Progress Report

Susan Shek Photography
AI Search Visibility Program

Every problem we have found, how we know it is real, why it matters for how AI systems and Google talk about you, and exactly what we would do about it.

Prepared for Susan Shek By GEO Agency August 22, 2026
12
In your original plan
5
Found since
8
We can start now
6
Waiting on you

How to read this. Each item has four parts. The problem in plain terms. How we know, with the real numbers and where they came from, so you can judge for yourself whether it is worth fixing. Why it matters, meaning what it actually changes about how AI systems and Google treat you. What we will do, as concrete steps. Every item is also labelled as either part of your original agreement or something we found afterwards. Where something is still unconfirmed we say so rather than dressing it up.

Following the new writing. Every piece of copy we draft goes into your existing shared document, Susan Shek Photography, as its own tab named for the page it belongs to. You can comment inline, rewrite anything in your own words, and nothing goes live until you have signed it off. That document stays the single place to look for anything we have written.

Finished We can start now Waiting on you Changed by the data * Scoped in your original statement of work
01

Where all of this came from

Your plan was written from one source. It has since been checked against four more.

WhenWhat we looked atWhat it told us
Jul 20Full technical review of your website
Your original plan came entirely from this.		Thirteen items, eight named pages.
Aug 17Google Search Console
Sixteen months, the full history Google keeps.		12,889 clicks from 2.7 million impressions. Showed which pages people actually want.
Aug 18Live ChatGPT testing
Twenty five real questions.		You were named in two, and it showed the rule behind every answer.
Aug 19Inside your WordPress siteNineteen deleted posts still earning traffic, and 141 redirects behind them.
Aug 22Google AnalyticsChatGPT already sends you more visitors than Bing. Nothing measures enquiries.
Aug 22Search Console, 2026 to date
Jan 1 to Aug 20, the latest Google has.		5.08K clicks from 1.08M appearances, average position 15. You rank better than a year ago and receive fewer visits.
02

Priority one

Five items. These are the difference between being recommended and being overlooked.

1. Nineteen deleted articles are being redirected to your homepage

Waiting on you

Nineteen articles sit in your website's trash. Their addresses do not return an error, they actively 301 redirect the visitor to your homepage.

How we know. These nineteen addresses earned 1,125 clicks and 260,846 impressions across the sixteen months to August 2026, roughly one click in every eleven. The three largest are Burden Kahn Mansion at 279 clicks, Marriage Proposals at 620 and 610 Loft and Garden at 278, and 12 Christian Wedding Traditions at 224. Your Yoast Redirects tool holds 141 redirects, and one chains twice: convent of the sacred heart wedding, then burden kahn mansion weddings, then your homepage.

Why this mattersA 301 redirect to an unrelated homepage is treated by Google as a soft 404. The authority that page earned over years is discarded rather than passed on, and the ranking collapses. Recovering this is the cheapest traffic available to you, because you are restoring positions you already earned rather than competing for new ones.

We have now measured this, rather than assumed it. Inside Search Console we filtered each search by the page Google attributes it to, then requested each address directly to see what the server does. Every one returns a redirect to your homepage. Burden Kahn Mansion: 17 clicks and 1,537 appearances so far in 2026. Seventeen people searched for that venue, clicked your result, and arrived on your homepage. Old Westbury Hebrew Congregation: 1,246 appearances and not one click. New York Athletic Club: 7 clicks from 1,503 appearances. Christian wedding traditions: 2,522 appearances, 2 clicks, and Google ranks you fourth for it. Ranking fourth and getting no clicks is not normal. It happens because the click does not reach the article.

One thing still open, and it does not change the decision. We cannot see from WordPress the exact date each article was removed. What we can see is that the loss is happening now, in 2026, not only historically.

What we will do
  1. Ask you whether the deletions and redirects were intended.
  2. Audit all 141 redirects and report which are correct, which point at deleted pages, and which are junk. We already found one pointing at a trashed page.
  3. Restore the articles if the deletions were accidental, largest first.
  4. Remove or repoint the redirects. Restoring an article while its redirect stays in place still sends visitors to your homepage.
  5. Clean up the 516 orphan tag archives left behind by the trashing.

2. Your price is not published anywhere an AI can quote it

We can start now

* Scoped in your original statement of work (item 4)

Every ChatGPT answer to a cost question named photographers who publish a number. Those who do not publish were left out entirely.

How we know. All four cost questions in our live test returned only photographers with a published figure. Two competitors publish theirs at $20,000 and $14,000. Your cost guide has 66,100 impressions and 145 clicks, and is already the fourth most common landing page for AI referrals. It was last updated September 2024, and the figure sits below several paragraphs of scene setting. You told us in your brand questions: $15,000 for photography, up to $20,000 with video, for full day wedding collections.

Why this mattersAI assistants answer a cost question by quoting a specific figure and citing the page it came from. A page with no extractable number cannot be that source, so it gets skipped even when it ranks well. Publishing a clear range is what makes you eligible to be the answer.
What we will do
  1. Move your range to the top of the existing guide, as the first thing the page says, in your words.
  2. Replace the older range currently on the page with your $15,000 to $20,000 figure.
  3. Add a visible last updated date so it never reads as stale.
  4. Link to it from your services page, which has 24,093 impressions but only 18 clicks. We are linking rather than moving the pricing, because your costs page already works and services does not.
  5. No new page.

3. Your reviews work for you everywhere except your own website

Waiting on you

* Scoped in your original statement of work (item 3)

You asked why ChatGPT does not pick up your reviews. It does. It just cannot find them on susanshek.com.

How we know. One of the only two questions where ChatGPT named you was answered because of what your couples wrote about you being calm and taking charge. It found that language on a third party review site. Meanwhile your reviews page and testimonials page both 404. Across eleven competitors, not one publishes a review count. You have 103 reviews at 5.0 and none of it is on your own pages.

Why this mattersTwo separate gains. First, AI systems weight independent opinion heavily, but they can only quote what they can find and attribute. Reviews on your own domain let an assistant quote the praise and cite you in the same breath, rather than citing WeddingWire. Second, AggregateRating and Review schema are what produce star ratings in Google results, which lifts click through rate on listings you already have.
What we will do
  1. Confirm your current review counts with you. We will not publish a rating we have not verified.
  2. Build the reviews page your site already links to.
  3. Place real quotes on the venue and service pages, starting with Zoe, Zhi and Amanda.
  4. Then add Review and AggregateRating schema. This order matters: publishing rating markup without the reviews visible on the page risks a Google penalty.

4. An AI crawler is blocked at your hosting

We can start now

* Scoped in your original statement of work (item 7)

Anthropic's ClaudeBot is refused by the bot protection at your host before it ever reaches your website.

How we know. The request returns a 403 from a stock server error page sitting underneath Cloudflare, which is characteristic of the Cloudways bot protection layer rather than anything on your site. Your agreement also states Microsoft's Bingbot already has access, while our review found it blocked too. Both cannot be true. We now have Cloudways access and can settle it.

Why this mattersA blocked crawler fails silently. There is no error and no warning, you simply never enter that system's understanding of the web. For ClaudeBot specifically this governs long term familiarity with your brand rather than today's citations, so it is a slow compounding gain rather than an overnight one. Being honest about that: this will not change what Claude says about you next week.
What we will do
  1. Add ClaudeBot to the allow list. We will not switch bot protection off, because it is genuinely protecting your WordPress login.
  2. Verify whether Bingbot and msnbot are blocked, and settle the contradiction above.
  3. Test with a direct request expecting success, then re-test all five search crawlers for knock on effects.

5. Your business details contradict each other

Waiting on you

* Scoped in your original statement of work (item 1)

Your site publishes two different addresses and four different lengths of experience.

How we know. Your footer and Google Business Profile say 401 Park Avenue South. Your schema, the structured data underneath the site that AI systems read directly, says 287 Park Avenue South. Separately the site claims 30+ years, 19 years, two decades and a decade in different places, while your schema says 2005. You told us your first wedding was in 2005, which settles the experience question. The address was never asked.

Why this mattersAI systems build a picture of your business by cross checking name, address and phone number across your site, your Google listing and directories. When those disagree, the safe move for a machine is to lower its confidence and leave you out rather than risk stating something wrong. Consistency is not a tidiness exercise, it is how a system decides you are a real, verifiable business worth recommending.
What we will do
  1. Confirm with you which address is correct. We believe 401 Park Avenue South, since that matches both your footer and your Google listing.
  2. Correct the address in your Yoast organisation settings, which is where the wrong one lives. We now have the access to do this, so it only waits on your answer above.
  3. Replace every experience claim with one phrase: photographing weddings in New York since 2005. Using the year rather than a count means it never goes out of date.
03

Priority two

Pages that already attract people. To be clear, we are not rewriting your venue pages. They are good pages and they are in your voice. We are adding the few things that are missing.

6. Your most valuable page has no H1

Changed by the data

* Scoped in your original statement of work (item 10)

Your venues guide drives more of your appearances in Google's AI Overviews than any other page, and it has no main heading at all.

How we know. This page accounts for 11,816 of the 48,600 times you have appeared in Google's AI answers. That is 24.3% from a single page. Google only began reporting this in May 2026, so that is roughly three months of data, and it reports appearances rather than clicks. Across all of search it earns 553 clicks from 347,958 appearances. It is also the page AI assistants send the most visitors to after your homepage, where they stay over a minute. It runs 2,057 words with no H1 and roughly 110 words of atmosphere before the first fact.

Why this mattersThe H1 is the single strongest on page signal of what a page is about. Without one, a machine has to infer the topic from body copy, which it does less reliably and with less confidence. Separately, AI Overviews and assistants extract the first factual sentence they can find. Opening with 110 words of scene setting means there is nothing quotable at the top of your best performing page.
What we will do
  1. Add a proper H1.
  2. Open with a concrete sentence stating what the guide covers and how many venues, so the first line is extractable.
  3. Leave your existing writing intact underneath.

7. Your best converting search lands on a page that does not answer it

Waiting on you

More people click your result for "620 loft and garden proposal" than any other search you appear in. The page they arrive at never mentions proposals.

How we know. Across the last sixteen months that search earned 56 clicks from 598 appearances, a 9.4% click through rate at position 5.8, roughly twenty times your site average. It is now slipping. So far in 2026 it is 13 clicks from 253 appearances, a 5.1% rate, and it has fallen to position 9.3. The related search "620 loft and garden" now sits at position 25.6 with 511 appearances and no clicks at all. They land on your 620 Loft page, which is genuinely well written and sounds like you, but is entirely about weddings. The proposals article that used to answer it is one of the nineteen in the trash. This page also carries no reviews, while your Plaza page has one and it helps.

Why this mattersThe decline above is the mechanism in action. Ranking for a search you do not answer is worse than not ranking. Visitors arrive, find nothing about proposals, and leave. Google reads that behaviour and gradually lowers the page, so a strong position quietly decays. Matching the page to the intent protects a ranking you already hold.
What we will do
  1. Add a proposals section to the live 620 Loft page, in your voice.
  2. Add a couple review to the page.
  3. If the deleted proposals article returns, link the two rather than duplicating them.

8. Nothing on your site says you are good in low light

We can start now

You told us dark venues are a speciality and you want more of that work. It appears nowhere on your website.

How we know. When we asked ChatGPT how a couple should vet a photographer, it told them to ask how the photographer handles dark churches and candlelit receptions. A competitor won a cathedral question partly because they had written about working in low light. It is an active filter and you are silent on it.

Why this mattersAI assistants increasingly answer by criteria rather than by name, telling couples what to ask for. You can only be matched to a criterion you claim explicitly in text. Expertise you have but never state does not exist as far as a language model is concerned, because it has nothing to quote.
What we will do
  1. Add a short passage in your words to Rainbow Room, Cipriani and Weylin, which are genuinely dark rooms, plus the ballroom section of the Plaza.
  2. Deliberately not on 620 Loft, which is a glass rooftop and rightly leads on natural light.
  3. Add the matching question to your FAQ, since that is what couples are being coached to ask.

9. Your Plaza page talks about you in the third person

We can start now

It reads as though somebody else wrote it about you. Your 620 Loft page does the opposite and is genuinely lovely.

How we know. The Plaza page says "Susan Shek has chosen this hotel as one of our top recommended venues". Your 620 Loft page says "I've photographed couples as they walk hand in hand past the reflecting pool". The Plaza page has 105,404 impressions, so it is worth getting right.

Why this mattersGoogle and the AI systems built on similar principles assess first hand experience, the first E in E-E-A-T. First person writing is direct evidence that the author was in the room. Third person reads like a directory entry, which any aggregator could have written. There is also a plain accuracy problem: "has chosen this hotel as one of our top recommended venues" never actually claims you have photographed a wedding there, so a machine reading it literally learns nothing about your experience at The Plaza.
What we will do
  1. Move it into first person to match your other venue writing.
  2. Add how long you have been shooting there and roughly how many weddings.
  3. Add the ballroom low light passage from item 8.
  4. Link through to your pricing guide.
  5. Keep the couple review already on the page.

10. Your FAQ answers carry no FAQPage schema

We can start now

* Scoped in your original statement of work (item 2)

You have sixteen real questions with real answers, written as plain paragraphs.

How we know. Your FAQ page carries sixteen genuine question and answer pairs, and none of the ninety two pages on your site carry any FAQ schema. The content is already there and already good.

Why this mattersFAQPage schema explicitly labels a question and its answer as a pair, which is the most directly quotable structure a website can offer. It is the difference between an AI system guessing which sentence answers a question and being handed the answer. Your FAQ is your most quotable asset and it is currently invisible in that form.
What we will do
  1. Turn each question into a proper heading.
  2. Add FAQPage schema in JSON-LD across the page.
  3. Extend the same treatment to the service pages.
  4. Add the low light question from item 8.
  5. This is structural. Your answers stay as you wrote them.

11. Several pages have no H1, and one has fifteen

We can start now

* Scoped in your original statement of work (item 12)

Some pages have no main heading, and one has fifteen competing with each other.

How we know. No H1 at all: Top Wedding Venues, Event Photography, Headshots, Wedding Albums. Too many: Services has fifteen, FAQ has four, About has three.

Why this mattersHeading hierarchy is how a machine builds an outline of your page and works out which parts answer which question. Fifteen H1s is the same as none: there is no hierarchy, so there is no outline, and the page reads as an undifferentiated block.
What we will do
  1. Give every page exactly one H1 that states what the page is.
  2. Demote the extras on Services, FAQ and About into a sensible H2 and H3 structure.
  3. No visible design change. This is markup, not styling.

12. Your llms.txt lists ten pages out of ninety one

We can start now

* Scoped in your original statement of work (item 8)

Yoast generates an llms.txt file on your site, the emerging standard for telling AI systems what your site contains. It is almost empty.

How we know. The file lists five pages and five posts out of ninety one addresses, and omits the FAQ entirely.

Why this mattersllms.txt is how you tell AI systems which of your pages matter, rather than leaving them to work it out by crawling. Right now yours actively misdirects them: it points at ten pages while omitting your pricing guide, your venues guide and your FAQ, which are the three most quotable things you own. An incomplete file is worse than none, because it looks authoritative.
What we will do
  1. Regenerate it to cover all pages and your best performing posts.
  2. Ensure the FAQ, pricing guide and venues guide are included.
  3. Re-check after the deleted articles question is settled, so it does not advertise pages that are not there.
  4. Clear the Breeze cache at your host afterwards, so the updated file is actually served.
04

Priority three

Real, worth doing, but they will not move your visibility on their own.

13. Two service pages have demand you are not capturing

Changed by the data

* Scoped in your original statement of work (item 11)

Two pages are shown constantly and convert badly because they are too thin. Two others in your plan have almost no demand at all.

How we know. Corporate event photography has 24,691 impressions and 14 clicks. Cinematography has 23,133 and 7, and its heading introduces a different business name. Against that, Headshots has 177 impressions and Wedding Albums 198.

Why this mattersThin pages fail not because of word count but because of coverage. A 300 word page cannot answer what it includes, how you work, or what it costs, so it can never be the source of an AI answer to those questions. High impressions with almost no clicks is the signature of a page that ranks but does not satisfy.
What we will do
  1. Expand the two pages with real demand: inclusions, workflow, samples, pricing.
  2. Ask your permission to swap the two with no demand for work that will do more, at no change to your fee. See section 06.
  3. Add written introductions to the venue galleries that are currently photographs with no text at all.

14. Your services carry no Service or Offer schema

We can start now

* Scoped in your original statement of work (item 9)

Your service pages carry none of the structured data that tells a machine what you sell.

Why this mattersSchema removes guesswork. Without it a system has to infer from prose that you offer wedding photography in New York at a given price. With Service and Offer markup you state it in a format built for machines, which raises confidence and makes you eligible for richer results. Adding Person markup for you matters too, because right now you appear only as a blog author under the bare first name Susan, which does not connect to the business.
What we will do
  1. Add Service and Offer schema to each service page.
  2. Include the price range from item 2 once confirmed.
  3. Add Person schema for you, and correct the four social profile links currently using insecure http.

15. Your business appears under four different names

Waiting on you

* Scoped in your original statement of work (item 6)

The site presents itself as Susan Shek Photography, Susan Shek Photography Inc., Shek Studios on the cinematography page, and Susan Shek Photo + Video.

How we know. Four variants found across the site. Your own Google data shows which is strongest: "susan shek photography" earns 451 clicks against 321 for "susan shek". You told us "Susan Shek is perfect", which we read as how you want to be known day to day.

Why this mattersAI systems resolve businesses into entities. Four name variants risk being read as four weak entities rather than one strong one, splitting the reputation, reviews and mentions you have built across all of them. Consolidating concentrates everything into a single recognisable entity.
What we will do
  1. Confirm with you: Susan Shek Photography as the formal legal name in schema, Susan Shek as the display name.
  2. Apply both consistently across every page and in your structured data.
  3. Retire Shek Studios and the other variants.

16. Placeholder text is publicly visible and four pages 404

Waiting on you

* Scoped in your original statement of work (item 5)

Your published privacy policy still contains unfilled template text that any visitor can read.

How we know. The live policy contains "[Insert Time Period, e.g., 7 years]" and "[Insert Email Address]". Four addresses 404: terms, reviews, testimonials and journal. Seven internal links point at redirecting addresses, including the Journal link in your main navigation.

Why this mattersTrust signals count. Unfilled placeholders in a published legal document read as neglect to a human and undermine the trust component of E-E-A-T for a machine. Broken internal links also waste crawl budget and break the flow of authority between your pages, which is how strong pages lend credibility to weaker ones.
What we will do
  1. Ask you for a contact email address and how long you keep client records. We cannot invent these.
  2. Fill in the privacy policy.
  3. Publish the reviews page, which item 3 needs anyway.
  4. Fix or remove the broken links, including the one in your main menu.

17. Nothing on your website is counting your enquiries

Found since

We can see people arrive at your enquiry page. We cannot see what happens next.

How we know. Your Inquire page had 1,915 views from 1,456 people in sixteen months. Google Analytics records zero key events across that entire period, and your confirmation page shows three views. That almost certainly means the form never triggered any tracking, rather than that only three people wrote to you.

Why this mattersThis one is not about AI visibility, it is about proving any of this worked. Without conversion tracking we can show you rankings and citations but never enquiries, which is the only number that actually matters to your business. There is good news buried in it: those 1,456 people arrived almost entirely from elsewhere on your own site rather than from Google, which proves your guides are doing their job of feeding people towards you.
What we will do
  1. Check what your enquiry form does on submit.
  2. Configure proper key event tracking in Google Analytics.
  3. Report enquiries alongside visibility from then on.
05

Your original thirteen items, checked

Seven unchanged, six moved. Nothing dropped without being replaced.

#Original itemWhere it stands
1Fix conflicting business detailsUnchanged, still the most important. Now item 5 above.
2FAQ schemaUnchanged. Now item 10.
3Review, rating and Person schemaMore important than we thought. One of your two ChatGPT wins came from reviews. Now item 3.
4Restructure the pricing guideSharpened. Now item 2.
5Broken and placeholder contentUnchanged. Now item 16.
6Standardise the business nameUnchanged, now backed by your data. Now item 15.
7Unblock ClaudeBot, confirm BingbotNow actionable. Cloudways access is in place. Now item 4.
8Complete the llms.txt fileUnchanged. Now item 12.
9Service and Offer schemaUnchanged. Now item 14.
10Restructure the venues guideMoved up. A quarter of all your Google AI impressions. Now item 6.
11Expand eight thin pagesChanged, needs a conversation. Two have no demand, two are in the trash. See section 06.
12Fix page headingsUnchanged. Now item 11.
13Monthly visibility reportingExpanded at no extra cost. Twenty five questions became forty, first measurement done.
06

The eight named pages need revisiting

Your plan committed us to eight specific pages. Your own data says that list needs a second look.

PageImpressionsVerdict
Corporate event photography24,691Strong demand. Keep.
About25,194Keep.
Cinematography23,133Strong demand. Keep.
Lotos ClubPhotographs onlyKeep. 119 photographs, no text.
New York Athletic Club8,045In the trash. Cannot be expanded.
Old Westbury4,806In the trash. Cannot be expanded.
Headshots177Almost no demand.
Wedding albums198Almost no demand.

Our recommendation, and it is your call. A straight swap at no extra cost. Keep the four that are working. Restore and expand the two in the trash if the deletion was accidental. Put the effort that would have gone into headshots and albums into your venue pages and your reviews instead. To be clear, you never asked us to drop headshots or albums. This is our reading of your data, not your instruction.

07

Work that was originally not in scope

Two things we found that fall outside the agreement you signed, because nobody could see them from the outside of your website.

Restoring the deleted articles and repairing the redirects

Awaiting your answer

Bringing the articles back, checking each still reads well, and making sure every old address leads to the right article instead of your homepage.

For scale, the content involved brought around 1,125 clicks from Google in the last year. Our next step is to audit all 141 redirects and report exactly what is broken. We would rather understand the full picture before putting a number on it, and we will come back to you with one.

Originally not in scope.

Publishing the reviews page and placing reviews across the site

Awaiting your answer

Building the reviews page your site links to but does not have, and placing your review wording on the venue and service pages where it will do the most work.

Originally not in scope.

→

What we need from you

Five things. Now that we have full access to your website, these answers are the only thing holding the work up.

  • 01

    Were the nineteen articles deleted and redirected on purpose?

    Nothing gets restored until you tell us. This is the largest single item in the report.

  • 02

    Which address is correct?

    We believe 401 Park Avenue South, matching your footer and Google listing. We would like that confirmed rather than assumed.

  • 03

    Your current review counts.

    We will not publish a rating we have not verified with you.

  • 04

    Approve the forty searches we will track, and your privacy policy details.

    The searches are in your shared document. We also need a contact email and how long you keep client records.

  • 05

    Your decision on the eight pages.

    Whether we can swap headshots and albums for work with more demand behind it, at no change to your fee.