AI Search Drupal Replatform
Built to be cited: Jacobs Engineering replatforms Drupal for an AI-driven, zero-click world.
AEO-ready Drupal build to future-proof a global engineering brand.
+56%
overall organic search click-through-rate
+8%
initial increase in ChatGPT referral traffic
+60%
desktop organic traffic click-through-rate
Jacobs is one of the largest engineering, science, and technology companies in the world. For years that reputation carried the website until search and SEO changed underneath it. Prospects and job seekers increasingly get their first answer from an AI summary or a zero-click result before they ever land on the site. A strong brand is necessary, but not sufficient. AI search visibility comes from structure as much as reputation. Our challenge was to migrate Jacobs.com to a new version of Drupal that was easier to manage, better designed for different user cohorts, and positioned Jacobs as an authoritative source in an AI search world.
Building AI Authority
A trusted name, a site to build AI authority.
The old jacobs.com was built to publish announcements, not to be read by search engines and answer engines. Taxonomy was tangled, content models were disconnected, and nothing told Google, Gemini, or ChatGPT what any given page actually was.
We rebuilt the content architecture in Drupal to make meaning explicit. We split the catch-all "News" into News and Insights, broke People and Projects out of Showcase, decoupled podcast series and hosts, and moved boilerplate out of freeform paragraphs into structured Drupal fields and a clean taxonomy. Every content type now maps to a real-world entity an AI crawler can recognize, relate, and cite.
Drupal SEO/AEO
Drupal SEO done right: schema engineered into the foundation.
Jacobs serves three users: prospects evaluating capabilities, investors checking signals, and engineers deciding where to build a career. Good UX organizes content for them; technical SEO and answer engine optimization organize it for the systems that decide what they see first. We built for both, and made the machine-readable layer core to the Drupal build. Instead of asking editors to hand-write structured data, Drupal generates schema markup automatically from the content itself, across thousands of pages.
Likewise, we protected the rankings Jacobs already had by migrating programmatically against staging with every page-level SEO setting intact, then launched on a clean DNS cutover with no downtime. And we did it in a fraction of the time it took previous efforts to complete.
schema breakdown
The Drupal AEO stack behind the strategy.
Template-level JSON-LD across every content type. Drupal auto-generates Organization, Article/NewsArticle, Person/ProfilePage, Service/OfferCatalog, PodcastSeries/Episode, and VideoObject/Event schema from node fields, with a page-type reference for what's automatic versus manual.
An entity-accurate knowledge graph. Jacobs is modeled as a brand under its NYSE-listed parent, Jacobs Solutions Inc., with verified sameAs links, so answer engines resolve the entity and attribute authority to the right organization.
FAQ schema on a toggle. Editors turn structured Q&A on per block; Drupal validates and merges it, so that content can surface as featured snippets and in AI answers without a developer.
Structured content types. Schema baked into content types with flexibility reserved only where it earns its keep. Less editor effort with more consistent signals to crawlers.
Clean Drupal taxonomy for discovery. Region, market, and services split into their own fields so content relates, filters, and aggregates automatically, and topical authority is legible to search.
Drupal migration that preserved equity. A ~3,800 items moved programmatically with noindex/nofollow intact, legacy paths captured for redirects, and zero production data loss.
Marketer-controlled publishing. MDrupal's Layout Builder and a brand-enforcing design system let the team build and publish without developers, and without breaking the schema layer underneath.
COMPONENT BREAKDOWN
MEASURABLE RESULTS
Sixteen weeks went from the old site to a new, restructured, schema-rich jacobs.com. The site launched with no downtime and no lost content, and Jacobs' internal Drupal team took ownership of an extensible platform with full developer documentation and knowledge transfer.
The deeper result is structural: every page now carries explicit, accurate signals about what it is and how it relates to everything else Jacobs publishes. As search keeps shifting from ten blue links to a single cited answer, that structure is what turns a strong brand into AI search visibility, and decides whether Jacobs gets quoted or gets talked around.