AEO Expert in
San Diego, CA

SEO and AI Search Work Together

I do not approach AEO as a shortcut around SEO. A page that cannot be crawled, understood or trusted does not become useful simply because it contains a short answer block or additional structured data. A concrete example is a useful service answer on a URL with an unintended indexing restriction or no discoverable internal route. Adding an answer marker leaves that underlying access problem unresolved; the page and its access settings need review.

Traditional SEO establishes the technical and informational foundation. AEO focuses more closely on questions, direct answers and retrieval. GEO considers how brands and source material appear within generative search experiences. The disciplines overlap because each ultimately depends on useful information being associated with a clear entity and a credible source.

Want to see how a page performs against those principles? Run one public webpage through my free AEO checker for a page-level AEO readiness score and priority areas.

For established WordPress businesses, Managed SEO, GEO & AEO is $4,000 per month. SEO, GEO, AEO and ChatGPT Search Optimization are included, with direct implementation, reporting and a monthly performance and strategy call with me. The initial audit is included in onboarding. See pricing details; other CMS platforms are custom quoted. Onboarding establishes the starting conditions and priorities. Continuing work addresses the agreed backlog and reviews the resulting observations, so the audit has a practical implementation path.

Monthly Performance and Strategy Call

Monthly Managed SEO, GEO & AEO includes a performance and strategy call with me. We review traffic and search trends using available Google Search Console and GA4 data, discuss completed work, look at AI visibility and citations separately from visits and leads, and agree the next priorities for your business.

My San Diego SEO and AI search services apply that combined approach to businesses competing in the local market while keeping technical SEO, search intent and measurable performance at the center of the strategy.

SEO and AEO Specializations

Technical SEO

Technical SEO determines whether search engines can efficiently access, render, understand and index the pages that matter. I review crawlability, canonicalization, indexation, internal linking, XML sitemaps, robots directives, JavaScript rendering, Core Web Vitals and unnecessary URL duplication. A finding should identify the affected URL, the observed behavior and the expected behavior. For example, an important page pointing its canonical to an unrelated URL needs a different remedy from several URLs correctly representing the same content.

The objective is not to produce the longest possible audit. It is to separate problems that can materially affect search performance from issues that are technically interesting but unlikely to change a business outcome.

Local SEO for Service Businesses

Local SEO needs more than a city name on a page. I review service relevance, geographic signals, business information, internal linking, structured data and the paths visitors use to find what they need. For example, a storefront page should help a visitor identify the real location and the services available there; a service-area page should explain where the business actually works. The appropriate structure follows the business rather than a list of place names.

My San Diego SEO consulting addresses technical foundations, locally useful content and measurable search performance.

ChatGPT Search Optimization

AI-assisted search introduces another discovery challenge: a business may have useful pages but remain absent or misrepresented when people ask comparison, pricing or hiring questions.

AI-search visibility starts with buyer-intent questions and a repeatable baseline. A useful review records which businesses appear, what sources support the answer, whether company details are accurate and which technical or content gaps are actionable. I keep the tested question, platform or search mode, observation date and cited URLs with the finding. Repeated observations can then be compared with visits and qualified inquiries without treating a single answer as a permanent ranking.

My ChatGPT Search Optimization service includes the initial buyer-question, competitor and citation review in onboarding, followed by agreed WordPress improvements and ongoing measurement.

Experience, Methodology and Client History

My SEO experience began long before terms such as Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization became common. That history matters because AI search did not eliminate the technical problems that existed before it. Search systems still need accessible pages, clear information architecture, useful content and enough evidence to decide that a source deserves visibility.

I approach an SEO problem by first determining what is actually wrong. On a local business website that may mean weak geographic relevance, thin service pages or poor internal linking. On a large content-rich website it may be faceted URLs, stale or duplicate pages, JavaScript rendering, indexation conflicts or restrictions imposed by the website platform.

Recommendations are more useful when they account for implementation. A technically correct fix has limited value if the platform will not allow it, the vendor must implement it or the expected impact does not justify the effort. A proposed fix should name the person who can ship it and the access required. A change I can make directly in WordPress is planned differently from a template change that depends on a website vendor.

There is independent history behind this work as well. My older Yelp client reviews provide historical third-party evidence of SEO work from earlier in my career rather than relying only on claims published on this website.

Web Answer Retrieval Protocol (WARP)

I created the Web Answer Retrieval Protocol to explore whether publishers can make important answers easier to identify and reference without removing the detailed supporting information a human reader needs.

WARP keeps the normal document as the primary source of information for people and search engines. Important answers retain unique identifiers such as [a1], [a2] and [a3], with optional related questions nested inside each answer citation. Each focused follow-up answer links to a specific visible evidence paragraph. Standard JSON-LD mirrors the visible answers, while a separate WARP map records the answer, follow-up and evidence relationships. On this page, the related answer about historical reviews points to the passage containing the Yelp source link. That is a source-backed E relationship: the reader can inspect the underlying review history rather than rely on the short answer alone.

The goal is clarity and provenance, not hidden content and not a claim of privileged access to a search engine or language model. The answer remains publisher authored and its surrounding evidence remains available for inspection.

WARP is a live publishing experiment on EricStrate.com. It is not endorsed by Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, schema.org. Traditional SEO, useful content, authority and technical accessibility remain the foundation. The WARP specification’s evidence section describes the support relationship. A working link demonstrates the publishing structure; a claim about a performance gain requires a separate comparison.

AI Search Research and Testing

AEO is difficult to evaluate if it exists only as theory. I test how different search and language-model systems retrieve information, how clearly entities are represented and whether changes to content structure make important facts easier to identify.

I also build and operate local AI infrastructure so I can experiment directly with retrieval, language models and search workflows rather than evaluating AI search only through third-party marketing tools. It lets me compare the context supplied to a model with the answer it produces and examine whether necessary qualifications survive. These experiments inform diagnosis; they are evaluated separately from a business’s actual search traffic and inquiries.

None of this replaces Search Console, analytics, rankings, qualified traffic or conversions. AI visibility is another search surface to investigate and measure alongside the channels businesses already use to evaluate organic performance.