Most conversations about seo for architect firms still start and end with Google rankings. That made sense for a long time. It's slightly incomplete now, because a growing number of homeowners skip the results page altogether and ask an AI tool who they should hire.
So before we explain anything, we'd like you to run a small test on your own practice. It takes about ten minutes, and the rest of this article makes more sense once you've seen what comes back.
Run the test before you read any further
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Mode. Then type the sort of question a real client would ask, naming your type of work and your area. For example, who is a good architect for a rear extension on a Victorian terrace in a particular borough.
Do it a few ways:
- Ask the question plainly, the way you'd ask a friend.
- Ask it again with a budget or a constraint, like a conservation area.
- Ask for a comparison between two or three named practices, including yours.
- Ask the tool what it knows about your practice directly.
Write down who gets named, in what order, and what's said about each. Do it on two different tools if you can. AI answers vary from one run to the next, so treat what you see as a rough sample, not a verdict.
Look at who gets named, and why
Now study the list. It's rarely the biggest practice, and it's not always the one ranking first on Google. Often it's a smaller firm with a clear, well-documented presence in the specific area you asked about.
Nobody outside the AI companies knows exactly how these tools choose, and anyone who claims certainty is overselling. What we can say is that they tend to lean on information they can find, read and cross-check. A practice that's described consistently across its website, its Google profile and a handful of directories gives an AI tool something solid to repeat. A practice described inconsistently, or barely at all, gives it nothing to work with, and it moves on to someone else.
Pay particular attention to the fourth question, where you asked about your own practice. Is the description accurate? Does it mention the work you actually want more of, or something you stopped doing years ago? Sometimes the tool says it can't find much, which is useful in its own way. Other times it repeats an old address, a wrong service or a project that isn't yours. Those errors usually trace back to a stale directory listing or a page that says too little, and they're often quicker to fix than people expect.
What the names usually have in common
When you look at the practices that keep coming up, a few things recur. Their project pages explain what was built, where, and under which planning route. Their business details match everywhere. They have recent reviews that mention specific work. And their content answers questions directly instead of circling around them in marketing language.
None of that is exotic. It's mostly clarity and consistency, applied patiently. It's also why practices with beautiful sites and thin text often lose out to less polished competitors who simply explain themselves better.
Where an architecture practice usually falls short
Most gaps fall into the same few places. Project pages that are galleries with no words. A Google Business Profile set up once and left alone. Old directory listings with outdated addresses or phone numbers. Service pages that say "we do extensions, loft conversions and new builds" without any detail about where or how. And no structured data, which is the markup that tells machines what a page is about.
Fixing these is the heart of what AI SEO services should cover for an architecture practice: consistent business information, project pages written for people and machines, structured data, and a way to check periodically whether you're being named. It's the same groundwork as good traditional SEO, extended to a place where fewer people are looking and the competition is thinner. We offer this ourselves, so weigh that, but the checklist applies to whoever you hire.
What it looked like for two of our clients
Extension Architecture is a London practice we've worked with since early 2016. Their authority score now sits at 31 and 148 of their pages are cited across Google AI Overview, AI Mode, Gemini and ChatGPT. That didn't come from one tactic. It followed a sequence of technical clean-up, structured content, then authority work, over time.
London Design & Build, a client since 2025, is at an earlier stage. Their organic traffic is up 12% to 281 visits a month, with early citations on ChatGPT and AI Mode. That's a modest number, and we'd rather say so plainly. Early citations are a good sign, not proof of enquiries, and it's too soon to say much more.
Keep checking, and be honest about what you see
Repeat your test every couple of months. Keep a simple note of the date, the tool, the question you asked and who was named. Over a year that little log tells you more than most reports will, because it's your own evidence and nobody else's version of it.
If your name starts appearing, or the description of your practice becomes more accurate, something is working. If nothing changes after a good stretch of effort, that's worth raising with whoever's doing the work.
