About me

Since 2016 I have worked at the intersection of classic search and AI answer engines. I started in technical and e-commerce SEO. What has shifted since is where the buying decision begins: more and more often inside an AI answer, not in the list of results. Ranking and visibility are no longer the same thing. I measure the gap between a Google position and an AI citation, and I close it.

Outcome, method, foundation

What clients buy from me is AI visibility: being named, cited and recommended the moment someone asks an AI for a recommendation in their category. The path there is GEO, generative engine optimization – the method built from extractable answer structures, clean entities, Schema.org and original data that a model likes to cite. Beneath it sits the foundation: technical SEO. What an AI crawler can't reach, render and parse, it can't cite. That is why the eight years I spent doing exactly that still count.

That ranking and citation have come apart is not a claim. Ahrefs analyzed roughly 15,000 search queries across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity: only about 12 percent of the URLs these chat engines cite rank in Google's top 10. For Google's own AI Overviews the link is tighter, where about 94 percent of answers cite at least one page from the top 20. So I deliberately say “chat engines,” not “AI” in general, and I measure per engine. Look only at your Google position and you can be invisible in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude without noticing.

What I focus on

My approach is “GEO first, SEO as the foundation,” and it stays evidence-first throughout: measure, prioritize, implement. I capture visibility at the prompt level, sort the gaps by impact and effort in an opportunity matrix, and build content and technology so that language models find, understand and cite the right facts about a brand. That includes a fixed 0-to-100 score for AI visibility, kept as a standing signal in a monthly cycle rather than a one-off audit. No generic best practices, no assumptions without a data basis.

Background

Over close to a decade I handled technical and content SEO for more than 100 websites and learned early to tie visibility firmly to revenue. That breadth is the foundation I now build GEO on.

In the enterprise space I owned the technical SEO strategy for a multilingual platform of roughly 20 million pages with a strict crawl budget. Through advanced indexation controls and a clean site architecture, overall traffic rose by 60 percent, with better lead quality. Projects like that are where crawl-budget management, log-file analysis and Python automation prove whether they actually hold up when a large site needs to be fully captured.

In e-commerce I have advised clients on a freelance basis since 2017, from market strategy through technical solutions to operational workflows. I raised the monthly revenue of several niche projects by 50 to 70 percent on average. In a larger engagement I owned the SEO and marketplace strategy for entering the German market, including competitor research, category selection against commercial criteria, and legal and regulatory analysis (EU product safety, packaging, VAT/OSS/ProdSG). I also built my own e-commerce brand in the yoga segment, with full logistics, customer service and multichannel sales, up to a self-sustaining operation.

For premium brands I have run end-to-end programs combining SEO and Google Ads across multilingual domains. I treat the technical foundation, content and paid channels as one strategy, backed by GA4 and Looker Studio dashboards for data-driven budget decisions.

I also bring leadership experience. As SEO Team Lead I moved a five-person team from “busy work” to KPI-driven, ROI-measurable execution and cut non-productive tasks by around 40 percent. In a digital transformation and operations project I led international teams, defined KPIs, and reduced costs and process bottlenecks by around 30 percent through unified procedures (SOPs).

The results hold up to scrutiny. Through margin-focused optimization of high-value product categories I delivered over 100,000 euros in incremental monthly revenue for an industrial client. In an earlier role I managed more than 50 SME clients in parallel and built scalable task-prioritization frameworks for it. Both show that the method grows with complexity.

How I work

I stick to a simple principle: flexible data collection, deterministic scoring. Every hypothesis traces back to prompt-level data. The real win is not traffic but the probability of being named in the buying process at all. Because if you don't appear in AI answers, the vendor shortlist is decided without you.

At a glance

Focus areas: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO/LLM), technical SEO and big data, e-commerce and internationalization.

Tech stack: Peec.ai, Screaming Frog, Sistrix, Ahrefs, Python, SQL, Looker Studio, Shopify, Magento, ChatGPT/Claude.

Stations: AN Digital, ABRAMS world trade wiki, LOUIS INTERNET, Würth Group, WDD Dr. Faltz & Partner, Semtrix, 11880.

Selected client brands: Braun Büffel, Jowat, Abus, Caritas Deutschland.

Certifications and education: Certified E-Commerce Consultant, Advanced Search Engine Optimization, E-Commerce Management (sgd).

Contact

Planning a GEO or SEO project and need someone who brings technology and strategy together? Write to me. You'll also find me on LinkedIn and Xing.