About

How we actually work

Every engagement runs through the same four steps, in order: Discovery (the business, the revenue line search moves, the personas), Audit (diagnose with data and interpret it), Strategy (architecture, topical map, content specifications, equity plan, prioritisation), and Advisory (continuous oversight while your team executes).

Execution stays with you. We specify, brief and verify in production. The reason isn't ideology — it's that the consultancy is most useful sitting where the decisions are made, not where the tickets are closed. When the gap is execution capacity rather than direction, we'll say so and recommend who else to bring in.

Structural rules

Two structural differences:

• One named senior on every engagement. No bait-and-switch to a junior after the close. The work is scoped against the time of one senior consultant; if scope exceeds what one senior can hold, we reduce scope, we don't add layers.
• Mutual fit is a gate, not a step. We screen out engagements where the ICP isn't ready for long-term work, where execution capacity doesn't exist, where the brief is "make us rank in three months". Walking away early is part of the model.

Source-grounded — what that means in practice

Every claim in every deliverable anchors to a declared source: GSC, DataForSEO, your analytics, a primary technical paper, a documented behaviour observed on the site. A brief without a source manifest doesn't go to draft. An audit finding without a business rationale doesn't go in the priority stack.

The reason is plain: by default, language models — and human consultants tempted to look prolific — produce convincing-sounding nothing. The cost of letting that into a deliverable is paid by you, six months later, when the recommendations don't hold up to scrutiny. The substance check is built into the system to make that outcome harder to reach.

How we think about AI Overviews, GEO and citation

The surfaces are new. The mechanism isn't. AI search retrieves and synthesises from the same web Google indexed yesterday, weighted by the same notions of relevance, authority and extractability — applied at chunk granularity instead of page granularity. SEO done well already covers most of what GEO requires; what changes is what you measure (citations, AI Overview presence, retrieval-stable chunks) and how you write (extractable, scope-clear, evidence-dense, multimodal where it earns its keep).

We treat GEO as a layer of SEO, not a category replacement. Engagements include AI-visibility measurement from day one — prompt suite on the queries that matter, citation tracking, retrieval-stability checks per silo — and we publish our own running read on what's actually changing across verticals.

Founder

canonicality is founded and operated by Enrique Garcia. SEO consultant since 2020. Senior CSM at LinkBuilder since 2021, where he has managed organic-visibility programmes for 40+ portfolios across ecommerce, SaaS, fintech, professional services, and local. canonicality is the consultancy built from the methodology refined through that work.

Engagements are signed under canonicality; the voice is Enrique's. No team of juniors behind the scenes.

The way in is an exploratory call — a short conversation to look at the site together and decide if the work makes sense for both sides. Get in touch.