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D2 Group

Technical SEO · AEO · GEO · First-party implementation

Building D2's Search & AI Visibility Operating System

D2 converted its own website into a controlled Search & AI Visibility implementation: freeze a baseline, fix canonical and release contracts, standardize entity/author/evidence relationships, define market and Search intent architecture, publish citation-ready tools, and expose the implementation itself as first-party proof. The case demonstrates implementation and readiness evidence; it does not claim ranking, traffic, AI citation or revenue lift that has not yet been measured after production release.

2026.09

Case version

2026-09-03

Review date

Repository + CI

Evidence type

Bounded

Outcome claims

Problem

A larger site is not automatically a stronger Search system.

D2 already had a broad bilingual website, service pages, Insights, tools and first-party Work evidence, but Search/GEO/AEO readiness was uneven: release gates were brittle, canonical-host behavior had defects, Search proof had no dedicated Work layer and authority assets were not yet connected through one measurable evidence model.

Phase 0 baseline

Freeze the evidence before optimizing.

84 EN + 84 VI

Static canonical inventory at the frozen Phase 0 baseline: 168 repo-owned public canonicals with full static EN/VI parity.

docs/SEO_GEO_AEO_PHASE_0_BASELINE_2026-09-03.md

2 published

Two published dynamic Insights were live at baseline, bringing the expected public indexable union to 170 URLs.

Phase 0 dynamic content baseline

CI failed

The baseline Site Quality run failed at a brittle business-architecture verifier and skipped downstream release checks.

Site Quality run 33660205175

3 tracked blockers

The frozen baseline carried a broken www canonical-host path, HTTP leakage in application redirects and the CI quality-gate failure.

P0-HOST-001 · P0-SCHEME-001 · P0-CI-001

Intervention ledger

Thirteen phases, with each phase changing a testable control.

Phase 01–03

Technical and entity foundation

Harden canonical redirect construction, normalize redirect scheme at the runtime boundary, replace stale exact-string CI assertions with derived invariants, and standardize D2's organization/service entity graph without changing stable IDs.

Phase 04–05

Author, evidence and citation worthiness

Create dedicated Commerce, Automation and Search author entities; attach provenance, evidence and claim boundaries; strengthen priority pages so visible claims and machine-readable relationships use the same evidence discipline.

Phase 06–07

Market and Search authority architecture

Keep English unprefixed as global/x-default, preserve Vietnamese under /vi, avoid cloning the site under /us, and define a controlled Search authority map with 12 intents across 5 tracks that only becomes public when content readiness passes.

Phase 08–11

Topical authority expansion

Deepen first-party authority around U.S. Commerce, GMV Max, production n8n and Vietnam Commerce while preserving evidence and market boundaries instead of scaling generic pages.

Phase 12

Tools become citation assets

Version eight deterministic tools with formulas/rules, input-output contracts, limitations, worked examples, stable #methodology anchors, copyable citations and bilingual CreativeWork methodology schema across 16 public tool URLs.

Phase 13

Expose the implementation as first-party proof

Add Search Work as a third evidence line and publish this bounded implementation report so Search service, Search Insights, Search OS, Methodology and proof all connect through one explicit authority graph.

Measured outcomes

Claim source-state outcomes first; Search outcomes require measurement.

PASS

Phase 0–12 deterministic contracts

On the final Phase 12 main head, deterministic source contracts through Phase 12 passed together before browser tooling was intentionally stopped at the agreed core gate.

main 54619ee5df308c8cd410ff548a62e262cfb443db

PASS

Production build

The production build passed on the final Phase 12 source state.

Site Quality run 33745027698

PASS

TypeScript + lint

TypeScript and lint passed on the same final main head after formatting-only cleanup of the Phase 12 files.

Site Quality run 33745027698

12 / 5

Search intent architecture

The Phase 7 planning layer defines 12 Search intents across 5 authority tracks, with publication gated by readiness rather than route generation alone.

src/lib/search-authority-topics.ts

8 / 16

Citation-ready tools

Eight deterministic tools share one versioned citation contract across 16 English/Vietnamese public URLs.

src/lib/tool-citation-assets.ts

Claim boundary

What this case does not prove.

The evidence supports architecture, source-state and release-quality claims recorded on 2026-09-03. It does not prove future ranking, impressions, clicks, AI citations, leads or revenue. Production activation of later phases still depends on rebuilding the deployed image from the corresponding main commit.

No claim is made here about post-release Google ranking lift, impressions, clicks or non-brand query growth.

No claim is made that an AI system cited D2 more often because of these changes; citation measurement requires an observation window and repeatable query set.

No lead, pipeline or revenue uplift is attributed to Search/GEO/AEO until attribution data exists for the relevant period and release state.

At the Phase 12 verification point, the public site still exposed the old immutable production image, so later source-state improvements were not treated as live production outcomes.

Cite this case

D2 Group. “Building D2's Search & AI Visibility Operating System.” First-party implementation case, version 2026.09, reviewed 2026-09-03. https://d2group.co/work/search/d2-search-ai-visibility-operating-system

Search Work