“Explain to your father and I what exactly it is you’re doing with ngenAOS.”
My mother asked it while handing me a bag with two Tupperware containers of leftovers from dinner. It wasn’t really a question. It was a demand to understand why Zack and I started a company.
“We build websites that are optimized to be read by AI,” I told them.
“What does that mean?” my dad asked.
I explained that more and more people are using chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity to ask a question instead of typing it into Google, back before Gemini was baked in.
“If you ask ChatGPT, ‘Where’s the best ice cream in Brick, NJ?’, it gives you a couple of recommendations, Dad. We build the websites that make it easier—and more likely—that ChatGPT uses our client when it puts that answer together.”
“What does that mean?”
Before we started talking into our phones to ask what tracking force our Sansui FR-D25 turntable recommends, we used Google Search to pull up links related to whatever we typed in. Websites were built to rank on the page for certain keywords. Search “family vacations,” and the engine returned a list of links to pages that contained those words, along with the sponsored ones up top.
That still matters. But a recent study from eightohtwo.com found 37% of searches now start with an LLM.
“What’s an LLM?” my dad shot back.
I explained, promised to keep the acronyms to a minimum from here on out, and got to what actually makes ngenAOS different from just about every other web-design / grow-your-online-presence / increase-your-revenue agency out there.
When you ask an LLM a question, it hunts for an answer—but it won’t expend much energy to find it. A site has to be structured so the LLM can get in, and the content has to be readable once it’s there.
LLMs want to give the right answer. Just like Ms. Butterfield in 9th-grade English used to say: cite your evidence. LLMs want human-written content that’s accurate and credible. You wouldn’t ask the neighbor with the overgrown yard for landscaping advice, and an LLM won’t cite a source it doesn’t trust.
Missing links and empty pages tell an LLM the whole site might be messy—and messy reads as untrustworthy. If Timmy’s Fantastic Tacos claims to have the best taco east of the Parkway but the link to the menu is broken, the LLM asks how good the taco can really be if they can’t fix their nav bar.
The early models trained on user-generated sites like Reddit. They want to see a site that keeps moving. New, human-written content tells an LLM the page isn’t stale.
Mom and Dad are still with me. I keep going.
“Building the website is only part of what we do.”
We run a trained team of specialized agents—market research, trend analysis, data synthesis, implementation tracking. They build approaches and content options around the client, backed by other agents who specialize in that client’s industry and customer base, all pointed at one thing: high-quality, relevant, credible content. A human writes the final piece. It goes on the site. Every month.
Then we measure it with real data. We take baseline metrics and report what we find to the client, every month.
“What’s an agent?” my dad asks.
To be continued — that answer’s a whole post of its own. More soon.