For most of my career, if somebody had talked to me about the digital visibility of an architecture studio, I would probably have thought they meant its website, Google ranking or perhaps social media.
I see it rather differently now.
Part of that comes from working much more closely with the business-development side of architecture and design studios, and part of it comes from watching how my own behaviour has changed. If I hear about a company or somebody recommends a person to me, I rarely rely on the recommendation alone. I look them up. I visit the website, search the founder, look at LinkedIn, see what they have written and try to understand what they actually know. Increasingly, I might also use an AI tool to research a market, understand a subject or identify businesses I didn't previously know existed.
I don't think this replaces relationships or referrals. Architecture and design remain deeply relationship-led industries and I can't see that changing any time soon. What has changed is how much information sits around those relationships before a conversation ever takes place.
Somebody can now form a surprisingly detailed impression of a studio without speaking to anybody inside it.
That makes digital visibility much more interesting to me than simply ranking a website.
A good studio can still be remarkably difficult to understand online
For most of my career, if somebody had talked to me about the digital visibility of an architecture studio, I would probably have thought they meant its website, Google ranking or perhaps social media.
I see it rather differently now.
Part of that comes from working much more closely with the business-development side of architecture and design studios, and part of it comes from watching how my own behaviour has changed. If somebody recommends a business or person to me, I rarely rely on the recommendation alone. I look them up. I visit the website, search the founder, look at LinkedIn, see what they have written and try to understand what they actually know. Increasingly, I might also use an AI tool to research a market, explore a problem or identify businesses I didn't previously know existed.
I don't think any of this replaces relationships or referrals. Architecture and design remain deeply relationship-led industries, and I can't see that changing any time soon. What has changed is how much information now sits around those relationships before a conversation ever takes place.
Somebody can form a surprisingly detailed impression of a studio without speaking to anybody inside it.
That makes digital visibility a much broader new-business question than simply whether a website ranks on Google.
A good studio can still be remarkably difficult to understand online
Most established architecture and design studios are not invisible. Quite the opposite. They may have years of projects online, press coverage, awards, Instagram accounts, LinkedIn profiles, competition entries, interviews and hundreds of pages sitting across different websites.
The problem is that a large digital footprint does not necessarily create a clear picture.
I see this quite often when researching studios. I can spend twenty minutes looking through a very good website and come away knowing that the practice produces excellent work without being much clearer about what it particularly wants to be known for, where its strongest experience sits or why a particular client should think of it for a particular problem.
That isn't necessarily a criticism of the website. Architecture websites have traditionally had another job to do. They are portfolios, expressions of the practice and places to show the work. The commercial argument behind the practice is often much less explicit.
But if a studio wants to become known for developer-led housing, hospitality, workplace retrofit, high-end residential or another particular area, there needs to be enough clear and credible information around the business for somebody to make that connection.
Search engines and AI systems face a version of the same problem. They don't have access to the collective knowledge sitting inside the heads of the directors. They can only work with information that has actually made its way into the world and that they are able to discover and interpret.
This is why I think digital visibility begins much earlier than SEO. It begins with deciding what you actually want people to understand about the business.
Before creating more content, understand what already exists
One of the first things I would look at is not what a studio should publish next, but what somebody researching it can already find.
A practice's digital identity does not begin and end with its website. Years of information may already exist through project credits, awards, press coverage, directories, interviews, LinkedIn profiles, biographies, PDFs, conference appearances, collaborators' websites and references from clients or consultants.
Some of it may describe the studio perfectly. Some of it may describe a version of the business that hasn't really existed for five years.
This becomes particularly interesting when a practice has changed direction. Perhaps it wants more work in a sector that is barely represented online, while an older area of the business dominates its digital footprint. A founder may have substantial expertise that is almost impossible to discover. Important projects might appear on other people's websites without enough context connecting them back to the practice. Different biographies may describe the same person in completely different ways.
Before adding another layer of information, I think it is worth understanding the picture that already exists.
What does the wider web appear to think the practice does? Which markets and subjects is it associated with? Who are the people most visibly connected with it? What evidence exists to support the expertise the studio claims, and where are there gaps, outdated information or contradictions?
This is one of the reasons I increasingly think about authority and discoverability, rather than simply SEO. The objective isn't only to make individual pages appear in search results. It is to make the business itself easier to find, understand and trust.
The new-business strategy should probably come before the content strategy
I wouldn't start by asking an architecture studio what it should write about. I would start by asking what work it wants more of.
That sounds like a small distinction, but it changes the exercise considerably.
If a practice wants to build more relationships with hotel developers, for example, the question isn't how it can produce more content. The question is whether the information somebody encounters around that practice gives them a credible reason to associate it with hospitality in the first place.
Are the relevant projects easy to find? Is the expertise behind those projects explained? Are the people who led them visible? Does the studio have anything useful to say about the issues hotel developers and operators are actually dealing with? Is there independent evidence elsewhere that supports what the practice says about itself?
When you start looking at visibility this way, a website stops being an isolated marketing object. It becomes one part of a much larger body of evidence around the business.
This is particularly interesting in architecture because studios contain an extraordinary amount of knowledge that never becomes visible outside them.
A director may have spent twenty years dealing with a particular planning issue, procurement route, building type or client problem. Another person may understand something incredibly specific about delivering hotels, retrofitting difficult buildings or navigating a particular market. The practice may have learnt something important through ten completed projects that a potential client is currently encountering for the first time.
Very little of that necessarily exists anywhere that person can discover it.
The knowledge is already there. The challenge is deciding which parts are genuinely useful to make visible and connecting them to what the studio wants to become known for.
Founder-led studios have another layer to think about
This becomes even more important for the founder-led practices I tend to work with because the business and the people behind it are difficult to separate completely.
Clients aren't appointing an anonymous corporate entity. They are often appointing the judgement, experience, taste and way of thinking of a relatively small number of people.
Yet it is quite common to find a beautifully presented studio website while the founder is almost invisible outside it. You can see what the practice has produced, but very little of the thinking behind the work or the person who will eventually sit opposite the client.
I don't think the answer is that every architect needs to become a “personal brand”, and I would be deeply suspicious of turning a thoughtful studio founder into somebody who feels obliged to manufacture five LinkedIn posts every week.
There is a much more natural version of this.
Founders already have opinions. They notice changes in their markets. They have learnt things through difficult projects, changed their minds about things, made mistakes and developed views that younger versions of themselves didn't have. They have conversations with clients and consultants every week that reveal something about where their industry is going.
Making some of that thinking public gives people another way to understand the practice.
It might be a considered LinkedIn post, a longer article, a contribution to an industry discussion, a case study that actually explains what was learnt rather than simply showing photographs, or a comment in the press. The format matters considerably less than whether there is something worth saying.
For a founder-led business, this can create a useful connection between the expertise of the individual and the expertise of the company. A potential client might encounter a founder's perspective on LinkedIn months before they ever visit the studio website. When they eventually do, the name is no longer completely unfamiliar and they already know something about how the person behind the business thinks.
I have become less interested in “content” and more interested in knowledge
The word content has started to bother me slightly because it encourages businesses to think in terms of output.
There is a pressure to fill a calendar with posts, articles and newsletters, regardless of whether there was anything particularly useful to say in the first place. Once the requirement to publish comes before the thought, the quality usually drops quite quickly.
AI has made this problem considerably more obvious because producing plausible-looking material is now incredibly easy. A company can create ten perfectly competent articles about almost any subject before lunch. If every competitor can do exactly the same thing, the existence of another generic article becomes increasingly meaningless.
What remains much harder to manufacture is genuine experience.
A founder who has spent fifteen years working with a particular client type knows things somebody summarising the subject from the internet doesn't. A studio that has delivered six complicated retrofit projects has encountered problems, compromises and decisions that won't necessarily appear in a generic guide to retrofit. A practice trying to enter a new market will have questions that somebody who has already worked there can answer from experience.
That is the material I think is worth making visible.
The objective shouldn't be to produce as much information as possible. It should be to identify the knowledge the practice genuinely possesses, decide which parts are useful to the people it wants to work with and find sensible ways of putting that knowledge into the world.
Over time, that begins to create something much more valuable than a content calendar. It creates a body of evidence around what the studio knows.
Search is changing, but I wouldn't build a strategy around trying to manipulate AI
AI makes this conversation more interesting because the way people find information is changing.
Traditional search often starts with somebody reducing a problem to a few words and working through the results. AI allows somebody to describe a situation in much greater detail, ask follow-up questions, compare approaches and research a market conversationally. Somebody doesn't necessarily need to know the name of a studio before beginning that research.
That creates an interesting opportunity for specialist businesses, but it also creates a temptation to treat AI discovery as another algorithm to manipulate.
I think studios should be cautious about that.
Google's own guidance for its AI search experiences says that the normal fundamentals of search remain relevant and that there are no additional technical requirements or special AI files required to appear in those features. OpenAI similarly provides publishers with controls around whether their sites can be discovered through ChatGPT search. The technology and products will continue to change, which is another reason I would be wary of building a long-term strategy around tricks designed for today's version of a particular system.
The more durable question is whether the digital representation of the business is clear, accessible, useful and credible.
Can somebody understand what the practice does? Are its projects, people and areas of expertise connected clearly? Is there substantive information behind the claims it makes? Does useful knowledge exist as accessible text rather than being trapped entirely inside imagery or documents that are difficult to interpret? Is the information on the website consistent with what credible sources elsewhere say about the business?
These are useful questions whether somebody eventually discovers the studio through Google, ChatGPT, LinkedIn, an industry publication or a recommendation from another person.
Nobody can credibly guarantee that ChatGPT, Google or another AI platform will recommend a particular studio. The objective isn't to trick a system into mentioning the business. It is to make the practice sufficiently clear and well evidenced that both people and machines have a better chance of understanding what it genuinely knows and does.
What you say about yourself and what others say about you do different jobs
A studio can control what appears on its own website, what its founders publish and how its projects are presented. That makes those channels particularly useful for explaining expertise in depth.
There is also a limit to what a business can establish simply by saying things about itself.
Every architecture practice can describe itself as thoughtful, innovative, experienced or award-winning. At some point there needs to be evidence behind those claims.
Projects provide some of it. Detailed case studies can provide more. But credible information from outside the business can add another layer because somebody other than the studio is creating the association.
Editorial coverage, interviews, awards, speaking appearances, recognised collaborators, client commentary and other independent references can all contribute to the wider picture somebody encounters when researching a practice.
This is where PR, digital visibility and authority begin to overlap.
Good press coverage has always been valuable because the right publication can put a studio in front of the right audience and add credibility. Increasingly, that coverage also becomes part of the public information through which the business can be researched later.
I wouldn't reduce PR to generating links for SEO or mentions for AI because that misses most of its value. The more useful distinction is between what a studio can explain through the channels it owns and the independent evidence that exists elsewhere.
The two reinforce one another.
A studio can explain what it knows and show the work behind that expertise. Credible third parties can provide independent evidence that the business and its people belong in that conversation.
A recent example from my own experience
I have recently seen a small version of this happen through my own LinkedIn activity.
The first example began with something I had been thinking about from my years in architecture: what happens to the apprenticeship of becoming an architect when AI removes more of the repetitive production work? I wrote about it on LinkedIn and the post went much further than I expected, reaching more than 18,000 impressions and generating over 70 comments.
What interested me wasn't simply the reach. Architects began adding experiences, disagreements and arguments I hadn't considered. The discussion changed some of my own thinking and eventually became a much deeper article exploring what AI could mean for architectural training, fees, practice structures and the value of professional judgement.
A short time later, something similar happened again. I wrote about what I wish I had understood about architecture at 18, particularly the commercial reality surrounding the profession that I only properly came to understand much later. Within a couple of days, that post had reached more than 10,000 people, 88% of them outside my existing network, and generated more than 40 comments. More than 200 people visited my profile directly from the post.
Again, the discussion became more interesting than the original post. Architects, developers and people who had left the profession began talking about fees, clients, money, professional education, the value architects believe they create versus the value clients perceive, and the strange contradiction of being frustrated by the economics of architecture while remaining enormously grateful for the education it provides. That conversation has now developed into another permanent piece of knowledge on the Grand House website.
Neither post was written to promote Grand House. There was no lead magnet, sales pitch or carefully engineered call to action. They started with things I genuinely knew or had been thinking about because of my own experience, and other people added their own knowledge to the discussion.
That is much closer to what I mean by digital visibility.
The value isn't simply that a post receives a large number of impressions for a few days. The more interesting effect is what can happen around it. People who didn't previously know you encounter an idea, some visit your profile or website and others join the conversation. The original thinking can then be developed into something more substantial that remains available after the social post has disappeared from people's feeds.
Over time, those individual pieces also begin to connect. In my case, they are gradually creating a body of work around architecture, the business of practice, technology, work-winning and how the profession is changing. That gives somebody researching me or Grand House considerably more context than a services page could provide on its own.
It also gives search engines and AI systems more substantive information from which to understand what I write about, what Grand House works on and how those subjects relate to one another. That does not guarantee that either will surface Grand House in response to a particular search or question. It simply creates a clearer and more credible body of evidence about the people, expertise and subjects behind the business.
For me, that is the important distinction. Digital visibility isn't about producing content for an algorithm. It is about making genuine expertise more visible and allowing useful ideas to travel further than the people who already know you.
→ Read: How will AI change the way architects learn, work and get paid?
Grand House Knowledge Hub article
→ Read: If I were 18 again, I would learn the business of architecture alongside architecture
Link this to the new Grand House Knowledge Hub article.
→ Original LinkedIn discussion: AI and the “CAD monkey” years
View the original LinkedIn post
→ Original LinkedIn discussion: What I wish I'd known about architecture at 18
Link this to the canonical LinkedIn post URL.
Visibility can begin long before somebody has a project for you
This matters particularly in architecture and design because the buying cycle can be extremely long.
A developer doesn't need a new architect every week. A hotel operator isn't appointing an interior designer every month. Somebody can encounter a practice, find its thinking useful and remember the name long before there is an appropriate project on which to appoint it.
This is where I think digital visibility connects directly with relationship development.
A future client might first encounter a founder's perspective because somebody in their network commented on it. Months later they see the practice mentioned in an article. At some point they visit the website and recognise the name. Perhaps they meet somebody from the studio at an event. None of those individual interactions needs to produce an immediate enquiry to have value.
By the time an actual opportunity appears, the practice may no longer be an unknown business trying to introduce itself from zero.
The same principle works in the other direction. If the studio approaches somebody proactively, that person can immediately research the practice. They may visit the website, look at the people behind it, search for relevant projects or read something one of the founders has written. What they find becomes part of how they interpret the original approach.
This is why I don't think digital visibility should sit in a separate marketing box while business development happens somewhere else.
If a studio has decided that it wants to build relationships with a particular group of developers, operators or decision-makers, its wider presence should support the same ambition. The website should make the relevant expertise understandable. The knowledge it publishes should demonstrate that expertise rather than simply claim it. The founders should be visible around subjects where they have something useful to contribute, and independent coverage should reinforce the picture where possible.
LinkedIn, search, AI, press, the studio website and direct business development then become different ways in which the same people can encounter and understand the practice.
None of this replaces relationships. It creates more opportunities for familiarity and credibility to begin developing before the first direct conversation, and more evidence for somebody to investigate once that conversation has started.
The objective isn't maximum visibility
I don't think most founder-led architecture and design studios need enormous audiences.
If a practice wants to work with a relatively specific group of developers, operators, private clients or organisations, becoming famous to 500,000 people may be considerably less useful than becoming familiar and credible to the few hundred people who genuinely influence the kind of work it wants.
The question therefore isn't simply how to get more traffic, followers, impressions or mentions. It is what the studio wants to become known for, who needs to understand that and whether the information currently available around the business gives them enough reason to believe it.
For practices that have historically depended heavily on referrals, this creates another way for reputation to travel. The referral doesn't disappear, but it is no longer carrying the entire burden of discovery. A founder's thinking can travel beyond the people they already know. The studio's knowledge can be discovered. Its projects, experience and point of view can remain visible when nobody inside the practice is actively promoting them.
Increasingly, some of the systems involved in that discovery won't be human either. Search engines and AI systems are also trying to understand which people and organisations are associated with particular subjects and what evidence exists to support those associations.
I don't think the answer is to start writing for machines, and I certainly don't think every studio needs to turn itself into a publishing business.
The more useful objective is to become much clearer about what is genuinely distinctive and valuable inside the practice, decide who actually needs to understand it and make enough of that knowledge visible that it can travel beyond the people who already know the studio.
For me, that is where digital visibility becomes part of new business rather than simply another marketing exercise.
By Richard Hall, Founder & CEO of Grand House
SQUARESPACE SETTINGS
SEO title
How Can Architecture & Design Studios Become More Visible in Search and AI? | Grand House
SEO description
How architecture and design studios can build digital visibility through clear positioning, genuine expertise, founder thinking, search, AI and credible third-party authority.
URL slug
architecture-design-studios-digital-visibility-search-ai
Excerpt
Digital visibility is becoming part of how architecture and design studios are discovered, researched and understood. The opportunity is not simply to produce more content, but to make the expertise already inside the practice easier for the right people to find, understand and trust.
Category
Authority + Discoverability
Tags
Architecture, Design Studios, Digital Visibility, AI Search, Search, Business Development, Founder Visibility, Authority & Discoverability
Have you shorten the copy now or I'm just imagining it from what we had before?
You're not imagining it. The latest version is somewhat shorter than the fullest version we had developed.
What happened is that when I consolidated the rewrite, I preserved the main arguments but compressed some of the explanatory material and removed some repetition. In doing that, I went a little too far given what we're trying to achieve with the Knowledge Hub.
In particular, some depth was reduced around:
the distinction between having a digital footprint and actually being understood;
how positioning should determine what the studio becomes associated with online;
the relationship between the founder as an entity and the studio as an entity;
how expertise moves from internal knowledge → published thinking → external discussion → third-party evidence → discoverability;
some of the explanation of how AI/search systems encounter and interpret information;
the relationship between owned authority and earned authority;
the longer argument about visibility happening throughout the buying journey rather than only when someone is actively searching for an architect;
and some of the connective reasoning that made the original feel more substantial.
I also notice something else now that we've established the writing style with the Business of Architecture article: we shouldn't equate “more human” with “shorter.” That's not what you were asking for.
You wanted the same intellectual depth, but written like a proper Richard Hall article rather than a ChatGPT-generated explainer. That means longer, developed paragraphs and arguments that unfold naturally, rather than reducing everything to the cleanest possible version.
So I would not use the version I just gave you as the final replacement.
The right approach is to go back to the fullest Digital Visibility article, preserve all useful ideas, evidence and nuance, incorporate the stronger two-LinkedIn-post case study we agreed on, and rewrite the prose rather than compressing the substance.
And I should pressure-test it in the opposite direction too: I won't restore material simply to make it longer. If two paragraphs genuinely say the same thing, they shouldn't both survive. But if an earlier paragraph contains a distinct insight, mechanism or useful explanation, it stays.
That should give us a more substantial article than the version above, probably closer in depth to the Business of Architecture piece, while still feeling human-written rather than artificially padded.
So yes: your instinct was right. I shortened it more than I should have.
Pasted markdown.mdDocumentPasted markdown (2).mdDocumentPasted markdown (3).mdDocument
That was the original post before we make any changes: See copy attached 1. Then this is what you gave me before shortening it: Attached 2 Then the one you created and shorten. Attachment 3.  Make sure that you make a final robust article that doesn't leave anything behind, gives great insides and info to my ICP and SEO / GEO including my USP and insides from my own experience etc and always writen in my voice and article / human written format. 
How can architecture and design studios become more visible in search and AI?
For a long time, visibility for an architecture or design studio meant a fairly familiar collection of things: a good website, completed projects, press coverage, awards, perhaps some social media and, most importantly, a strong network of people who already knew the practice.
Those things still matter. What is changing is the way potential clients research businesses and form an impression of them before anybody inside the studio knows that research is happening. Someone looking for an architect, interior designer or specialist creative studio may still ask somebody they trust for a recommendation, but they might also search Google, look through LinkedIn, read an article, investigate a particular specialism or increasingly use an AI tool to understand a market, explore a problem and identify relevant businesses.
I have noticed the same change in my own behaviour. If somebody recommends a company or person to me, I rarely rely on the recommendation alone. I look them up. I visit the website, search the founder, look at LinkedIn, see what they have written and try to understand what they actually know. Increasingly, I might also use an AI tool to research the market around them or understand who else operates within it.
By the time I eventually speak to that business, I may already have formed a fairly detailed impression of who they are, what they know and whether they feel relevant.
I don't think any of this replaces relationships or referrals. Architecture and design remain deeply relationship-led industries, and I can't see that changing any time soon. What has changed is the amount of information sitting around those relationships before a conversation ever takes place.
That makes digital visibility a much broader new-business question than whether a website ranks on Google.
Being online is not the same as being understood
Most established architecture and design studios are not invisible. Quite the opposite. They may have years of projects online, press coverage, awards, Instagram accounts, LinkedIn profiles, interviews, directories, competition entries and hundreds of pages sitting across different websites.
The problem is often not an absence of information. It is an absence of clarity.
I see this quite often when researching studios. I can spend twenty minutes looking through a very good website and come away knowing that the practice produces excellent work without being much clearer about what it particularly wants to be known for, where its strongest experience sits or why a particular client should think of it for a particular problem.
That isn't necessarily a criticism of the website. Architecture websites have traditionally had another job to do. They are portfolios, expressions of the practice and places to show the work. The commercial argument behind the practice is often much less explicit.
But if a studio wants to become known for developer-led housing, hospitality, workplace retrofit, high-end residential or another particular area, there needs to be enough clear and credible evidence around the business for somebody to make that connection.
Search engines and AI systems face a version of the same problem. They don't have access to the collective knowledge sitting inside the heads of the directors. They can only work with information and associations that have actually made their way into the world and that they are able to discover and interpret.
This doesn't mean repeating the same keywords throughout a website or manufacturing dozens of articles around search terms. It means gradually building a body of information that demonstrates why the practice belongs in a particular conversation.
Digital visibility becomes commercially useful when it makes the business easier for the right people to understand.
Start with what the studio actually wants to be known for
I wouldn't start by asking an architecture studio what it should write about. I would start with the same question that sits behind a good new-business strategy: what work does the studio actually want more of?
That sounds like a small distinction, but it changes the exercise considerably.
If a practice wants to build more relationships with hotel developers, for example, the question isn't how it can produce more hospitality content. The question is whether the information somebody encounters around that practice gives them a credible reason to associate it with hospitality in the first place.
Are the relevant projects easy to find and is the expertise behind them explained? Are the people who led those projects visible? Does the practice have anything useful to say about the issues hotel developers and operators are actually dealing with? Can somebody understand how the studio thinks rather than simply see photographs of what it has produced? Is there independent evidence elsewhere that supports what the practice says about itself?
When you start looking at visibility this way, the website stops being an isolated marketing object. It becomes one part of a much larger body of evidence around the business.
This is particularly interesting in architecture because studios contain an extraordinary amount of knowledge that never becomes visible outside them. A director may have spent twenty years dealing with a particular planning issue, procurement route, building type, client problem or market. Another person may understand something incredibly specific about delivering hotels, retrofitting difficult buildings or working with a particular type of developer. The practice may have learnt something through ten completed projects that a potential client is currently encountering for the first time.
Very little of that necessarily exists anywhere that person can discover it.
The knowledge is already there. The opportunity is to work out which parts genuinely matter to the clients the studio wants, and make enough of that knowledge visible that the practice becomes easier to understand in relation to those problems.
Your digital footprint already exists, whether you've designed it or not
This is something I think established businesses can easily overlook.
A studio's digital identity does not begin and end with its own website. Years of information may already exist around the business through project credits, press coverage, awards, directories, interviews, LinkedIn profiles, biographies, PDFs, social posts, conference appearances, collaborators' websites and references from former clients or consultants.
Some of it may describe the studio perfectly. Some of it may describe a version of the business that hasn't really existed for five years.
This becomes particularly interesting when a practice has changed direction. Perhaps it wants more work in a sector that is barely represented online, while an older area of the business dominates its digital footprint. A founder may have substantial expertise that is almost impossible to discover. Important projects might appear on other people's websites without enough context connecting them back to the practice. Different biographies may describe the same person in completely different ways.
Before producing more information, I think it is worth understanding the picture that already exists.
What does the wider web appear to think the practice does? Which markets and subjects is it associated with? Who are the people most visibly connected with it? What evidence supports the expertise the studio claims? Where are the gaps, outdated information or contradictions?
That exercise can reveal a surprisingly large gap between how a practice understands itself and how somebody encountering it from the outside is likely to understand it.
This is one of the reasons I increasingly think about authority and discoverability, rather than simply SEO. The objective isn't only to make individual pages appear in search results. It is to make the business itself easier to find, understand and trust.
In a founder-led studio, the founder is part of the picture too
This becomes particularly important for the founder-led architecture, design and creative studios I tend to work with because the business and the people behind it are difficult to separate completely.
Clients aren't appointing an anonymous corporate machine. They are often appointing the judgement, experience, taste and way of thinking of a relatively small number of people.
Yet it is quite common to find a beautifully presented studio website while the founder is almost invisible outside it. You can see what the practice has produced, but very little of the thinking behind the work or the person who will eventually sit opposite the client.
I don't think the answer is that every architect needs to become a “personal brand”, and I would be deeply suspicious of turning a thoughtful studio founder into somebody who feels obliged to manufacture five LinkedIn posts every week. There is a much more natural version of this.
Founders already have opinions. They notice changes in their markets. They have learnt things through difficult projects, changed their minds about things, made mistakes and developed views that younger versions of themselves didn't have. They have conversations with clients and consultants every week that reveal something about where their industry is going.
Making some of that thinking public gives people another way to understand the practice.
That might happen through a considered LinkedIn post, a longer article, a contribution to an industry discussion, a case study that actually explains what was learnt rather than simply showing photographs, an interview or a comment in the press. The format matters considerably less than whether there is something worth saying.
A potential client may encounter a founder's perspective on LinkedIn long before visiting the studio's website. They might then read an article, look at a project, remember the name and encounter it again several months later when a relevant need appears. By the time they eventually speak, the founder isn't completely unknown.
AI adds another dimension to this. As more of a founder's genuine expertise, experience and point of view becomes publicly available and clearly associated with the business they run, there is more substantive information through which both people and machines can understand that relationship.
The objective isn't to perform for an algorithm. It is to make expertise that already exists inside the business visible outside it.
I have become less interested in “content” and more interested in knowledge
The word content has started to bother me slightly because it encourages businesses to think in terms of output.
There is a pressure to fill a calendar with posts, articles and newsletters regardless of whether there was anything particularly useful to say in the first place. Once the requirement to publish comes before the thought, the quality usually drops quite quickly.
AI has made this problem considerably more obvious because producing plausible-looking material is now incredibly easy. A company can create ten perfectly competent articles about almost any subject before lunch. If every competitor can do exactly the same thing, the existence of another generic article becomes increasingly meaningless.
What remains much harder to manufacture is genuine experience.
A founder who has spent fifteen years working with a particular client type knows things somebody summarising the subject from the internet doesn't. A studio that has delivered six complicated retrofit projects has encountered problems, compromises and decisions that won't necessarily appear in a generic guide to retrofit. A practice trying to enter a new market will have questions that somebody who has already worked there can answer from experience.
That is the material I think is worth making visible.
The subject might be how a particular building type is changing, something clients repeatedly misunderstand, what the studio has learnt from delivering a certain kind of project, a shift in procurement or regulation, or a change in the market affecting the people it wants to work with. The subject should come from expertise and experience rather than the need to fill a content calendar.
Over time, those individual pieces begin creating a clearer picture of what the studio and the people behind it know. Experience, informed opinion, specific observations and first-hand knowledge become particularly valuable in a world where generic information can be generated almost instantly.
The objective shouldn't be to produce as much information as possible. It should be to identify the knowledge the practice genuinely possesses, decide which parts are useful to the people it wants to work with and find sensible ways of putting that knowledge into the world.
That creates something much more valuable than a content calendar. It creates a body of evidence around what the studio actually knows.
Digital visibility is bigger than SEO, LinkedIn or PR
I think this distinction matters because it is very easy to divide digital visibility into channels.
The website belongs to SEO. LinkedIn belongs to social media. Press coverage belongs to PR. Articles belong to content marketing. Direct conversations belong to business development.
That makes organisational sense, but it isn't necessarily how somebody encounters a business.
Imagine a developer sees something an architecture studio founder has written on LinkedIn because somebody in their network comments on it. They look at the founder's profile, visit the practice's website, read a relevant project case study and then encounter the practice again several weeks later in an industry publication. Months afterwards, when researching a particular project or problem, the same name appears again.
From the developer's point of view, those aren't necessarily five separate marketing channels. They are accumulating evidence.
The founder has demonstrated how they think. The website has shown relevant experience. The case study has provided detail. The press coverage has added independent credibility. Perhaps a mutual contact then reinforces the impression through a recommendation.
Together, those encounters begin creating an association between a business and a particular kind of expertise.
That is much closer to how I think about digital visibility.
What you say about yourself and what others say about you do different jobs
A studio can control what appears on its own website, what its founders publish and how its projects are presented. That makes those channels particularly useful for explaining expertise in depth.
There is also a limit to what a business can establish simply by saying things about itself.
Every architecture practice can describe itself as innovative, thoughtful, experienced or award-winning. At some point there needs to be evidence behind those claims.
Projects provide some of it. Detailed case studies can provide more. But credible information from outside the business adds another layer because somebody other than the studio is creating the association.
Editorial coverage, interviews, awards, reviews, speaking appearances, recognised collaborators, client commentary, professional references and other independent mentions can all contribute to the wider picture somebody encounters when researching a practice.
This is where PR, digital visibility and authority begin to overlap.
Good press coverage has always been valuable because the right publication can put a studio in front of the right audience and add credibility. Increasingly, that coverage also becomes part of the public information through which the business can be researched and understood later.
I would be careful about reducing PR to generating links for SEO or mentions for AI because that misses most of its value. The more useful distinction is between the knowledge and evidence a studio controls and the independent authority that exists elsewhere.
The two do different jobs, but they reinforce one another.
A studio can explain what it knows, show the work behind that expertise and make the thinking of its people visible. Credible third parties can provide independent evidence that the business and its people belong in that conversation.
For a smaller studio, that can be particularly useful. You don't necessarily need the largest marketing budget or the biggest audience if the information that does exist around the practice is unusually clear, relevant and credible.
AI is changing how expertise gets discovered
AI makes this conversation more interesting because the way people find information is changing.
Traditional search generally required somebody to know roughly what they were looking for and reduce the problem to a relatively short query. AI allows people to research much more conversationally. Someone can describe a particular situation, ask follow-up questions, compare different approaches and explore a market without necessarily knowing the names of the businesses they might eventually discover.
That creates an interesting opportunity for specialist studios because discovery doesn't always have to begin with somebody already knowing your name.
There is also an obvious temptation to treat AI discovery as another algorithm to manipulate. An entire language has already developed around “ranking in ChatGPT”, AEO and GEO, often accompanied by claims that businesses can somehow engineer recommendations from generative systems.
I think studios should be cautious about that.
Google's current guidance on its generative AI search features continues to emphasise the fundamentals of good search and useful, non-commodity content rather than a separate set of tricks for AI. Google has also clarified that llms.txt is not required for Google Search and does not improve or damage rankings there. Google for Developers
OpenAI's guidance is similarly practical. Public websites can appear in ChatGPT search, and publishers that want their content to be discoverable and surfaced in ChatGPT should make sure they are not blocking OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI also separates OAI-SearchBot, which is used for search, from GPTBot, which relates to model training, so allowing search discovery does not require making the same decision about training. OpenAI Help Center
Those technical details matter, but I wouldn't mistake them for the strategy.
The more durable question is whether the digital representation of the business is clear, accessible, useful and credible. Can search engines access the relevant information? Can somebody understand what the practice actually does? Are its projects, people and areas of expertise connected clearly? Is there substantive information behind the claims it makes? Does useful knowledge exist as accessible text rather than being trapped entirely inside imagery or PDFs? Is the information on the studio's own website consistent with credible information elsewhere?
Google itself describes structured data as a way of helping it understand page content, but structured data doesn't create expertise that isn't there in the first place. Google for Developers
These are useful questions whether somebody eventually discovers the studio through Google, ChatGPT, LinkedIn, an industry publication or a recommendation from another person.
Nobody can credibly guarantee that ChatGPT, Google or another AI platform will recommend a particular studio. These systems change, their answers can vary and the mechanisms through which information is selected are not completely transparent. I would be wary of anybody selling certainty where it doesn't exist.
The objective shouldn't be to trick an AI system into mentioning the studio. It should be to create a sufficiently clear, useful and well-evidenced digital representation of what the business genuinely knows and does, then make it easy for both people and machines to find, understand and verify it.
Visibility begins long before somebody searches for your studio
Not every future client begins by searching for a supplier. Often they encounter an idea first.
They see something a founder has written because somebody in their network commented on it. They read an article that has been shared. They hear somebody speak. They come across a project in the press or find a useful perspective while researching something else. Only afterwards do they look at the person or business behind it.
This matters enormously in architecture and design because the buying cycle can be long. A developer doesn't need a new architect every week and a hotel group doesn't appoint an interior designer every month. There can be a considerable gap between somebody becoming aware of a practice and having a live project on which that practice could be appointed.
Digital visibility allows familiarity and credibility to develop during that gap.
A future client might first encounter a founder's perspective because somebody in their network commented on it. Months later they see the practice mentioned in an article. At some point they visit the website and recognise the name. Perhaps they meet somebody from the studio at an event. None of those individual interactions needs to produce an immediate enquiry to have value.
By the time an actual opportunity appears, the practice may no longer be an unknown business trying to introduce itself from zero.
The same principle works in the other direction. If a studio approaches somebody proactively, that person can immediately research the practice. They may visit the website, look at the people behind it, search for relevant projects or read something one of the founders has written. What they find afterwards becomes part of how they interpret the original approach.
This is why I don't think digital visibility should sit in a separate marketing box while business development happens somewhere else.
Digital visibility and new business should be one strategy
If the new-business strategy says a practice wants to build relationships with a particular group of developers, operators or decision-makers, its digital presence should support the same ambition.
The website should make the relevant expertise understandable. The knowledge the studio publishes should demonstrate that expertise rather than simply claim it. The founders should be visible around subjects where they have something useful to contribute. Third-party coverage should provide independent evidence where possible.
LinkedIn, search, AI, press, the studio website and direct business development then stop behaving like unrelated channels. They become different ways through which the same relatively small group of people can encounter, understand and gradually become familiar with the business.
None of this replaces relationships.
Architecture and design remain deeply relationship-led industries and people continue to appoint people they trust. Digital visibility simply allows some of that familiarity and credibility to begin forming before the first direct conversation takes place.
It also works in the other direction. New-business activity can create discovery, after which the studio's digital presence helps somebody investigate and build confidence in what they have just encountered. Equally, digital visibility can create the first point of discovery, after which a relationship develops through conversations, meetings and eventually the right opportunity.
The two are increasingly difficult to separate.
A recent example from my own experience
I have recently seen a small version of this happen through my own LinkedIn activity.
The first example began with something I had been thinking about from my years in architecture: what happens to the apprenticeship of becoming an architect when AI removes more of the repetitive production work? I wrote about it on LinkedIn and the post went much further than I expected, reaching more than 18,000 impressions and generating over 70 comments.
What interested me wasn't simply the reach. Architects began adding experiences, disagreements and arguments I hadn't considered. The discussion changed some of my own thinking and eventually became a much deeper article exploring what AI could mean for architectural training, fees, practice structures and the value of professional judgement.
A short time later, something similar happened again. I wrote about what I wish I had understood about architecture at 18, particularly the commercial reality surrounding the profession that I only properly came to understand much later. Within a couple of days, that post had reached more than 10,000 people, 88% of them outside my existing network, and generated more than 40 comments. More than 200 people visited my profile directly from the post.
Again, the discussion became more interesting than the original post. Architects, developers and people who had left the profession began talking about fees, clients, money, professional education, the value architects believe they create versus the value clients perceive, and the strange contradiction of being frustrated by the economics of architecture while remaining enormously grateful for the education it provides. That conversation has now developed into another permanent piece of knowledge on the Grand House website.
Neither post was written to promote Grand House. There was no lead magnet, sales pitch or carefully engineered call to action. They started with things I genuinely knew or had been thinking about because of my own experience, and other people added their own knowledge to the discussion.
That is much closer to what I mean by digital visibility.
The value isn't simply that a post receives a large number of impressions for a few days. The more interesting effect is what can happen around it. People who didn't previously know you encounter an idea, some visit your profile or website and others join the conversation. The original thinking can then be developed into something more substantial that remains available after the social post has disappeared from people's feeds.
Over time, those individual pieces also begin to connect. In my case, they are gradually creating a body of work around architecture, the business of practice, technology, work-winning and how the profession is changing. That gives somebody researching me or Grand House considerably more context than a services page could provide on its own.
It also gives search engines and AI systems more substantive information from which to understand what I write about, what Grand House works on and how those subjects relate to one another. That does not guarantee that either will surface Grand House in response to a particular search or question. It simply creates a clearer and more credible body of evidence about the people, expertise and subjects behind the business.
For me, that is the important distinction. Digital visibility isn't about producing content for an algorithm. It is about making genuine expertise more visible and allowing useful ideas to travel further than the people who already know you.
→ Read: How will AI change the way architects learn, work and get paid?
Grand House Knowledge Hub article
→ Read: If I were 18 again, I would learn the business of architecture alongside architecture
Link this to the new Knowledge Hub article once you've published it. Grand House Knowledge Hub article
→ Original LinkedIn discussion: AI and the “CAD monkey” years
View the original LinkedIn post
→ Original LinkedIn discussion: What I wish I'd known about architecture at 18
View the original LinkedIn post
By Richard Hall, Founder & CEO of Grand House