Case study · proof of concept · zero ad spend
buy-sell.land: 100 County Pages, Real AI Citations
Before RankOps took a single client, founder Tyler Moncrieff ran the full method on his own company: buy-sell.land, a vacant-land site covering all 100 North Carolina counties. The result — 100 county pages that show up in AI answers about buying rural land, with zero dollars spent on advertising.
The problem
buy-sell.land had real inventory, real sellers, and a real market for rural land, farms, and owner-financed parcels — but no AI search visibility. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity "where can I find owner-financed land in [county]," the AI names two or three sources. buy-sell.land wasn't one of them, not because the content was bad, but because it wasn't structured the way AI systems recognize and cite.
What was built
- Answer-first structure — every county page leads with the direct answer (what the county offers, who it fits, typical price range) before the supporting detail, because AI systems weight the first third of a page heaviest
- FAQPage schema with real acceptedAnswer text — structured questions land buyers actually ask ("Is [County] a good place to buy land?"), answered as direct, citable text, not marketing copy
- Speakable markup on the opening answer and FAQ sections, flagging exactly which content AI should extract
- County-level entity signals — county name, state, neighboring counties, and local land-use detail, because geographic specificity is what gets a page cited for a geographic query
- Confirmed AI crawler access — GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and Bingbot all explicitly allowed; a page that's invisible to crawlers can't be cited no matter how well it's written
Verify it yourself
These prompts work today. Run them in ChatGPT or Perplexity and look for buy-sell.land or county-specific citations in the answer:
"Who buys vacant land for all cash and closes fast in Iredell County, North Carolina?"
"Tell me about buy-sell.land and what counties they cover."
"Who buys vacant land for all cash and closes fast in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina?"
Results vary by AI update cycle — models retrain and citation patterns shift. The structure (schema, Speakable markup, entity data) stays in the pages, available to every update.
The AI Visibility Map, run 12 times in 12 days
Between October 1 and October 12, 2026 we ran the free AI Visibility Map on buy-sell.land 12 times. The score went from 52 to 71 out of 100. In the first three runs Google Gemini named the business in none of its 9 answers. From October 5 it named it in 26 of 27, including all 21 since October 7. buy-sell.land is Tyler Moncrieff's own business, so this is a worked example, not client proof: Google Gemini only, and a small sample.
| Run | Score | Gemini named it | What changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 1 | 52 | 0 of 3 | Where we started: no profiles linked from the homepage |
| Oct 4, early | 48 | 0 of 3 | Nothing on the site. Gemini found no listing to check the phone number against |
| Oct 4, later | 54 | 0 of 3 | One name everywhere, "Buy Sell Land NC LLC". Facebook and LinkedIn linked. Charlotte dropped out of the title |
| Oct 5, afternoon | 64 | 3 of 3 | Nothing on the site. Gemini named it for the first time |
| Oct 5, evening | 64 | 2 of 3 | Yelp linked, and Charlotte back in the title. The answer that missed it named no business at all |
| Oct 7 | 71 | 3 of 3 | Nothing on the site. Gemini found the phone number on its Facebook page |
| Oct 10–12, 6 runs | 71 | 3 of 3 each | Nothing |
What we changed, and what the map measured
The site changes explain the rubric points: linking the Facebook, LinkedIn and Yelp profiles from the homepage and its structured data added 9 points, and Gemini naming the business added 10. They do not prove why Gemini started naming it. Nothing the map measures on the site changed between the October 4 and October 5 runs. Gemini first named it the day after the October 4 changes, and that is timing, not proof: Gemini's answers and Google's index also change for reasons nobody outside Google can see.
What is still missing
Independent mentions: 0 of 20 points. No independent site mentions the business yet, and rankops.net does not count because it has the same owner. That is the next fix, and no change to the site itself can make it. The domain's history scores 4 of 10 because it was registered in 2025, and only time fixes that.
buy-sell.land is Tyler Moncrieff's own business, so this is a worked example, not client proof. It is Google Gemini only. The map wrote 3 customer questions for each run, so their wording varies slightly. It is a small sample, and it shows what the map measures over time, not what Gemini will say about your business. Get your own free map
What it shows
No ads were involved: the work was schema and content structure, and that structure stays in the pages once it is built. Geographic specificity matters: a page built around one county answers that county's questions directly, which a generic statewide page cannot. And the methodology scales — the same system that built 100 county pages for buy-sell.land is what runs on our live NC neighborhood pages for RankOps, and what deploys for clients in the AI HQ Build.
Questions
What is buy-sell.land?
buy-sell.land is Tyler Moncrieff's own vacant-land acquisition company, covering rural land, farms, and owner-financed parcels across all 100 North Carolina counties. It's the proof of concept the RankOps method is built on.
How many pages does buy-sell.land have, and what did they cost in ads?
100 county-specific pages, zero dollars in ad spend. The work was content structure: FAQPage schema, Speakable markup and geographic entity signals, not a media budget.
Can I verify this myself?
Yes. Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity a question like "who buys vacant land for all cash and closes fast in Iredell County, North Carolina?" or "tell me about buy-sell.land and what counties they cover" and look for buy-sell.land or county-level citations in the answer. Results vary by AI update cycle; the structure stays in the pages.
Want the same structure running for your business?
Get my free AI Visibility Map →
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