SEO & AI Search Consultant · 19 years in

Search didn’t die. It split.

Your customers still look things up — they’ve just stopped doing all of it on Google. For 19 years I’ve made businesses findable, and I now do it across the whole fractured surface: Google’s AI results, ChatGPT, and the assistants answering questions about you without ever sending a click. I do the diagnosis and the implementation. Not a deck.

Independent · UK-wide · Surrey-based

  • 19 years in SEO and search
  • 4 AI products designed, built and running
  • Daily published analysis of how search is changing

The shift

“Rankings” stopped describing reality. Most businesses haven’t noticed.

Here’s what’s actually going wrong — and why your current setup probably can’t even see it happening.

  • You rank well. Traffic fell anyway.

    Google now answers the question on the results page itself. You can hold position one for a query nobody clicks through on. The ranking report still looks healthy; the pipeline doesn't.

  • AI assistants recommend your competitors.

    More of "who should I use for X" happens inside ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews. If you're not in that answer you're not in the running — and no analytics tab shows you the deals you never knew you were up for.

  • Your SEO gets reported, not done.

    The most common reason SEO fails isn't bad strategy — the recommendations never ship. They sit in a deck while nobody owns the implementation. Search only rewards work that goes live.

  • You read well to people, badly to machines.

    AI systems fetch, strip and recompress your pages before a human sees them. Most sites were built for a human reader and a 2015 crawler. The reader that now matters is neither.

What I do

What I actually do

Two things, mainly. The rest exists because I can build the fix — not just specify it and hand it over.

And because I build — not just advise:

Web design and development, custom applications, AI chatbots and integration. When the fix is a new site, a faster site, or software, the person who diagnosed the problem is the person who builds it. You’re not paying me to brief a developer. I am the developer.

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The new shelf

Your next customer is asking an AI about you right now.

More “who’s best for X” questions get answered inside ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews every month — often without a single click to your site. Here’s what that looks like:

Who should I hire for SEO in Surrey?
AI assistant

a-specialist-agency.co.uk a-surrey-directory.com your business?

If you’re not in the sources it trusts, you’re not in the answer. Getting you into them is the job.

See if you’re being cited

Experience includes work with
Nike Porsche JD Sports Foot Asylum Edmiston

Ventures

I don’t just consult on this. I build it.

Most people who advise on technical SEO have never shipped the thing they’re telling you to change. I run four SaaS products of my own — so when I talk about crawl budget, Core Web Vitals or how an AI agent parses a page, I’m describing problems I’ve fixed in production.

  • LessonLoop

    Management software for music academies. Live on iOS and the web.

  • Klarvo

    AI-transparency and EU AI Act compliance tooling for websites.

  • VeloPress

    WordPress performance optimisation, productised.

  • Vintifi

    Coming soon.

These are my own ventures, not services on this page — they’re here because they’re the proof.

Jamie McKaye

Who you’d be working with

Who you’d be working with

I’m Jamie McKaye — an independent SEO and AI search consultant, based in Surrey and working with businesses across the UK. Nineteen years in, I’ve watched search reinvent itself enough times to distrust anyone selling certainty about it. That’s why I publish my thinking in the open most days, and why I’d rather show you the reasoning than hand you a list of promises. When a project needs a designer, a second developer or a CRO specialist, I bring in people I trust — and stay your single point of contact throughout.

More about me

FAQ

Reasonable questions

Straight answers, no sales gloss. Can’t find what you need? Get in touch.

Do you only work with Surrey businesses?

No. I'm Surrey-based and happy to meet locally, but search work rarely needs a shared postcode — I work with businesses across the UK.

Do you do the work, or subcontract it?

I do the work. For specialist pieces — design, a second pair of development hands, conversion — I bring in trusted collaborators, but I run the engagement and I'm accountable for the result.

Is "AI search optimisation" just SEO with a new name?

Largely, yes — and anyone telling you it's an entirely new discipline with an entirely new playbook is selling something. The fundamentals carry over. What's genuinely new is narrow, technical, and worth getting right.

What does working with you actually look like?

It starts with a diagnosis — what's genuinely limiting your visibility — then an implementation plan with the work ordered by impact. Then the work ships. I don't sell retainers that produce reports.

What size of business do you work with?

From owner-run businesses to established firms. The common thread is wanting the problem genuinely solved, rather than managed indefinitely.

If search is changing faster than your setup can keep up with

— that’s the conversation worth having. No retainer pitch. Just a straight read on where you stand and what I’d do about it.