For twenty years, the business of getting found online has run on a fairly simple formula: figure out what words your customers type into Google, then build a website that uses those words. Keywords in, traffic out. It worked well enough that an entire industry, search engine optimisation, or SEO grew up around it.

That formula is now quietly breaking, and a small Bath-based consultancy with a very on-the-nose name is betting its business on the fix. Intent Consultancy doesn’t just help companies rank on Google. It’s built around a wager that the next decade of “getting found” will be less about matching keywords and more about understanding why someone is searching in the first place and that this shift matters just as much for a two-person plumbing firm as it does for a national retailer.

The keyword era is ending

Here’s the change driving all of this. Search used to mean typing a few words into a box and scanning ten blue links. Increasingly, it means asking ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google’s AI Overviews a full question and getting a single, synthesised answer, often with no click-through to a website at all. Google itself now answers a huge share of searches directly on the results page, before a user ever reaches a business’s site.

For a small business, this is genuinely disorienting. The old playbook,stuff your homepage with “best plumber in Bath” and hope for the best is aimed at a system that’s rapidly becoming secondary. The new gatekeepers are large language models deciding which businesses are worth mentioning when someone asks “who should I call for a boiler repair near me?” And those models aren’t counting keyword density. They’re weighing something closer to reputation: does this business’s content, reviews, and web presence actually demonstrate expertise and trustworthiness?

That’s the specific bet Intent Consultancy is making. Its site talks about helping businesses become visible not just in traditional search results but on “emerging AI-driven platforms,” and it stakes its whole identity on a single idea: “successful business decisions begin with understanding intent.” Not traffic. Not rankings. Intent, the actual motivation behind a search, a purchase, or a customer’s hesitation to pick up the phone.

What that looks like in practice

Strip away the branding and the consultancy’s actual offer is refreshingly concrete, which is unusual in an industry known for vague promises. There’s Google Business Profile management from £50 a month the unglamorous but often decisive work of making sure a business’s map listing, reviews, hours, and photos are accurate and well-tended, since that listing is frequently the first (and only) thing a local customer sees. There are tiered SEO packages, scaling from £150 to £1,050 a month depending on how many search phrases a business wants to compete for, from a handful up to a thousand. There’s content writing priced at £15 a page, aimed squarely at being readable by both humans and AI systems. And there’s something you don’t see from most small SEO shops: AI training for businesses themselves, priced between £300 and £800, presumably teaching owners how to actually use the tools that are reshaping their industry rather than just paying someone else to game them.

It’s a pricing structure that signals who this is for: not enterprise clients with six-figure marketing budgets, but independent and mid-sized businesses that need professional-grade visibility without agency-scale costs. A single-location retailer or a regional service business is exactly the kind of client priced out of big agencies but underserved by generic, templated SEO tools.

The honesty gap and why it’s interesting

What’s notable about the site, if you read it closely, is what’s absent. There are no case studies, no client logos, no “we increased traffic by 400%” claims, no ranking guarantees. In an industry built on bold promises, that restraint is almost its own statement. It could read as a young business still building its track record the site gives no founder names or company history either, which is unusual for a firm asking people to trust it with their marketing budget. Or it could reflect a genuine wariness about overpromising in a field where the rules are visibly changing under everyone’s feet. Nobody, not the big agencies, not Google, not the SEO veterans with twenty years of case studies actually has a proven playbook yet for optimising a business’s presence for AI-generated answers. Anyone claiming otherwise right now is probably guessing.

That’s arguably the more honest position. AI search optimisation, sometimes clumsily labelled “answer engine optimisation” or “generative engine optimisation,” is a discipline that’s maybe two years old. Nobody has a decade of data showing what reliably gets a business mentioned by ChatGPT. Consultancies that claim mastery of it are, to some extent, all figuring it out in real time alongside their clients.

The bigger idea worth taking from this

You don’t have to hire Intent Consultancy, or even be in Bath, to find the underlying idea useful. The framing that “everything starts with understanding the intent behind the challenge, the opportunity and the desired outcome” is really just a good discipline for evaluating any marketing spend. Before asking “how do we rank for this keyword,” it’s worth asking what the person searching actually wants are they ready to buy, comparing options, or just trying to solve a problem they don’t yet have words for? AI-driven search engines are, in a sense, forcing that question on businesses whether they like it or not, because the systems answering customer questions now reward genuine clarity and trustworthiness over keyword tricks.

Small businesses have spent two decades learning to optimise for an algorithm. The businesses that adapt fastest to this next shift will likely be the ones that stop thinking about algorithms altogether, and go back to a much older question: what does the person on the other end actually need? That’s a rebrand SEO consultants everywhere are scrambling to make. Intent Consultancy just happened to put it in the company name.

PR / Public Relations by Calibre 100