The situation
Common Ground runs several ventures at once across capital, brand, technology and construction. Each one needed the same three things that a client engagement eventually needs too: a place for a client to see their own files, updates and a data room without an email thread carrying all of it; a way to know whether the firm's own sites and content actually show up in a search, in an AI answer engine, or in a language model's retrieval, rather than assuming they do; and an honest audit of what systems, accounts and automations are actually running before adding one more.
We built each tool for our own portfolio first, the same standing rule behind every system in this room, and each one is now offered to clients under its own name, white-labeled per engagement. The visibility engine in particular grew directly out of a standard the firm wrote for itself in June 2026 and only later turned into a named, validated product.
Running several ventures at once meant client updates went out by hand over email, nobody could say with any confidence whether the firm's own web presence actually showed up in a search or an AI answer, and the firm's own stack of tools and automations had grown past the point where anyone could describe it from memory.
Built a branded client portal and data room with versioned, hidden-until-published pages; built a scoring engine for search, generative-engine and language-model visibility, validated against a hand audit before it was trusted; and built a systems and accounts audit that runs before any new tool gets installed.
The portal's first live client workspace stood up in September 2026. The visibility engine was validated against a hand audit of ten sites across sixteen check types before it was named, and search, generative-engine and language-model visibility is now built into every product the firm ships and into its first clients this year.
Read on
The decision and the reasoning
Why we did it this way, told first.
ReadWhat we did and what it produced
The work, decision by decision, and the result.
ReadA slice of the project list
A few related projects.
ReadPrivate side
The full report, the source files on record, the timeline and every figure with its source. Password.
Enter