In 2009 a hand-coded HTML site made search the company’s main channel. By 2025 all that was left of it was a 14-page brochure site on Tilda, kept alive by ads. In September 2026 I built a knowledge base of almost 500 pages in its place: tools calculate to the fire codes, document forms fill in right in the browser, devices can be taken apart in 3D, and an AI assistant answers from the site’s own content. The site went live on 25 September; now we wait to see whether search comes back.
20 days
from first commit to a live site
458
pages in the knowledge base. On Tilda the whole site was 14 pages
21
tools calculate to the fire codes. Of 14 competitors in the search results, only one has such a calculation
41
document forms fill in right in the browser. Competitors have none
The site has been live since 25 September 2026, and since 13 October it has run in backup mode because of the attacks on Yandex data centers. I will take the search and enquiry figures once the site is back to normal operation. Page count as of 16 October.
ClientDORADO Group, St Petersburg
What they doFire alarm, evacuation alerting, suppression: design, installation, maintenance
WebsiteFour versions in 17 years, one Metrica counter
My roleOn staff 2009–2013, remote after that; in 2026, the entire site
01 · 17 years
One counter, four sites, one rise — and a shot at a second
The Metrica counter has been on the site since August 2009 and moved along with the domain. So the new site will be measured by the same yardstick as the first one: search visits per day.
Search visits per day, annual average · 100% = an average day in 2014
search, % of 2014rise2024: no counter on Tilda
Annual averages cover the months when the counter was running: from October in 2009, until July in 2023. 2026 is January–August on Tilda. The new site has been live since 25 September; its point will appear after the first full month. Ads are not included in search visits.
02 · 2009—2013
A hand-coded HTML site made search the main channel
I joined the company in 2009 and stayed on staff until 2013. Over that time search went from a fifth of visits to more than half, and on Yandex the site climbed to second place for the topic’s main query.
18 July 2013, Yandex, St Petersburg. The query “fire alarm” had 83,631 impressions a month, and dorado-company.ru was second in the organic results. The frame is mine; the screenshot is from the company archive.
Search share of all visits
20%→68%
2009 → 2012. Search became the main channel, not an add-on to ads.
Search visits per day
×9
2012 vs the counter’s first months, autumn 2009.
As early as 2010, four queries in ten were reference queries
Reference 42%Commercial 25%General 20%Brand 13%
Reference queries are questions, forms and regulations: “fire hose valve inspection report”, “fire evacuation plan template gost”, “ppb 01-03”, “basic fire safety training programme”. People were looking for an answer, not a contractor — the hunch the whole 2026 site is built on.
Aug 2009Metrica counter on the site
Oct 2009The dorado-company.ru domain, an HTML site
2010Search is almost half of all visits
Jul 2013Second place on Yandex for “fire alarm”
2013The site moves to Joomla; I leave the staff and keep helping remotely
The 2011 site
The left-hand menu already has a “Regulatory documents” section: technical regulations, standards, codes of practice. Reference content was on the site from the very start.
A working copy of this version lives on today’s dorado.expert, in the section on the site’s history.
03 · 2014—2025
Then the site became a brochure, and search left along with the reference content
The peak came in 2014, after I had already left the staff, on the foundation laid in 2009–2013. After that the site increasingly sold services, the reference pages disappeared, and search fell for ten years straight.
2009—2013 · HTML
2013—2023 · Joomla
2023—2026 · Tilda
since 25.09.2026 · code
First screens of the four sites come from the site history page on dorado.expert, rebuilt from the web archive.
Forms and regulations in search
26%→5%
2010 → 2018. Over the same period commercial queries grew from 25% to 46%: when those dipped too, there was nothing left to fall back on.
Tilda, 2025: who found the site in search
79 of 100 were searching for the company itself. The site was found by people who already knew DORADO; search brought in almost no one new.
Search share of all visits
68%→5%
2012 → 2025. The Tilda site lived on ads; search brought almost nothing.
2015, marketing department report
Search budget: zero. Yet two thirds of the quarter’s enquiries came in on their own, as calls and emails.
This is exactly what had been lost by 2025.
Search phrases, January 2015 · from my export
“how fire-rated door locks work”
“hd-sdi what is it”
“fire evacuation plan per gost”
“fire safety briefing log download”
People came for an answer. Demand didn’t change in ten years — the site did.
04 · September 2026
Instead of a brochure site, a knowledge base that answers the question
The company called me back and asked for the same thing as in 2009. I didn’t repeat the first site: people aren’t looking for a contractor, they’re looking for an answer — how many detectors they need, what the fine is, whether they need a fire safety declaration. So the answer should be the main way in. In six weeks the 14-page brochure site grew into a reference of almost 500 pages: codes, calculations, document forms, articles and an assistant that answers from them.
Before and after
Brochure site on Tilda
14 pages
services and an enquiry form
found by the company name
first screen on a phone: 6.4 s
→
Knowledge base in code
458 knowledge base pages
21 tools that calculate to the fire codes
41 document forms built in the browser
167 regulation cards with document status
412 questions with answers checked against the codes
81 articles, with a new one every day
a 3D equipment atlas: 9 devices, 52 parts
an Alice AI assistant that answers from site content, by voice or text
first screen on a phone: 2.1 s
20 days
from the first commit on 5 September to the live site on 25 September
494
commits and 93 releases in six weeks
35
automated checks before every deploy
498
URLs in the sitemap. The Tilda site had no sitemap
Build log
05.09
A Tilda snapshot and an Astro skeletonStarting point: fourteen pages.
10.09
A palette taken from safety signsPer GOST 12.4.026: red for action, yellow for deadlines, blue for requirements, green for “done”. There is no stock imagery on the site: diagrams, façades and devices are drawn in code.
16.09
One line blanked out half the siteThe new search got the same class name as the root of all the diagrams: 82 drawings on 165 pages vanished at once, even though everything was there in the source.
22.09
The day the site started workingThe night before: the move to Yandex Cloud. Telegram is unreachable from the Cloud, so a Google Sheets script became the go-between. The ?tag= parameter broke any page: the gateway read it as a function version, and it didn’t reproduce on my laptop. The admin panel handed over to the client saved nothing — the same day it got GitHub sign-in and auto-deploy. Enquiries went to a Yandex Tracker queue instead of a CRM.
25.09
Launch, nine releases in a dayThe new site returned a 404 for the Yandex Webmaster ownership verification file — we restored it before the rights were revoked.
30.09
The Alice AI assistantIt answers only from site content, code checks any price in an answer, and the spending cap is set in advance.
02.10
Voice inputThe assistant “heard nothing”: the browser distorted the audio, pushing the voice an octave higher. The busiest day of the build: 62 commits.
07.10
A decision based on ad dataOnly one ad visitor in twenty reached the end of a wizard. The wizards were rebuilt: the first step is a set of “What do you have?” tiles, and the answer builds up as you go.
09.10
All 126 answers checked against the codes41 were corrected; each one now carries its review date.
14.10
3D equipment atlasNine devices, from a smoke detector to a sprinkler: you can rotate a device, take it apart and click any of 52 parts. The same day: a guide to GOST safety signs with a “Guess the sign” game.
15.10
Search and assistant in one windowA visitor types a question into the search bar, and if there is no ready page, the assistant picks it up. The estimate on the pricing page: three questions about the property and a “from–to” range, no phone number required.
How I built it
One person with AI agents. The agents write code, verify texts against the codes and run the tests; I set the tasks and make the decisions. Every decision is written down with its reasoning — both what we did and what we chose not to do.
05 · The result
Every tool calculates the code requirement instead of asking for a phone number
Under each answer line is the clause of the document it was calculated from. Below is how it looks live: screenshots taken from dorado.expert on 10 and 16 October 2026; click to enlarge.
The “What’s required” wizard. After three answers the checklist is already taking shape: blue is mandatory, yellow is up to the design, struck-through isn’t needed.
Fire extinguishers. The number is based not on floor area but on the distance to a fire: drag the length and the plan and the answer recalculate instantly.
The “press the call point” demo. Press the manual call point and the diagram lights up the signal path from the little box by the door all the way to the fire service.
Estimate. The calculator on a service page adds the job to the estimate, and an “In the estimate” bar appears at the bottom. Prices and the price list come from one file, and the director edits them himself.
An estimate in three questions. Property type, area, systems — and you immediately get a “from–to” range based on price-list rates. No phone number, no sign-up: an engineer works out the exact estimate from the floor plan.
Search and assistant in one window. Search for a regulation or a form and you get a page. If there is no ready page, the AI assistant picks up the question and answers from site content.
Document form. Form on the left, sheet on the right: the document rebuilds with every character typed and downloads as PDF or DOCX without sign-up. The property card carries over to the next form in the set.
AI assistant
It answers only from the site’s knowledge base and shows where each answer comes from
With footnotes. Each answer carries numbered sources, like a reference book: an article, a Q&A or a case from the same site.
Leads to action. If the site has a tool for the question, the assistant links to it, and the visitor runs the numbers themselves.
Doesn’t make things up. If the content has no answer, it says so and offers to pass the question, with the conversation, to an engineer.
Kept in check. Code checks any price in an answer, and the spending cap is set in advance. Questions can be asked by voice.
None of the 14 competitors from the same search results has an assistant like this.
Conversation on dorado.expert, 16 October 2026: my questions, the assistant’s answers unedited.
At rest
Alarm on scroll
The evacuation system cover. As soon as you start reading, the system the page is about goes off in the frame: sign, beacon, exit sign.
The “What we do on site” cross-section. Pick a system and it assembles across the whole building, from the pump room in the basement to the devices on each floor. Drawn in markup, not as an image.
The full home page — you can scroll it
The site vs competitors · I went through 14 contractor sites from the same search results
Tool
14 sites, a dot means yes
Ours
Code-based calculationnot a quiz to get your phone number, but an answer with a link to the clause
1 of 14
21 tools
Document generatorthe form is built in the browser
0 of 14
41 forms
AI assistantanswers from site content
0 of 14
yes
Regulation cardswith document status and a change feed
0 of 14
167
Reviewed on 9 October 2026, read-only. The only code-based calculation among competitors is a fire suppression type selector. The other “calculators” are quizzes that ask for your phone number before giving an answer.
06 · What’s next
The site is live. Now it’s up to search
I’m not publishing search figures yet: the site ran normally for only two weeks before the outages began. I’ll take snapshots over a full month of normal operation — search first, enquiries a month later.
What wasn’t in the plan
Since 8 October, drones have been attacking Yandex data centers: in Sasovo, in the Kaluga region and in Vladimir. The site is hosted on Yandex Cloud, and the outages began just as search was starting to find it.
On 12 October the site would not open. Since the 13th it has run in backup mode: content, tools and the estimate open, but enquiries through the site and the assistant are switched off, and every page carries a banner with phone numbers. The knowledge base kept growing during the downtime: that week saw the 3D atlas, the safety sign guide and some twenty new document forms. I’m watching the situation: I’ll take the snapshots once the site is back to normal, and mark the downtime days in them separately.
What I will check
Snapshot 1
Has search come backSearch visits per day over a full month, against Tilda and against the best month of 2014. The new point will go on the chart from the first act.
Snapshot 1
Who it brings inWhether people still find the site by the company name, or whether those looking for an answer arrive: codes, forms, calculations.
Snapshot 2
Does reference traffic sellEnquiries by source and the path “article → wizard → estimate → enquiry”. This is the main question of the case.
How I will compare
Month against the same month. Autumn is peak demand for the topic; comparing with summer would flatter the new site.
No downtime days. Days when the site would not open or ran in backup mode because of the attacks on Yandex data centers will not count toward the average.
Search only. Ads run in parallel but are not counted in search visits.
Adjusting for 2026 search results: answers right in search take some of the clicks, so the comparison with 2014 works against the new site.
07 · Finale
The second time: not repeating the first, but testing the decision against search
Demand hasn’t changed in seventeen years: people look for an answer, not a contractor. The second time round I made the answer the site’s main way in — and I’ll test that with search, not with design.
My part
2009—2013, on staff
The HTML site: structure, copy, SEO, visual identity.
2013—2025, remote
The Joomla site and advertising: search phrases, placing articles on industry platforms.
2026, the entire site
Product, content, design system, code, Yandex Cloud, analytics. One person with AI agents.
In 2009 Maksim joined our staff and built a website that made the company findable in search. Enquiries came in on their own, with no ad budget. When he left, we stayed in touch: he ran the site and the advertising remotely for another ten years.
By 2025 our Tilda site was running on ads alone, and I called Maksim again: do it like back then. He listened and proposed something else. People aren’t looking for a contractor, they’re looking for an answer: how many detectors they need, what the fine is, whether they need a declaration. So the site has to answer. That’s how a knowledge base replaced the brochure site: code-compliant calculators, document forms that fill in right on the site, articles, an assistant. He did it alone, in three weeks, and explained every decision — both what he did and what he chose not to do.
I edit the prices and copy myself, and enquiries arrive in a single queue. Search is only starting to find the new site; the numbers will come later. But I’ve already understood the main thing: Maksim pushes back where a contractor would just nod.
Alexey ChashnikHead of DORADO Group · October 2026 · translated from Russian
Search: Yandex Metrica, visits from search engines, one counter since 20 August 2009; ads are not included in these visits. Annual averages are calculated over the months when the counter was running. Query categories: Metrica search phrases, 2009–2025. Speed: Lighthouse, local run on 2 October; the official PageSpeed figures are being re-measured. Competitors: a review of 14 sites on 9 October 2026. Screenshots: dorado.expert, 10 and 16 October 2026; knowledge base contents: section summary as of 16 October 2026; 2013 search results: screenshot from the company archive.
![The “DORADO Assistant — answers from the site’s content” window. Question: “Does a café of 80 m² need a fire alarm?” Answer: a café is functional fire hazard class F3.2, public buildings get a fire alarm regardless of floor area, footnote [6] and an “Open the tool ‘What your premises need’” button. Question: “What is the fine for a sole trader with no evacuation plan?” Answer: Article 20.4(1) of the Administrative Code, 40,000 to 60,000 roubles for a sole trader, with two sources expanded as links](/cards/case-dorado-pomoshnik-dialog.jpg)
