Independent consultant · Google and AI search
When your customers ask AI, someone gets named.
My job is making sure it's you. I help businesses get found on Google — and get named in the answers ChatGPT and other assistants write when someone asks for a recommendation.
best orthopedic surgeon in Denver
For knee and hip specialists in Denver, three practices come up consistently: Summit Ridge Orthopedics, known for sports medicine and arthroscopic work; Front Range Joint Center, a larger group with several locations; and Your practice, which specializes in joint replacement.
You work with me directly — there's no account manager in between
English and Spanish, both written properly
Ten years working inside legal and healthcare compliance
What changed
Your customers stopped scrolling. They started asking.
It used to work like this. Someone typed a question into Google, got ten blue links, and clicked around until they found you.
Now they open ChatGPT and type the same question in plain English. And they don't get ten links. They get a short paragraph that names two or three businesses and says nothing at all about everyone else.
Nobody scrolled. Nobody compared. By the time a person is involved, the shortlist already exists — and you were on it, or you weren't.
The good news is that getting on that list isn't luck, and it isn't a secret. Here's how it actually works.
How it works under the hood
How an AI decides which businesses to name.
There's a lot of mystique around this. There shouldn't be. The process has four steps, and once you've seen them, most of the advice out there sorts itself into useful and useless.
Someone asks a real question
Not keywords. A full sentence, the way people talk. "Who's a good hip surgeon near Denver who takes my insurance?"
The assistant searches — several times at once
It doesn't run your question as one search. It breaks it into a handful of smaller ones and runs them together. That's why a page about one specific thing often beats a page that covers everything.
It reads what it finds and looks for agreement
It's checking whether the same facts show up in more than one place. If your phone number is different on three sites, that's a fact it can't confirm — so it gets less weight, or gets dropped.
It writes a paragraph and names a few names
The businesses that make it are usually the ones that were easiest to understand and easiest to verify. Not the ones that spent the most.
Two things follow from this, and both are worth knowing before you hire anyone. You can't buy your way into that paragraph — no AI company sells the spot. And nothing in the process is exotic: it rewards being clear, being consistent, and being checkable. Most of what gets sold as "AI optimization" is either that plain work with a new name on it, or a shortcut that doesn't do anything.
What I do
Three jobs, and none of them are mysterious.
Getting named by AI assistants
Making your business easy to understand and easy to check.
The industry calls this GEO, which stands for generative engine optimization. Ignore the name. The work is making sure that when an assistant looks you up, it finds the same clear story everywhere — and enough proof to repeat it out loud.
- Your name, address, phone and hours identical on every site that lists you
- Pages that answer the questions customers actually type, in their words
- Every claim on your site traced to something that proves it
Getting found on Google
The boring foundation everything else stands on.
Can search engines actually read your site? Does it load fast enough that people stay? Does your business information agree with itself? This is where most problems turn out to live, and it's the least exciting part of the job — which is exactly why it gets skipped.
- A full check of what's blocking your site from being read properly
- Pages organized so each one has a clear job
- Load speed and how the site behaves on a phone
Content that survives a busy month
Written to be useful, published on a schedule that holds.
Generic articles don't help anymore — search engines and assistants both got good at spotting them. What works is the thing only you could have written: your process, your results, the question you get asked every week. And a system so it keeps happening after the enthusiasm wears off.
- Articles built from questions your customers really ask
- An approval trail for doctors and lawyers, so nothing goes out unchecked
- Everything documented and handed to you, not held hostage
Free, and you don't need me for it
Three things you can check yourself in ten minutes.
Before you hire anyone — me included — do these. They cost nothing, they take a coffee break, and they'll tell you more about where you stand than most paid audits.
Ask an assistant to recommend someone like you
Open ChatGPT and type the question a customer would type. "Best family lawyer in Tampa." Whatever fits your business and your city.
Do it three times in three fresh chats. The answers won't match exactly, and that's normal.
What it tells you: whether you show up at all, and who's taking the spot you want.
Google your own business name and read carefully
Look at the panel on the right and at every directory listing that comes up. Check the phone number, the address, the hours, the spelling of your name.
Then compare all of it against your own website.
What it tells you: if anything disagrees, that's costing you calls right now — and it's usually the cheapest thing on the list to fix.
Look at your own site the way a machine does
Open your homepage and press Ctrl+U (or Cmd+U on a Mac). A page of code opens. Don't worry about understanding it.
Press Ctrl+F and search for your main headline — the big sentence at the top of your site.
What it tells you: if you can't find your own words in there, search engines and AI assistants may not be reading them either.
If all three come back clean, you're in better shape than most businesses and you may not need to hire anyone yet. If they don't — now you know exactly what to ask about, and you'll be much harder to sell nonsense to.
Working together
Four steps, and you can stop after any of them.
We talk
Thirty minutes. You tell me about the business, I tell you what I see. Free, and it ends there if there's nothing worth doing.
I look properly
A written review of where you stand, in plain English. Everything sorted into what I could confirm and what I couldn't.
You get a plan and a price
What I'd fix, in what order, how long it takes, what it costs. You approve it before anything happens.
I do the work
With a monthly report you can actually read. Nothing gets published under your name without your written go-ahead.
How I work
The prism doesn't create the light. It reveals what was already in it.
If I can't prove it, I won't publish it.
Every sentence on your website should be one you could defend if a customer — or a regulator — asked you where it came from. That includes your credentials, your comparisons, and words like "best" and "only."
So the work starts by separating what's provable from what's assumed. Anything in the second pile gets flagged before it goes anywhere near your site. It's slower. It's also why nothing blows up later.
Proof before publishing
If I can't point to where a claim came from, it doesn't go up — including claims we'd both like to be true.
Your yes, in writing
Nothing goes live without your written approval. If you're a doctor or a lawyer, that record matters as much as the content itself.
Your rules come first
Medical and legal advertising has real rules and real penalties. I read the actual regulation before writing a word, not after someone complains.
You keep everything
The accounts, the content, the documentation, the process. If we stop working together you lose nothing and start nothing over.
Questions
What people ask before hiring me.
What is GEO?
GEO stands for generative engine optimization. It means getting your business named in the answers AI assistants write, instead of only in a list of Google links.
The name sounds technical, but the work isn't mysterious: make sure your information is correct everywhere, answer the questions your customers actually ask, and give the assistants facts they can confirm somewhere else.
Worth knowing: Google published guidance in 2026 saying that optimizing for AI search is still just good SEO. Anyone selling GEO as a separate, exotic service is often selling you the same work twice.
How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my business?
You can't pay for it. No AI company sells placement in the answers their assistants write, and anyone offering to sell you a mention is selling you something else.
What actually works is unglamorous. Your business details match everywhere they appear online. Your website answers real customer questions in plain words. Other sites confirm what you say about yourself. Assistants repeat facts they can check twice.
Can I do some of this myself?
Yes, and you should start with the free parts. Claim your Google Business Profile and make sure the phone number, address and hours are right. Make those same details match on every directory that lists you. Ask a few happy customers for reviews.
That work costs nothing and fixes a surprising share of visibility problems. Hire someone when you need the deeper work — your site structure, content written around real questions, and someone measuring whether any of it moved.
Do I need an llms.txt file?
Almost certainly not. An llms.txt file is a small text file some people add to a website hoping AI systems will read it.
In May 2026 Google stated publicly that files like this aren't needed to appear in its AI answers, and very few sites use one. It takes ten minutes and does no harm, so it isn't a scam — but it isn't a strategy either.
If someone is charging you real money to install one, that's worth a question about what else you're being charged for.
Does regular Google SEO still matter?
Yes, more than most AI marketing admits. When an assistant answers a question it usually searches the web first — the same web Google indexes. A site Google can't find well is usually a site the assistants miss too.
Most visibility problems turn out to be ordinary: wrong contact details, pages that are hard for machines to read, or no content answering the question in the first place.
How long does it take to see results?
Fixing broken details can show up within weeks. Getting named more often by AI assistants takes longer and moves less predictably, because these systems update on schedules nobody outside those companies controls.
Three to six months is a realistic window for meaningful change. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is guessing — and that promise tells you more about them than about your business.
What does it cost?
It depends on the size of your site and how much needs fixing, so the price gets set after the review rather than before it. Work runs either as a one-time project with a fixed price, or as a monthly arrangement.
The first conversation costs nothing and comes with no obligation.
Do you work with doctors and lawyers?
Yes, and those fields need extra care. Medical and legal advertising is governed by professional boards with real rules about what you can claim, how testimonials can be used, and which credentials have to be disclosed.
Content in these fields gets checked against the specific regulation before it's written, and nothing gets published without documented approval from the professional whose name is on it.
This isn't secondhand. I spent two and a half years supporting one of the largest immigration law firms in Los Angeles, on its compliance team, and two years leading quality assurance inside US healthcare billing. I've worked under these constraints rather than read about them.
How is this different from hiring an agency?
You talk to the person doing the work. No account manager in between, and no junior quietly executing the plan you discussed with someone senior.
The honest tradeoff is capacity. This is one person taking a small number of clients, so availability is limited — and it's the wrong choice for work that genuinely needs a team.
The table below lays out where each option actually wins.
One consultant or an agency — where each one actually wins.
Green marks the side I think genuinely wins that row. Two of them aren't mine. If your situation looks like the agency column, hire an agency.
| One consultant (me) | An agency | |
|---|---|---|
| Who does the work | The person you talked to. No handoff, no junior executing someone else's plan. | Usually a team. The person who sold you the plan often isn't the one running it. |
| Capacity | Limited. A handful of clients at a time, and I turn work away when I'm full. | Real. If you need twenty pages a month or a site migration on a deadline, they can staff it. I can't. |
| Range of services | Narrow on purpose: search visibility, structured data, compliance-sensitive content. | Broad. Paid ads, design, social, email under one contract and one invoice. |
| If the person leaves | There's no bench. If I'm sick or unavailable, the work waits. | Someone else picks it up. That continuity is worth paying for. |
| Speed of a decision | You ask, you get an answer. No ticket, no internal review cycle. | Slower by structure. More people means more approvals. |
| Regulated fields | The person reading the medical or legal advertising rule is the person writing the copy. | Varies widely. Some have compliance discipline; many treat it as the client's problem. |
| Track record | Thin. This consultancy is new, so there are no published results to show yet. | Documented case studies and references you can call. That's a real advantage and I won't pretend otherwise. |
Four of seven rows go to the agency. That's the honest count. Hire me when the work is narrow, sensitive, and needs one accountable person — not when you need volume.
Who I am
The person you'd actually be working with.
I'm Alejandro Penuela. I work on my own, from Medellín, Colombia, with clients in the United States and Latin America, in English and in Spanish.
I didn't come to this work from marketing. I came from compliance.
Six years in a government legal office, taking sworn declarations word for word and keeping case files in order. Then two years leading quality assurance teams in US healthcare billing — checking other people's work against a standard and finding what didn't match. Then two and a half years as a legal case assistant for one of the largest immigration law firms in Los Angeles, assigned to the compliance team because of that QA background, reviewing matters before they closed.
That's an unusual road into this job, and it's the reason I work the way I do. Ten years of being paid to ask "can we actually prove this?" turns into a habit. When I look at a website now, that's the question I'm asking about every sentence on it.
It also means that when I work with a doctor or a lawyer, I've already been inside those worlds — HIPAA, board rules, documented approvals. I'm not learning your constraints on your time.
I also build AI systems. Last year I published a research experiment measuring how an AI model's answers change when you ask it the same question a hundred times. It's public, the code is public, and anyone can check it.
One person, a few clients at a time. You'll always be talking to whoever is doing the work, because that's the same person.
And one honest note. This consulting practice is new. Everything above is real and checkable, and so is the research — but I'm early in building a public record of client results. If that matters to you, ask me on the call and I'll tell you plainly who I'm working with and what stage it's at.
Next step
Let's find out where you stand.
Thirty minutes, no cost, nothing to sign. I'll tell you what I see — including if the honest answer is that you don't need me yet.