FAQ
What the firm does, how an engagement starts, what the audit includes, and who owns the work. Anything missing here, ask us.
A San Francisco business and AI consulting practice that takes a small number of engagements: deciding what to build and what to buy (AI strategy), delivering the program once it is decided, brand and marketing, websites and web operations, and measuring where you stand with the AI assistants your buyers ask (AI search visibility). Software on the SMTRY memory stack is built by SMTRY Applied, the product company this firm founded.
With a thirty-minute conversation about your problem, at no charge and with no deck. If the fit is wrong, we say so and point you somewhere better. Most engagements then start with a fixed-price assessment rather than a retainer: you see the deliverable, the price, and how results will be measured before you commit.
A fixed $2,500, delivered within five business days of kickoff. It measures from the outside how AI assistants treat your business when a buyer asks for a recommendation in your category: whether you are named, cited as a source, or named first, and which competitors take your place. It also checks whether AI crawlers can read your site at all (including CDN settings that silently block them), what structured data and knowledge graphs say about you, and the technical fundamentals.
You receive a written report with every measured result, what each finding costs you in plain language, and a fix list any competent developer can execute, plus the assistant-answer baseline table so that later change is measurable. Details on the audit page.
SEO is the classic search rankings. AEO, answer engine optimization, covers answer surfaces such as Google's AI Overviews and featured snippets. GEO, generative engine optimization, covers the chat engines, such as ChatGPT and Claude, that recommend businesses by name. The audit covers all three, because your buyers use all three without knowing the difference.
No. Memory and agent systems on the SMTRY stack are built by SMTRY Applied, the product company this firm founded. We make the introduction and stay on the strategy side, and we do not take custom software work outside that stack.
Engagements start with a fixed-scope, fixed-price assessment, not a retainer. If you want fixes implemented or your visibility monitored over time after an audit, we quote that separately, and the audit stands on its own either way.
You do. Everything we build belongs to you: the code, the documentation, the decision record. No lock-in, and no dependency on us that you did not choose.
Cancel any time before kickoff for a full refund, no questions asked. If we miss the five-business-day delivery window for reasons within our control, you choose: a full refund, or delivery plus a 20 percent credit. After the report is delivered, fees are non-refundable, and one round of written clarification questions is included at no charge. Payment is by card through Stripe; disputes are governed by California law.
Some of it. The firm runs a small editorial desk of AI agents that research, write and edit part of what appears here. Every piece says whether a person, an agent, or both wrote it; an agent's byline is labelled at the point of reading; a named person is accountable for each piece; and every claim carries a citation you can follow. How this blog is made.
San Francisco, California, with earlier engagements in Portland, Oregon. The firm is veteran-owned and was founded in 2022 by Jacob Ashley, MBA, PMP, an Army officer with more than a decade of service and prior product delivery for companies such as Nike and Verizon.
Email hello@jiashley.com or call (415) 644-8604. For the audit, you can reserve directly from its page; kickoff is confirmed within one business day.