Developer-led · South Orange County
SEO, AIO & GEO expert in Orange County, California.
ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews are crawling your site right now. We can see them in the server logs. Most agencies can’t — and that’s why their clients aren’t getting cited. We are Div Digital. We make sure the AI cites you.
01 — The shift
Why “SEO” alone isn’t enough anymore.
Industry forecasts put 25% of traditional search volume shifting to AI-native discovery by the end of 2026. If your strategy stops at Google rankings, you’re optimizing for one quarter of the conversation.
- SEO — Search Engine Optimization
- Ranking in Google and Bing. Still the foundation. Technical health, on-page signals, links, content quality.
- AIO — AI Optimization
- Making your content extractable by language models.
llms.txt, semantic HTML, Schema.org structured data, entity markup, E-E-A-T signals. - GEO — Generative Engine Optimization
- Engineering the actual citations: appearing in ChatGPT answers, Perplexity sources, Claude responses, and Google AI Overviews. Tracking share-of-voice and closing gaps.
02 — At a glance
SEO vs AIO vs GEO — what’s the difference?
A client asked us this on a call last month. We built the table.
| Discipline | Goal | Key signals | What you measure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional SEO | Rank on page 1 of Google & Bing | Backlinks, Core Web Vitals, on-page keyword targeting, technical health | Organic traffic, keyword rankings, click-through rate |
| AI Optimization | Be machine-readable to language models | llms.txt, Schema.org structured data, semantic HTML, entity markup |
Successful AI crawler hits, structured-data validity, indexation in Bing |
| Generative Engine Optimization | Be cited in AI answers | Quotable lead sentences, third-party trust signals (G2, Trustpilot, LinkedIn), comparative content depth | Share-of-voice in ChatGPT, Perplexity citations, AI Overview appearances |
03 — Our approach
Three layers, one strategy.
We don’t bolt “AI” onto traditional SEO. We rebuild the foundation underneath it.
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Foundation — Technical SEO
Core Web Vitals, valid HTML, fast time-to-first-byte, crawlable URL structure, XML sitemap, clean robots.txt, canonical strategy, meta tags. The work that has to be right before anything else matters.
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Layer two — AI Optimization
Schema.org graphs that establish entities. Semantic HTML so models can extract meaning. An
llms.txtfile that tells AI crawlers what your site is. Author bios, credentials, and citations that signal expertise. -
Layer three — Generative Engine Optimization
Citation engineering: rewriting lead sentences so they’re quotable. Comparative tables AI extracts verbatim. Third-party presence on review sites that LLMs weight as trust signals. Weekly prompt testing across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and AI Overviews.
04 — The team
Three senior engineers. Sixty combined years.
Most “AI SEO” agencies are marketing teams that added “AI” to their pitch. Div is run by three engineers who’ve been doing technical SEO since long before LLMs existed. We are not a content shop — we write the code that makes your site machine-readable.
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Tim Hobert
Founder & Principal Engineer
20 years of SEO and full-stack web engineering. Former developer at CNN.com, SonyMusic.com, and Columbia.edu before founding Div Digital in September 2014. Tim leads the agency’s technical strategy and AI search optimization practice across south Orange County.
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Shawn Gregg
Lead Engineer
Former Head of Web Production at Sony Music Entertainment, where he originally hired Tim. With 20+ years of enterprise-scale web development behind him, Shawn now leads complex client builds and front-end architecture at Div Digital.
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Ramon Pujol Cots
Lead Engineer
Computer engineering degree. Career enterprise consultant — still running enterprise website development engagements daily through Div. Joined the firm in late 2014, two months after we opened. Ramon owns data engineering, integrations, and back-end architecture across our WordPress, Drupal, and Next.js work.
- Acquia Certified Developer
- Acquia Certified Drupal Developer
05 — What we built
Proprietary tooling we run on every site.
When the off-the-shelf tools didn’t do what we needed, we wrote our own. These run across our client portfolio today.
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aio-geo-llmsOur WordPress plugin. Auto-generates and caches a current
llms.txtfor any site — index of pages, post types, and sitemaps in the format AI crawlers actually consume. Pantheon-safe (no filesystem writes). Battle-tested across every WP site we run. -
ADXP —
ai.div.digitalOur internal AI agent platform. Monitors AI crawler activity across client sites, tracks share-of-voice in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, and flags ranking drops before they show up in Search Console. Clients get a live dashboard.
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Quicksilver hooks
Pantheon deploy hooks that warm
llms.txtand key page caches the moment new content ships. AI crawlers never hit a stale page after a deploy.
06 — Where we work
South Orange County, in person.
Tim is based in south OC and meets clients face to face. If your business is in any of these cities, we’ll come to your office — not the other way around.
- Laguna Beach
- Newport Beach
- Laguna Niguel
- Dana Point
- Aliso Viejo
- Corona del Mar
- Laguna Woods
- Laguna Hills
- San Juan Capistrano
- Mission Viejo
- Lake Forest
- San Clemente
- Irvine
- Costa Mesa
- Rancho Santa Margarita
- Tustin
- Tustin Foothills
Outside this list? We work with enterprise clients nationwide. Use the form below and tell us where you’re based — we’ll let you know whether in-person or remote engagement makes sense.
07 — Questions
Frequently asked.
How do AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity decide which sites to cite?
AI engines extract quotable answers from well-structured pages — typically the first one or two sentences under each H2 heading. They prioritize sites with valid Schema.org structured data, an llms.txt file, fast Core Web Vitals, and corroborating signals on third-party platforms like Trustpilot, G2, and LinkedIn. The technical and editorial signals overlap with traditional SEO but are weighted differently. We optimize for both.
What is llms.txt and does my site need one?
llms.txt is a plain-text Markdown file at the root of your domain (e.g. yoursite.com/llms.txt) that gives large language models a structured map of your most important pages. It is the AI-era equivalent of robots.txt + sitemap.xml combined. Every site we build or audit gets one — generated dynamically so it stays current as content changes.
Is my website indexed by Bing? Why does that matter for ChatGPT?
Bing indexing is a hard prerequisite for ChatGPT citation, because ChatGPT-with-browsing uses Bing under the hood. If your pages are not in Bing's index, they cannot appear in ChatGPT answers regardless of how strong your Google rankings are. Most agencies overlook this. We check it on day one.
How long until I see my brand in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews?
Initial structured data and llms.txt changes typically register with AI crawlers within two to four weeks. Sustained citation patterns build over three to six months as the model retraining cycles incorporate your improved signals. We track share-of-voice across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and AI Overviews weekly so you see progress, not just promises.
Do I need to throw out my existing SEO work to do AIO and GEO?
No. AIO and GEO build on a solid technical SEO foundation — they do not replace it. If your site is already ranking well in Google, you have most of what you need; we add the structured-data, semantic-HTML, and entity-markup layer that makes the same content extractable by AI. If your SEO foundation is weak, we fix that first.
Why work with a developer-led agency instead of a marketing agency?
AIO and GEO are technical disciplines first and content disciplines second. Most "AI SEO" services are marketing teams that added "AI" to their pitch without changing methodology. Div is run by three senior engineers with combined 60-plus years of web engineering — Tim Hobert (former CNN.com, SonyMusic.com, Columbia.edu), Shawn Gregg (former Head of Web Production at Sony Music), and Ramon Pujol Cots (Acquia Certified Developer, former enterprise consultant). We write the code that makes your site machine-readable.
08 — Start a conversation
Tell us where you are. We’ll come to you.
Tim replies directly within the hour during business hours. Or email tim@div.digital.