Be the business AI names.
AI visibility, answer engine optimization, and local SEO for Wilmington businesses. Strategy that ties to booked work, not vanity metrics.
Top of Search is a marketing consultancy in Wilmington, North Carolina that helps owner-operated local businesses get cited by AI search engines. When a customer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, or Gemini who to hire in Wilmington, the work is making sure your business is the one named.
That is a different job than ranking on a results page. Answer engines assemble a recommendation from structured data, third-party sources, and content specific enough to quote. If your business is described inconsistently across the web, carries no schema markup, and has service pages that read like everyone else's, the engine has nothing solid to work with and names a competitor it can verify instead.
Wilmington is home and it is also the proving ground. The same work runs for businesses anywhere, but here it happens with someone who knows the market, the seasons, and who your buyers actually are.
What gets built, and in what order.
Google Business Profile
The strongest local signal you control, and the first place answer engines look. Categories, services, attributes, the new AI-read fields, and a review pattern that mentions the work you actually do.
Entity consistency
Your name, address, phone, and description identical everywhere they appear, so engines resolve one coherent business instead of guessing between several versions of you.
Schema and site structure
The markup that tells an engine what you do, where you do it, and who vouches for you. Plus a site architecture that lets it retrieve and quote you accurately.
Content built to be quoted
Pages that answer the specific questions Wilmington buyers type, worded so an engine can quote them directly. Often this means rewriting what you already have rather than publishing more.
Measurement
A fixed set of prompts, run monthly across the engines, showing where you appeared, where you did not, and which competitors were named instead. Not traffic. Citations.
It works here.
Gillespie Group Real Estate is now the third most cited website for answers about the Wilmington real estate market, ahead of legacy brokerages, and first for relocation questions. Three and a half years of deliberate work, built here.
Read the case study →Four ways to work together, and what each costs.
Most Wilmington owners start with the audit. It tells you where you stand and what to fix first, and it's yours to keep whether or not we keep working together.
AI Visibility Audit
$1,000A 10 business day consulting engagement. Your business run against real customer prompts across five engines, scored across six sections, with a prioritized list of what to fix first and a 30 minute review call.
Launch and Learn
$2,500A 90 day paid advertising test that builds and runs the campaign, so you learn whether paid traffic is the right lever. Ad spend paid directly to the platform, $500 a month minimum.
AI Visibility Partnership
From $3,500 / moOngoing ownership of the answer layer. Strategy always, execution as deep as you want it, alongside whoever already handles your other marketing. Six month minimum.
Fractional CMO
From $8,000 / moSenior marketing leadership tied to your revenue, month over month, without a full time hire. One client per category per market.
Wilmington and the Cape Fear region.
Based in Wilmington, working across New Hanover, Brunswick, and Pender counties. That includes Wrightsville Beach, Carolina Beach, Kure Beach, Leland, Hampstead, Southport, Oak Island, Ogden, Porters Neck, and Castle Hayne.
Also working with businesses in Raleigh and the Triangle, and with owners across the country. Local is where it started, not where it stops.
Before you reach out.
What does AI visibility work cost in Wilmington?
The audit is $1,000 and is the right starting point for most businesses. Ongoing partnership begins at $3,500 a month with a six month minimum, and fractional CMO work begins at $8,000 a month. A 90 day paid advertising test is $2,500 plus ad spend paid directly to the platform. Pricing is the same whether you are in Wilmington or anywhere else.
How long before my business shows up in AI answers?
Most businesses see citation shifts within 60 to 90 days when existing content and authority are in place. Building from scratch typically takes 4 to 6 months. AI systems need time to crawl, retrieve, and trust new content, and how long that takes depends on how competitive your category is and how crowded the Wilmington market is for what you do. This isn't deterministic the way a Google ranking is. The same query can return different sources from one request to the next. The work improves your eligibility to be cited and the consistency with which you appear.
I already pay for SEO. Do I need this too?
It depends on what your current provider is doing. Traditional SEO builds rankings on a results page, while this work builds the entity clarity, structured data, and quotable content that determine whether an engine names you inside an answer. The two overlap and a strong SEO foundation helps, but ranking well does not guarantee being cited. Ask your current provider how they measure whether AI recommends you.
Do you work with businesses outside Wilmington?
Yes. Wilmington is home and the work is tested here first, but clients are in Raleigh and across the country. What a business needs to be named by an answer engine does not change with the zip code. What changes is which questions matter and who else is competing to answer them.
Will you take on one of my competitors?
It depends on the engagement. The AI Visibility Audit is a diagnostic. It reads where your business stands today and tells you what to fix, and diagnosing two businesses in the same category takes nothing away from either one. Launch and Learn is the same shape: a defined test with an end date. Both are available to competing businesses. The AI Visibility Partnership and Fractional CMO engagements are exclusive: one client per category per market. Those two depend on making one business the answer, which cannot be done for two businesses competing for the same question. If a competitor of yours already holds one of those seats in your market, that comes up on the first call.
What kinds of Wilmington businesses is this for?
Owner-operated businesses where the owner still makes the decisions, generally doing between one and five million in revenue, in a category where a customer would ask an assistant for a recommendation before calling anyone. Home services and real estate are the most common, though the work is not limited to them.
How do I find out where I stand right now?
Run the free Citation Check, or ask ChatGPT the question a ready-to-buy customer in your market would ask and see whether you are named. Screenshot what you find, because that is your baseline. The audit does this formally across five engines and scores it across six sections.
What do you need from me to get started?
Access to your website or a developer who can publish changes, timely answers when we need business context, and someone who can approve copy. If your website is locked behind a slow vendor relationship, mention it on the first call so we can plan around it.
Strategy first. Revenue tied. Detail obsessed.
Let's see if we're a fit.
A 30 minute conversation about your business and whether engaging with Top of Search might be the right next step. Share a few details, pick a time, and I'll come prepared.