Generative Engine Optimization — AI Search

AI can't create
information gain.

Buyers now start their research inside AI.
I supply the judgment that gets your brand mentioned: which bets to make, and how to mine your experts for information gain that AI can't create.

25+ years in marketing & growth leadership
Founder of a GEO practice · Ex-CMO · Yale MBA

Optimizing for  ChatGPT · Claude · Perplexity · Google AI Overviews

Richard H Roberts

Selected Work

Results I've led

Engagements I led at Active Ingredients, across very different categories.

B2B SaaS · Microsoft cloud

Nerdio

GEO · led a team of four · 50+ pages

  • +1,394%brand mentions across top LLMs
  • +1,266%Google AI Overview mentions
  • 25%GEO share of voice (200%+ ahead of competitors)
  • +602%leads YoY · 2.1× conversion vs. baseline
"Active Ingredients are true pioneers in GEO. The results have been outstanding — a completely new, high-efficiency funnel for our sales team." — Lane Cauley, Nerdio
Enterprise analytics

Qlik

SEO · led a team of six · 90+ pages · 10+ yr relationship

  • +1,152%unbranded organic traffic YoY
  • +477%leads from organic search
  • Top 5Google ranking, primary Gartner keyword
  • +35%Gartner Magic Quadrant conversions
"A critical partner for 10+ years — they transformed our website into a truly powerful growth engine. Great strategy, design, content, tech, and service." — Susan Nishimoto, VP Global Digital Marketing, Qlik

The method travels beyond B2B

Consumer / CPG

Chicken of the Sea

+44% organic traffic while cutting paid dependence, and +871% brand mentions across top LLMs.

Finance / Asset management

Hennessy Funds

+139% organic growth and +226% digitally-sourced deals in a compliance-heavy category.

Approach

Why some brands get mentioned and others get penalized

AI slop can spike metrics for a few weeks, then get you buried. In one controlled experiment, two sites of 1,000 AI-generated posts each were silently deindexed by Google, one falling from 2,426 daily impressions to 15 in four days. Long-term success comes from giving the models something they can't already generate. That's what my work manufactures: information gain.

01 / Interview

Get expert insights

I interview your subject-matter experts and pull out what they actually know: the data, perspective, and detail that isn't already on the internet.

02 / Create

Make it net-new

That expertise becomes original copy, data tables, and diagrams engineered to be the most useful source on the topic, not a rewrite of what already exists.

03 / Engineer

Make it retrievable

Technical SEO, content architecture, and partner-led digital PR make that content easy for search engines and LLMs to find, trust, and cite.

The result is information gain, the difference between a source AI quotes and noise it ignores.

Writing

Ideas on the
AI-search shift

The data and thinking behind the method: making the case against AI slop, and how to build content that earns mentions and doesn't crush your SEO.

Essay · GEO strategy

AI Slop Is Doomed. Here's Why.

Why "GEO at scale" gets a short-lived spike, and why content built on genuine information gain compounds as the models tighten.

Essay · GEO Methodology

How to Stop the Slop: The AIG Framework

A measurable, six-dimension method for engineering content that AI engines cite instead of ignore.

About

GEO, AI-Search, and Marketing Leader

I've spent 25+ years on the front edge of platform shifts: e-commerce, mobile, SEO, and now AI search. Each time, I built the capability to own the shift before it was obvious.

I've led marketing as a CMO and VP at venture-backed companies (Fuze, EQO, ZipRealty, CNET, Zing.com) and driven growth for global brands including HP, NetApp, Honeywell, Equinix, and Dell. In 2025 I founded a Generative Engine Optimization practice, building the tooling, the "information gain" method, and the team to deliver it. I started it after seeing LLM answers begin to replace the blue-link search results brands had relied on for twenty years.

I'm equally comfortable as the strategic north star on an engagement and as the hands-on builder shipping the work. Yale MBA; BA in psychology and economics from Emory.

I'm also a novelist: the award-winning Tuning In series. It's the same instinct as the day work, understanding how people think, and creating something genuinely new rather than more of the same.

Career at a glance

  • Founder, GEO PracticeActive Ingredients
    2017–Present

Selected prior leadership

  • Chief Growth OfficerBOL Agency
    2009–2015
  • Chief Marketing OfficerFuze
    2008–2009
  • Chief Marketing OfficerEQO Communications
    2006–2008
  • VP MarketingZipRealty
    2005–2006
  • AVP MarketingCNET.com
    2002–2005
  • VP Marketing & Co-FounderZing.com · acquired by Sony
    1997–2001
  • DirectorGrey Interactive · launched Dell.com
    1996–1997

Focus · GEO · AEO · technical SEO · LLM visibility & citation strategy · content architecture

Education · Yale University, MBA · Emory University, BA