Search & AI visibility · Devon and the south west
Be the answer, not just a result.
First Mention is a search and AI visibility consultancy covering Devon and the south west. We track whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews name your business when a customer asks for a recommendation, then do the work that gets you named.
First Mention opens in the first quarter of 2027. We are building the service now and taking a limited list of early businesses.
Join the list and we will send you a free baseline AI visibility report when we open: the questions your customers are actually asking, and whether the answers name you or somebody else.
best family friendly pub near Salcombecited: tripadvisor.co.uk, visitsouthdevon.co.uknamed 5/5
where to stay South Hams with a dogcited: sawdays.co.uk, coolplaces.co.uknamed 4/5
quiet hotels near Dartmouthcited: booking.com, muddystilettos.co.uknot named
quiet. Nothing on the site, and nothing written about the hotel anywhere else, describes it that way. Fixing this is not a website job, it is getting the right adjective into the places the answer is already reading.
three days in South Devon itinerarycited: visitdevon.co.uk, nationaltrust.org.uknamed 3/5
Illustrative only. This is a worked example showing the shape of a real report. The queries and the reasoning are real; the hotel is not named because it is not a client. Real, attributed client data replaces this panel as soon as we have it.
Tap or hover any row to see what the answer actually said.
The problem
Your customers stopped scrolling.
Roughly 68% of Google searches now end without anyone clicking anything.1 The answer happened on the results page, and the visit you would once have got never arrived.
Similarweb put AI Overviews on roughly 43% of Google searches in mid‑2026, up from about 15%. Semrush's own tracker reads closer to 48%.2 The two disagree because they measure different keyword sets, and anyone who quotes you a single confident number is not telling you that.
Meanwhile the overlap between the top Google links and the sources AI answers actually cite has fallen from around 70% to under 20%.3 Ranking first and being invisible in the answer is now an ordinary outcome, not a freak one.
Most agencies are still selling you position three. We measure something different: whether you get named, how often, and which sources the answer is pulling from.
That last part is where the work happens. If the answer about South Hams hotels is citing TripAdvisor and a walking blog, tidying your own site will not move it. Getting you onto those sources will.
What we do
Measured monthly. Explained by a person.
Every client gets a fixed set of real buying queries, run monthly across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews, with each question asked five times in the same pass. The answers move around between runs, so what we report is a frequency, not a yes or a no. A flat yes is usually one run and a bit of luck.
Then we go through it together, at your place or online, whichever is easier for you. There is a set time every month when someone sits down and talks you through what moved, what it means and what we are doing about it. You get a conversation, not a PDF in your inbox and a dashboard login you never use.
If you are not ready to commit to that, start with the audit. It comes back in two halves. One half is work you can get on with yourself, written plainly enough for you or whoever looks after your site to just do it. The other half is work you are better off handing to us. Some businesses will take the first half away, do it, and come back for the second later. We are happy either way.
The audit is £950, and if you go on to a retainer within 30 days we waive the £500 joining fee.
Why every tier includes writing
Articles are how the rest of it happens.
The largest academic study of AI search so far tested nine different ways of changing a page across 10,000 queries. The three that moved visibility most were adding statistics, citing sources and including quotations, worth up to a 40% lift.4 All three are things you do inside an article. None of them are things you do to a homepage.
The more useful number in that study is a different one. The gain was largest for pages that were not already winning. A page sitting around fifth saw its visibility in AI answers roughly double once it cited its sources properly.4 The big names are already named. This is the part of search where a business in Totnes can still get in front of one in London.
Articles also keep earning. When HubSpot audited its own blog it found that updating older posts roughly doubled their monthly organic views, and that 92% of the leads the blog produced came from old posts rather than new ones.5 That is the argument for a retainer instead of a one‑off push, and it is why we would rather write four good pieces a month than twenty thin ones.
Worth saying plainly: the 40% is a best case, not an average, and it came out of a controlled test rather than a hotel in Salcombe. The HubSpot figure is a company reporting on its own blog. We would rather hand you the caveats than round the numbers up.
Pricing
Published, because you should not have to ask.
One rate card. New clients and long-standing ones pay exactly the same, and there is no annual uplift written into it. Everything each tier includes is written out in full on the pricing page, down to how many questions we track and how often you see us.
Monthly retainers: Foundation £750, Growth £1,595, Partner £2,850. One-off audit £950. Bespoke from £5,000. All per month except the audit, all excluding VAT. Conventional SEO is included at every tier: there is no separate charge for the AI work.
Steady, maintained visibility for smaller operations. 2 articles a month, 15 questions tracked, a visit every quarter.
What is includedFor businesses that need ongoing SEO and AI visibility work. 4 articles a month, 30 questions tracked, a visit every month.
What is includedFor competitive markets where the problem sits mostly on other people’s websites. 6 articles a month, 50 questions tracked, digital PR.
What is includedThirty of your customers’ real questions, run five times each across all five platforms, alongside a full conventional SEO audit. Delivered in person and yours to keep. The £500 onboarding fee is waived if you take a retainer within 30 days.
What the audit coversMulti-site operators, groups, and businesses trading nationally from a south west base. Built around the situation rather than fitted to a tier.
Talk it throughThe short version of the terms
- Six-month initial term, then rolling with 30 days’ notice
- £500 onboarding fee, waived if you arrive from a paid audit within 30 days
- Each retainer covers one website, one location and one Business Profile
- Prices exclusive of VAT, which will be added if and when we become VAT registered
- Based
- South Devon
- Covering
- Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, Dorset
- Also working with
- Companies operating out of the south west
- Enquiries
Who you are actually working with
You deal with the people doing the work.
First Mention was started off the back of two years leading search and AI visibility strategy in Tokyo, in a property market with no shortage of competition. The principles do not change when you move them to Exeter, Plymouth or Barnstaple. The people you explain them to do.
It is built to stay small. Whoever sits across the table from you is one of the people actually doing the work, not an account manager reading from a template. That is also why we would rather drive to you than send a dashboard link.
The honest limitation: a small team can only take on so many clients at once. When the list is full it is full, and we will say so rather than stretch.
Names and faces go up here before we open. If you would rather know exactly who you are dealing with first, email and ask. You will get a straight answer.
Questions we get asked
The things worth asking before you hire anyone.
Are you open yet, and when can you start? Not yet. We open in the first quarter of 2027.
You can join the list now. When we open, the first thing you get is a free baseline report on your own business: which questions your customers are asking, and whether the answers name you or somebody else.
The list is deliberately limited, so that everyone who joins gets a proper start rather than a place in a queue.
Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend my business? No, and be wary of anyone who says they can.
These systems do not return the same answer twice. Ask the same question five times and you will often get five slightly different lists. Nobody controls that, and no agency has a switch that places you inside an answer.
What can be changed are the inputs the answer is built from: what your own site says, and what the third-party sources those answers cite say about you. We measure how often you are named before we start and how often afterwards. That movement is what we are accountable for, not any single result.
Isn't this just SEO with a new name? No. Conventional SEO is part of the work, not something we have replaced.
Every tier includes the conventional work: Google Business Profile and local listing management, Search Console reporting, and, from Growth upwards, on-site optimisation of your existing pages. The audit and the quarterly review cover keyword positions, striking-distance terms, keyword and backlink gaps against your four named competitors, and technical health, alongside the AI figures. If your ordinary rankings are weak, that gets fixed, because it is the foundation everything else sits on.
What has changed is the endpoint. Traditional SEO optimises for a position in a list of links. We also optimise for being named inside a generated answer, where frequently there is no list at all. Ranking well still helps and still matters, but it no longer guarantees being mentioned: the overlap between top-ranking links and the sources AI answers actually cite has fallen from around 70% to under 20%.
The other difference is where the work happens. A meaningful share of it is not on your website at all, but on the third-party sites those answers already draw from. That part has more in common with digital PR than with traditional SEO.
How do you measure AI visibility? A fixed set of your real customer questions, run monthly across five platforms.
We agree a set of the questions your customers actually ask, then run them across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews, asking each question five times within the same monthly pass.
Because answers vary between runs, we report frequency rather than a yes or a no: named four times out of five, not simply "yes". Anyone reporting a flat yes is running the query once and hoping.
We also record which sources each answer cited, which is what tells us where the next piece of work has to happen. You get the raw answer text alongside the summary, so you can check our reading of it.
What happens if my visibility doesn't improve? We tell you plainly, rather than burying it in a dashboard.
There is no results guarantee. No one controls what these systems return, and a guarantee would be a promise about somebody else's product.
What we do commit to is this. Your baseline is measured before any work starts, so there is a real number to move. Every month you see whether it moved, talked through with a person rather than mailed over as a PDF.
If the numbers have not moved by the end of the initial term, we will say so directly, explain what we think is causing it, and either change the approach or tell you honestly that continuing is not worth your money. After the initial term the agreement runs month to month on 30 days' notice, so you are never locked into work that is not producing.
Why is there a six-month initial term? Because both search and AI visibility lag, and shorter terms measure noise.
Content has to be written, published, crawled and indexed before it starts being drawn on by the systems that cite it. Third-party placements take longer still.
Six months is the minimum period over which the data means anything. Run it for three and you are largely looking at normal variation between runs. We would rather set a term we can fairly be judged on than take three months of fees for work that cannot yet be assessed.
After the initial term it is rolling with 30 days' notice, so you are never tied in beyond work you can see the results of.
Do I have to buy the audit first? No. It is a good starting point, but it is not a prerequisite.
The audit suits you if you want a full diagnosis before committing to anything ongoing. It comes back in two halves: the things you can go and fix yourself, and the things where you are better off with us doing it.
If you already know you want ongoing work, go straight to a retainer. Every retainer includes the same tracking, and the £500 onboarding covers the setup and initial analysis. Starting on a retainer means the content work begins in month one rather than after a separate diagnostic step.
Either route is a perfectly good way to use us. The audit is not a gate we put in front of the service.
Who owns the content, accounts and data? You do. All of it, on payment.
Every article, image and piece of material we produce belongs to you once it is paid for, and it stays yours if you leave.
We never ask for your passwords. We work through delegated access, such as Manager permission on your Google Business Profile, granted by you and revocable by you at any time without our involvement. Any account we set up on your behalf is created in your name and your ownership, not ours.
Do you work with businesses outside Devon and the south west? Yes. The only difference is that reviews happen online rather than in person.
In-person meetings are part of the service within Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset. Outside that area we work in exactly the same way, with the same tracking, the same reporting and the same monthly review, held online instead.
Pricing does not change. There is no travel surcharge for local clients and no discount for remote ones. One rate card, wherever you are.
The cost of the answer. Every AI answer has a footprint. Training and running these models uses real electricity and real water, and our trade depends on them. Pretending otherwise would be daft.
So the aim, once we are trading, is to give 1% of revenue to environmental causes, on the model 1% for the Planet uses. Revenue rather than profit, because revenue is the harder of the two to fudge. We are not a member of that scheme and will not say we are unless we join.
Register your interest
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We are still building. Leave your website and we will come to you when we open, with a short report on what AI currently says about your business and about the businesses you compete with.
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