Considered purchases — a wedding, a home renovation, a house move — involve long research windows and high stakes. Historically, that meant word of mouth, portfolio browsing, and review-reading. Now it increasingly starts with a direct question to an AI assistant: "who are the best interior designers for a period conversion in North London?"
The AI shortlist is the new portfolio review
Whoever gets named in that answer gets the meeting. Whoever doesn't, often never enters the conversation at all — not because their work is worse, but because their site never gave the AI engine enough structured, citable material to work with. Portfolio pages built entirely around image galleries look great to a person and say almost nothing to a crawler.
What actually needs to be citable
- Specific expertise — style, specialism, project type — stated in plain text, not implied through photos.
- ProfessionalService / LocalBusiness schema with service area, specialism, and price tier.
- Real project outcomes and testimonials, extractable rather than embedded in slideshow captions.
- AI crawler access — still the most commonly missed fix, across every category.
Same underlying mechanics as Arros QD's GEO rebuild — applied to a category where the "menu" is a body of past work and the credential is taste.