The guy behind GreenRank walked away from this industry once.

Quick version: I'm Pat Robinson. I built GreenRank. I run it. I do the work. There's no team. There's me, the AI tooling I've spent years getting good at, and one specific job — getting US landscaping businesses cited in AI search.

2017

I was a year into running a small SEO consultancy out of London. Decent client list. Real results, mostly. I joined a paid community to learn faster — the kind of place where the senior members shared the tactics they'd used to take a client from page five to page one in three months.

It turned out the tactic was buying up expired domains with leftover authority, propping them up with thin scraped content, and pointing link-juice at client sites. They called it a "private blog network" and sold each other domains for hundreds of pounds. Some members were running thousands.

It worked. Briefly. Then Google noticed, as Google always does. Clients got penalised. Rankings collapsed. The community's response wasn't to stop. It was to sell each other a new batch of domains and start again.

I closed the consultancy that year and stepped away from the industry entirely.

What I did with the next decade

Watched search from the outside. Watched the agency model bloat into ten-thousand-pound-a-month retainers. Watched the SEO conferences turn into lifestyle marketing. Watched Google's algorithm updates wipe out one shortcut after another and the same people sell new shortcuts six months later.

Watched ChatGPT happen. Then Claude. Then Perplexity. Then Google AI Mode and AI Overviews. Watched search stop being about ten blue links and start being about whether an AI mentions your business when somebody asks for one.

And watched the same people who sold Google-gaming start selling "GEO services" and "AEO frameworks" with the same energy and the same methodology.

What changed for me

Two things.

First, AI search visibility is genuinely different from traditional SEO in a way that favours small, specific, ethically-built businesses. The gameable shortcuts don't work the same way. AI engines reward clarity, structured information, and being the obvious answer to a specific question. That's harder to fake, and easier to do honestly, than gaming the old algorithm.

Second, AI tooling has gotten good enough that one person can now deliver work that used to need a five-person agency. I don't need to grow a team to make this work. I need to build one specific tool that does one specific job for one specific kind of business, and keep it sharp.

Why GreenRank, and why landscapers

Three reasons. The market is enormous and underserved digitally — over 650,000 US landscaping businesses, 31% of small operators have no website at all. The work is highly templateable across cities, which means I can do good work at scale without it becoming generic. And it's an industry where the customers — homeowners — are exactly the audience using AI search to make decisions today.

I picked one industry on purpose. Specialising means I know what AI search engines say about landscaping today, and what to fix when they get it wrong about you. A generic AEO consultancy can't say that.

If you're a landscaper reading this and you'd like to know where you stand, the free score is here.

The principles I'm holding GreenRank to

1. I'll only sell what I'd buy. If a tactic wouldn't survive a Google update or an AI engine policy change, I won't recommend it. Even if it works in the short run.
2. I'll be specific about who this is for. If you're not a US landscaper, you're not the customer. I'd rather you spend your money with someone who specialises in your industry than have me dilute the work to fit you.
3. I'll tell you what won't work. Bad reviews can't be fixed by AI visibility. A site nobody updates can't be fixed by AI visibility. A business doing genuinely poor work can't be fixed by AI visibility. I'll say so.
4. I'll cap how big this gets. The done-for-you premium tier is capped at a small number of clients deliberately, to keep the work sharp and not turn into the agency I left.

What about future verticals

GreenRank is the first sub-brand of what I plan to become a small portfolio of AEO services for contractor industries — plumbers, roofers, HVAC, electricians. Each gets its own focused product brand rather than a generic "AEO for everyone" pitch. The mothership for that portfolio lives at patrickrobinson.consulting, but it's deliberately quiet right now. GreenRank is where my attention is.

The honest constraint

I'm based in the UK. I can serve a limited number of done-for-you clients before I tap out — that's a deliberate cap, not a marketing line. The free tools and the audit, though, scale fine because they use the AI tooling without much of my time.

If that's the kind of operator you want to work with — small, specific, sceptical of the industry I came from — we'll get on.