Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)
- FAQ, HowTo & Article schema
- Question-led content structure
- Featured snippet & AI Overview capture
- Concise, chunkable answers
- Speakable markup
Your agency files activity and calls it strategy. One senior operator owns PPC, AI search and technical SEO across Europe, from audit to invoice, with near-full working-day overlap and measurement that holds up under GDPR, and builds the commercial edge that decides who dominates 2027.
Pay-per-click (PPC) is paid, auction-based advertising across Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Meta and LinkedIn, where you pay only when someone clicks, measured against profit, not vanity metrics. Mid-market businesses across Europe meet the same failure from PPC agencies and SEO agencies the world over: technically active accounts, commercially adrift results. Account managers rotate. Junior staff run the work. Nobody holds the full picture.
The Crane Consultancy is a senior-led PPC and SEO consultancy, not an agency. One practitioner holds the entire engagement: paid search, paid social, server-side tracking, technical SEO and the financial logic that connects them. Every decision is filtered through one question: does this compound your profit? In 2026, with paid auctions tighter and search itself splitting between Google and AI answers, that question carries more weight than it ever has.
Europe is not one market but a dozen, each with its own language, platform habits and competitive weather, and the practice builds for that difference rather than averaging it away. From the DACH region to the Nordics, Benelux, France, Iberia and the fast-growing economies of Central and Eastern Europe, demand splinters by country, by language and by buying culture. Cross-border e-commerce and B2B in particular turn on local detail, from currency and delivery to the phrasing of a single ad headline, and a pan-European setting that ignores it wastes budget in every market at once.
Delivery from the United Kingdom is a practical advantage here rather than a compromise. The UK working day overlaps almost entirely with Central European time, so there is live contact through the day, not a handover into a void. At this level distance is not the variable that decides a result; senior, undivided ownership is.
Search in 2026 no longer ends at a list of blue links. European buyers now put their questions to Google AI Overviews, to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot, and act on a single synthesised answer. If your business is not named in that answer, a competitor is.
This is the discipline of AI search optimisation: the architectural work that decides whether large language models can read your business, trust it and cite it. It divides into Answer Engine Optimisation, AEO, the structure that wins direct answers and AI Overviews, and Generative Engine Optimisation, GEO, the entity and authority signals that make a model recommend you by name. It is a technical exercise, not a content mill. Most European websites lose here for the same handful of reasons: weak entity signals, missing or broken schema, and pages an AI reads as plain text rather than a defined business with services, locations and proof.
The practice treats this as core engineering. Structured data, a coherent entity graph, machine-readable content, an llms.txt discovery file, fast Core Web Vitals and disciplined crawl-budget hygiene are built so the model finds you, parses you and quotes you. The work is grounded in how classic search, AI Overviews and answer engines behave today, and built to still hold in 2027 rather than be unpicked a year later.
Most European SEO agencies optimise for rankings. The Crane Consultancy optimises for revenue. Technical SEO, server-side tracking and conversion architecture are built to serve the paid media stack, not compete with it. The measurement beneath it all is engineered to be accurate and GDPR-compliant at once, with consent-aware first-party data that holds the numbers honest where browser analytics quietly fail.
Most businesses operating across Europe collect more data than they use and run more by hand than they should. The practice closes both gaps.
The same forensic mind that runs the media builds the layer beneath it: clean measurement you can trust, dashboards that report profit rather than vanity, and automation that removes the manual work quietly draining the week. Where it earns its place, practical AI is put to work inside the business, from Claude and Gemini to bespoke internal tools, as an edge rather than novelty. Across multiple European markets the result is plain: better decisions, made faster, on numbers that hold up.
The practice works with mid-market European businesses across the following sectors. B2B lead generation, B2C and full omnichannel e-commerce engagements are all taken on.
The founder's track record includes the global digital transformation of LUSH Cosmetics across sixteen markets, and the same forensic discipline he brought to it is applied to every European engagement, regardless of size.
Architect of the LUSH Cosmetics global digital transformation across sixteen markets, recognised by Welocalize as Best Global Client Team. Former Paid Media Enablement and Commerce Lead at Adapt and Head of Paid Media at Navigate, leading programmes across attraction, conservation and tourism portfolios.
Most recently engaged as Digital Data and Analytics lead through the Everywhen brand launch, securing data integrity across a migration spanning Towergate Insurance and forty other brands. A power user of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and GTM, now applying that technical depth to AI search optimisation: structured data, entity signals and the machine readability that decides visibility in Google AI Overviews and answer engines. Meta Certified Media Buying Professional. Google Partner. Amazon Ads Partner.
The practice is based in the United Kingdom and works with European businesses remotely, from first audit to weekly optimisation. A UK working day overlaps almost entirely with Central European time, so there is live contact every day rather than a handover into a void.
The senior mind that wins the work is the senior mind that does the work.
The typical PPC agency and SEO agency model has a structural flaw: the senior practitioner who wins the pitch is not the person who runs the account. Whoever has capacity inherits the work, while the senior who pitched moves to the next sale.
Geography has never been the thing that decides a paid-media result; seniority is. The best partner for a European business is not the largest agency in the nearest capital but the one senior operator who holds the account without interruption, reviews it every week, and filters every decision through commercial profit rather than vanity metrics. From the United Kingdom, with a working day that overlaps almost entirely with the continent, that is exactly what a European engagement gets: one practitioner who has run global programmes for household names, available directly, with none of the agency layers that put a junior between your budget and the expertise you contracted.
Every engagement runs on four standing commitments, each a deliberate departure from how agencies typically operate.
Every ad account, tag manager, analytics property and dashboard sits under your ownership. Always. We do not gatekeep your data.
The senior named on the proposal is the senior who does the work. No handover to a junior. No silent reassignment after the contract signs.
Performance dashboards updated frequently. No vanity PDFs assembled the night before a quarterly review.
WhatsApp access to Nicholas, not a ticket queue. Ask the difficult question when you need to, in your working day.
In the two months since starting to work with Nic, I have been so impressed by his technical understanding across analytics and digital advertising. He has completely overhauled our data so we can see in detail what is happening and make better decisions, and reviewed all of our existing campaigns, which are already performing better. I cannot recommend Nic highly enough.
Nic manages our PPC campaigns with professionalism and expertise. He takes the time to understand our business, its objectives and the challenges we face, and is proactive in identifying opportunities to maximise results and return on investment.
Nic helped fill in the missing pieces on a complex data, attribution and privacy project, unearthing a series of unknown issues in the data stack and laying out a plan to remedy them that rolled out successfully. I would recommend Nic and The Crane Consultancy for their technical expertise and thorough understanding.
I have worked with Nic for several years and his attention to detail is second to none. He is extremely knowledgeable and very attentive, offering solutions and proactive in his suggestions.
Nic is an expert in his field, offering insight and reporting with real value, tailored to our needs.
Yes. The Crane Consultancy works with European businesses remotely from the United Kingdom, where the working day overlaps almost entirely with Central European time. That means live contact through the day rather than a handover into a void. European engagements include direct WhatsApp access to the founder, live performance dashboards and regular video sessions.
The Crane Consultancy is a senior-led PPC and SEO consultancy, not a traditional PPC agency. One senior practitioner holds every European engagement from audit through to ongoing optimisation. There are no junior account managers, no team rotations and no handover documents. You work directly with the founder, Nicholas Crane, throughout.
Measurement is engineered to be accurate and GDPR-compliant at the same time. Consent-aware, server-side tracking through first-party infrastructure and Google Consent Mode v2 keeps the numbers honest where browser analytics quietly fail, while respecting the consent choices a European visitor makes. The result is reliable attribution that holds up under European privacy law rather than working around it.
Yes. Buyers increasingly ask Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot for recommendations and act on a single synthesised answer. The Crane Consultancy builds the technical foundations that let those systems read, trust and cite your business: structured data and schema, a coherent entity graph, machine-readable content, an llms.txt discovery file and fast Core Web Vitals. This is the discipline of AI search optimisation, made up of Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).
Yes. Europe is a dozen markets rather than one, each with its own language, platform habits and buying culture. Each market is structured and measured on its own terms across paid search, paid social and organic, never blurred into a single continental average. The founder has run digital programmes at genuine multi-market scale, including the LUSH Cosmetics transformation across sixteen markets, and the practice applies that discipline to a single account or a coordinated rollout across several.
European engagements are held to the same standard as the practice's UK work: one senior practitioner, profit-first, with measurement built to hold every channel accountable. The same senior-led PPC, AI search and SEO consultancy serves Bath, Bristol, London and cities across the United Kingdom.
The Crane Consultancy provides senior-led PPC, AI search optimisation and technical SEO consultancy to mid-market businesses across Europe, delivered remotely from the United Kingdom. It is a trading name of Crane Consultancy Limited, registered at Companies House under number 15526285, VAT number GB466677439, founded in 2024. The practice operates from Bath and Bristol, with a registered office at 45 Albemarle Street, Mayfair, London W1S 4JL. European clients are served entirely remotely, with a working day that overlaps almost entirely with Central European time and direct access to the founder.
Every European engagement is held by one senior practitioner, the founder Nicholas Crane, from audit to invoice, with no account manager rotations and no junior handovers. Services include PPC across Google, Microsoft, Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube and Amazon; technical SEO; Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) for visibility in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot; consent-aware, GDPR-compliant server-side tracking; and conversion rate optimisation. Nicholas Crane is a Google Partner, Stape Partner and Amazon Ads Partner, and led the LUSH Cosmetics global digital transformation across sixteen markets.
A proper conversation with the person who would do the work. Tell me where you are and what you're weighing up, and you'll get an honest read on what I'd change, what I'd leave alone, and where the real upside is. No pitch, no rush.
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