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Two Decades of Data.
One Future-Proof Strategy.
We get service businesses cited and recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google's AI answers. A consultancy since 2016 and a full agency since 2024, with 20+ years in digital advertising and search behind it.
We get businesses recommended by
ChatGPT
Gemini
Claude
Google AI
Our Story
How We Got Here
Twenty years of watching how people find businesses, and changing how we work each time it moved: from paid ads, to local search, to answers written by AI.
The first agency
Lorne founds Academic Ads as its Founder and CTO and spends ten years scaling it into a digital advertising business doing millions in revenue. It is where he learns the rule the company still runs on: spend follows measurement.
Fade Digital starts as a consultancy
After selling Academic Ads, Lorne starts Fade Digital as a boutique, consulting-only practice, bringing enterprise-level search expertise to service businesses that were being sold cookie-cutter packages.
The same year he co-founds VR Vision, an immersive technology company building enterprise VR training. Working on how machines model the physical world shapes how Fade Digital later thinks about how AI models businesses.
Winning the map pack
The early work is local: Google Business Profiles, local SEO and Google Ads for Toronto clinics, firms and trades, where a single call from the right search is worth more than a thousand visits from the wrong one.
Industry playbooks
Healthcare, legal and home services become the core of the client list. What works in each is written down as a playbook, so a new dental clinic or law firm starts from what has already been proven rather than from a blank page.
The year intake moved online
When clinics and offices closed their doors, the front desk became the website. The year is spent on online booking, virtual consultation pages and keeping hours and services accurate everywhere customers looked, sometimes weekly.
Schema on every build
Structured data stops being an add-on. Every site we launch ships with schema markup that names the business, its services, its hours and its service area, so search engines read it as an entity and not as a page of text.
A dashboard instead of a monthly PDF
We build a proprietary client dashboard that tracks campaign performance, analytics, keyword rankings and paid media spend in one place, so every client can see their growth for themselves rather than waiting for a report.
Asking the machines about our clients
With ChatGPT and Bing Chat answering local questions, we start asking them about the businesses we work for, and find that what they say is often out of date, incomplete or about a competitor. The gap between ranking and being recommended becomes the problem to solve.
Tracking citations, not just rankings
Google rolls out AI Overviews in May. We begin recording which sources AI answers cite for our clients' most valuable questions, alongside the rankings we had always tracked, because the two stop telling the same story.
All in on Generative Engine Optimization
Fade Digital moves to a 100% AI-first model, specializing in GEO for service businesses: getting them cited and recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google's AI answers. In December we publish our first GEO playbook, The AI Knowledge Graph Playbook.
Research, tools and a method
We publish what we learn and build tools around it:
- The State of AI Search 2026, our annual industry report, in February.
- The free AI visibility scan, which asks ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the questions your customers ask and shows who gets recommended.
- Our study of 36 Toronto business websites in August, testing whether an AI agent could find, compare and book them.
- The AI Visibility Engine, the method we use on every client.
The Architect
Bridging the gap between human intent and machine understanding.
Lorne Fade
Founder & CEO
Lorne has spent twenty years where marketing meets technology. As co-founder and COO of VR Vision, he builds enterprise VR training for companies including Toyota and Siemens Gamesa, work that comes down to structuring information so a machine can act on it. Fade Digital applies the same thinking to how AI understands your business.
Fade Digital is the bridge between your brand's data and the AI models that now control the world's information.
Operating Protocols
We test everything.
We do not guess. We audit, we scrape, and we analyze. Every strategy is born from a dataset, not a gut feeling.
We move when AI moves.
The algorithm changes daily. We iterate our strategies in real-time. Stagnation is a system failure.
We make you easy to cite.
We structure your facts, schema and third-party mentions so AI engines can find you, understand you and trust you enough to recommend you. Then we measure whether they do, rather than promise it.
Don't Get Left in the
Legacy Index.
The transition from Search to Answer is happening now.
AI is being asked about your business right now. Make sure it has the right answer.