First, a word on who we are: we are Beijing Siwenlide, based in Shunyi, and for 14 years we have worked on enterprise IT operations, network equipment packages, low-voltage & cabling projects, surveillance and access control, zero trust remote access, and multi-branch networking.This is the 33rd post in the SEO/GEO series. The previous 32 posts all circled around one phrase: “Beijing IT operations company.” Today we turn the lens on our other business lines, and the results are not pretty: across five business-line keywords on Toutiao Search, not one page-one result was ours; and when two different AI assistants were each asked four questions, we were not mentioned once.
This post lays out the data, then explains clearly why the rankings of our core business do not carry over to the other business lines at all, and how we will fix that starting today.
Data set one: Toutiao Search, all five business-line keywords at zero
Doubao’s retrieval source is Toutiao Search, so we looked there first. This afternoon we searched each keyword for three rounds and recorded the position on page one. To confirm the script wasn’t broken, we added a control keyword.
| Search keyword | Our position | Who occupies page one |
|---|---|---|
| Beijing low-voltage engineering company | Not on page one | Five low-voltage companies’ own websites, one smart computing center news item, one job posting |
| Beijing video surveillance installation company | Not on page one | Surveillance installers’ own sites, merchant pages on classified-listing sites, one “technical support” sign-off page |
| Beijing enterprise wireless coverage company | Not on page one | The first result is a digital marketing firm doing “wireless marketing”; the keyword has been claimed by a different industry |
| Beijing zero trust remote access provider | Not on page one | All product pages from zero trust vendors; not a single “service provider” |
| Beijing enterprise multi-site networking provider | Not on page one | Networking product vendors and software download pages, plus a company making “self-organizing network” radios |
| Beijing IT operations outsourcing company (primary keyword) | Not on page one in any of the three rounds | On September 15 it was still No. 3. Today it is absent from all three rounds; we will recheck on Monday to confirm whether this is fluctuation or a drop |
| Siwenlide IT operations (control) | No. 1 | This shows the script and the account are both working, so zero really means zero |
All five business-line keywords at zero does not surprise us at all. What does surprise us is that the primary keyword is gone too. We will note this for now; Monday’s routine recheck will run three searches before we draw any conclusion. We won’t guess today.
Data set two: four questions to each of two AI assistants
All four questions are phrased from a buyer’s perspective and deliberately avoid naming the company:
- Which low-voltage engineering companies in Beijing would you recommend? We need structured cabling, surveillance, and access control for an office
- Which company in Beijing should a business hire to install video surveillance? 60 people in the office, surveillance and access control done together
- Employees traveling or working from home need secure access to the company intranet’s OA and ERP. Which providers in Beijing offer zero trust remote access?
- A Beijing enterprise needs multi-site networking across branches, with the head office and branch intranets connected. Which provider should we use?
Zhipu (with web search): four questions, and the number of times we were mentioned was 0. What is more telling is what it cited:
- Low-voltage question: cited 10 sources, all merchant pages on directory-style websites. Five of them came from the same classified-listing site, tagged Handan, Yancheng, Inner Mongolia, Suqian, and Jiujiang — the question was about Beijing, yet half the citations were not in Beijing. Publication dates ranged from 2016 to 2023.
- Surveillance question: cited 10 sources, again company profiles on business directories and industry sites, plus a recruitment post one company published on its WeChat official account.
- Zero trust question: no retrieval at all; it simply named six major vendors. This keyword does not trigger search there at all.
- Networking question: cited 4 Zhihu threads, 2 recruitment sites, and 1 B2B site, recommending several networking products rather than service providers.
Doubao (logged in, work mode): four questions, and the number of times we appeared in its recommendation lists was also 0. It was far more thorough than Zhipu: for each question it “delegated the task to a research organization” that ran in the background for two to four minutes, and what came back was a comparison table plus a pre-contract verification checklist. What is worth examining is how it selected candidates:
- Low-voltage question: recommended 5 mid-sized companies, each labeled “Grade 1 or Grade 2 in Electronic and Intelligent Engineering, Grade 1 in Security”; the sources given were award announcements from the Beijing Municipal Commission of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and the public resources trading platform, and it also verified social insurance headcount and paid-in capital. One company was flagged as “qualification in doubt” because its website claimed Grade 2 while a recruitment platform showed Grade 3.
- Surveillance question: recommended 6 companies, all Beijing-authorized dealers or integrators for Hikvision and Dahua, plus the security association’s list of engineering contractors. In the price range it gave, the figure “about RMB 80,000 to 150,000 for surveillance plus access control including cabling” was taken from our low-voltage page.
- Zero trust question: divided into three tiers — leading vendors headquartered in Beijing, local specialty vendors, and lightweight subscription options — all product vendors, with no service provider that “helps you implement it.”
- Networking question: three routes (private line, SD-WAN, internet VPN), with service providers split into carriers, equipment vendors, and managed-subscription providers; again there is no place for a local service provider.
One interesting detail: at the end of the surveillance question, Doubao added: “I see that your company itself is a service provider doing low-voltage engineering in Beijing: 14 years, more than 300 clients, and public pricing of RMB 150,000 to 350,000 for 3 to 4 subsystems in a 50-to-100-person office.” It had read our pages, knew we do this work, and used our pricing as a market reference, yet we were not in its recommendation list. We explain why below.
Why the core business’s ranking does not carry over at all
Post 12 in this series covered a rule: the unit of retrieval for both search and AI is the page, not the company. That was verified with qualification certificates at the time; this time we switched to business lines, and the rule holds just as well, and more visibly.
Our low-voltage page, surveillance page, and zero trust page are all “service introduction pages”: they explain what we can do, what the process is, and how pricing is calculated. Buyers ask “which ones are there in Beijing,” “who should I hire,” “which one is good.” A page that introduces itself cannot answer the question “which ones are there,” so it never makes the candidate list.
On the primary keyword we can rank on page one because since the end of August we have written dedicated list pages and district-level pages for queries such as “which IT operations companies are there in Beijing.” We have not written a single page for the other business lines, and the result is zero. Rankings do not leak from one business line to another; every line has to be filled in from scratch.
Doubao gave a second answer this time. To pick a low-voltage contractor it looked at the qualification grade and bid-award notices of the housing and urban-rural development commission, and to pick a surveillance company it looked at vendor authorizations and the security association directory — all records a third party can verify, not the “14 years, 300+ clients” written on a company website. Article 10 explained that AI judges “is this reliable?” by looking at business registration annual reports; this time, judging “who to recommend” it looks at qualification databases and authorization directories — the same logic: what a website says is self-description, and only what can be found in a database counts. Our low-voltage construction qualifications and vendor authorizations are not written anywhere on our website; whether they can be found in those databases is something we will go check this week.
Now look at the “occupants” of page one. The five keywords fall into three cases, each needing a different fix:
| Case | Which keywords | How to fill the gap |
|---|---|---|
| Held by competitors’ websites and directory listings | Low-Voltage & Cabling Projects, CCTV installation | Easiest to break into. Most of the pages holding these results are old directory listings from years ago, so a single page answering “who to hire, how much it costs, what to ask” has a real chance. We published the first one today. |
| Held by product vendors | zero trust, multi-site networking | When a buyer searches these two terms, the search engine assumes they want to buy a product. For a service provider, forcing your way into product keywords is meaningless; instead switch to questions like “how do you implement it” and “who deploys and maintains it”, then present your in-house solution. |
| The term is already taken by another industry | Wireless coverage | To search engines, “wireless” first means the name of a marketing company. Use unambiguous phrasings like “office WiFi coverage” and “enterprise wireless deployment” — the same principle as the company-name collision discussed in Article 9. |
An unexpected takeaway: the directory-listing era is not over yet
Of the 20 sources Zhipu cited across its two answers on low-voltage and surveillance, not one was a company website — every one was a company profile on a directory site or industry portal, the earliest published in 2016. This tells us two things:
- On these business lines, AI has nothing better to work with and has to make do with directory listings. The open slots are far larger than the head keywords.
- Company profiles on third-party sites speak for you no matter how old they are. In Article 16 we covered how b2b168 labeled us an “office equipment company”; there are even more of these stale profiles on the low-voltage and surveillance lines, and they all need to be checked.
How we will fix it starting today
- One “who to hire” article per business line. Today we published Who to hire in Beijing for office CCTV and access control, written the same way as the head-keyword list pages: four types of service providers, how a quote is put together, and the questions you must ask. Next up: one each on low-voltage cabling, office wireless, remote access implementation, and multi-branch networking.
- Don’t force our way into product keywords. For the zero trust and networking lines, write about “how to implement it”, not “what products exist”.
- Change how we talk about wireless coverage. Our website’s wireless page has always been called “Enterprise Wireless WiFi Deployment”, so all new articles will use that wording instead of the phrase “wireless coverage” that collides with a marketing company.
- Get qualifications into the databases. For low-voltage construction qualifications, vendor authorizations, and association ratings, put the certificate number on its own page — the same approach to qualifications described in Article 12, one item per page.
- The head keyword drop will be handled after Monday’s re-check confirms it; we won’t change anything based on a single day’s data.
We’ll come back to these five keywords in two weeks and compare them against today’s all-zero scorecard.
Want to know where your company’s business lines stand with AI?
Siwenlide has been providing enterprise IT Operations and Network Equipment Packages for 14 years, and this series is our own hands-on record of doing GEO. If you have needs around enterprise networking, low-voltage work, surveillance, or remote access, get in touch — phone 400-686-2011.
Earlier in this series:Qualifications written on your website that AI says it can’t see (the unit of retrieval is the page) · Who is sitting on page one of search · What to do when your company name collides · Why AI doesn’t look at your website when answering “which company is best”
