Search clicks 172 → 386 in four months, from absent to top-3 in AI answers for her category.

The site had been restructured in August 2022 and never cleaned up, and a second rebuild in March 2026 layered new flat URLs over the old categorised ones. By April the audit read like a slow leak: 73% of top Google rankings and 67% of organic traffic value lost in three months, 0 of 63 mobile URLs passing Core Web Vitals, 145 live 404s, a duplicate "accountability" cluster competing with itself, a broken TLS certificate on the old apex domain, and a 0.4% CTR on the pages that still ranked. It was hurting every channel: social visitors left in three seconds, email visitors lasted thirteen, and an estimated $37K to $45K a year of Google Ads was compensating for organic traffic that used to be free. For the queries a bureau or a conference chair would actually type, "change management keynote speaker", "women in leadership speakers", she did not appear in ChatGPT or Perplexity at all.

Diagnosis first, from Analytics, Search Console and a rank-tracker pull, with every finding re-validated against live Search Console data before anything was sequenced. The plan ran in the order of what was actually fixable: the 404s, the cannibalising cluster, the mobile vitals, internal links pointing at flat URLs, the noindex and soft-404 leftovers. Then the entity layer, which is what AI answers read: a Wikidata entry, a normalised bio deployed across the site and six social profiles with the exact phrases engines match her on ("change management keynote speaker", "behavioral scientist") in the first line, review and video schema, an optimised press release, and a HARO routine for third-party mentions. In July I mapped which public lists feed the answer engines for her category, found that a competitor's popular list had quietly dropped her in June, and handed her three asks for her bureau and existing profiles rather than outreach she could not control. Weekly calls throughout; the developer, sales and PR sides stayed in-house.