for extraction. Technician certifications and licensing wired into the knowledge graph so engines could verify who was answering.

63
Organic consultations / mo
7 mo
To first AI citation
#1
Named source, city-wide
iii
Dental & Ortho · Chicago

The bookings that stopped costing $3,400

$3,400 $186
Cost per won booking
The situation

Prospects researched for six weeks before calling, but $26,000 a month bought visibility only at the very last click, the most expensive possible moment.

What Attrio built

A full topical rebuild across implants, orthodontics, cosmetic and general care, with authored provider guidance at every stage of the journey rather than only the bottom of it.

4 of 5
Bookings now organic
−95%
Cost per booking
2 mo
Ad pause, no drop
iv
Immigration Services · Houston

Cited in three languages

11 148
Organic consultations per month
The situation

Vast, constantly-shifting subject matter and a multilingual audience that lived inside AI answers. Its English-only pages were invisible to most of the families it served.

What Attrio built

Multilingual AEO across visa categories, forms and procedures, with structured data mapping every service to eligibility criteria, maintained against policy changes.

+312%
Organic consultations
3
Languages cited in
94%
Topical coverage
v
Wealth Advisory · Naples, FL

The advisor that never bought a click

$0
Lifetime ad spend
The situation

A quiet, trust-driven market where the competition was thin but so was the business's visibility. Referrals were strong; search produced nothing.

What Attrio built

Authoritative guidance content built to compound, provider entity credibility engines could verify, and local plus specialty authority designed to outlast any campaign.

31
New clients / mo
$0
Paid acquisition cost
59%
AI answer share
vi
Cosmetic Dentistry · Atlanta

Outranked, not outspent

5.2×
More won customers than the top bidder
The situation

Two national businesses were outbidding the business on every keyword in the metro. At $31,000 a month, competing on budget was a fight it could not win.

What Attrio built

Rather than bid higher, the business went around the auction, owning the organic and AI layer above the ads, where placement can't be purchased.

5.2×
vs. top paid competitor
#1
Organic, 3 core terms
−61%
Blended cost per customer
vii
Multi-Location Clinic · Denver + 4

Four dark markets, lit

4 of 5
Offices producing organically
The situation

One flagship office thrived on referrals. The other four were invisible despite $22,000 a month in shared spend: no local presence, no consistent identity, no attribution.

What Attrio built

Per-location authority with consistent entity signals across all five offices, roll-up reporting for the partners, and drill-down attribution per market.

+284%
Business-wide organic leads
5
Offices, one identity
14 days
To live attribution
viii
Roofing & Exteriors · Brooklyn

Ads off. Nothing happened.

0%
Lead volume lost during a 90-day pause
The situation

The managing partner didn't believe organic could carry the business. So we tested it: every paid campaign switched off for a full quarter.

What Attrio built

Nine months of foundation work first: entity, schema, topical depth and citation velocity, so the test had something to stand on.

90 days
Ads fully dark
0%
Lead volume lost
+8%
Jobs, vs. prior quarter
ix
Med Spa & Aesthetics · Los Angeles

The answer engine's default source

83%
Share of AI answers in its service line
The situation

Treatment questions are almost entirely research-driven. Prospects ask AI which procedure fits before they ever call, and the engines answer directly, naming one clinic and rarely a second. The business was paying $11,000 a month to intercept those searches with ads.

What Attrio built

Deep coverage of injectables, laser treatments, body contouring and skincare, written as extractable answers with real provider credentials and results engines could verify.

83%
AI answer share
212
Queries cited on
+19
Referring domains / mo
x
Home Remodeling · Tampa

Fourteen days to first light

14
Days from signature to live attribution
The situation

The business had been burned by an agency that took five months to produce a report. It needed proof of momentum before it would commit further.

What Attrio built

White-glove onboarding: technical foundation and attribution live inside two weeks, with the authority build running continuously behind it.

14 days
To live attribution
+41%
Organic, first 90 days
Top 6%
Authority index, yr one
05 · The Platform

Finally see exactly where you're winning.

No confusing charts or numbers that look good but mean nothing. Just the stuff that matters: where AI is naming you, where you're showing up, and what your next customer actually costs. When AI recommends you, that customer costs you nothing. Nobody sends you a bill. With ads, every customer costs the same as the first, forever.

Attrio Authority Terminal
Across the book
Where AI answers name our clients
Google AI Overviews0%
ChatGPT0%
Perplexity0%
Gemini0%
Microsoft Copilot0%
Claude0%
Grok0%
Meta AI0%
Signals · portfolio
Avg. authority index
0/100
up from avg. 31 at start
Cost of the next organic customer
$0
no click charge, no bid war
Of AI answers name a client
0%
▲ 34% vs. prior 90 days
Customers won · 90 days
0+
organic + AI
06 · Under the Hood

The behind-the-scenes work that makes AI trust you.

There's no button for this. Getting named by AI takes real engineering under the hood. The invisible groundwork that convinces an engine your business is the one worth recommending. Here's what we build.

07 · The Compounding Loop

Every month it works, it gets stronger.

This is the part ads can never do: it builds on itself. Each month of work earns more AI mentions, those mentions bring more customers, and more customers make the next month easier and cheaper, including any ads you still run. It compounds, like interest.

1
Audit
Map current authority, gaps, and where the business is invisible to engines.
2
Foundation
Entity, schema, site health and architecture engineered from the backend up.
3
Authority
Topical depth and E-E-A-T built until engines treat the business as a source.
4
Citation
AEO and GEO earn named mentions inside AI answers and overviews.
5
Attribution
Every won customer tied back to the source that produced it.
6
Compound
Insights reinvested. The asset grows; cost per customer keeps falling.
08 · By Service

Built around how your customers actually search.

A med spa gets found on impulse. A wealth advisor gets chosen on trust. We build your authority around exactly how your customers actually search for your work.

Profile 01

Med Spa

The most-bid keywords in any service category. Businesses burn six figures a month renting "med spa near me" clicks that vanish when the budget does.

What Attrio builds
  • Service & location pages that own local intent organically
  • AI-cited answers for "is it worth it" research queries
  • Service-result schema engines read as proof of expertise
Profile 02

Home Services

Urgent 2 a.m. searches. Clients ask the AI first: "why is my AC blowing warm air?" and the business named in the answer gets the call.

What Attrio builds
  • Answer-optimized content for repair and pricing questions
  • Entity authority so engines surface the business by name
  • Rapid visibility across every service and city served
Profile 03

Dental

A long, research-heavy journey. Prospects read for weeks before calling. Whoever earns trust across that research wins the booking.

What Attrio builds
  • Topical clusters covering the full treatment & procedure journey
  • E-E-A-T signals: credentials, authored guidance, outcomes
  • Citation presence at every stage, not just the last click
Profile 04

Home Services

Urgent, high-intent searches: a burst pipe, a dead AC in July, where the customer takes the first name AI gives them.

What Attrio builds
  • Emergency-intent authority for "near me, right now" searches
  • Service-and-city coverage so the business owns every neighborhood it serves
  • Structured data mapping every service to the questions customers ask first
Profile 05

Wealth Advisory

Trust is everything and competition is quiet: a market where authority, not ad spend, decides who the search points to.

What Attrio builds
  • Authoritative guidance content that compounds for years
  • Provider & business entity credibility engines can verify
  • Local + specialty authority that outlasts any campaign
Profile 06

Multi-Location & Franchise

Several locations or a specialized boutique with uneven visibility. Some markets thrive on referrals; others are invisible entirely.

What Attrio builds
  • Per-location authority with roll-up reporting
  • Consistent entity signals so every office is recognized
  • A shared foundation that lifts weak markets without new spend
09 · Measure the Gap

What changes when you own your authority.

Before Attrio, your growth is rented: you pay for every click and guess at what's working. After, you own it: AI sends you customers on its own, and you can see exactly which ones came from where. The free audit shows you the gap first.

Before Attrio31Authority Index
  • Leads stop the day the ad budget pauses.
  • Invisible inside ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews.
  • Pays a premium per click for thin, unrecognized pages.
  • SEO done years ago; never adapted to answer engines.
  • No entity presence: engines can't tell the business apart.
  • Reporting counts clicks and rankings, not won customers.
After Attrio88Authority Index
  • Organic & AI leads keep arriving with or without ads.
  • Cited by name across every major AI answer engine.
  • Pays far less per click. Relevance is rewarded.
  • Built for the answer-engine era, not the last one.
  • A recognized entity engines trust and surface.
  • Attribution tied to retained clients and revenue.
The 60-second self-check

How much of your growth would survive the ads going dark?

Check every one that's true today. Be honest.

14
Tap to begin
10 · The Methodology

How the Authority Index is actually measured.

A score you can't inspect is marketing. This one is a measurement. Here is exactly how a citation is counted, how the 0 to 100 score is built, and how movement is credited to the work, published so the number means something to a prospect, a skeptic, and the models themselves.

01

How a citation is counted

A citation is recorded when, in response to a real buyer question, an AI engine either names the business in its answer or links it as a source. The two are tracked separately, never merged, because a named mention and a cited source are different signals.

Every question is measured across six engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and Claude.

AI answers vary by session, location, and time, so a single check is never treated as a result. Each question is run many times from a controlled location on recorded dates, and what gets reported is citation frequency, the share of runs in which the business appears, not a one-off hit. The question set is fixed per vertical and written the way customers actually ask, so the measurement can be reproduced.

02

How the 0 to 100 score is built

The Authority Index is a composite of independently observable inputs, each mapping to the eight pillars:

  • Entity resolution: is the business a distinct, disambiguated entity engines recognize?
  • Structured data coverage: schema completeness and validity across services.
  • Citation frequency: the measurement above, across all six engines.
  • Topical authority: depth and extractability of coverage for real buyer questions.
  • Corroboration: external sources that confirm the entity, not self-claims.
  • Technical health: crawlability, Core Web Vitals, indexation.

The score is normalized against the businesses currently winning the same market, not a theoretical ideal. 100 is not perfection. It is the ceiling set by the strongest competitor in your vertical and metro, which is why the Index is comparative: it measures you against exactly who you are losing to.

03

How movement is credited to the work

This is where most authority scores quietly cheat. The standard here is stated openly.

A baseline is measured before any work begins, then re-measured on a fixed cadence using the identical question set, engines, and location every time. The same ruler, every time.

Movement is tied to specific work shipped, with dates. A change in citation frequency is attributed to the intervention that preceded it, never claimed in the abstract.

The honest claim is documented correlation on a controlled measure, not proof of sole causation. By holding the questions, engines, and location constant, the variable that changed is the work. Market-wide shifts are not claimed as ours, and we say so.

The Authority Index is produced by the Authority Audit, where it is measured directly against your market. The number on this page is an example, not a claim about any specific business.

The Authority Audit

See where you're invisible to AI, and what it takes to fix it.

We map your website's foundation, your organic authority, and whether AI engines cite you at all, then score it against the businesses already winning your market. Tell us about the business and we'll take it from there.

We reply within one business day.
Personalized · Confidential · Built for a business, not a category
Questions

The answers, in plain English.

What is AI search authority?

AI search authority is how consistently AI engines like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Claude name and recommend your business when someone asks for the best option in your category. It's earned through entity verification, structured data, topical authority, and citations, not bought like ads.

How is this different from SEO?

Traditional SEO gets you ranked in a list of blue links. AI search authority gets you cited and recommended by name inside AI answers. As customers shift from scrolling search results to asking AI directly, being the named recommendation matters more than ranking on page one.

Does Attrio run ads?

No. Attrio builds owned authority, not paid campaigns. Ads stop working the moment you stop paying; authority keeps producing customers long after the work is done. If you do run paid ads, building this authority makes them cost up to 61% less, because search engines reward businesses they already trust.

What kinds of businesses does Attrio work with?

Attrio works with local and regional service businesses: med spas and aesthetics, home services, dental and orthodontics, legal, wealth advisory, roofing, auto, and more. Any business that gets chosen by a customer searching for a recommendation can benefit.

What is the Authority Audit?

The Authority Audit is a diagnostic. Attrio maps your website's technical foundation, your organic authority, and whether AI engines cite you at all, then scores it against the businesses already winning your market.