What I Want to Build Next

For twenty years the question was simple: can Google find you? That question is closing. The new one is harder; will AI choose you? It is the biggest change in search economics in a decade, and most businesses do not know it is happening yet.

Twenty years of not trusting the dashboards

I have spent those twenty years building marketing systems for B2B firms and SEC-regulated wealth advisors. I ran the attribution. I managed the budgets. I watched every platform over-report its own numbers; eventually I stopped trusting the dashboards and started building the measurement systems I wished existed. (I realize that is a strange thing for a marketer to admit. Accuracy matters more than comfort.)

The numbers were real, and they were not enough

The clearest lesson came in the last two years, inside one of the most regulated, most competitive verticals there is. I built the search and AI infrastructure from zero. The numbers were real, measured against primary-source data rather than platform estimates: 122 AI engine citations in 14 days; the number-one brand position on a 50-prompt category basket; organic impressions up 53.8%. By the comparative audit, the firm had the most thorough AI-accessibility posture of any peer in its category.

Then the data stopped cooperating. The technical signals were green. Impressions climbed. AI engines cited the work at scale. The conversions that should have followed did not arrive in proportion; the dashboards said we were winning, and the business outcomes were more honest.

The Authority Gap

That gap is the most important thing I have learned, and it is what I want to build the rest of my career on. I call it the Authority Gap. In high-stakes categories, AI-search performance is bounded by structural authority that technical work alone cannot manufacture. Technical execution moves impressions; structural authority moves clicks. AUTHORITY IS THE CEILING.

So I built a way to measure it

Assistive Agent Optimization (AAO) is a 10-gate diagnostic that scores how likely an AI assistant is to choose your content when a real person is making a real decision: Discovery, Structure, Content, Reputation, Infrastructure, Authority, Recency, Granularity, Differentiation, and a weighted citability score that ties them together. AAO is the measurement side of the work that Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) operators do on the optimization side; complementary, not competitive. I am productizing it as Bayesian and Priors (baypri.ai), a diagnostic that surfaces a company’s authority ceiling before it spends a fortune and years finding that ceiling the hard way. It is launching with enterprise inbound already on the table.

What I want next

Here is what I want next. One of two things, and I am selective about both.

A senior role, in-house, where authoring the methodology is the job. Head of AEO. Director of AI Search. SEO Lead at an AI company or a search-technology vendor. Somewhere the differentiator is methodology depth and infrastructure, not headcount. I am not pivoting into general marketing leadership; I want to own the answer-engine strategy end to end, for a team that already understands why that is about to matter more than anything else in its category.

Or a small number of fractional and advisory engagements. An AEO audit. A measurement system. An authority-gap diagnostic for a company that wants to know where its ceiling sits before it invests. Embedded full-time or engaged on a single mandate, the work is the same.

Who I work best with

Operators who would rather see the honest number than the flattering one; companies that treat AI search as the structural shift it is, not a checkbox; teams that want the rare operator who can present the strategy to the board and write the Python that proves the ROI. If that sounds like a chore, I am not your person. If it sounds like the whole point, we should talk.

The shift is happening whether or not the dashboards admit it. I would like to help you be the one AI chooses.

See how I can help | Read the AAO framework | About me