Hello! With all the outside change happening, I’ve changed what I call myself this year.
I’m an SEO & AI Search Consultant now, and I want to explain why, because the reasoning says more about the work than the label does.
People still introduce me as an SEO consultant, and they’re not wrong. I live in Toronto, I’ve spent over 20 years building and optimizing the web, and I help companies show up where it matters. But the shape of that work has changed enough that the old title was quietly misleading people about what they’d get.
What Actually Changed
When I started, SEO was mostly about technical precision. You fixed crawl issues, optimized pages, built links. Do that consistently and you won. It was measurable, logical, and kind of satisfying.
Google isn’t the only gatekeeper now. People ask ChatGPT which vendor to shortlist. They read an AI Overview and never click. They form an opinion about your company from a summary that cites three sources, none of which are you.
A site can be technically perfect and still be invisible in the places where buyers actually decide. That’s a different problem than the one I was hired to solve ten years ago, and it needs saying out loud in a job title.
Why not GEO, or AEO, or whatever it’s called this month
I sat with this for a while, because there’s a whole vocabulary competing for it right now.
I didn’t pick any of them, for two reasons.
The first is that they name a technique, and techniques get renamed. Channels last longer. “AI search” describes where your buyers are, which is a more stable thing to build a practice on than whatever we end up calling the optimization work.
The second is that I don’t think this is a new discipline. It’s the same discipline pointed at more surfaces. The people announcing that SEO is dead are mostly selling something, and the fundamentals haven’t moved: be findable, be credible, be the source worth citing. What changed is that there are now several systems deciding whether you qualify, and they don’t agree with each other.
What I Work on Now
Most projects fall into four areas.
Diagnostics. I start by finding where your visibility actually lives across Google, AI answer engines, and whatever your buyers use to ask questions. Then I map what’s driving results and what’s blocking them. Not a 200-page audit. A prioritized list of what’s broken and what it costs you.
Technical and structural work. If the foundation isn’t solid, content quality doesn’t matter. Migrations, rebuilds, CMS transitions, rendering problems, JavaScript that hides your content from crawlers and retrieval systems alike. I started as a front-end developer, so I can work directly with your dev team instead of throwing tickets over a wall.
Content systems. Structures that make content easier to scale, find, and measure. The kind that hold up as both Google and the AI platforms keep changing their minds.
AI visibility tracking. I run monthly citation diagnostics across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini for clients: which queries mention them, which sources get cited instead, and how that shifts month over month. This data mostly didn’t exist when I started doing it, so I built the process myself.
The Model Behind The Work
I work on visibility-led growth, and the shape of it is a loop rather than a funnel.
The traditional approach publishes top-of-funnel content and hopes it converts down the line. I work the other way: start with the pages your buyers are already searching for when they’re close to deciding, then build visibility outward from there.
The stages are visible, influential, considered, chosen. The part people miss is that it doesn’t end at chosen. It cycles back, and the bottom of the funnel is where it keeps returning. Comparison pages, alternatives pages, and category listicles do more for pipeline than another how-to post, and they’re also the pages AI systems reach for when someone asks which vendor to pick.
Who I Work With
Mostly B2B SaaS teams, especially in communications platforms, compliance tools, and location-tech. Long sales cycles, where visibility affects pipeline at several points rather than one.
I’m a good fit if you need technical depth, strategic clarity, and someone who can talk to your engineers. I’m not a fit if you want blog posts written or a keyword list delivered.
What this means for you
If your traffic isn’t turning into leads, if AI answers are quoting your competitors instead of you, or if you’re doing everything right and still not growing, that’s the work.
I help founders, marketing teams, and product people connect visibility to revenue. Less gaming systems, more understanding how information actually flows and making sure yours is in it.
If that’s the kind of clarity you’re after, reach out here.