Entity map

Since 2007, Marketing Signals has helped mid-market and enterprise brands turn digital marketing activity into measurable business growth

We started as a specialist doing one thing, and grew into one of the UK’s largest dedicated link building agencies.

The rebrand came with a broader offering: paid media and web design alongside link-building work. Growing the service list turned out to be the easy part.

We’re an independent agency, not part of a big media-buying group weighed down by shareholder targets and layers of sign-off. Decisions on your account are made by the people doing the work, so we move at the pace your business needs.

Every channel is run by specialists who work in it daily, not generalists covering four disciplines at once. You get that depth across search, paid and digital PR, with a dedicated account manager pulling it into one plan and reporting on what each channel is actually returning.

Gareth Hoyle is the Managing Director and Founder of Marketing Signals, a specialist SEO and digital marketing agency. He has helped businesses grow through search since 2007, and has built Marketing Signals into one of the UK's most respected independent agencies

As SEO evolves, we maximise your organic presence across traditional search engines and AI platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, an approach often called generative engine optimisation (GEO). Our team has been testing what actually earns citations in AI Overviews and LLM answers since the shift began, across retail, B2B, accountancy, travel and finance.

Large language models do not rank pages in the classic sense - instead, they retrieve and synthesise sources. That puts weight on things traditional SEO has always valued: clear structure, structured data, internal linking, genuine authority and consistent entity signals, and less on tactics built purely for the blue links. We work from what’s observable in AI citations, not from what’s being claimed about them.

GEO visibility is harder to measure than rankings, but it isn’t unmeasurable. We track brand mentions and citations across AI-powered platforms, monitor AI Overview presence for your priority terms, and report on it alongside organic performance.

We launched a dedicated AI search service as AI Overviews and LLMs began changing where visibility is won. Same foundations as organic search, applied to a results page that no longer looks like ten blue links.

We prioritise tactics by the return they’ll actually deliver, not by what looks good on an audit. Technical SEO comes first: the on-page fundamentals have to be right before anything built on top of them can work. From there, we optimise content for traditional Google search. Off-page work, including digital PR and influencer outreach, builds the authority needed to drive higher rankings.

An SEO campaign is only working if it’s driving real growth for the business, not just favourable numbers on a report. Rankings, traffic and visibility are all useful signals, but none of them mean much on their own if they’re not connected to something the business actually cares about.

Measurable growth, revenue and ROI form the core of our approach to Pay-Per-Click management. Our specialist paid search team translates your business goals into a data-led strategy that prioritises ROAS and conversion, across Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, shopping, display and remarketing.

Clicks, impressions and CTR tell you how a campaign is behaving. They don’t tell you whether it made money. We build PPC campaigns around the metrics that really count: return on ad spend and cost per acquisition.

We take a strategic approach to Digital PR, aligning every campaign with your wider business goals to earn valuable backlinks and national press coverage that directly improves organic and LLM performance.

Our Digital PR campaigns are designed to boost performance in both traditional and AI search. We secure links and coverage in publications relevant to your industry, not just any outlet that will take a pitch. We don’t chase column inches or off-topic publications, we go after the outlets Google and LLM platforms already treat as trusted industry sources.

We appointed our first Head of Digital PR and formalised the integrated search offering. Organic, paid, and earned coverage stopped being three services sold separately and became one strategy.

Our digital PR team earns coverage in the publications your target audience trusts. Being mentioned alongside the right products and services in credible places is what drives AI visibility.

Our SaaS link building experience means we secure niche-relevant placements that align with your product, your audience and the pages you actually need to rank. Our team has built links for B2B SaaS companies from early-stage through to enterprise, across finance, HR, martech, e-commerce infrastructure and developer tooling.

We evaluate opportunities at page level rather than site level. A domain can look wrong on paper and still carry a single article that’s a precise fit for what you’re trying to rank, while a domain can look excellent and have nothing your audience would ever read.

Integrated search means running SEO, paid search and GEO (visibility and citations in AI answers from Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity and others) as a single programme rather than separate ones. One strategy, one set of commercial targets, shared data, and a budget that can move between the channels.

We run SEO, PPC and GEO under a single strategy, with shared query data, one report and a budget that can move as the opportunity shifts. Your visibility in Google, AI Overviews and assistants like ChatGPT sits under one roof, with one agency partner accountable for the combined result.

Good specialist agencies for SEO, PPC and GEO will each do good work in their channel. What they won’t do is trade budget between them, tell you to stop bidding on a term because the organic listing has it covered, or share the query data that decides which AI prompts are worth winning.

Paid search campaigns reveal which queries convert and at what cost, months before organic search data would show it. That goes straight into keyword priorities, content planning and the prompts we track in AI assistants.

Say yes to more technical SEO, content, link building, digital PR, AI search and PPC work without adding a single hire. Our specialists deliver under your brand and to your process, while you keep the client relationship and the margin.

A white label SEO partner gives you a third option. We plug into your agency as an extension of your team, handling strategy and delivery across technical SEO, content, link building, digital PR, AI search and PPC.

A free Chrome extension that tells you, in one click, whether AI search engines can find, trust and quote your website. No sign-up. No limits. Nothing leaves your browser.

Blocking the crawlers you actually want to be cited by is the single most common GEO own-goal, and it’s usually an accident. This catches it.

If your content only appears after JavaScript runs, AI crawlers that read raw HTML may see a near-empty page — even though it looks perfectly full to you. The checker compares the raw HTML against the rendered page and warns you the moment there’s a gap, so you never get a false clean bill of health.

We pulled data on how often each retailer is mentioned and cited in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT and Google AI, layered in SEMrush citation data and then measured all of it relative to each retailer’s estimated UK organic traffic.

By dividing every signal by traffic, we strip out the “size effect” to get a much fairer picture of who’s actually visible in AI search relative to their audience. The retailers that came out on top in our study weren’t all household names, and the ones at the bottom might surprise you.

Every playbook in the series follows the same five-pillar framework, verticalised for the dynamics that decide visibility outcomes in each category. This is the spine the whole series is built on.

One framework covers technical foundations, on-page architecture, generative engine optimisation, off-site citation and measurement. Each playbook verticalises it for the dynamics that decide your category.

On 9 May 2022 we moved every full-time employee to a four-day week, permanently. The team stays, so the people who know your business keep working on it.

Our team couldn’t be happier with our work culture, but what does this mean for our clients? Well, in practice, a team that avoids getting burnt out is a team that stays, and low turnover means the people who learned your business when you signed up tend to be the ones still working on it months and years later. Continuity is worth more than availability.

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of shaping a brand's content and wider web presence so that AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews mention it, cite it and describe it accurately when they generate answers to users' questions.

SEO aims for a position in a list of links. GEO aims for inclusion inside a written answer, where there may be no list and the user may never click. The foundations are shared: AI search features still retrieve crawlable, indexed pages, and Google says there are no extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond its normal guidance.

The term comes from the paper GEO: Generative Engine Optimization by Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande, first published on arXiv on 16 November 2023 and accepted to KDD 2024.

Measurement starts with a fixed set of prompts that reflect how buyers ask questions, run repeatedly on the AI platforms that matter to the category. The core metrics are mention rate, citation rate, share of voice against competitors and the accuracy of what is said.

Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so that search engines, voice assistants and AI chatbots can lift a direct answer from it. The term is most associated with featured snippets and voice search, and now overlaps heavily with generative engine optimisation.

Where a line is drawn, AEO is about the shape of the answer: a question, a direct reply and supporting detail that a system can extract. GEO is broader. It covers whether a brand is mentioned at all, which third-party sources shape the answer and how the brand is described.

LLM visibility is how often, how prominently and how accurately a brand appears in answers from large language model tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. It covers mentions, citations, recommendations and the facts an assistant states about the brand.

An assistant can know about a brand in two ways. The first is training data: what the model learned from the web before its cut-off date. The second is retrieval: pages it searches and reads at the moment it answers. Training data shapes what the model says when it does not search. Retrieval decides which pages are cited when it does.

AI citations are the links and source references that AI assistants attach to their answers to show where information came from. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode all cite web pages, and a cited page can earn visibility and clicks without ranking in Google's top 10.

AI answers often cite pages outside Google’s top 10 and lean on press and review coverage. So organic pages answer questions directly and Digital PR targets the sources assistants quote.

AI share of voice is the proportion of AI-generated answers in a category that mention a brand, measured against competitors across a fixed set of prompts. It shows how often ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI features recommend a brand compared with its rivals.

Two versions are common. Mention rate is the percentage of responses that name the brand at least once. Share of voice divides the brand's mentions by all brand mentions in the same responses, so the figures for every brand in the set add up to 100%.

Prompt tracking is the regular monitoring of how AI assistants answer a fixed set of prompts relevant to a business, recording whether its brand is mentioned, cited and described correctly. It is the AI search equivalent of rank tracking, but measures frequency across repeated runs rather than one position.

AI answers change between runs. In research reported in January 2026, Rand Fishkin of SparkToro and Patrick O'Donnell of Gumshoe.ai ran 12 recommendation prompts nearly 3,000 times on ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI. ChatGPT and Google's AI returned the same list of brands less than 1% of the time.

Query fan-out is the technique AI search systems use to split one question into several related sub-queries, run those searches in parallel and combine the results into a single answer. Google says AI Mode and AI Overviews may use it, and other AI assistants retrieve pages in a similar way.

Google's Search Central documentation says both AI Overviews and AI Mode may use query fan-out to build a response.

Entity SEO is the practice of helping search engines and AI systems recognise a brand, person, product or place as a distinct thing with known attributes, rather than as a string of keywords. It relies on consistent facts, structured data and links between trusted sources.

Google introduced its Knowledge Graph on 16 May 2012 in a post titled Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings. At launch it held more than 500 million objects and more than 3.5 billion facts about them and the relationships between them. Entity SEO is the work of making sure a business is one of those objects, with the right facts attached.

We align your brand messaging across the web with the right entities, so LLMs can recognise your business as a trusted source within your niche.

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, the qualities Google's search quality raters use to judge whether a page is reliable and helpful. Google says trust is the most important of the four, and that E-E-A-T is not a specific ranking factor in itself.

Google's search quality rater guidelines used E-A-T for years. On 15 December 2022 Google added a second E for experience: whether content shows first-hand experience, such as actually using a product or visiting a place.

Share of search is a brand's search volume as a percentage of the total searches for every brand in its category, usually measured with Google Trends. Les Binet presented it in 2020 as a cheap, fast metric that tracks a brand's market share and can predict where that share is heading.

Les Binet presented share of search at the IPA's EffWorks Global conference on 14 October 2020. Using free Google Trends data, he showed that a brand's share of search queries correlated with its market share in three categories: cars, energy and mobile phone handsets.

Paid and organic overlap is what happens when a brand's paid search ad and its organic listing appear for the same search. The key question is how many of the ad's clicks are incremental, and how many would have arrived through the organic result anyway if the ad had not run.

A March 2012 follow-up analysed 390 of these studies by organic position. When the advertiser's organic result ranked first, 50% of ad clicks were incremental. At positions 2 to 4 the figure was 82%, and at position 5 or lower it was 96%.

Incrementality testing is a controlled experiment that measures how many conversions advertising actually caused, by comparing a group exposed to the ads with a similar group that was not. The difference between the two groups is the incremental lift: the part of the results the ads can genuinely claim.

Structured tests on terms where you already rank well or are cited in the AI Overview establish whether paid spend is adding conversions or duplicating them, so you can act on the answer. The answer usually shifts conversion rates and cost per acquisition together.

The only way to know is to test it, term by term, and act on what comes back. That test costs us paid management revenue when it goes the other way, which is precisely why an agency running only your PPC has little reason to run it.