Semantic SEO
Why an entity is a better starting point than a keyword
Keywords describe what someone typed. Entities describe what exists. Only one of those survives a change in how people search.
Article in progress
Semantic SEO Consultant & AI Agent Automation Expert · Hereford, UK
I help brands become visible and generate leads in the age of AI.
I’m Sanjeeb Basnet — a Semantic SEO consultant exploring how businesses can become understood, discovered and recommended across search engines and AI systems.
Or message me directly on WhatsAppWould AI recommend your business?
Check your AI visibility
02/The shift in search
Search is changing.
The search experience is expanding beyond traditional results pages. Businesses increasingly need to understand how search engines, AI systems and users interpret their brand.
Then
- Keywords
- Rankings
- Backlinks
- SERPs
Now
- Entities
- Context
- Topical authority
- Semantic relationships
Next
- AI retrieval
- AI recommendations
- Generative search
- Brand visibility
Search is no longer just about ranking pages. It’s about becoming understandable to machines, discoverable by people, and recommendable by AI.
03/Who I am
I’m interested in one question: how do people discover businesses when search itself is changing?
The route here wasn’t a straight line, and I don’t think it should have been.
I started in information technology — learning how systems structure, store and retrieve information. That turned out to be the right foundation for a field most people enter through marketing, because search is fundamentally a retrieval problem before it is a marketing one.
A marketing degree and Google-certified digital marketing training added the other half: how people actually decide, and what makes a business worth choosing. A master’s in leadership and management at the University of Wolverhampton reframed all of it again — visibility is a strategic question, not a channel tactic.
General digital marketing narrowed into SEO. SEO narrowed into Semantic SEO, after training in Koray Tuğbay Gürbüz’s methodology through Orca Social Academy and HolisticSEO.digital. That methodology is still the operating system behind how I work: entities, topical authority and semantic relationships rather than keyword lists.
I founded Uncover SEO to work on that properly. Today the work is pointed at one question in particular: helping brands get cited by AI search engines — AI visibility and Generative Engine Optimisation in the environments where people now ask rather than search. The research continues in public through Uncover SEO’s SEO Lab, where ideas get tested before they get recommended.
That same entity-first thinking is what led me to found Holistic Agent, a platform for UK small businesses to build AI agents — customer support, booking and lead qualification — that are genuinely useful rather than impressive in a demo. It also carries a free course on AI agents and automation, built on the same governed, engineered-system approach.
The route
2015–2017
Trained in Information Technology
The technical foundation. Learning how systems store, structure and retrieve information — the same problem search engines solve at scale.
2017–2019
Bachelor's degree in Marketing
Formal marketing education alongside Google-certified digital marketing training. Technical understanding met the question of how people actually decide.
2019–2023
Master's in Leadership and Management
University of Wolverhampton, UK. Strategy, organisational thinking and the discipline of running something — not just executing within it.
2023–2026
Founded Uncover SEO
Following advanced semantic SEO training through Orca Social Academy and HolisticSEO.digital — Koray Tuğbay Gürbüz’s methodology, which remains the operating system behind how Uncover SEO works.
2026
Founded Holistic Agent
An AI agent platform for UK small businesses — customer support, booking and lead-qualification agents, built on the same entity-first, governed-system thinking as Uncover SEO’s Semantic SEO work.
Now
Helping brands get cited by AI search engines
Running Uncover SEO and Holistic Agent, with the work pointed at the question that follows on from all of it: not just whether a brand ranks, but whether an AI system will name it in the answer.
04/What I've built
Built through Uncover SEO.
Uncover SEO is my consulting and experimentation environment focused on modern search visibility — Semantic SEO, entity authority engineering, and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).
- 01
Sanjeeb Basnet
Founder · Semantic SEO Consultant
- 02
Uncover SEO
Consulting · Experiments · Systems
- 03
Holistic Agent
AI Agents · UK Small Businesses
- 04
AI Visibility Grader
Product · Experimentation
05/My approach
How I think about visibility.
Not a services grid. These are the six things I check before anything else, in roughly this order — because each one is worth very little without the one before it.
- 01
Understand the entity
Who are you, what do you represent, and what does the market already associate with your brand? Everything else is downstream of that answer.
- 02
Build topical authority
A connected information ecosystem rather than isolated content. Depth in a defined territory beats breadth across borrowed ones.
- 03
Connect the semantic layer
Make the relationships between entities, topics, content and audiences legible to machines — not just readable by people.
- 04
Earn trust
Build signals that exist beyond your own website. Self-declared authority is the weakest kind there is.
- 05
Become visible everywhere
Search engines, local search, social platforms — Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook — digital PR, and AI systems. In the age of generative search, your presence on trusted social platforms is not optional; it is a retrieval source.
More on Social Media Optimisation → - 06
Measure visibility, not just rankings
Discoverability and brand presence across modern search environments — because a rank position no longer describes the whole surface.
06/Semantic SEO
SEO is becoming a problem of understanding.
A search engine that can’t work out what your business is cannot decide when to recommend it. Semantic SEO is the work of making that answer unambiguous, structured as what I call the Entity-to-Visibility Stack — seven stages where each one only holds if the one before it does.
Entity
The thing itself — a brand, a person, a product, a place.
07/Social Media Optimisation
Social Media Optimisation in the AI era.
Social Media Optimisation is no longer a separate discipline. When AI systems answer questions, they increasingly cite social proof — reviews, verified profiles, trusted creators, community signals. Optimising your social presence is optimising your visibility in AI-powered search.
Entity consistency across platforms
The same name, the same claims, the same facts — verified profiles and uniform branding everywhere your business appears, so no platform contradicts another.
See Semantic SEO →Social signals AI systems trust
Reviews, engagement and cross-platform mentions. AI systems weigh these as evidence a brand is real and worth citing, not as vanity metrics.
Content that gets cited
Thought leadership, case studies and named frameworks — the kind of self-contained, citable content already published in Search Notes.
Read Search Notes →
08/AI visibility
The next search result might be an answer.
Users increasingly ask AI systems questions rather than only browsing traditional results. Which turns visibility into five separate questions, not one.
- Brand
- Website
- Search engines
- Entities
- Knowledge
- AI retrieval
- AI recommendation
- Customer
The Five-Layer AI Visibility Model
01
Visibility Layer
Are we being seen?
02
Interpretation Layer
Are we being understood?
03
Authority Layer
Are we trusted?
04
AI Inclusion Layer
Are we being cited or used?
05
Conversion Layer
Are we generating business outcomes?
Most brands measure the first layer and fail at the second. Being seen is not the same as being understood — and only what is understood can be cited, trusted or recommended.
Tool
Would AI recommend your business?
Traditional rankings tell only part of the story. Discover how your brand appears across modern search and AI environments.
Check your AI visibility
Opens the AI Visibility Grader, built by Uncover SEO.
09/Selected work
Things I’ve built, tested and learned from.
Each panel follows the same shape: the problem, the approach, what was actually built, where it stands, and what it changed about how I work. Everything here exists — where there is no result yet, the panel says so.
AI AgentsHolistic Agent
- Problem
- AI agent tooling for small businesses is either too generic to be useful or too complex to deploy without a developer — most UK small businesses end up with neither.
- Approach
- Apply the same entity-first, governed-system thinking behind Semantic SEO to AI agents: an agent should be trained on a business’s own verified content, answer only from it, and escalate honestly when it doesn’t know.
- Implementation
- A Next.js and Supabase platform where a business creates a customer support, booking, or lead-qualification agent and deploys it with a single embed code. Includes a free, self-paced AI Agent & Automation course — 14 modules, 7 projects, 19 design patterns and 5 certification levels.
- Status
- Live — customer support, booking, and lead-qualification agents running for UK small businesses, plus live demos of each agent type at holisticagent.ai/agents.
- Learning
- The same discipline that makes a brand legible to AI search engines — clear entities, verified facts, honest limits — is what makes an AI agent trustworthy to a customer.
AI VisibilityAI Visibility Grader
- Problem
- Rankings describe one surface. They say nothing about whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews can identify a brand, understand it, or recommend it.
- Approach
- Score AI search visibility directly rather than inferring it from traditional metrics — a seven-dimension rubric applied across the major AI search environments.
- Implementation
- A Next.js application deployed on Vercel, built and maintained as a separate product under Uncover SEO.
- Status
- Live in beta — scores AI search visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews on a seven-dimension rubric.
- Learning
- Building the measurement instrument clarified the problem: most brands have no visibility data at all for the environments their customers are increasingly asking.
SystemsUSAIOS — a sixteen-document AI operating system
- Problem
- A method that lives in one person’s head cannot be delegated, audited or taught. An agency built around AI needs its own way of working specified as carefully as anything it specifies for a client.
- Approach
- Turn the discipline inward: treat the agency itself as a system with defined entities, responsibilities and interfaces, rather than a set of habits.
- Implementation
- Sixteen documents spanning the company handbook, SOP library, prompt library and KPI dashboard — the operating layer for running an AI-first agency.
- Status
- Complete as a documented system: sixteen documents, handbook through KPIs.
- Learning
- Writing an operating system down is what exposes the decisions that were never actually made — the gaps are invisible while the process is improvised.
Local SEOThe Founding 10 programme
- Problem
- A new practice has method but no track record, and the businesses who would benefit most have no way to judge it. Trust has to be built before it can be traded on.
- Approach
- A 90-day guaranteed local-visibility programme for ten founding businesses, where the guarantee carries the risk that a track record would normally carry.
- Implementation
- Programme design, scope and delivery structure are complete, built around what can genuinely be moved inside ninety days.
- Status
- Open cohort. No client has signed yet — the MSA is with a solicitor ahead of the first signature.
- Learning
- Designing to a guarantee disciplines the scope: you can only promise what you actually control, which rules a good deal of standard SEO practice out.
ResearchSEO Lab
- Problem
- Most SEO advice circulates as received wisdom and is never tested against the search environment it claims to describe.
- Approach
- Treat claims as hypotheses — test strategies, analyse the results, and publish what actually holds up across AI search, AEO and GEO.
- Implementation
- Published at uncoverseo.com/seo-lab as three streams: guides, case studies and experiments.
- Status
- Live, with the method and structure in place. No experiments published yet — write-ups follow the same evidence rule as everything else here.
- Learning
- A public lab works as a commitment device: it is considerably harder to repeat an untested claim once you have said in public that you would test it.
Semantic SEO
Client case study
Coming soon — the first Founding 10 case studies land after Month 3.
E-commerce SEO
Client case study
Coming soon — the first Founding 10 case studies land after Month 3.
Proof
First client results and case studies will appear here as Founding 10 businesses complete their first 90 days.
10/Search notes
Thinking about search.
I study search, run experiments, and publish what holds up. These are the positions I keep returning to — each one will become a full piece at its own URL.
AI Search
What happens when your customer stops searching and starts asking
The query becomes a conversation, the result becomes an answer, and the click becomes optional. That changes what you optimise for.
Article in progress
Topical Authority
Topical authority is a claim you have to make legible
Publishing widely is not the same as owning a subject. Authority is structural before it is editorial.
Article in progress
AI Visibility
The Five-Layer AI Visibility Model, explained
Visibility, interpretation, authority, AI inclusion, conversion. Most brands are failing at the second layer and measuring only the first.
Article in progress
Frequently asked
- Can search engines understand your business?
- Only if your entity — who you are, what you do, and who you serve — is defined clearly and consistently across your site and the wider web. Ambiguous or contradictory information forces a search engine to guess, and it guesses conservatively.
- What does AI visibility mean?
- AI visibility is whether AI systems — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — can identify your business, understand what you offer, and choose to mention or recommend it. It is a different, and increasingly more important, measure than a traditional search ranking.
- What is the difference between SEO and Semantic SEO?
- Traditional SEO optimises for keywords and rankings; Semantic SEO optimises for entities, topics and the relationships between them, which is what search engines actually use to judge relevance now.
- How is GEO different from traditional SEO?
- Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) targets being cited inside an AI-generated answer rather than being listed on a results page, so it optimises for clarity, structure and citability instead of keyword density and backlinks. Both share the same foundation: an entity that is genuinely well understood.
- Does social media affect AI search visibility?
- Yes — AI systems increasingly retrieve from social profiles, reviews and community signals as part of how they judge whether a brand can be trusted and cited. Social Media Optimisation is now part of the same visibility work as SEO, not a separate discipline.
11/The conversation
Let’s make your brand easier to discover.
Whether you’re trying to build topical authority, improve organic visibility, understand AI search, or rethink your digital strategy — let’s talk.
Start a conversation
→ Contact form on uncoverseo.com
Book a strategy call
→ Calendly · 30 minutes
Message on WhatsApp
→ wa.me · fastest response