AI search visibility and reporting automation for a Surrey digital agency

The brief

Thunderbolt is a digital agency in Farnham that helps growing businesses with web design, SEO, paid search, social, email and branding. Its SEO clients had started asking a new question: why does ChatGPT recommend our competitor and not us? Thunderbolt wanted a credible answer, a service it could sell, and the tooling to deliver it at agency scale.

At the same time, monthly client reporting across six channels was consuming a day or more per account manager.

What we did

• AI Search Visibility programme. We built Thunderbolt a repeatable audit: a benchmark of how each client brand shows up across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity for the questions buyers actually ask, a technical checklist covering crawlability, structured data and llms.txt, and a content plan that targets the gaps. The audit runs monthly so progress is measurable.
• White-labelled tooling. The benchmark runs as a tool inside Thunderbolt’s own stack, branded as theirs, with an evaluation set so the team can trust the scores.
• Reporting automation. Ad platform, analytics, search console and social data now flow into one place. A drafting assistant writes the first pass of each monthly report in Thunderbolt’s tone of voice, and the account manager finishes it.
• Adoption. Workshops for the SEO and account teams, a playbook for selling the new service, and office hours for the first two months.

The result

AI Search audits became a new line on the rate card and sold to fourteen existing clients in the first quarter. Across those clients, the share of brands cited in AI-generated answers rose from roughly one in eight to more than four in ten within four months. Account managers got the better part of a day back each week, which went into the strategic work clients actually pay for.

“Our clients were asking about AI search before we had an answer. Now it’s one of the first things we talk about in a pitch.” Founder, Thunderbolt