AI visibility for
UK businesses

Ranking on the first page and absent from the answer

British firms tend to have mature search programmes. Agencies are plentiful, the market is competitive, and a great many businesses hold strong positions for the terms they care about. That is exactly why the current shift is disorienting: none of it guarantees a mention when the same question is put to an assistant in plain language.

An assistant composes an answer and names two or three organisations. There is no tenth position to occupy. What decides inclusion is whether a system is confident enough to repeat something about you — and confidence comes from being unambiguous, corroborated, retrievable and uncontradicted, not from where you sit on a list of links.

So the common UK pattern is a business with good rankings, a competent agency, respectable traffic, and a marketing director who cannot explain why a smaller competitor keeps being named in answers they are not.

Companies House is an advantage most markets do not have

Every UK company carries a registered name and a company number in a single public register. That is a genuinely strong starting position for entity clarity, because there is one authoritative record of who you are — something a business operating across several US states, for instance, simply does not have.

The advantage only pays if what you publish agrees with it. The recurring British failure is the gap between the registered name and the trading name: the company is registered as one thing, trades as another, appears on its own website as a third shortened form, and is listed by directories under whichever version they captured first. The register says one thing, the web says four, and a system asked to name a supplier hedges rather than picks.

Two related patterns show up often enough to be worth naming. Businesses that run both a .co.uk and a .com and left the older one answering end up splitting the corroboration they have spent years earning across two identities. And organisations that describe themselves as operating "UK-wide" while their pages only ever discuss England are making a claim the content does not support — which matters more than it used to now that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are frequently the subject of the question being asked.

There is also a quieter content issue. A large amount of British marketing copy is written in American English, because it was drafted for a global site or by a global agency. When the question a customer asks uses British phrasing and spelling, the passage that would have answered it does not contain the question.

Four scoring cards, one Authority Rating

Those four combine into the composite Authority Rating. Nothing else feeds it.

An Australian platform, and the honest part about time zones

OG01 has no UK office, no UK staff, no UK telephone number and is not incorporated in the United Kingdom. It is an Australian company whose platform is available to businesses operating in or targeting the UK. Every reading is produced from outside your domain, the findings arrive in a browser and by email, and remediation is coordinated remotely.

The trade-off worth stating up front is the clock. Australian business hours and UK business hours barely meet: a British morning is an Australian evening. Scheduled calls need planning, and asynchronous handover is the default rather than a fallback. In practice that works because findings are written to be executed rather than discussed — but if your buying criteria include an account manager reachable at 10am London time, this is the wrong arrangement and it is better learned now than in month two.

Billing for UK customers is in US dollars. Australian dollar pricing applies only in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific territories we serve.

And who it is not for

• Marketing leads who need an outside reading. A measurement produced by neither the in-house team nor the incumbent agency is a different instrument in a board conversation from another internal deck.
• Agencies serving UK clients. An independent score separates the diagnosis from the party being paid to fix it, which is a useful thing to be able to hand over.
• Multi-brand and group businesses where several registered entities and trading names have accumulated over years of acquisitions.
• Not for you if you want a guaranteed placement in an AI answer, a same-day phone relationship in UK hours, or a supplier who will tell you there is a trick. None of those are on offer.

What is never claimed

No guarantee of rankings, citations or a mention in any AI answer. No claim to know how ChatGPT, Google, Gemini or Perplexity select sources — that logic is not published and not observable from outside, and a supplier offering you a factor list cannot show you how they verified it. No promise about how long a change takes to be reflected, because there is no reliable universal figure and quoting one would be guessing with a number attached.

What is offered instead: a measurement of the conditions you control, an ordered list of what to change, and the identical measurement run again afterwards so the difference is attributable to the work rather than asserted about it. Where a value could not be measured it is reported as unmeasured, not defaulted to zero. Where your site refuses an automated request, the result is Not Rated rather than an invented low score. Use the explanation to decide what to investigate before changing your site. Follow the linked FAQ for retry guidance and help; the result does not establish how other crawlers are treated.

UK questions