The stack, and
how I use it.
Tools are cheap. What matters is the order you do things in and what you refuse to automate, so that is here too.
Ten things I
can be held to.
SEO strategy & leadership
Owning the channel end to end (roadmap, priorities, team and reporting), and being accountable for the number at the end of it.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO / GEO)
Engineering content to be the source AI engines cite, measured by citations and answer position rather than blue-link rankings.
AI citation & prompt reverse-engineering
Running structured prompt corpora across engines to map which sources get pulled in, and turning the gaps into a content roadmap.
AI content workflows & automation
Multi-agent systems that carry the recurring analytical work, connected to live data rather than exports.
Topical authority & content clusters
Pillar and cluster architecture with internal linking designed so coverage compounds instead of accumulating.
Programmatic, technical & schema SEO
Templated page systems at scale, site health, structured data and entity resolution: the parts that decide whether content ever gets a chance.
Website management & development
Shipping technical, schema and front-end changes directly, without waiting on an external development queue.
Citation-earning link acquisition
Placement in the third-party sources that engines and buyers already trust, judged on whether they appear in answers.
CRO & AI-to-pipeline analytics
Core Web Vitals, A/B testing, and measurement that connects AI sessions and citations through to conversion.
Team leadership & mentoring
Teams of four to eight, run on visible priorities, daily cadence and reporting people can actually act on.
What I work
in daily.
Grouped by job, not by vendor.
AI search / AEO
Automation & MCP
SEO & analytics
Content & web
The order I
do things in.
Six rules that survived eleven years.
Find out what is actually true
Before any roadmap: crawl the site, read the data, run the prompts. Most SEO strategies fail because they were written against an assumed starting position rather than a measured one.
Map the subject, then the keywords
Topical coverage decides whether a domain reads as an authority. Keyword research fills the map in; it does not draw it.
Fix the floor before raising the ceiling
Technical health, schema and entity resolution first. Publishing on a broken foundation is expensive and slow to diagnose later.
Optimise for the surface that exists now
Ten blue links, featured snippets, and now generated answers with citations underneath. The measurement changes; the discipline does not.
Automate the rule-based half
If a task has clear inputs and a decision rule you can write down, it should not be consuming a strategist's week.
Report against pipeline
Traffic is an input. The number that earns the channel its budget is qualified interest at the other end.