Most marketing services never tell you what’s under the hood. We think you should know, because what’s under the hood decides whether your marketing still runs on a week you’re too busy to check on it.

This fall we rebuilt the engine behind Surfaced. We took everything off the general-purpose automation tool it had grown up on and moved it onto a platform we built for exactly this work. That work happens in two places: your Google Business Profile, which is what most customers see first when they look you up in Maps, and your website.

New to Surfaced? Here’s what it is. Surfaced keeps a local business findable, on Google, in Maps, and in the answers AI assistants give when someone asks for a recommendation, without the owner having to think about it. Every week it looks at what’s changed: new reviews, what people searched for, how your pages are doing. Then it drafts the work. Every new review gets a reply written in your voice. Your Google Business Profile gets up to two fresh posts a month. Your website gets new pages and improvements aimed at what your customers actually search for. You see each piece as a finished preview and approve it with one click, and nothing goes live without that click. You can start with just your Google Business Profile: Presence is $249 a month, with no commitment and no new website. The full service is $999 a month and covers both your website and your Google Business Profile. If you only want the website, that’s $749 a month. Either way, there’s no build fee on a six-month commitment. See how it works, or find out where you stand for free.

For our clients, the day-to-day stays the same. You get a preview, you approve or you don’t, and the work happens. What changed is everything behind that button.

Why we did it

Surfaced started on n8n, a popular workflow automation tool. It’s a good tool, and it got us a long way. But as the service grew, the work ended up spread across several places: some jobs ran on n8n’s timers, some ran inside our own application, and one piece lived on its own on a server. Each did its job. None of them could see what the others were doing.

That’s fine while everything works. A marketing service, though, mostly earns its keep in the weeks nobody is watching. If a weekly job quietly stops, you want the system to notice before your customers do. With work spread across three places, nothing had the full picture.

So we put it all in one place.

One system runs everything

Every recurring job now runs from a single schedule: checking for new reviews, drafting replies and profile posts, collecting your search data, drafting new pages, publishing. Every run leaves a record behind, and so does a run that should have happened and didn’t. A job that doesn’t run is something we see, not something we find out about weeks later.

The work is split across focused AI agents, each with one job. One drafts review replies. One writes profile posts. One plans what your website needs next. One publishes. One measures. Each is small enough that we can test it on its own and keep improving it without touching the others.

What changed on your Google Business Profile

Your profile is often the first thing a customer sees: your rating, your reviews, and whether anyone is home. A profile with unanswered reviews and a last post from two years ago tells them something, even if your work is excellent.

Every review gets a reply drafted in your voice. New reviews are checked three times a week. Each one gets a reply written the way you’d write it yourself on your phone between jobs: their first name, one specific detail from what they said, two to four sentences, signed the way you sign. Not “we appreciate your business” and not “your feedback is important to us.” Those phrases, and others like them, are on a list the writer is told never to use, because a reply that could have been written by any company reads like it was. A five-star review gets thanks for the specific thing they praised. A one-star review gets an apology first, never a defense, and an invitation to call.

You can change the reply right where you approve it. The draft opens on a preview page. Edit it there if you want, and it posts exactly as you left it. If you reject one, we ask why, and we read every answer.

If you’ve already answered a review yourself, we leave it alone. Before posting, the system checks Google for a reply from you. If there is one, it records yours and doesn’t post ours.

Profile posts that sound like your business, not a template. Once a month, up to two posts, drawn from only three kinds of material: something genuinely timely for your trade this month, a spotlight on one service you haven’t posted about in six months, or what recent reviews keep praising, in our words rather than quoting your customers. What you won’t get is the same post with a different suburb’s name swapped in. If you turn one down, your reason goes to the writer as an instruction for next time. When you approve one, it’s live on Google within seconds.

What changed on your website

From your yes to a finished preview in minutes. When you approve a new page idea, a full draft is written, built and put on a real preview link, usually within a few minutes. You see the finished page on the web, the way a visitor would, and you approve it a second time before it reaches your live site.

Your search data, collected every week. Your Search Console queries and clicks, your Analytics traffic and your rankings, so the next page idea comes from what people actually search for, not a guess.

We record what happens after each change. After an approved change goes live, the system goes back and records what moved. Working out whether one specific change caused a movement is harder, and we won’t show you a before-and-after until we can stand behind it.

Your site is easier for AI tools to read. Every client site now also serves a clean, text-only version of each page, without the layout and scripts. AI agents already ask for pages in that format: we’ve confirmed that tools such as Claude Code and Codex request it. It’s one more way to be in the answer when someone asks an assistant for a recommendation.

The same rules apply to both

Your approval is checked twice. Nothing goes live without your yes, whether it’s a review reply, a profile post or a page. That was always true, and it’s now enforced at the last step as well. Before anything goes out to Google or your website, the publishing step looks up whether you actually approved it. If you didn’t, it refuses. No shortcut and no “it was probably fine.”

One email a week. You get one briefing: how you’re doing, your new reviews and your rating, and everything that’s waiting for your approval. It’s built from the same records the system keeps for itself, so the numbers you see are the numbers it works from.

How we moved without disrupting anyone

Rebuilding the engine of a service people depend on is a little like replacing a car’s engine while it’s on the highway. We set ourselves three rules:

Move one piece at a time. We migrated in stages: first the data collection, then the drafting and planning, then the publishing, then measurement. Each stage was finished before the next one began.
Nothing gets switched off until its replacement has been seen doing the job. Not tested in a sandbox. Seen working, on a real client’s profile or site, with the result on record. Only then did we turn the old piece off.
Keep the old version ready. Each old piece was switched off, not deleted, so we could have rolled back the same day if we had needed to. We never needed to, and once the new system had run on its own for a stretch, we retired the old one for good.

Every website change also went to a preview link first and was checked there before going live, which is how we already handle the pages we write for you.

The result is that none of our clients had to change anything about how they work with us. Same emails, same previews, same approve button.

Why this matters if you’re choosing a marketing partner

Most small business marketing runs on a patchwork: a scheduling tool, a reporting tool, a spreadsheet, and someone remembering to log in. It works until the person is on vacation, or a tool changes its settings, and then it quietly stops. Usually nobody notices until the phone rings less. Reviews go unanswered, the profile goes stale, and customers comparing you with the business down the street notice before you do.

Here’s what we’d suggest asking any provider, us included:

What happens when something fails? Does it get noticed, or does it wait for you to notice?
Can anything go live without your approval? That includes a reply to a review. And is that a policy, or does the system actually prevent it?
Who is the voice? Does a review reply sound like you, or like a call center?
How do you know the work is helping? Is that measured, or assumed?

We rebuilt Surfaced so we’d have good answers to those questions. You approve the work, and the system does the rest and keeps a record of all of it.

You don’t have to start with your website, either. If you already have a site you like, Presence takes on just your Google Business Profile: review replies, monthly posts and the weekly briefing, with no site rebuild and no commitment. If you want marketing that keeps running on the weeks you can’t think about it, let’s talk.