How Dinkum works

Short version: every morning Dinkum reads your Search Console, Bing, your site and your sales. It turns everything it knows into candidate changes, scores each one, makes the best one in your code and sends it to you to approve. We call that change a Dink. Two and four weeks later it checks the page against the rest of your site, and that verdict changes what it picks next.

Dinkum is a search agency that does the work instead of reporting on it. This page is how that work actually happens, taken from the code that runs it.

What it reads, and how often

Where ideas come from

• One step off page one. Searches where you sit between position 8 and 20 with at least 20 impressions in 28 days.
• Seen but not clicked. Pages with at least 100 impressions in the top 15 that get well under the clicks their position normally earns.
• Losing clicks. Pages under 70% of their previous 28 days, with the cause worked out: lost rankings, lost click-through, less demand, or a Google update. If the drop isn't confirmed yet, it waits.
• Competing with yourself. One search split across two or more of your pages.
• Competitor gaps. Searches with at least 30 a month where a competitor is in the top 20 and you're missing or past page two. Their brand searches never count.
• New competitor pages. A rival's new comparison or alternatives page is a reason to write or refresh yours.
• AI questions that name others. Buyer questions where AI tools name competitors and not you.
• Links you already have room for. Pages whose own text mentions a search but don't link to the page that should win it.
• Families of searches. Patterns like “invoice template for {trade}”, tested with 3 to 5 pages first, then left for 4 weeks.
• Other languages. Countries searching for you in their own language, when the demand is real.
• Your team. Suggestions made on your own site with the Chrome extension, or on the dashboard. These go first.

Your keyword map

Searches are grouped the way Google groups them: when two searches share four or more of the same top-ten results, they're one group, and you get one strong page for it instead of several pages competing. Each group has the one page that should win it, and a status.

Gaps are scored on demand, how many competitors rank and how high, how hard the search is to win, and how close it is to what you sell. “Competitor alternative” and “vs” searches get extra weight, because the people typing them are ready to switch.

How competitors are compared

Competitors are found at the start from who ranks for your searches and who you name. Each must rank in the top 20 for at least 10 searches in your market and be on topic. Marketplaces, social sites and forums are left out. You get up to eight.

Every week Dinkum checks the searches each one newly broke into the top ten for, the gaps between you, the pages they just published, the sites that link to two or more of them and not to you, and the pages and AI answers that name them and not you. Their prices are never guessed: any claim about a competitor comes from a source checked that day.

How a Dink is chosen

Every candidate is scored on three things, and the highest score wins the day.

• Value is the extra clicks a month times what a click is worth. With sales data, that's your real revenue per visitor. Without it, a buyer search (pricing, alternatives, “vs”, “best”, reviews) counts three times an informational one.
• Evidence is how strong the case is, from 0.3 to 1.
• Track record is how often that kind of work has worked on your site. Until there are three verdicts for it, it starts at 60%.

Effort is noted but never counts against an idea. Anything already waiting for you, or done in the last 14 days, is skipped. A wrong price or claim on your site is always fixed first. Dinkum's AI agent does the ranking, following these rules; the measuring and the verdicts are plain code.

A two-week calendar plans the new pages and refreshes ahead. Refreshes go to pages competing with each other first, then to pages one step off page one. You can skip or add any item.

SEO: the technical side

Rankings are tracked daily from Search Console. A move onto page one only counts once it has held for seven days, and it's credited to the Dink that came before it.

AEO: getting named in AI answers

Every week Dinkum asks the same panel of about 25 questions: five about your brand, three comparing you with your top competitors, your core searches the way a buyer would ask them, and up to 12 more from your keyword map. The panel stays fixed so the trend means something.

It asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Google's AI Overviews, in your market. Claude and Gemini can be added. Each answer is checked for whether you're named, where you rank among the brands it lists, who is named instead, which pages it cites, and any price or claim about you that doesn't match your real facts. A change from last week is only reported when it's statistically real.

The fix is usually on your own page: answer the question in the first paragraph, in plain words an AI can quote, with a comparison table and FAQ where they fit. Nothing is added to please an AI that your product can't back up.

GEO: making you quotable

AI tools can only quote what they can read and trust, so this is about access and facts.

• AI crawlers. Every week, 28 crawlers, including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended, are checked against your robots.txt, Cloudflare's rules, blocked responses and noindex tags. Blocks that only stop AI training are left alone; blocks that keep you out of AI answers get fixed.
• Facts. Prices, plans and limits on every page are checked daily against your product, and a page stamped “fact-checked” only gets a new date after every fact on it is re-checked.
• Structure. Schema, llms.txt entries and links to your real profiles on every new page. llms.txt is an experiment, not a promise of anything.
• Sources. The pages AI tools cite that name your competitors and not you, with a way in for each, drafted into up to five pitches a month for you to send.

Social

Every new page gets a post drafted for X, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Once your accounts are connected, you post it with one click; nothing goes out on its own. Missing profiles are flagged, and the real ones are linked from your site so search engines and AI tools know they're you.

How a verdict is reached

Each Dink is checked 14 and 28 days after it goes live. The first three days are skipped while Google recrawls. The page's clicks are compared with the 28 days before, adjusted for how the rest of your site moved over the same days. Title fixes are judged on click-through instead of clicks.

Any Google update that overlapped the window is noted with the verdict.

How it learns

Every verdict goes into your site's ledger. The share of each kind of Dink that worked, across the last 40, becomes its track record in the score. Kinds of work that keep paying off on your site get picked more; ones that don't get picked less. Memories that don't change, like your facts, your house rules and your team's own words, are kept in the same notebook and used on every Dink.