The need

On Nov 1, 2026, BC, Alberta, Manitoba and the NWT stopped changing their clocks while the rest of North America kept going. Overnight, the time differences everyone knew stopped being true for half the year. Converters, calendars and devices weren’t ready, and recurring meetings started landing an hour off.

Don Falconer, EVP of Operations at Big Room Creative, hosts or attends more than 800 online meetings a year across more time zones than he’d like. He needed a converter that got the new rules right, and plain answers for everyone asking “what time is it there now?” So we built one.

The experiment

We also used it as a test. Search is changing: people still google, but more and more of them ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot or Google’s AI answers instead. So the question was how quickly a brand-new site could earn a place in both, through traditional search engine optimization (SEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO), with no ads, no paid links and no existing audience.

How we built it

The site was built in a weekend by Don working with Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, and has been refined a little every day since.

• Don set the direction: what the site needed to do, who it was for, what to write and what to cut. He edited the copy, made the calls and handled outreach.
• Claude researched the rules from government sources, wrote the code and the time zone engine, generated and checked every page, set up structured data, sitemaps and search engine pings, and pulled the analytics to see what was working.

The result is about 190 pages and a handful of working tools, served as fast static pages from Cloudflare with no servers, databases or tracking:

• A time zone converter that knows the 2026 rules for any date, plus a meeting planner
• Check my calendar, which finds Outlook, Google and Apple meetings that will be an hour off, entirely in your browser
• Pages for 79 city pairs, 14 time zones, 50 cities and a time zone cheat sheet with 29 code converters
• Plain-language guides in About Time, from fixing your iPhone to fixing your Outlook meetings
• Every rule traced to a government source in our methodology, with a public corrections page and a free download of the data

Early results

These are the numbers from the site’s first few days in search, as of Oct 26, 2026. They’re early and small, but they move fast:

• In Google from day one. Google started showing the site on Oct 22, its first day in search: more than 1,000 impressions, with 129 pages appearing in results.
• Page one within days. Searches like “abt time zone” and guides like our recurring meetings guide and iPhone fix reached average positions of about 7 to 9 within the first week.
• Google became the top source of visitors in five days, without any posting or promotion that day.
• AI assistants are using it. In its first five days in search, AI assistants read the site more than 40 times to answer people’s questions: ChatGPT 36 times, plus DuckDuckGo’s AI assistant and Perplexity. ChatGPT’s search crawler indexed the site within days.
• Fully crawled in three days. Google, Bing, Claude and Meta AI had each read essentially the whole site within about three days of launch.
• Fast. Pages load in about 0.6 seconds on phones for real visitors.
• Shared at work. People have been passing it around in Microsoft Teams and Slack.

What made the difference

• Answer first. Every page leads with the answer in its first sentence, which is what both Google and AI assistants quote.
• One page per real question. “Vancouver to Toronto time difference” and “what is ABT time zone” each get their own page, because those are the questions people ask.
• Titles that match how people search. When Search Console showed people searching “android daylight saving fix canada”, we renamed the page to match.
• Sources and honesty. Government sources, real update dates, and a corrections page. AI assistants and search engines both favour sites they can trust.
• Built for machines as well as people. Structured data, an llms.txt file, instant search engine pings and fast static pages.
• Useful beyond the article. Tools like the calendar check give people, and other sites, a reason to share the link.