AAB is an advisory firm with more than 1,000 staff, 14 offices and clients in over 80 countries. Twelve service lines, ten industries, and a prospect could start from either end: I need help with VAT, or I run a food and drink business.

Building both trees out would have produced around 120 thin pages competing for the same search terms. That part has an ordinary answer: one taxonomy serving both routes in, owned by the CMS.

The hard part was internal, and I interviewed across every service line and sector to find out how hard. Every line has a partner who believes theirs is the front door. Any ranked menu means eleven of them are wrong, in public, on the homepage, permanently. That is a standing objection that reopens every time the site gets reviewed.

So the menu is a flat, searchable set of chips. Every line gets identical billing and the prospect does the ordering. Plain-language search sits above structured browse at two levels, so someone who knows the term finds it and someone who does not can browse to it.

Every path resolves to a named partner. A contact form on a firm of 1,000 people is a queue.

Adding a service line is now one CMS action. Nothing published on this engagement, and no metrics.