I’m a Rails developer at Concordia Publishing House, a 160-year-old publisher in St. Louis. The codebase I work in daily serves about 500,000 users. My public OSS contributions live at github.com/MatthewJamisonJS . AEO consulting is what I do on the side, for local businesses that don’t have a development team.

Why AEO

About two years ago I started noticing something. Small businesses I knew personally (a tamale vendor in south city, a drywall crew in O’Fallon) were invisible in ChatGPT and Perplexity results, even when the queries were obvious: “Best tamales in south St. Louis.” “Drywall repair near O’Fallon IL.” These businesses had websites. They had Google reviews. AI tools couldn’t read them cleanly, couldn’t cite them, often didn’t surface them at all.

The problem wasn’t that they were bad businesses. The problem was technical: missing or malformed structured data, robots.txt files blocking crawlers, no llms.txt, schema.org markup that either didn’t exist or had errors. Things I knew how to fix.

That’s why Gateway Tech AEO exists. Not because I saw a market gap. Because I watched good businesses get skipped by AI tools and I knew what to do about it.

What I actually do

I audit your site’s AEO visibility across three channels: AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews), classical search (Google, Bing), and third-party listings (Google Business Profile, Yelp, Apple Maps). From that audit I produce a written report: specific, prioritized, jargon-free.

If you hire me for implementation, I build the schema.org markup for your business type (LocalBusiness, Service, Person, whatever applies), configure your robots.txt so AI crawlers can read you, add an llms.txt file so large language models understand your structure, and fix the technical blockers keeping you out of AI results.

The tools I use: schema.org vocabulary, JSON-LD, Hugo (for static sites), Rails (for app-backed sites), Cloudflare Workers (for lightweight API layers), Lighthouse (to verify performance doesn’t regress), and validator.schema.org to confirm the markup is clean before we ship.

I don’t run ads. I don’t do social media management. I don’t do SEO in the traditional backlink-building sense. I do structured data, crawlability, and the technical layer that makes AI tools able to find you and cite you.

Honest limitations

I can’t promise you’ll appear in every AI response. Nobody can: the models are probabilistic, the citation logic isn’t published, and the picture changes fast. What I can do: make sure the technical barriers are gone, so when someone asks an AI about your category in your city, your business is a candidate. Whether it gets cited depends on a lot of factors beyond markup. I won’t pretend otherwise.

I also have a full-time job. I take on a small number of clients at a time. If there’s a wait, I’ll tell you upfront.

How to reach me

The contact form on the home page is the fastest path. Tell me your business name, your city, and what you’re trying to be found for. I’ll reply within 24 hours, usually same day.

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