Hayden Schuster · Resume
Search Systems & AI Visibility
Hayden Schuster
Senior SEO & AI Visibility Manager, Optimal (a OneMagnify company) · Austin, TX
Search is fragmenting. The systems that survive aren’t built for one engine.
I build SEO systems for enterprise brands navigating the shift from search engines to answer engines. Technical foundations, content architecture, and discoverability frameworks that get content found, understood, and chosen wherever search happens next.
Crawlability, indexation, rendering. The technical foundation everything else stands on.
Architecture, entity clarity, structured data. The signals that tell search what a page is.
Intent, information gain, extraction-ready structure. The work that wins the citation.
The Operating Framework
Found. Understood. Chosen.
Every SEO decision I make maps to one of three stages. Skip one and the others fail. It works the same way across traditional search results and answer engines like AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. The surfaces are different. The architecture problem is the same.
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01 Found
Can it be reached
Crawlability, indexation, rendering, and launch readiness. The technical conditions required before any other work matters. Search engines and AI crawlers have to be able to get to the content in the first place.
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02 Understood
Does search know what it is
Site architecture, internal linking, entity clarity, and structured data. The systems that tell search engines and language models what a page is and how it relates to everything around it.
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03 Chosen
Does it win the answer
Intent alignment, information gain, and extraction-ready structure. The work that earns the click in SERPs and the citation in AI answers. The decision moment is where strategy compounds or collapses.
I’ve built and operate five live sites on these principles.
See the portfolioCurrent Role
Optimal, a OneMagnify company
Senior SEO & AI Visibility Manager
- Own SEO and AI visibility strategy for enterprise client programs, spanning traditional organic search and emerging answer-engine surfaces including AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.
- Design AI visibility systems that combine technical SEO foundations, entity clarity, structured data, and extraction-ready content so enterprise content is reliably cited and surfaced by both ranking systems and generative answer engines.
- Lead cross-functional strategy with content, engineering, and analytics teams to translate the shifting search ecosystem into measurable visibility, citation, and traffic outcomes.
- Serve as the senior SEO authority in executive client engagements, advising enterprise stakeholders on how to adapt search strategy as discovery fragments across search engines, AI surfaces, and answer-first interfaces.
Recent Experience
Building the foundation
Senior Digital Marketing Specialist
- Led SEO strategy across five enterprise website launches, preserving and expanding organic visibility during complex site migrations and platform transitions.
- Designed repeatable SEO systems that scaled across large multi-brand websites, aligning technical foundations, content architecture, and internal linking frameworks.
- Acted as primary SEO authority in executive client engagements, translating search ecosystem insights into measurable growth strategies.
SEO & Search Strategy Lead, Rose City Marketing
- Build and operate five niche websites designed around search behavior and structured information systems, testing scalable programmatic content models across emerging SERP and AI-answer environments.
- Provide independent SEO consulting on strategy, audits, and technical implementation for select clients.
Capabilities
Skills & specialties
Search Strategy & Technical SEO
Technical SEO, site architecture and indexation strategy, site migrations and launches, rendering and JS SEO, Core Web Vitals analysis, SEO audits, issue prioritization, structured data.
AI Visibility & Answer Engines
AEO and GEO strategy, AI Overviews visibility, citation and surfacing in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, extraction-ready content design, entity clarity, answer pack architecture, fan-out intent coverage.
Content Strategy & Organic Growth
SERP and competitive analysis, content gap analysis, keyword strategy, content planning and prioritization, information gain, conversion-oriented content optimization.
Analytics & Performance
SEO forecasting, performance analysis, KPI reporting, data-driven prioritization, search and AI visibility analysis.
Tools & Platforms
Google Analytics (GA4), Google Search Console, Looker, Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, Clarity, Peec.AI, WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace.
Earlier Experience
The first chapters
Education
2013 – 2017
University of Oregon
Bachelor of Arts, Journalism & Communication
Minor: Business Administration
Sites I built because I couldn’t not build them.
Same architecture brain. Different obsessions. These started as “I’ll just make one page” and became full sites. That’s usually how it goes.
I’ve been going to Autzen since I was a baby. Of course I built a website about it.
109 pages of Oregon Ducks football. Season archives, rivalry records, recruiting data, player profiles, and the heartbreak index. Built by a lifelong Duck who is way too emotional about this program.
The series needed a proper reference site. Nobody had built one. So I did.
An unauthorized Dungeon Crawler Carl information repository. Book guides, character dossiers, floor breakdowns, theory articles, spoiler zones, and a class quiz. The Borant Corporation has filed 47 cease-and-desist orders. All have been used as kindling.
