SEO · Digital Marketing · AI Automation

I turn SEO expertise into AI powered systems.

Building on over a decade of enterprise SEO and digital marketing experience, I am now using AI and automation to deliver analysis and prioritisation at a speed and scale that manually would be impossible.

Experience at scale

26 years

Enterprise SEO and digital marketing

20+ countries

International SEO across multi-market businesses

14 years

Leading SEO at Saongroup / The Stepstone Group

33 people

Largest SEO/CRO teams led

+2M visits

Additional traffic delivered at DoneDeal

10+ migrations

Platform and domain migrations delivered successfully

From experience to automation

Building upon a career of successful SEO, working with SEO juniors to get more stuff done, I now provide the input and rules to AI frameworks that can apply my knowledge and experience faster, more reliably and at greater scale than ever before. It was never lack of knowledge or codified systems that was the bottleneck it was having the people to implement it.

Recently Shipped: Citation Gap

Find your citation gaps. Get cited.

Score how well AI answer engines can cite your page, and get the paste-ready fixes to close the gap.

more likely to appear in LLM answers
Tested across 12 industries
Citation Gap audit showing scoring, recommendations and implementation-ready fixes

FAQ

What do you do?

I combine enterprise SEO and digital marketing experience with AI automation. I focus on turning repeatable analysis, decision-making and workflows into systems that help teams work faster, prioritise better and operate at scale.

What is Citation Gap?

Citation Gap is an AI-powered AEO/GEO audit system. It combines technical SEO QA, content opportunity analysis and answer-engine analysis, compares a page with successful competitors, and returns prioritised recommendations with implementation-ready fixes.

How is Citation Gap different from a checklist-based audit?

Citation Gap is not based solely on a best practice checklist. It runs real time analysis on competitors and has an algorithm based on the analysis of thousands of currently successful pages. This isn't guessing or doing what people told me. It is real time understanding of what works now, and how to apply it.

What is the difference between SEO and AEO/GEO?

SEO is focussed on ranking in Google's organic listings, where success is measured in visits and conversions from the traffic source Google organic. The focus for AEO or GEO is to be cited as a source in answer engines, where success is measured in visibility and sentiment. In both cases the goal is to be recommended by a machine that has a large number of users.

How do you approach SEO automation?

SEO automation is no different to working with a team of SEO juniors. Understanding what can move the dial is the first step. Then creating a repeatable workflow that achieves the desired changes. And finally measuring to validate the expected positive outcome. Working with a team you try to do two things 1) make it as easy as possible to follow the process 2) develop the knowledge of the people doing the task so that they can become more reliable. There is usually a period of oversight where you are checking their work carefully then eventually you start to rely on their learned experience. All of the same stages apply to SEO automation. The difference is the scale of the outcome. In automation you only need to go through the onboarding once and you have potentially infinite capacity. With a team, onboarding is a constant process, and capacity is limited in many ways.

Is Citation Gap one product or several?

Citation gap is one analysis engine delivered in different formats so it is available where and however you prefer to work, the idea behind this approach is that it doesn't require you to change the way that you work to accommodate the tool. The engine has multiple concurrent systems and the output can be adapted to suit the focus of the task. For technical analysis it can only show you technical bugs and fixes. For competitor analysis it can show you content gaps etc. It is designed to be flexible and adaptive, working where you work on the task that you are focussing on.

How much does Citation Gap cost?

Citation Gap is currently free to use through its live Claude connector.

What is your background?

I have twenty six years of enterprise digital marketing experience, including SEO, large scale delivery, team leadership, process development and measurement. I'm now applying that experience to AI powered SEO automation.

John Lawson

About me

John has spent over a decade in enterprise digital marketing, working across SEO, technology teams and large scale delivery. He is now using that experience to build AI automation systems that can multiply operational capacity, getting more done faster, while maintaining human control and accountability.