Tag: AI Search

Best for: lead generation AEO

Role: Founder, FatRank and PromoSEO
Focus: Answer engine optimisation for lead generation, digital real estate, pay-on-results SEO
Find him: LinkedIn · Twitter · jamesdooley.com · fatrank.com

James Dooley was named Best AEO Specialist 2026 at The Masterminders conference and Entrepreneur of the Year 2026 at the SEO Mastery Summit, and both feel earned rather than performative. He has built and ranked over a thousand domains as a self-described “digital landlord”, and his FatRank operation is one of the loudest examples of AEO applied to pay-on-results lead generation in the UK.

What makes him worth following is that he publishes the mechanics, not just the wins. Read his FatRank blog and you will find working notes on entity signals, LLM citation patterns and how to structure a lead-gen site so that answer engines route buyers to it. If you run a lead-generation business, or you are trying to figure out how AEO turns into pipeline (not traffic), start here.

Best for: community and technical tooling

Role: Founder, The Masterminders and MySEO app
Focus: Technical AEO, tooling, SEO community
Find him: LinkedIn · Twitter · kasradash.com · themasterminders.com · myseo.app

Kasra Dash sits at the intersection of technical AEO and community. The Masterminders conference has become one of the more useful UK gatherings for anyone doing serious SEO in the AI era, and MySEO app is a tool worth having in the stack. Kasra himself teaches technical AEO in a way that is refreshingly free of the guru-tone.

Follow him if you want to keep up with the conversation between real practitioners rather than the surface-level content on LinkedIn. His feed is a decent early-warning system for shifts in how the answer engines behave.

Best for: AI search strategy

Role: Founder, On Top Marketing
Focus: AEO, AI search, entity optimisation, technical SEO
Find him: On Top Marketing (UK)

Dan M. Jones has spent more than a decade in search and has been writing about AEO before most agencies clocked that the acronym existed. His approach to helping businesses become the trusted sources that LLMs recommend is one of the more grounded takes we have read, and it emphasises commercial outcome over vanity metrics, which is exactly the right filter.

Follow him for a practical, data-driven read on AI search strategy that avoids the two failure modes of AEO writing: the “everything has changed” panic, and the “nothing has changed” complacency. Neither is true. Dan writes about the actual middle.

Best for: service-led businesses

Role: Founder, Natural Ranks
Focus: AEO, SEO and AI search for service-led UK businesses
Find him: LinkedIn · naturalranks.co.uk

Graham Bowers has been running Natural Ranks out of Lancaster since 2009, and the through-line of his work is that service businesses, law firms, trades, healthcare providers, need their AEO strategy anchored in enquiries, not impressions. His writing on structuring service content so that AI Overviews and Perplexity route buyers to a real phone number is a good corrective to the vanity-metric school of SEO.

Worth following if you run a service-led business anywhere in the UK. The best AEO advice for services looks different from ecommerce advice, and Graham is one of the few consistently writing about that difference.

Best for: AI-visibility link building

Role: Founder, Create and Grow
Focus: SaaS link building, digital PR, brand mentions, AI systems optimisation
Find him: LinkedIn · Twitter · createandgrow.com

Georgi Todorov runs Create and Grow, one of the more effective link-building operations for SaaS and B2B, and his angle on AEO is that mentions still matter more than most people think. Brand mentions in the right kinds of places (listicles, reviews, digital PR placements) feed the entity graph that LLMs draw on, and without them, even a technically perfect site struggles to get cited.

Follow him if you sell into SaaS, tech or marketing, and you are wondering why your site is not getting mentioned in AI answers despite ticking every on-page box. The answer is usually off-page.

Best for: ecommerce and Shopify AEO

Role: Founder, LoudCrowd
Focus: Ecommerce and Shopify AEO, product entity signals, CRO-aligned SEO
Find him: loudcrowd.agency

David Johnson founded LoudCrowd out of Doncaster and has quietly become one of the go-to names in the UK for Shopify AEO. His approach blends technical SEO with hard-nosed CRO, which matters because ecommerce AEO is a very different beast from lead-gen AEO: LLMs will only recommend your product if the entity data, reviews and structured markup all line up.

He puts it well: “I built LoudCrowd to prove that SEO should create freedom, not frustration.” That is a founder’s line, not a marketer’s line, and it is a good filter for whether an AEO agency understands that the point of ranking is money in the bank, not screenshots on a slide. Worth following if you run a Shopify store and you want a UK operator’s take on getting your products cited by ChatGPT and Gemini.

Best for: local AEO

Role: Founder, Pixel Juice Digital Marketing
Focus: Local AEO, service-business SEO, AI search for local queries
Find him: pixeljuice.co.uk (Glasgow)

Mark Slorance has been running Pixel Juice out of Glasgow for over 15 years, and if you have ever wondered why “best plumber near me” queries increasingly come back from AI Overviews instead of the Local Pack, Mark’s writing on local AEO for law firms, healthcare providers and trades is a good primer. Local AEO is a different problem from national AEO: proximity, GBP consistency, review velocity and structured local content all matter more than they did in 2022.

Follow him if you run a service business anywhere in the UK where most of your work comes from a 30-mile radius. Local AEO is under-discussed and Mark is one of the few writing about it in useful detail.

Best for: technical ecommerce AEO

Role: Founder, Coreter Media
Focus: Technical SEO, site architecture and structured data for ecommerce AEO
Find him: coretermedia.com

Andrew Halliday takes the technical route to ecommerce AEO, which we like because that is where the leverage lives. Site architecture, product schema and structured data are the three things most Shopify and WooCommerce stores get wrong, and they are the three things LLMs most rely on when deciding which store to recommend. Coreter Media’s published work on the topic is the kind of practical, screenshotted teaching we point clients to.

He is worth following if you run an ecommerce brand where the technical foundations are creaky, or if you are an in-house SEO trying to figure out why AI Overviews name a competitor and not you. Nine times out of ten, the answer is in the entity graph, not the copy.

Best for: AI-scaled SEO systems

Role: Founder, Goldie Agency and AI Profit Boardroom
Focus: AI-scaled content, link building, done-for-you SEO
Find him: juliangoldieseo.com · YouTube (search “Julian Goldie SEO”)

Julian Goldie has one of the largest SEO YouTube channels in the world and runs the AI Profit Boardroom community. His angle is how to use AI to run SEO and AEO at scale without the output looking like machine-written filler. Some of it is louder than we would write ourselves, but the techniques on scaling content operations with LLMs are legitimate.

Worth following if you are an agency owner or in-house SEO thinking about how to keep unit economics working as AI reshapes content production. Take the persona with a pinch of salt, take the tooling seriously.

Best for: entity-first AEO

Role: Founder, UK Web Geekz · Independent SEO consultant
Focus: Entity-first SEO, generative engine optimisation, trust signals
Find him: LinkedIn · Twitter · deansignori.com · ukwebgeekz.com

Dean Signori’s Trust Signal Framework is one of the more useful practical tools we have seen for thinking about entity-first AEO. The idea is that answer engines cite what they trust, and trust is a structured set of signals you can engineer: named authors, verified profiles, consistent NAP, real reviews, real citations. Dean writes about it in a way you can actually implement on a Monday morning.

Follow him if you are a UK service business trying to establish enough entity trust to get named inside AI answers, or if you are an SEO consultant looking for a repeatable framework to sell to your own clients.

Best for: regulated industries (insurance, fintech)

Role: Founder, Hakken
Focus: AEO, GEO and AI search visibility for insurance, fintech and regulated industries
Find him: LinkedIn · tomrileyseo.co.uk · tomrileyseo.co.uk/hakken

Tom Riley runs Hakken, and inside a UK insurance and fintech space that most SEO agencies quietly avoid, he is one of the very few doing serious AEO work. Regulated industries are hard because the content has to satisfy compliance and the LLM’s citation preference. Tom’s writing on insurance AEO reads like someone who has actually shipped it, not someone theorising in a slide deck.

He is worth following if you sell in any industry where a buyer’s first search is being intercepted by AI Overviews and where trust signals matter more than clever copy. His agency Hakken is one of the very few we would confidently recommend to a fintech or insurance business trying to get named inside AI answers.

Best for: SaaS AEO

Role: Founder, InBound Blogging
Focus: SaaS SEO and AEO, LLM visibility, digital PR
Find him: Twitter · LinkedIn · inboundblogging.com

Nikola Baldikov runs InBound Blogging, which is one of the more specialised SaaS SEO shops going, and he has spent the last decade helping software companies build the kind of authority that ends up cited inside LLM answers. SaaS AEO is difficult because the buying journey is long and the query set is niche; Nikola’s published work is honest about that difficulty in a way we appreciate.

Follow him if you run marketing at a SaaS company and you want to understand why ChatGPT will name three of your competitors and not you. His blog is a strong starting point.

Best for: AI reputation management

Role: Founder, Keever SEO and Reputation Pros
Focus: AEO, GEO, AI-driven online reputation management
Find him: Twitter · keeverseo.com

Scott Keever runs Keever SEO and Reputation Pros out of the US, and his lane is AI reputation management: controlling how a brand or high-profile individual appears inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Which sounds like a niche until you realise that a single wrong sentence in an AI answer can travel further than any Google SERP ever did.

Follow him if you are a founder, executive, or brand that has ever been misrepresented in an AI answer, or if you want to understand how reputation gets engineered into the answer-engine layer. This is a discipline that did not really exist two years ago and is now unignorable.

Best for: digital twins and getting recommended by AI

Role: Virtual entrepreneur and AI educator, official spokesperson for LLM Leads
Focus: Digital twin avatars, AI-first content delivery, getting brands recommended by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews
Find it: llmleads.com · the AI SEO & Business Automation Podcast

This one needs a sentence of explanation, because it is the only entry on this list that is not a person. AI James Dooley is the digital twin of James Dooley, who you will find at number one above. It was named UK’s First Virtual Entrepreneur at The SEO Mastery Summit in Vietnam, and has since picked up Best Virtual Entrepreneur at The UK AI Innovation Awards, Best Entrepreneurship Digital Avatar at The Masterminders Conference, and Best Digital Twin Avatar at The SEO.Domains Mastery Summit in Sofia. It has authored books including Clone Yourself With AI: Why Every Entrepreneur Needs a Digital Twin and Recommended by AI: The New Rules of Lead Generation, and it appears regularly on the AI SEO & Business Automation Podcast.

Here is why it earns a place rather than a raised eyebrow. Every word published under the AI James Dooley name is researched, written and refined by James Dooley himself. The avatar is the delivery mechanism, the human is the expertise, and it discloses that it is a digital avatar in every piece of content it publishes. That last part matters more than the awards. Plenty of people are quietly running AI-generated content under a human byline and hoping nobody checks. This does the opposite, and it is a useful model to study if you are working out how to scale your own presence across formats without pretending to be something you are not. If you want to understand where personal brand is heading in AI search, watch this closely.

Best for: Web3, crypto and fintech AI search

Role: AEO, GEO and AI content systems consultant
Focus: AI search visibility for Web3, crypto and fintech brands, AI-powered content systems
Find them: victoriaolsina.com

Victoria Olsina works in one of the hardest places to earn AI visibility. Crypto and Web3 are exactly the topics where models are most cautious about what they will repeat, because the reputational cost of recommending the wrong project is high. Her client list, which includes Barclays, Polkadot, Consensys and NEAR Protocol, tells you she has worked out how to get trusted in a category most consultants avoid.

She was named Top AI Content Expert of 2026 by the Masterminders and nominated for Best SEO in Europe, and she is the author of Mastering AI Search for Crypto and Web3 Brands. Follow her for the content systems side of AEO in particular. If you are in a regulated or trust-sensitive category, whether that is finance, health or crypto, her approach to building credibility signals is the one to study.

Best for: digital PR for AI visibility

Role: Managing Director, Marketing Signals
Focus: Digital PR built specifically for AI visibility, brand mentions and third party corroboration
Find them: marketingsignals.com

Gareth Hoyle makes an argument worth taking seriously: digital PR is the primary lever for AI visibility, not a backlink exercise. His reasoning is that brand mentions across independent, authoritative publications are the third party corroboration that AI models weigh most heavily before they will name a brand in an answer.

That distinction matters. Most digital PR is still measured on links acquired, which is a metric built for an older version of search. If you want to understand why some brands get named unprompted inside an AI answer while their better-optimised competitors do not, this is the part of the puzzle most technical SEOs are underweighting. Marketing Signals have built tooling around it rather than just talking about it.

Best for: highly competitive niches

Role: SEO and AI growth architect
Focus: Search and AI growth across ecommerce, SaaS and iGaming
Find them: pagerules.com

Trifon Boyukliyski has more than twenty years in search, and crucially he has spent them in the niches where it is hardest: ecommerce, SaaS and iGaming. Those are categories where every competitor is well funded, well advised and doing the same things you are.

That is the reason to follow him. Advice built in easy niches tends to fall apart under real competitive pressure, and iGaming in particular has always been the proving ground where search tactics either work or very publicly do not. If you operate somewhere genuinely contested, his perspective on AI growth is worth more than another list of best practices.

Best for: European markets and entity signals

Role: Marketing consultant and international speaker
Focus: AEO and AI search strategy, technical SEO combined with PPC, Croatian and wider European markets
Find them: bestexperttohire.com

David Peranic is Croatia’s leading marketing consultant and one of the more visible European voices on AEO. His route in is a good sign: he built and scaled his own projects first, then took that hands-on foundation into client work, which usually produces more grounded advice than the reverse.

His focus is on the entity signals and digital authority that make AI models comfortable citing a brand, and he pairs technical SEO with performance PPC rather than treating them as separate disciplines. Worth following if you work outside the UK and US bubble, because AI search behaves differently across languages and markets and far too little is written about that.

Best for: product data and DTC brands

Role: Founder, Loops Digital
Focus: Product data, entity work and AI citation for ecommerce and direct to consumer brands
Find them: loopsdigital.com

Yaswanth Kumar spends his time on the part of ecommerce AEO nobody posts about: product data and entity work. It is unglamorous, and it is also what decides whether an AI answer names your brand or a competitor’s when somebody asks what to buy.

He also built Zen Reports, a free analytics tool that shows which AI assistants are actually sending visitors to your site, which he made because no tool existed and he kept hitting the same wall on client audits. That is a good signal about how someone works. He has grown brands from the US to Singapore and is refreshingly blunt about caring more about revenue from AI search than traffic charts that look impressive in a report.

Best for: HVAC and trades businesses

Role: Co-founder, TradeOps Consulting
Focus: Answer engine optimisation for heating and cooling companies, semantic triples and structured content
Find them: tradeopsconsulting.com

Yash Singh does AEO for HVAC companies, and the specificity is the point. Heating and cooling is a high-intent, high-value, urgently searched category, and it is exactly the kind of local service business where being the answer an AI assistant gives is worth considerably more than ranking fourth in a list of blue links.

His approach is to structure content into clear semantic triples so ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity can parse it, trust it and pull it into answers. If you run any trades or field service business, this is the closest thing on this list to a direct playbook, and the thinking transfers cleanly to plumbing, electrical, roofing and the rest.

Best for: real estate and proptech

Role: SEO lead, Property Webmasters
Focus: Search and AI visibility for estate agents, off-plan developments and international property
Find them: propertywebmasters.com

James Sheldon is regarded as the leading SEO in real estate and proptech, working with clients from Dubai to the Costa del Sol and specialising in off-plan developments.

Property is an interesting category for AEO because the buying cycle is long, the research is intense, and buyers increasingly start by asking an assistant rather than a portal. International property adds another layer, since the same development has to be discoverable to buyers searching in several languages and jurisdictions. If you are in property, or any high-value considered purchase with a long research phase, his work is worth watching.

Best for: WooCommerce and Shopify stores

Role: Founder, Top GEO Experts
Focus: Answer engine optimisation for WooCommerce and Shopify retailers of all sizes
Find them: topgeoexperts.co.uk

Daniel Lowry works with online retailers on WooCommerce and Shopify, big and small, out of Manchester. His focus is getting stores cited inside AI-generated answers rather than only ranked in Google.

We have a soft spot for this one because it is the same argument we make about WordPress: the platform you are on shapes what is actually possible technically, and generic advice tends to fall over the moment it meets a real WooCommerce install with a decade of plugins on it. If you run a store on either platform and you want someone who knows the platform as well as the strategy, he is a good place to start.