Discoverability
Index Report
How a business shows up — and doesn't — across search and AI engines in its local market.
Buyers asking AI engines for turf recommendations in Edmonton hear about the company in 4 of 21 answers. The market leader was named in 12 — and two engines credit it with the company's own flagship product, VerdeLawn™.
Ask Perplexity, ChatGPT, or Gemini who to call for artificial turf in Edmonton and the company almost never comes up. Across 21 commercial buyer questions put to the three engines in July 2026, the company was named in 4 answers — and in one of those, Gemini merged the company into a competitor's listing rather than naming it on its own.
That absence is the story of this report. The company scores 35 of 100 on the SMC Discoverability Index — 8th (tied) of the 9 businesses scored, level with Parkland Landscape Centre, whose website carries a banner saying it is no longer monitored. The gap to the leader, Summit Turf Works at 68.5, is wide. The most damaging single finding: on the direct question "Is VerdeLawn good artificial turf?", Perplexity and Gemini both credit Prairie Synthetic Grass as VerdeLawn's exclusive supplier. The company — the actual business behind the product — received zero attribution on all three engines.
The board is more winnable than the rank suggests. Every business above the company has an exposed flank: the AI-visibility leader blocks browsers at its own front door with a security challenge; the review-volume leader runs a dead website; the top homeowner installer hasn't claimed its Google profile; the putting-green specialist has one Google review. The company's foundations — a 5.0★ profile, clean on-page basics, and a working AI-agent endpoint most competitors lack — are real. What's missing is the entity layer, the content, and the third-party footprint that AI engines build their answers from. All three are buildable.
Revenue at stake from AI-answer invisibility, modeled on recovered jobs: 1–2 jobs per month × $5,000 average job value (client-provided) × 12 months. Basis: the company is absent from 17 of 21 commercial AI answers a buyer might ask; the competitors named in those answers capture that intent today. Assumptions stated in section 06.
Every business was measured the same way, live, on 2026-07-09: browser-rendered page inspection (not raw scraping, which JS-built sites defeat), technical probes of each domain, a Jordan-approved set of 14 buyer queries — the eight AI-intent queries run as fresh conversations across three AI engines, and Canada-weighted trust checks on the platforms that matter for trades — Google Business Profile, HomeStars, TrustedPros, and Consumer Choice.
We measured 4 layers of discoverability. Classical SEO — what search engines can read, index, and rank. AEO / GEO — Answer and Generative Engine Optimisation — how a business appears when buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity for recommendations in Edmonton–Calgary. webMCP readiness — whether a site publishes data in formats AI agents can parse directly. The fourth pillar, Canadian trust signals, scores the review and directory presence Canadian buyers (and the engines that cite them) actually use.
Figures tagged [modeled] state their assumptions inline; [estimated] marks values from observable-but-inexact signals; [unverified] marks the one case (Prairie Synthetic Grass's on-page code) where a security challenge blocked live inspection twice. Everything else traces to a logged capture or probe.
The company's website is home, about, and a quote form. No pricing page, no FAQ, no VerdeLawn™ product page, no wholesale-program page, no city pages. Every cost, spec, and "best of" question buyers ask goes to competitors' content instead — this one gap suppresses two pillars at once. Fix horizon: 30–60 days.
Live render: strong keyword title ("Wholesale Artificial Turf Supplier Alberta & Installation"), a real meta description, exactly one H1, sane heading order, all images carrying alt text. Two competitors above the company on the board (GreenSpan Surfaces, Northgate Grass) render with zero H1s. The plumbing works; there's just very little flowing through it.
Sitemap valid and current (lastmod 2026-07-04) with clean robots.txt. But the citation footprint is the site itself, the Google profile, and Instagram — no directories, no third-party mentions found. Domain authority signals score 2/6 [estimated].
Asked "Is VerdeLawn good artificial turf?", Perplexity and Gemini both name Prairie Synthetic Grass as VerdeLawn's exclusive supplier/dealer; ChatGPT credits no company at all. Gemini's wholesale answer goes further, listing "Prairie Synthetic Grass / the company" as one merged entity and handing the combined listing the company's product exclusivity. The company's flagship asset is doing marketing work for someone else. Fix horizon: 30–90 days (schema + product page + citations).
The four: #1 on Perplexity's wholesale-supplier answer (the bright spot), a top-3 "call first" spot on ChatGPT's bulk-Calgary answer, a secondary "also worth considering" on Perplexity homeowner, and the conflated Gemini listing. Absent from all six cost/winter-spec answers, all three putting-green answers, and all three VerdeLawn answers. Prairie Synthetic Grass appeared in 12 of 21; AllSeason Greens in 11.
ChatGPT built its installer shortlists from third-party sources — listicles, directories, brand sites. The company appears on none of them: not a national "best of" listicle, not an Edmonton vendor roundup (both live and [2026]-dated), not HomeStars, not TrustedPros. When engines cited the company at all, the only source was the company's website itself.
The company's Google Business Profile is rated 5.0★ across 23 reviews with owner responses and fresh photos — but shows no street address (service-area setup), and the review count trails Parkland Landscape Centre (386), Summit Turf Works (179), and GreenSpan Surfaces (85). Volume is what earns a spot in the Places results engines quote. No HomeStars, TrustedPros, or Consumer Choice presence — though notably, nobody in this set holds those either (section 07).
Live render found a single JSON-LD block of type WebSite — no LocalBusiness, no Service or Product, no FAQPage, no AggregateRating. Address, phone, and email exist only in the page footer, not in structured data. This is the single biggest fixable technical gap, and it feeds the Gemini identity confusion directly: engines have no machine-readable statement of who the company is and what it owns. Fix horizon: 2–4 weeks.
The company's website publishes a live llms.txt describing the business, VerdeLawn™, and service area — and documents a working site MCP endpoint (/_api/mcp) with tools for business details, site search, and booking/purchase flows. Only one competitor of eight (Summit Turf Works, via its commerce platform) has anything comparable; six have nothing at all. Sharpen it and the company is ahead of 7 of 8 competitors on the machine-readable web.
Eight competitors were scored with identical method. What the board shows: every business ahead of the company is winning on one or two pillars while leaving another wide open. Nobody in this market is strong everywhere — which is what makes the climb realistic.
The only competitor treating AI as a channel: substantive llms.txt, a live agentic-commerce endpoint (agents can query the catalog and transact today), 4.9★ across 179 Google reviews, #1 on an Edmonton vendor roundup's turf list, and #1 answers on wholesale and winter-spec queries. The flank: it's Calgary-anchored wholesale — thin on Edmonton homeowner installs, no HomeStars/TrustedPros, and its entity schema is generic.
The AI-visibility leader — 12 of 21 answers, both live Edmonton listicles, a HomeStars profile, 4.5★/49 — and currently the credited owner of the company's VerdeLawn™ story. Two flanks: its site met our live browser with a security challenge twice (on-page code [unverified] — a wall against the AI crawlers it invites in robots.txt), and its VerdeLawn claim is contestable by the company that actually holds the line.
Perplexity's #1 homeowner recommendation, 4.9★/85, a 5.0 Houzz profile, LocalBusiness + FAQPage schema. The flanks: its Google profile is literally unclaimed ("Claim this business"), the homepage renders zero H1s, and turf is one service page among a dozen — it wins as a landscaper, not a turf specialist.
Rides the Meridian Turf dealer network: the brand appears in 8 of 21 answers, Cascade Outdoor Surfaces itself in only 2. Fresh site, rich schema graph, 4.6★/43. Its visibility is rented from a brand it doesn't own — the same play the company can run with VerdeLawn™, as owner rather than tenant.
Owns putting-green intent outright — #1 on all three engines for that query, on content depth and the global brand's proof (a pro-golf brand partnership, published green-speed ratings). The flank is stark: one Google review, an out-of-town address, no listicle or directory presence. Its moat is content — the most copyable kind.
TrueLine Turf: solid AI mentions, 8 reviews split across two Google listings, blog stale since 2017. Northgate Grass: national content earns AI citations, but its Edmonton profile has zero reviews and no website link, plus zero H1s and 40 of 42 images missing alt text. Parkland Landscape Centre: the market's review giant (4.7★/386) behind an abandoned website — proof that review equity alone no longer converts to AI recommendations.
One 0–100 score, built identically for every business: classical SEO (30), AEO / GEO (35, weighted highest because it's where the durable edge is forming), webMCP readiness (20), and Canadian trust signals (15).
| Rank | Business | SEO /30 | AEO/GEO /35 | webMCP /20 | Cdn trust /15 | SDI /100 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Summit Turf Works | 24 | 22 | 14 | 8.5 | 68.5 |
| 2 | Prairie Synthetic Grass | 21 | 26.5 | 3 † | 10.5 | 61 |
| 3 | GreenSpan Surfaces | 14.5 | 16.5 | 7.5 | 9.5 | 48 |
| 4 | Cascade Outdoor Surfaces | 20 | 13 | 7 | 7.5 | 47.5 |
| 5 | AllSeason Greens | 22 | 15.5 | 4 | 4 | 45.5 |
| 6 | TrueLine Turf | 17.5 | 14.5 | 4 | 5.5 | 41.5 |
| 7 | Northgate Grass | 18 | 9 | 7 | 3.5 | 37.5 |
| 8= | This business | 15.5 | 8.5 | 6.5 | 4.5 | 35 |
| 8= | Parkland Landscape Centre | 9 | 14 | 3.5 | 8.5 | 35 |
† Prairie Synthetic Grass's on-page/schema could not be inspected — its site presented an interactive security challenge to our live browser twice; the webMCP pillar is scored conservatively from external probes only and tagged [unverified]. Full sub-signal scoring in the run's leaderboard.md.
We model cost on recovered jobs, not traffic estimates — the arithmetic a buyer can check. When a homeowner or contractor asks an AI engine who to call and the company isn't in the answer, that job goes to whoever is. The company is absent from 17 of the 21 commercial answers captured; the businesses filling that space — Prairie Synthetic Grass, AllSeason Greens, Summit Turf Works — are named dozens of times across them.
| Scenario | Assumption | Jobs / year | At $5,000 avg job (client-provided) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conservative | Closing the visibility gap recovers 1 job/month currently routed to competitors named in AI answers | 12 | $60,000 / yr [modeled] |
| Base | 2 recovered jobs/month across homeowner + wholesale tracks | 24 | $120,000 / yr [modeled] |
Both figures are [modeled — assumptions stated above]. They exclude the harder-to-price cost of the VerdeLawn™ misattribution: every "Is VerdeLawn good?" answer currently sends product-aware, high-intent buyers to a competitor's door. At wholesale scale, a single redirected contractor account is worth multiples of one job.
The rank is low; the raw material isn't. These are the assets the roadmap builds on — several of them advantages nobody else in the set holds.
Sequenced for compounding effect: entity first (so engines know who the company is), content second (so there's something to cite), then the third-party footprint (so engines hear it from someone other than the company). Items 1–4 are the 30-day sprint; 5–8 the 90-day build; 9–11 the moat.
| # | Action | Why it matters | Effort | Impact | SMC engagement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Schema overhaul: LocalBusiness + Service + Product + FAQPage + AggregateRating JSON-LD, naming the company "exclusive Western Canadian supplier of VerdeLawn™", with address, phone, hours machine-readable | The entity layer is one WebSite block today. This is the direct counter to Gemini merging the company into a competitor — and the site platform supports it natively | Low | High | Fix Sprint |
| 2 | VerdeLawn™ product page: specs, Alberta-winter performance, antimicrobial claims with sources, "who supplies VerdeLawn" stated plainly | Reclaims the "Is VerdeLawn good?" answer on all three engines — currently a competitor's free advertisement | Med | High | Fix Sprint |
The complete prioritized plan — the exact technical fixes, how each is implemented, and the order to run them — comes with your own Discoverability Index. This sample shows the shape of the plan, not the playbook.
Get your own reportItems 1–6 are all within the company's direct control — no waiting on third parties. Completed, they plausibly move the SDI from 35 into the low 50s [estimated]: roughly +6 on webMCP (entity schema), +4–5 on classical SEO (content depth), and +3–4 on Canadian trust (directories, profile completion). On the current board that's top-4 territory — past Parkland Landscape Centre, Northgate Grass, TrueLine Turf, AllSeason Greens, and Cascade Outdoor Surfaces — with the third-party citation work (item 7) still compounding behind it.
The realistic route to #1 runs through the two leaders' weaknesses. Summit Turf Works owns wholesale AI answers but is Calgary-anchored and invisible on Edmonton homeowner intent — the company can take the Edmonton-installer answers Summit Turf Works doesn't contest. Prairie Synthetic Grass owns overall AI visibility but is renting its best story from the company: the moment engines have a machine-readable, third-party-corroborated statement that the company is VerdeLawn™'s supplier, the misattribution that props up its Q8 presence starts working in reverse. Neither leader holds a review rating as strong as the company's, and neither holds the trades directories or the Consumer Choice award — because nobody does yet.
AI answers refresh on their own cadence, so changes land on a lag. We recommend a re-capture of the full query set at 6–8 weeks (late August 2026) to measure movement, then the quarterly re-score to hold the trajectory. The first checkpoint that matters: the company named — correctly, on its own — in the VerdeLawn™ answer on at least two of three engines.
Same method, your real numbers — where you rank, what the gap costs you, and the plan to close it. Start with a free Visibility Check.
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