Free · 30 minutes · No prep required

Book a 30-minute fit check.

Bring your brand and your category. We'll spend 30 minutes looking at where you sit on Mainland Chinese answer engines, what's in the way, and what's worth doing first. If we're not the right fit for the work, we'll say so — and point you at someone who is.

Email info@eastbound.ai to book →

The button opens your email client with a short pre-filled brief. Send it as-is or edit. We reply within one business day (HK/SG hours), confirm a slot, and send a calendar invite. No CRM, no marketing list — your message goes to the team that does the work.

What you'll get out of the call

Thirty minutes is short by design. We use it to do three specific things, in this order:

A quick read on where your brand currently sits. Before the call we'll run a lightweight check: are you in the engines' source pools at all, do third-party citations exist, what does your on-site readiness layer look like. Five to seven minutes briefing you on what we found.
Your category's answer-engine pattern. Different categories have different source-graphs. Luxury handbags lean on Zhihu and SMZDM at aspirational tiers but collapse to Vogue Business and auction-house archives at ultra-luxury. Travel is heavily multi-turn. SaaS skews developer-corpus on DeepSeek. We'll tell you what we've measured for your category specifically — and where the data is thin.
A straight answer on fit. Whether the work that would actually move your numbers is research, on-site readiness, off-site source-graph development, or all three — and whether Eastbound is the right partner for that work right now. If the budget, timing, or scope doesn't match, we'll say so.

What this is not. It is not a sales pitch. It is not a free audit (the free audit is a separate tool that runs in your browser). It is not a generic "AI strategy" call. It's a 30-minute working session about your specific brand, your specific category, and what's worth doing or not doing.

Who this is built for

Good fit

You're a Western brand operating in or expanding to Mainland China — luxury, travel, SaaS, consumer electronics, beauty, or adjacent categories.
You have a domain, some content, and a real customer base. Doesn't have to be huge.
You've noticed (or someone has flagged) that ChatGPT / Claude / Gemini surface you OK but DeepSeek, Qwen or Doubao either don't surface you, or surface you with the wrong details.
You want a measured read, not a checklist or a deck of generic "GEO best practices."
You're open to hearing "the answer is off-site source-graph work, which takes quarters not weeks."

Not a fit (yet)

You need a guaranteed ranking position in a specific engine in a specific timeframe. We don't sell guarantees and we'd rather not waste your call slot.
You're optimising primarily for English-language Western AI search. We focus on the Mainland Chinese answer-engine layer; for ChatGPT-only / Perplexity-only work, agencies like AthenaHQ or Profound are better-aligned.
You want help gaming AI mentions through PBNs, paid Reddit accounts, or fabricated review networks. We won't do that work and we don't think it works longer-term.
You're at the "what is GEO" stage. Read the pillar page first; come back when you have a specific question.

What to bring (and what not to bring)

Bring

Your domain.
One sentence describing what you sell and to whom.
The one question you most want answered.
Any existing AI-visibility report you've run elsewhere (Profound, AthenaHQ, Ahrefs Brand Radar, an in-house spreadsheet — anything). We'll calibrate against it.

Don't bring

A full RFP. The fit-check is upstream of procurement; if the call goes well we'll do that paperwork separately.
A signed NDA. We don't need one for a 30-min discovery call. If you want one for a follow-up engagement, we'll sign yours or send ours.
Your CMO. Bring whoever owns the answer-engine numbers day-to-day — usually that's not the CMO. If the CMO wants the call, that's fine too, but it changes the conversation.

Logistics

Length: 30 minutes. We hard-stop at 30. If we need a longer follow-up, we book it separately.
Cost: Free. No payment, no card on file, no follow-up sales sequence. We do paid work after the fit-check, if it's mutual.
Format: Video call (Google Meet or Zoom — we'll send a link with the calendar invite). Audio-only is fine if your video is broken.
Time zones: We're HK-based. We hold slots Mon–Fri across HKT 09:00–22:00 to cover EU and US East Coast. US West Coast we run early-morning HKT (works for late-evening PT). Tell us 3 windows in the email and we'll match.
Languages: English as default. If you'd prefer Mandarin or Cantonese, mention it in the email and we'll route accordingly.
Recording: We don't record by default. Mention it if you'd like a recording for your team — we'll send the file after.

Why Eastbound, in 60 seconds

We're a Hong Kong-based China AI visibility consultancy. We measure how Mainland Chinese answer engines (DeepSeek, Qwen, Doubao) surface brands, sources, and evidence — and we publish the methodology rather than treating it as proprietary. Our most-recent panels: a 540-call multi-engine source-attribution study, a 1,620-response handbag panel including the ultra-luxury tier-collapse finding, and a reliability re-test confirming top-5 source membership replicates at κ = 1.00 across runs (with the appropriate κ = 0.46 hedge on Doubao long-tail). Our research is at eastbound.ai/blog; our pillar reference is eastbound.ai/china-ai-visibility.

We make recommendations labelled measured evidence, prior-knowledge hypothesis, or planned intervention test — never as guarantees. If we don't know, we say so.

Ready when you are

One short email. We reply within a business day with two or three time options.

Email info@eastbound.ai to book

Or write directly to info@eastbound.ai if your email client doesn't open the pre-filled draft. Want to run the audit first? Free audit here — no booking required.