I realized I wasn’t optimizing for the right thing

I was helping a small local brand with SEO content, keywords, technical stuff and even after solid optimization, they weren’t showing up where it mattered.

Not on Google. Not on Perplexity. Not when people searched in ChatGPT or Claude.

That’s when it hit me: traffic wasn’t the problem. Recognition was. We’re so busy optimizing for rankings and impressions — but AI agents don’t care about rankings. They care about structure, clarity, and signals they can interpret. That rabbit hole led me to create something new.

A new framework. A new kind of optimization. Something I now call: IAO.