Case Study
A Place In The
Sun
Helping One of Britain’s Best-Known Brands Stay Visible in the Age of AI
The Brief
A Place in the Sun is one of the UK’s most recognisable property brands — spanning TV, magazine, and online property listings across Europe. Despite its fame, the brand faced a paradox: its name was one of the most searched phrases online, yet millions of those queries led to irrelevant results.
The goal wasn’t simply to drive more traffic, but to reclaim ownership of its own name and build long-term retrievability across both human search and emerging AI-driven discovery engines.
Client
Sector
Property and Media
Services
Region
UK / Europe
The site suffered from weak technical foundations, fragmented domain authority, and duplicate content across its English and Portuguese properties. Google, Gemini, and early AI crawlers were splitting entity associations between “TV programme,” “property brand,” and “holiday homes.”
The Mission:
1. Re-establish A Place in the Sun as the primary entity for property and relocation.
2. Create a site architecture that machines could interpret consistently across languages.
3. Transform SEO from keyword chasing to retrieval engineering by ensuring the brand surfaced wherever people (or AI) asked about overseas property.
The Retrieval-First™ Strategy
1. Entity & Knowledge Graph Re-alignment
Mapped and standardised entity relationships across the site — linking “A Place in the Sun,” “Channel 4,” “property portal,” and “Spain / Portugal / France” clusters. This clarified which concepts belonged to the brand, strengthening its connection to “buying property abroad.”
2. Crawl & Canonical Repair
Resolved indexation issues, normalised hreflang for multilingual consistency, and re-built canonical hierarchies so crawlers could prioritise the right pages.
3. Multilingual Content Restructure
Rewrote cornerstone guides in English and Portuguese with shared schema, optimised headings, and retrieval-friendly semantic links (“buying property in Algarve” ↔ “A Place in the Sun Algarve listings”).
4. Authority Restoration
Secured high-domain backlinks from media, lifestyle, and finance sites, reinforcing both topical and brand-entity credibility.
5. Cross-LLM Visibility Testing
Tracked brand retrieval within ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini Overviews, ensuring the site was cited as a verified result source in property-related responses.
Integration That Accelerates Results
"Great job on a challenging international project. Very happy with the work completed! Excellent standard of on-page SEO work for our website. Completely transparent with good communication throughout. Highly recommend." — Heather, Digital Marketing Director, A Place in the Sun
Results
→ Top-ranked for 4 high-difficulty brand + location phrases (1st position in both English and Portuguese)
→ +43% increase in qualified leads within six months
→ Cross-language entity consistency improved by 68% (measured via internal Knowledge Graph extraction)
→ Brand surfaced in AI-search results for “buying property in Portugal” and “A Place in the Sun TV property listings”
→ Ongoing roadmap integrating retrieval metrics into Search Console and Looker dashboards
Why It Worked?
Traditional SEO stops at ranking. Retrieval-First™ goes further to ensure a brand is interpreted correctly by both humans and machines. By aligning A Place in the Sun’s entity structure, multilingual content, and authority signals, Harton Works rebuilt not only its rankings but also its digital identity within the new search ecosystem.
Early Retrieval-First™ Insight
In an age where AI generates answers faster than users can click, ownership begins with interpretation. When your brand becomes the reference that models train on — not just a result they list — you’ve achieved Retrieval-First™ visibility.
Protect Your Brand’s Search Future.
Don’t wait for visibility to slip.
Let’s build a clear, measurable plan to strengthen your authority across Google, Gemini, and beyond.