Search disciplines
AI Search Services Across the Places People Search
Most companies don't come to us because they want another search acronym.
They come because something is off. Competitors keep showing up in AI answers. Organic traffic has been sliding. Five locations are competing for the same searches. Google Ads is spending money nobody can explain. Or several teams touch search and nobody has a clear view of the whole thing.
DankRank is an AI search agency working across AI search, organic search, local search, paid search and fractional search leadership.
We start by figuring out which part of the system needs attention. It might be one service. It might touch a couple of areas. We don't start by assuming it needs a retainer.
Free. Includes 2 meaningful competitors. Founder-reviewed. Delivered within 2 business days. No call required.
Search
- AI Search
- Organic
- Local
- Paid
- Fractional
Route
Core Search Services
Our primary work across industries: AI search, organic search, local search, paid search and fractional search leadership.
Cannabis Marketing Services
We also work across industries, with deeper experience in regulated cannabis search and advertising.
01
Tell Us What's Going Wrong
The easiest way to waste a search budget is to choose the deliverable before the problem is clear.
That can look like more content, a new tool, a technical audit, another agency or a GEO project because somebody heard the term in a meeting.
Any one of those might be useful, but none of them tells us what the problem is by itself.
Use the sections below to find the situation that sounds closest to yours and see where we'd start.
- more content
- a new tool
- a technical audit
- another agency
what the problem is
02
Your Competitors Are Showing Up in AI Answers. You Aren't.
Start here when ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI search experiences keep surfacing competitors, publishers or marketplaces while your brand barely appears.
We look at the prompts that matter, who gets mentioned, what gets cited, which sources keep showing up, how your brand is understood and whether there is enough useful information about you for these systems to work with.
That can lead into GEO, AEO, entity work, citation analysis, content changes, source development or measurement. What we find decides what comes next.
AI answers vary, we can't fully see why a system chooses one source over another, and one good screenshot proves very little. We look for a pattern before recommending the work.
03
Rankings Slipped, Traffic Fell, or the Site Became a Mess
Sometimes the answer is less exotic than the headline.
A migration changed internal links. A content program created five pages for one intent. Old pages were never retired. Important sections became harder to crawl. The site kept publishing without deciding which page should answer which search.
Adding more content to that situation can make it worse.
Our organic work covers architecture, page ownership, intent, internal linking, content discovery, recovery, cleanup and the decisions behind what should stay, change, merge or disappear.
04
Your Locations Are Fighting Each Other
Ten locations don't need ten copies of the same page with the city name changed.
Local search gets harder as a business grows because each location needs a clear reason to exist in search. Store pages, service areas, Google Business Profiles, local intent, reviews, pickup and delivery, hours, parking, neighbourhood signals and internal routing all have to make sense together.
When that architecture is weak, locations can compete with each other instead of building the brand's coverage.
Our local search work is built for that kind of problem, including multi-location businesses where the easy answer would be to publish more pages and hope Google sorts it out.
05
You Need Demand Now, but the Account Is Hard to Trust
Paid search makes sense when you need qualified demand before organic work has time to mature, or when an existing account has become expensive, confusing or difficult to defend.
We can build, rebuild or manage paid search with the same standard for evidence we use elsewhere in search.
AI helps with research, analysis, testing ideas and repetitive review. Strategy, budgets, approvals and account changes stay with people.
If that's the problem, the paid-search page shows our build and management options, how we use AI in the account and which decisions stay with people.
06
Search Is Spread Across Too Many Owners
SEO sits with one agency. Paid media sits somewhere else. Content has its own plan. Local search belongs to another team. Now somebody has added AI visibility to the list.
The execution may be fine. What can be missing is one senior search operator who can look across the channels, decide what matters first, challenge work that doesn't hold up and give the people already doing it one direction.
Our Fractional Head of Search & AI Visibility engagement gives that ownership a clear home.
It is designed for companies that need senior search ownership without hiring the role full time.
- Four specialists, four fragments
- One owner across all four
07
How We Decide What You Need
We start with evidence, not a package.
The free Visibility Baseline gives us a first look at how you currently show up across search and how that compares with 2 meaningful competitors. From there, we can see whether the biggest issue is AI search, organic, local, paid, leadership or some combination.
A focused one-time strategy may be enough. If ongoing work makes sense, the scope comes from what we found. And if there isn't enough of a problem to justify hiring us, we'd rather tell you that than invent one.
You get a written founder-reviewed baseline, 2 competitor comparisons and a clearer view of where the search gaps are. Delivered within 2 business days. No call required.
An illustrative diagram of how competing search requests are ordered by one accountable owner. Five requests arrive at once: organic wants a new page, paid wants a better landing page, local needs location cleanup, an AI visibility initiative is underway, and the development queue is already full. All five cross a single decision point, after which two are marked to go first and three are marked to wait. The routing shown is illustrative of how the engagement works and describes no particular client or programme.
Search decision
- Organic wants a new pageWaits
- Paid wants a better landing pageFirst
- Local needs location cleanupFirst
- An AI visibility initiativeWaits
- The development queueWaits
08
One Operating System Behind the Work
Whether we're looking at AI search, a location cluster or a paid account, the research and QA run through Cultivation OS.
It keeps live search data, AI-assisted analysis, decisions and experiments connected so the team is working from the same record.
The team uses repeatable processes for the mechanical work, while search judgment stays with people.
Vee stays involved where senior judgment matters. Everyone works from the same decision record, with AI used where speed and scale are useful.
- Live signalsSearch, AI answers, Maps, paid
- Human decisionA person owns the consequence
- Coordinated executionAcross all four disciplines
- ExperimentOne change, one question
- MeasurementWhat actually happened
- Next decisionMeasurement returns to the decision, not to a report
09
You Can Inspect the Work Before You Hire Us
DankRank launched in 2026, so we're not going to pretend we have ten years of DankRank case studies.
We're publishing the work we can prove now.
That includes the build of this site, our launch Visibility Baseline and AI citation experiments where the result gets documented whether it helps the sales story or not.
If you want to see how the architecture, Claude Code build, workflows and QA came together, start with the site itself.
Or browse the broader evidence library:
10
Starting Prices Are Public
You should be able to tell whether we're remotely in range before booking anything.
We publish starting prices so you can tell quickly whether we're in range. The actual scope still follows the diagnosis.
All prices are in USD. Canadian clients may be quoted in CAD.
- Search + AI Visibility BaselineFREE
Founder-reviewed Search + AI Visibility Baseline showing where you stand, what looks weak and how you compare with two relevant competitors.
- AI Visibility Strategy$2,500 one-time
Built for a defined AI-search question or visibility problem that needs a plan before ongoing execution.
- A defined prompt and query set tied to real buyer questions
- Competitor visibility comparisons
- Citation and source-pattern analysis
- Search Strategy / Recovery$3,500 one-time
For sites that need diagnosis, cleanup and a prioritized plan before committing to ongoing execution.
- Search and page-ownership mapping
- Crawl and indexation review
- Information architecture recommendations
- Local SearchFrom $1,800/month
Ongoing local-search work for businesses that need profile management, location architecture, content, measurement and local visibility improvements over time.
- Google Business Profile audit and optimization
- Maps and local-organic visibility review
- Location and market page architecture
- AI Search Cultivation$3,500/month
Ongoing work for brands that need continued measurement, implementation, testing and adjustment as AI search changes.
- Brand and entity gap findings
- Page and content priorities
- Technical discovery findings where relevant
- Organic Cultivation$3,500/month
Ongoing organic-search work for brands that need implementation, measurement, content and architecture improvements over time.
- Internal-link analysis and routing
- Cannibalization and duplicate-content cleanup
- Content inventory and keep / update / merge / redirect decisions
- Google Ads ManagementFrom $1,000/month + media spendfor monthly media spend up to $10,000. For monthly media spend above $10,000, management is typically 12-15% of media spend, subject to a $1,000 monthly minimum.
Ongoing paid-search management across Google Ads, and Microsoft Ads where the account warrants it, including analysis, testing, measurement and account improvements.
- Paid search strategy and account review
- Google Ads management
- Search-term and query analysis
- Meta Ads ManagementFrom $2,000/month + media spendfor monthly media spend up to $10,000. For monthly media spend above $10,000, management is typically 12-15% of media spend, subject to a $2,000 monthly minimum.
Paid social campaign management for businesses that need controlled audience targeting, creative testing and measurable demand generation across Meta platforms.
- Campaign strategy and account structure
- Audience and geographic targeting
- Creative and placement testing
- Performance analysis and optimization
- Programmatic Advertising$7-9 CPM management + media spendfor monthly media spend up to $15,000. For monthly media spend above $15,000, management is typically 12-15% of media spend, structured so that crossing the threshold cannot reduce the management fee below the applicable CPM-based model.
Programmatic media management for businesses that need scalable reach across display, video and other eligible inventory with tighter audience and geographic controls.
- Audience and inventory strategy
- Geographic and frequency controls
- Campaign pacing and optimization
- Performance and attribution reporting
- Fractional Head of Search & AI Visibility$5,000/month
Senior search leadership across AI visibility, organic, local and paid search.
- Search strategy and prioritization
- Cross-channel search roadmap ownership
- AI-search and AI-visibility leadership
- Multi-service / multi-market Search + AI programsFrom $6,500/month
Integrated search and AI visibility leadership for businesses managing multiple channels, markets or locations that need one coordinated growth strategy.
- Cross-channel search strategy
- Multi-market or multi-location prioritization
- AI visibility and organic search coordination
- Measurement, reporting and roadmap ownership
Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
How do we know which of these services we need?
Most companies do not know yet, and guessing gets expensive.
That's what the free Visibility Baseline is for. We look at how you currently show up across search and compare you with 2 meaningful competitors to see where the clearest gaps are. Sometimes the answer is AI search. Often it's an organic architecture problem wearing an AI costume.
Can you work across more than one service at the same time?
It can be the right call because the four disciplines share the same pages, entities and evidence.
What we won't do is scope all four because it makes a bigger contract. The scope comes from what the Baseline found.
What if the real problem isn't search?
If the evidence points outside search, we'll say so.
Search can't fix a product nobody wants, a price that doesn't work or a sales process that drops leads. In that situation, a search program would be the wrong recommendation.
Do you take on one-time projects?
A focused one-time strategy or cleanup is often enough, and each service page shows what that costs.
Ongoing work is for situations that genuinely keep changing, which in AI search is more of them than it used to be.
Next step
Not Sure Which Route Fits?
You don't need to diagnose the issue before you contact the search company.
Send us your website, your primary competitor and a little context. We'll review how the business currently shows up across search, compare 2 meaningful competitors and give you a written Visibility Baseline.
Free. Founder-reviewed. Delivered within 2 business days. No discovery call required.
The Baseline may point to one of the services above. It may also show that the fix is smaller than a retainer. Either answer is useful.