Steve Redhead

Steve Redhead has been getting websites found since 2008 — back when that meant studying Google's algorithm closely enough to put a client on page one, and then keeping them there through every update that followed.

It started, improbably, in a sauna at his local gym. A conversation about a computer problem turned into racquetball, which turned into a knock on the door and a summons to Chick-fil-A, where David Solomon explained pay-per-click advertising and told Steve he had skills he didn't know he had. He was right. Within months Steve was writing PPC ads, and not long after that he was deep in the mechanics of how Google decides what to rank.

SEO clicked for him the way some things just do. Content structure, heading hierarchy, H1s and H2s, the architecture underneath a page — it came naturally. David's sites started landing on page one, and often more than once on the same page. When YouTube took off, Steve studied that algorithm too, and learned to put video on the first page of Google for practically any business.

Taking it into the field

He carried those skills into the field with a phone-book company moving into digital marketing, meeting local business owners and explaining how search actually worked. The company asked every employee to build a personal site. Out of more than 600 staff, Steve was the only one who did — and his site started outranking the corporate one. That's a longer story, and it's told properly here.

Why GEO and AEO, and why now

The ranking factors that dominated traditional SEO — structured headings, authoritative Q&A pages, clear entity definitions, factual depth, and consistent brand signals — are the same signals large language models use to decide which sources to cite. Years spent building those structures for Google's crawler makes the shift to optimizing for AI answer engines an evolution, not a restart.

What that looks like in practice: writing in direct-answer format that satisfies both a human reader and an AI extractor; schema and structured data that let engines classify content accurately; entity-rich supporting material — definitions, comparisons, FAQs — that raises the odds of being cited; and auditing a site to find the gaps that are keeping it out of the answer.