# Found First

> SEO, GEO & Local AI Search Agency in Chicago. Found First gets local and multi-location businesses ranked in classic search, cited inside AI answers, and recommended by name. Serving Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City.

Contact: jimmy@foundfirstsearch.com | 314.313.1398
Markets: Chicago IL, St. Louis MO, Kansas City MO
Services: SEO, generative engine optimization (GEO), local AI search visibility

## Pages

- [About](https://foundfirstsearch.com/about/): About Built by someone who kept watching the wrong businesses win. Not on quality. On structure. The competitor above...
- [Contact](https://foundfirstsearch.com/contact/): Contact Talk to the person who’d be doing the work. No gatekeeper, no qualification script, and no call required...
- [Free AI Visibility Snapshot](https://foundfirstsearch.com/ai-visibility-snapshot/): Free · No call required The AI Visibility Snapshot. Ten real buying questions for your category and your city, run...
- [Glossary](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/): Plain definitions of the terms used in AI search, AI integration and agentic commerce — 33 of them, grouped by what they are for. Where a term is contested or the evidence is thin, we say so.
- [Agentic commerce](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/agentic-commerce/): Agentic commerce is shopping where an AI agent does part of the work — finding, comparing, sometimes buying — on the shopper’s behalf. The agent reads your catalog, not your homepage.
- [Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/agentic-commerce-protocol/): The Agentic Commerce Protocol is the open standard OpenAI and Stripe published in 2025 for AI agents to transact with merchants. It launched to power in-chat checkout and is now mostly about discovery.
- [AI agent](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/ai-agent/): An AI agent is a system where a language model decides its own next steps and which tools to use, rather than following a fixed path. More capable than a workflow, and harder to predict.
- [AI crawlers](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/ai-crawlers/): AI crawlers do three different jobs — training, search indexing, and live fetching. Blocking the wrong one is how a business disappears from AI answers.
- [AI governance](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/ai-governance/): AI governance is the written rules for how a business uses AI — which tools, which data, who reviews what. For health, legal and finance clients it is usually the first thing they ask to see.
- [AI integration](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/ai-integration/): AI integration connects an AI model to the systems a business already runs — CRM, inbox, website, catalog — so it does useful work inside them instead of in a separate chat window.
- [AI Overviews](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/ai-overviews/): AI Overviews are Google’s AI-generated summaries above the normal results. Being cited in one is not the same as ranking — here is what the data shows.
- [Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/answer-engine-optimization/): Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is optimizing a page so a system can extract a direct answer from it. How it differs from GEO, and why the boundary is blurrier than most agencies admit.
- [E-E-A-T](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/e-e-a-t/): Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — what Google asks its human quality raters to assess. Google states plainly that it is not a ranking factor.
- [Entity resolution](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/entity-resolution/): Entity resolution is how a system decides that scattered references to a business are all the same thing. It is the cheapest, highest-leverage work in AI visibility.
- [Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/generative-engine-optimization/): Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of getting a business named, quoted or linked inside an AI-generated answer rather than ranked in a list of links.
- [Google AI Mode](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/google-ai-mode/): Google AI Mode is Google’s dedicated AI search experience in its own tab. What Google says it is, how it differs from AI Overviews, and why that difference matters.
- [Google Business Profile](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/google-business-profile/): The free listing that controls how a business appears in Google Search and Maps. Google names relevance, distance and prominence as what drives local results.
- [Grounding](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/grounding/): Grounding ties a generated answer to retrieved sources, so the model reports rather than recalls. It is the opening a local business has against a national brand.
- [Hallucination](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/hallucination/): A hallucination is a confident statement the sources do not support. For a local business the costly version is mundane: wrong hours, wrong service area, a competitor credited with your work.
- [Human-in-the-loop](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/human-in-the-loop/): Human-in-the-loop means a person reviews or approves an AI system’s output before it takes effect. The cheapest risk control there is, and the one most often skipped.
- [Knowledge graph](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/knowledge-graph/): A knowledge graph stores things and the relationships between them, rather than documents. Being a resolved entity in one is what makes a business available to be recommended.
- [Large language model (LLM)](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/large-language-model/): A large language model is trained on vast amounts of text to predict what comes next — the engine underneath ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Fluent by design, factual only when grounded.
- [llms.txt](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/llms-txt/): llms.txt is a proposed markdown file listing a site’s important pages for AI systems. Honest status: adoption is uneven and Google has not endorsed it.
- [Local pack](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/local-pack/): The map and short list of businesses Google shows for a search with local intent. Still the highest-intent surface in local search, and increasingly a source for AI answers.
- [Model Context Protocol (MCP)](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/model-context-protocol/): The Model Context Protocol is an open standard for connecting AI applications to tools and data. Introduced by Anthropic in 2024, now governed under the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation.
- [NAP consistency](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/nap-consistency/): NAP consistency means your name, address and phone number appear identically everywhere. No published study measures its effect — the widely quoted figures are surveys of opinion.
- [Product feed](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/product-feed/): A product feed is a structured file of every product you sell — title, price, availability, attributes. Once a Google Shopping chore, it is now what AI shopping assistants read first.
- [Prompt injection](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/prompt-injection/): Prompt injection hides instructions in content an AI reads — an email, a web page, a document — to hijack what it does. It sits first on OWASP’s list of LLM application risks.
- [Query fan-out](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/query-fan-out/): Query fan-out is Google’s term for breaking one question into many simultaneous searches. It explains why AI citations only partly overlap with rankings.
- [Rank grid](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/rank-grid/): Measuring local rank at many points across a map instead of one, because local results change block by block. A coverage map, not a score.
- [Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/retrieval-augmented-generation/): Retrieval-augmented generation is when a model searches for documents first and writes its answer from what it finds. It is why being retrievable now matters more than being memorable.
- [Semantic search](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/semantic-search/): Matching on meaning rather than on the exact words typed. It is why a page can be retrieved for a phrasing that appears nowhere on it.
- [Share of AI voice](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/share-of-ai-voice/): Share of AI voice is the proportion of a fixed prompt set where a business gets named. Because AI answers are non-deterministic, it is the only honest way to measure.
- [Structured data](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/structured-data/): Structured data is machine-readable labelling that tells a system what your content is. Google is explicit that it is not required for AI search and is not a ranking factor.
- [Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/universal-commerce-protocol/): The Universal Commerce Protocol is the open standard Google co-developed with Shopify and major retailers for AI agents to shop and check out. It powers checkout in AI Mode and Gemini for eligible merchants.
- [Workflow automation](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/workflow-automation/): Workflow automation runs a defined sequence of steps when something happens — a form arrives, a deal changes stage. Predictable, auditable, and the right answer more often than an agent.
- [Zero-click search](https://foundfirstsearch.com/glossary/zero-click-search/): A zero-click search ends without a click to any website. In early 2026 that was 68% of US Google searches — which reframes what SEO is for.
- [Home](https://foundfirstsearch.com/): SEO · GEO · Local AI Get named when your customers ask an AI. Ranking on Google and being named inside an...
- [Insights](https://foundfirstsearch.com/insights/): Field notes on AI search, generative engine optimization and local visibility from Found First.
- [SEO & AI Visibility in Chicago](https://foundfirstsearch.com/chicago/): Chicago is not one search market. What a Chicago shortlist is actually assembled from, why 77 community areas matter, and the citation targets that decide who gets named.
- [Thank you](https://foundfirstsearch.com/thank-you/): Thanks for reaching out to Found First.
- [What we do](https://foundfirstsearch.com/what-we-do/): What we do Ranking, citation, and recommendation as one program. Five workstreams, four ways to buy, and every price...

## Insights

- [What an AI integration consultant actually does (and five questions to ask before you hire one)](https://foundfirstsearch.com/what-an-ai-integration-consultant-does/): Everyone is an AI consultant now. The real job is connecting models to the systems you already run, with rules about data and a plan for when it’s wrong — and five questions separate the people who do it from the people who demo it.
- [Automation or AI agent? How to tell which one your business actually needs](https://foundfirstsearch.com/automation-vs-ai-agents/): A workflow follows a path someone wrote down. An agent decides its own. Most small-business problems want the first — sometimes with one AI step inside it — and five questions tell you which you’re looking at.
- [AI implementation for small businesses: start with one workflow, not a platform](https://foundfirstsearch.com/ai-implementation-small-business/): Nearly nine in ten organizations use AI somewhere; only about a third can point to any effect on the bottom line. The gap is implementation, and it closes one workflow at a time.
- [Agentic commerce for Shopify stores: what changed in 2026, and what to do about it](https://foundfirstsearch.com/agentic-commerce-shopify/): In twelve months, in-chat checkout launched, retreated and relaunched on a different protocol. The part that never changed: the assistant shops from your product data. Here is what a Shopify store should actually do.
- [Why Small Businesses Are Hesitant About AI (And the Question It Doesn't Answer)](https://foundfirstsearch.com/does-ai-recommend-your-business-2/): Most of what you've heard about small businesses and AI is either a sales pitch or a scare story. Here's the version...
- [Everything in local SEO that nobody can actually prove](https://foundfirstsearch.com/local-seo-what-nobody-can-prove/): Citations, NAP consistency, review counts, posting frequency. The industry quotes confident numbers for all of them. Almost none come from a measured outcome.
- [Ranking and getting cited are now two different numbers](https://foundfirstsearch.com/ranking-versus-citation/): Only 12% of the pages AI assistants cite rank in Google’s top ten for the same query. That gap is the entire reason a second discipline exists.
- [The robots.txt line that quietly removes you from AI answers](https://foundfirstsearch.com/robots-txt-ai-crawlers/): AI crawlers do three different jobs. Most robots.txt files treat them as one — and the result is a business that opted out of the answers without meaning to.
- [Local AI Search in Chicago: Why the Best Business Usually Isn’t the One Recommended](https://foundfirstsearch.com/local-ai-search-chicago/): AI answers rank legibility, not quality. What a Chicago AI answer is actually built from, why the referral-driven business tends to lose, and the six things that change it.
- [Generative Engine Optimization: What Actually Gets You Cited in AI Answers](https://foundfirstsearch.com/generative-engine-optimization/): GEO is not rebranded SEO. Here is the mechanism behind AI citations, the five inputs that decide them in order of leverage, and how to measure the result without fooling yourself.
- [How to Find Out If AI Recommends Your Business (And What to Do If It Doesn’t)](https://foundfirstsearch.com/does-ai-recommend-your-business/): A ten-minute test you can run yourself, what the citations actually tell you, and the four inputs that decide whether an AI names your business.

## Optional

- [Sitemap](https://foundfirstsearch.com/sitemap.xml)