About

Hi, I’m Tom. I’m a digital marketing strategist in Seattle, and I’ve been helping people get found online since the late 1990s — long enough to remember when submitting your site to a web directory counted as a strategy.

These days I work at the newest edge of that same problem: AI SEO. When language models, answer engines, and browsing agents become the way people find things, the rules shift under your feet. I find that genuinely exciting. It’s the biggest change in search I’ve seen in my career, it’s happening in real time, and the playbook is still being written. I’m here writing it.

Working the frontier

AI SEO is young enough that much of the work simply doesn’t exist yet — so I invent it. I design workflows for making pages readable to retrieval systems, build prompt libraries, test how AI crawlers and agents actually fetch and interpret content, and work out which signals matter when the reader is a machine assembling an answer instead of a person scanning a results page.

Since 2019, I’ve done that work in-house on the digital commerce team of a major global technology company, bringing AI SEO into the day-to-day: crawl access, structured content, source evidence, measurement, and the practical checks that decide whether a page can be found and understood.

My favorite part of this field is that nobody has it fully figured out — including me. Every week brings a new crawler, a new answer surface, a new claim to test. The job is separating what’s genuinely new from what’s familiar SEO wearing a new label, and turning the difference into something a team can actually ship.

The experience behind it

A new field rewards a long memory. I’ve watched search reinvent itself several times over — from directories to PageRank to mobile to featured snippets to generated answers — and the fundamentals that survived every one of those shifts are the same ones AI systems depend on now: crawlability, structure, clarity, credibility.

My path here wasn’t a straight ladder. I worked in the arts, fundraising, nonprofit communications, retail, agency strategy, and consulting before enterprise SEO became the center of my work, including years as a marketing director. Along the way I’ve led site builds, migrations, audits, content programs, analytics work, and SEO strategy for enterprise technology companies, retailers, newsrooms, startups, nonprofits, and agencies — some projects multinational, others scrappy enough that the whole budget fit in one meeting.

That range is why I care so much about implementation. Today I work alongside brand managers, creatives, engineers, and leadership to turn search strategy into shipped changes, because AI SEO problems usually live in the gap between the recommendation and the release.

Why this site exists

I built AI SEO Workplace because I needed a place to sort what I was learning — and because I figured other practitioners could use it too. AI search moves fast. Some of what’s written about it is genuinely new, some is old SEO with new labels, and some is speculation dressed up as certainty.

This site is where I do the sorting in public: checklists you can run, playbooks you can follow, templates you can paste, briefings that explain how things actually work, and a source library so you can check my homework.

The fine print

I don’t pretend the field is settled, and I’d rather show you my reasoning than hand you a hot take. When I’m wrong, I correct it — the Editorial Policy explains how claims here are sourced, reviewed, and fixed.

The views and materials here are my own. They don’t represent my employer, clients, or any other organization I work with.