The questions we get asked most.

Sophons runs the whole front end of growth for a UK import or export business: we build the marketing website, design the interface, handle search visibility across both Google and AI answer engines, and produce the ongoing content and social output that keeps it working. It is one system with one team behind it, rather than four suppliers with four invoices.

No. An agency sells you hours and hands back deliverables. Sophons is a product with people behind it — you get a live website, a search and content engine attached to it, and a monthly rhythm of work that compounds. The output is a growing pipeline of enquiries, not a folder of PDFs.

Trade has its own buying behaviour. Purchase decisions run long, they involve several people, and buyers judge credibility on things like certifications, incoterms, lead times and shipping capability long before they judge your brand. Specialising means we already know what a buyer is looking for on your site, so we are not learning your market on your budget.

AEO — answer engine optimisation — is the practice of making your business quotable by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. Increasingly, a buyer sourcing a supplier asks an assistant before they open a search results page. AEO means structuring your site so those systems can read it, trust it and name you in the answer.

The website usually goes live within four to six weeks. Technical search improvements tend to show in four to eight weeks. Content-driven organic growth is slower and more durable: expect meaningful movement from month three, and compounding growth from month six onward.

No. We build from scratch just as often as we rebuild. If you have an existing site we will keep whatever is earning its place — your domain authority, your ranking pages, your redirects — and replace the rest.

Analytics are off until a visitor opts in, and we use Plausible, which is privacy-first and sets no cookies and collects no personal data. Enquiry details are used only to answer the enquiry. Everything we hold, why we hold it and how long we keep it is set out in our privacy policy.

We only ever need what is already public or what you choose to share about your market and your customers. Supplier lists, pricing and margin data stay with you — none of it is needed to do this work, and we do not ask for it.