Underscore was founded in 2024 by Zhiliang, drawing on years of UX, design, and Webflow development experience across fintech startups and multinational corporations.

The work started with websites. Building them, migrating them, making them faster and more usable. Over time, a pattern became clear: the brands that performed best were the ones built on solid infrastructure. Clean architecture, clear content hierarchy, structured data. The surface-level stuff mattered less than what sat underneath.

Then the ground shifted. AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview started changing how people discover and evaluate businesses. Instead of scrolling through search results, buyers began asking AI directly: *"Who's the best option for X in my market?"* The answer AI gives isn't random. It's built from signals across the web, signals most brands don't know they're sending.

Companies that had invested heavily in traditional search found themselves invisible in these new spaces. Their competitors were being cited and recommended. They weren't.

We saw this gap and stepped in. Our background in infrastructure, UX, and technical development turned out to be exactly what AEO requires. This isn't a content game. It's an architecture game. How AI crawls your site, interprets your brand, and decides whether to recommend you, all of that lives in the infrastructure layer.

Today, we work with established SME business owners who sense this shift happening. They've built real businesses over years. They know something has changed. What they lack is a clear, trustworthy path forward.

Through our 7 Signals Framework, we take an infrastructure-first approach to AEO, closing the gaps that determine whether AI recommends your brand or quietly skips over it.

No page farms. No content fluff. Build toward what works, then double down.