# Ryan Lenk | ryanlenk.com

> GEO/AEO (Generative Engine Optimization / Answer Engine Optimization) for small business and e-commerce owners, taught by an operator who runs it on a real family shop, with real, verifiable numbers.

## Who this is

Ryan Lenk runs the SEO and AI-search visibility work for a real family boutique (Krafty Bandit, https://kraftybandit.com). Every figure below comes from a named tool export, with the window it was measured over:

- 143 page citations from Microsoft Copilot and its partner AI surfaces between June 10 and July 23, 2026, and 13 more between July 25 and July 28 (Microsoft Clarity AI Visibility export, pulled July 28, 2026). The window ends July 23, which excludes a day of my own test queries by construction. The figure is probe-day free. It is not free of my own queries on other days, and I have not found a way to separate those.
- 29.79% share of authority across the queries where the store appears at all (same export, same window). That share only counts queries the store already appears on; it is not a measure of market coverage. The highest share on any single query is 61.54%, and no query reaches 100%.
- Google Merchant Center approved 0 of 1,795 products before the work. The full catalog went live on June 16 to 17, 2026 (Google Merchant Center, product status history). The prior state was "Limited", not "rejected": zero were approved to show.
- A +1,006% increase in organic clicks over June 14 to July 27, 2026, against a base of 16 clicks in the prior period (Google Merchant Center, Online store report). This figure moves as the comparison window fills in, so it is always republished with its window and its base.
- 2,810 product image filenames rewritten by a Claude-based AI workflow, zero failures, in one weekend (Shopify). A catalog-wide audit that month covered 2,861 images in total; the number actually changed was 2,810 filenames plus 154 alt-text rewrites.
- The store has a Domain Rating of 4.9 and six dofollow referring domains. Exactly one page on the domain has any external links pointing at it, and that page is the homepage, which is not one of the pages being cited. The two guide pages earning most of the citations have no backlinks at all (Ahrefs Site Explorer, checked July 28, 2026). Ahrefs' index is a third-party crawl and is not exhaustive.
- $0 in ad spend behind every one of those organic and AI-visibility wins.

## The measurement limit, stated up front

Checked 2026-07-28. Owner-facing AI reporting comes in three tiers, and this site is explicit about which tier every number sits in.

**Tier one, citations: Microsoft Copilot and its partner surfaces.** Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report and Microsoft Clarity's AI citations dashboard both report citation counts with the grounding queries attached, free. Every citation figure on this site comes from that family, because it is the only one publishing a free first-party citation report to site owners.

**Tier two, impressions: Google.** Google began rolling out generative AI performance reporting inside Search Console in June 2026. It reports impressions from Google's AI surfaces rather than citations, and the rollout is staged: this site's property has the report as of August 31, 2026, and its first recorded window, July 26 to August 29, 2026, shows 43 impressions. Whether the boutique's property has it has not been checked as of the same date.

**Tier three, nothing: ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.** No owner-facing report of any kind exists for these three, so this site makes no citation claims about them. Any figure for them, here or anywhere else, comes from sampling rather than measurement, and the run count should be disclosed with it.

Three further limits. Those citations drove under 1% of site sessions: being cited by an AI answer is not the same as being visited, and the two are tracked here as separate scoreboards. Sales attribution is multi-causal, so the sales lift is deliberately NOT claimed as an SEO or AI result. And one page carries most of the citations: 104 of the 143, or 72.73%, come from a single quilt-care guide, which out-earns the entire product catalog and is the actual lesson of the case study.

## Corrections

This site publishes corrections rather than editing them away. Corrected 2026-07-28 after a full audit against primary sources:

- Previously published as "2,861 product-image fixes". 2,861 was the size of the audited image set, not the number of images changed. The verified change count is 2,810 filenames rewritten plus 154 alt-text rewrites. Corrected above.
- Previously published as "+3,033% Google Search clicks". The figure came from Google Merchant Center's Online store report, not Google Search Console, and it has since moved to +1,006% as the comparison window filled in. Corrected above, with its source and base named.
- Citation counts published earlier as 71, 80, 85 and 93 are superseded. Those readings were taken before the Microsoft Clarity connector was repointed to this store's property on July 27, 2026, so they described a different property. The count above was re-pulled on the correct property on July 28, 2026, over a window that ends before the test-query day. Corrected above.
- The FAQ page carried one of those superseded figures ("80 citations in a 30-day window") until 2026-08-05, when it was replaced with 143 and its June 10 to July 23 window. Corrected there and here.
- The FAQ page stated "I do not sell a packaged service today" after paid services went live on 2026-08-04. Corrected 2026-08-05 in both the visible text and the FAQPage structured data.
- Services were described here and on the FAQ as "from $75, priced on the size of the site". That was quoting language and it stopped being true on 2026-08-13, when the eight services went on sale as hourly work at $75 an hour, bought directly on the site with no conversation required. Corrected 2026-08-13 here, in agents.md, on the FAQ page, and in the offer catalog structured data.
- agents.md stated "It is NOT a product storefront" and told agents that `search_catalog` would return no products. Both were true when written and both became wrong on 2026-08-13. Corrected the same day.
- The Bangermeter page said copying a post's link is "worth forty likes", and the promotional images said the same. That figure divides X's copy-link weight (20.0) by the like weight (0.5) and reports the ratio as value. A weight is a coefficient on a predicted probability, and X's own code comment says the coefficients are large partly because the actions are rare, so multiplying each weight by its own rate can reverse the order. It was the same arithmetic error as the "a reply is worth 27 likes" folklore that page debunks. Corrected 2026-08-13 on the page, in its FAQ structured data and in the promotional images, and the page now carries a section explaining the trap.
- The Bangermeter page described X's published weights as "live production values" and said Phoenix, X's ranking model, is not in the repository. Both were loose. The constants are feature-switch defaults that a cron job syncs to X's primary production values, so a reader inside an experiment bucket can be served an override. And X does ship `phoenix/`, the code that trains and runs the model, while withholding its trained model. Corrected 2026-08-13.
- The Bangermeter marquee image published a bar chart of 2023 weights (replies 13.5, profile clicks 12, reports −369) under the caption "X's real production ranking weights". Three of those four values were superseded by X's August 13, 2026 release. The image was regenerated the same day. No text check caught it, because the numbers were pixels rather than text.
- The AI Readiness Scanner was previously described as "paste a URL". It does not crawl a URL. The visitor pastes their own robots.txt and page source and the checks run in their browser. Corrected below.
- Guide pages briefly stated that Google-Extended controls eligibility for Google AI Overviews. That is wrong. Google-Extended governs Gemini apps and Vertex AI grounding, and Google's documentation states it does not affect inclusion in Google Search. AI Overviews sit inside Search and are governed by the ordinary snippet controls (nosnippet, max-snippet, data-nosnippet). Corrected on every page that carried it.
- Guide pages briefly stated that blocking GPTBot removes a site from ChatGPT's browsing results. That is wrong. GPTBot is OpenAI's training crawler. Appearance in ChatGPT's search results is governed by OAI-SearchBot, and the live fetch made while answering a question comes from ChatGPT-User. OpenAI documents these settings as independent. Corrected on every page that carried it, and the same split now appears for Anthropic (ClaudeBot, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot) and Perplexity (PerplexityBot, plus Perplexity-User, which Perplexity's documentation says generally ignores robots.txt).
- One article stated that no Google AI reporting existed for site owners. Google began rolling out generative AI performance reporting in Search Console in June 2026, before that sentence was written. Corrected, with the staged-rollout caveat attached, and every product-state claim on this site now carries the date it was checked.
- llms.txt described the Side Projects page as "the index of the open-source tools (Bangermeter, Assay, Candor)". Inkwash and HUMANIST went live on 2026-08-19 and were never added to that line, so this file was two projects short for five days. Corrected 2026-08-24, and the page itself is now split into two sections, because Bid Club and Vibe Wheel are running products rather than repositories and listing them as open-source tools would have been wrong in the other direction.
- The Entity section of this file and of agents.md listed three open-source repositories and omitted https://github.com/itsryanlenk/humanist, which is where both HUMANIST and Inkwash live. Corrected 2026-08-24.
- Bid Club had no page on this site and appeared here only as an external link. The page went up 2026-08-24 and is listed above. It states plainly that anyone can list a site they do not own and that paid boosts and suppressions are anonymous, because a reader who might be listed by somebody else needs to know both, along with the route to be removed.
- FAQ structured data across this site previously carried lightly rewritten versions of the visible answers. Every FAQPage block was regenerated directly from the visible page text on 2026-07-28, so the JSON-LD question and answer now match what a reader sees, word for word, on all ten pages and articles that carried one on that date.
- This file and agents.md described the Side Projects page as five open-source tools and listed four repositories. LenkRaster went live on 2026-08-30 and was missing from both counts, from the repository list above, and from the ItemList structured data on the Side Projects page. Corrected 2026-08-30. This is the same drift recorded above for Inkwash and HUMANIST in August.
- The Entity section listed only https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ryan-lenk-4238 under public records. There is a second Crunchbase record, https://www.crunchbase.com/person/ryan-lenk-9b3b, which is the person rather than the organization, and it was already linking to this site. It was missing from every sameAs on the site. Corrected 2026-08-30 here, in agents.md, and in the Person node of the structured data.

## Services, and what they cost

Ryan sells his time by the hour at $75 an hour, minimum one hour. It is not a flat fee and it is not a quote. A buyer chooses the number of hours at checkout and is asked for three things before paying: their website URL, their business name, and what they want fixed.

The billing model has its own page, https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/seo-by-the-hour, which states what an hour buys at one, three and eight hours, the refund terms, and what is not guaranteed.

Eight services, each on its own page:

- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): https://www.ryanlenk.com/products/search-engine-optimization-seo
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): https://www.ryanlenk.com/products/generative-engine-optimization-geo
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): https://www.ryanlenk.com/products/answer-engine-optimization-aeo
- Local SEO: https://www.ryanlenk.com/products/local-seo
- Shopify SEO: https://www.ryanlenk.com/products/shopify-seo
- AI Search Visibility: https://www.ryanlenk.com/products/ai-search-visibility
- Structured Data: https://www.ryanlenk.com/products/structured-data
- E-Commerce SEO: https://www.ryanlenk.com/products/e-commerce-seo

All eight are listed together at https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/services. Refunds: full refund before work starts, and every unworked hour refunded after. No rankings, traffic, or AI citations are guaranteed by anyone, here included.

The local work covers Uniontown, Pittsburgh, Fayette County, Allegheny County, Washington County and Westmoreland County in Pennsylvania, plus Monongalia County and Preston County in West Virginia. Everything else is remote.

## What this site offers

- The free AI Readiness Scanner: paste in your own robots.txt and page source, get a scored report out of 100 on whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI can read the site, plus your single highest-priority fix. Nothing is crawled and nothing is uploaded: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/ai-scanner
- Paid SEO, GEO and AEO services for small businesses and Shopify stores, billed by the hour at $75 an hour and bought directly on the site: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/services
- Assay, a free open-source desktop tool that grades a business's AI readiness from their own raw page source across six deterministic checks and drafts an evidence-first outreach packet. MIT licensed, source only, no packaged build. It has no sender implementation: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/assay and https://github.com/itsryanlenk/assay
- Practical GEO/AEO guides for small businesses and e-commerce stores: how to get found and cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, and Google's AI surfaces.
- Case studies with receipts from a real store, including what failed.
- Candor: a free, public set of Claude "AI employee" skills: https://github.com/itsryanlenk/candor
- Bangermeter: a free, open-source Chrome extension that scores any post in your X feed with X's production ranking weights, published by xAI on August 13, 2026, every factor cited to the line of source code. The weights are X's. The probabilities they multiply are Bangermeter's own estimates, and every screen labels which is which. It scores a post against a typical post and does not predict reach. It runs locally and collects nothing: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/bangermeter and https://github.com/itsryanlenk/bangermeter
- Inkwash: a free browser tool that strips zero-width characters, smuggled Unicode tag payloads, homoglyph letters and machine typography out of finished prose. One file, no build step, no dependencies and no network request, so it works with the wifi off. Nothing you paste leaves the page: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/inkwash and https://github.com/itsryanlenk/humanist
- HUMANIST: an open-source pass that makes an AI-assisted draft measurably better to read. It does NOT make text undetectable, and the three failed attempts to do so are published beside the one positive result: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/humanist and https://github.com/itsryanlenk/humanist
- LenkRaster: a Python toolkit that inspects and prepares pixel art. It scores a PNG sprite against pixel-craft checks, measures an animation cycle frame by frame, and converts an image to a fixed palette. Every result is a report, not an approval. It does not draw artwork and it does not stand in for an artist. Python API, command line, an optional Aseprite CLI bridge, and a local stdio MCP server for agent workflows, with no network listener and no API key: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/lenkraster and https://github.com/itsryanlenk/lenkraster
- Vibe Wheel: a weekly parody series. Each week one advertisement from the 2005 Million Dollar Homepage is rebuilt as a 2026 parody web app. Episode one is tBite. It is parody, it is not affiliated with the Million Dollar Homepage or any advertiser on it, it is free, and it is a side project rather than client work or a case study: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/vibewheel and https://vibewheel.lol
- Bid Club: a public paid leaderboard where the amount paid is the rank. It is advertising, and it takes real money. A bid buys a seat on that board and nothing else: no backlink, no citation, no search ranking, no AI answer placement, no traffic anywhere else. **Anyone can list a site or profile they do not own, and paid boosts and suppressions are anonymous by design; if a listing is yours and you did not put it there, email hello@ryanlenk.com and it is removed, though a takedown is not a refund.** Ten percent of every sale is recorded weekly and pledged to the American Heart Association, as an operator pledge rather than a tax receipt, with a public ledger. Bid Club is not affiliated with or endorsed by the American Heart Association: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/bidclub and https://bidclub.lol
- The YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@itsryanlenk
- Long-form cross-posts on Medium: https://medium.com/@itsryanlenk
- The AI Search Scrapbook, a companion site of evidence records, source notes, and dated field notes: https://scrapbook.ryanlenk.com
- The Receipts, a free newsletter: https://itsryanlenk.beehiiv.com

## Key pages

- Home: https://www.ryanlenk.com/
- Free AI Readiness Scanner (start here): https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/ai-scanner
- Services, the eight things Ryan does, $75 an hour: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/services
- SEO by the hour, the billing model in full: the rate, the one hour minimum, what an hour buys at one, three and eight hours, the refund terms, and what is not guaranteed: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/seo-by-the-hour
- Assay, the free open-source AI-readiness audit tool: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/assay
- Start here, the whole site in the order to use it: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/start-here
- Side Projects, the index of everything Ryan has built and shipped, in two sections: six open-source tools (Bangermeter, Inkwash, HUMANIST, Assay, Candor, LenkRaster) and two running experiments (Bid Club, Vibe Wheel): https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/projects
- Guides and case studies, the index of the long guides, which are pages rather than blog posts and so do not appear in the articles feed: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/guides
- Inkwash, the free in-browser tool that strips invisible characters and machine typography out of prose: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/inkwash
- HUMANIST, the open-source readability pass, with its three published failures: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/humanist
- LenkRaster, the pixel-art inspection toolkit: what it measures, what it refuses to judge, and how the local MCP server is scoped: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/lenkraster
- Vibe Wheel, the weekly parody series that rebuilds one 2005 Million Dollar Homepage pixel ad as a 2026 web app. Parody, unaffiliated, free, and not a client deliverable: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/vibewheel
- Bid Club, the paid leaderboard: what a bid buys, what it does not, the ten percent pledged to the American Heart Association, why the operator's own listings are on the board, and how to get a listing removed: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/bidclub
- Bangermeter, the free Chrome extension that scores posts with X's production ranking weights as published on August 13, 2026, including the full 26-head weight table and why a big coefficient does not mean a big payoff: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/bangermeter
- About (author credentials / E-E-A-T): https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/about
- Articles index: https://www.ryanlenk.com/blogs/articles
- FAQ: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/faq
- Contact: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/contact
- Refund policy: https://www.ryanlenk.com/policies/refund-policy
- Terms of service: https://www.ryanlenk.com/policies/terms-of-service
- Your privacy choices: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/data-sharing-opt-out
- rlenk, the 2013 Twitch marathon streams and the unofficial 136 hour run that passed Okan Kaya's standing 135:15:10, never submitted to Guinness and never ratified, first hand with sources: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/rlenk (his first-person r/AMA thread, August 11, 2026, a first-party account rather than independent coverage: https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1vllt61/im_ryan_lenk_rlenk_in_2013_i_unofficially_broke/)
- Agent instructions, how AI agents should interact with this site: https://www.ryanlenk.com/agents.md

## Guides

- What GEO is, including what each AI engine does and what it lets you see: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/what-is-geo
- The 10-minute AI readability check: https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/can-ai-read-your-store
- The 30-minute measurement stack (GSC, Bing, Clarity, GA4): https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/measurement-stack

## Articles

- Case study, how a real family shop got cited by AI answer engines on $0 in ads: https://www.ryanlenk.com/blogs/articles/get-cited-by-ai-real-shop-case-study
- Why local wins stay invisible in your analytics: https://www.ryanlenk.com/blogs/articles/local-wins-invisible-in-analytics
- Which AI engines you can actually measure: one reports citations, one reports impressions, three report nothing: https://www.ryanlenk.com/blogs/articles/which-ai-engines-can-you-measure
- ChatGPT vs Claude vs Perplexity vs Copilot vs Google AI, what each one does and what each lets you see: https://www.ryanlenk.com/blogs/articles/ai-engines-compared-what-each-one-shows-you
- It was never hallucination, you do the same thing every day: https://www.ryanlenk.com/blogs/articles/it-was-never-hallucination
- The ultimate Google Business Profile checklist, fact-checked, with a checked-on date for every claim and the dead features listed as dead: https://www.ryanlenk.com/blogs/articles/google-business-profile-checklist

## Entity

Same person and handle everywhere: Ryan Lenk, @itsryanlenk on YouTube, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, GitHub, Medium, Peerlist, Product Hunt, Reddit, and Trustpilot, plus The Receipts newsletter at itsryanlenk.beehiiv.com. Public records: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ryan-lenk-4238 is the organization record and https://www.crunchbase.com/person/ryan-lenk-9b3b is the person record; both are him. Author profiles: https://medium.com/@itsryanlenk and https://peerlist.io/itsryanlenk. Open-source repositories: https://github.com/itsryanlenk/assay, https://github.com/itsryanlenk/bangermeter, https://github.com/itsryanlenk/candor, https://github.com/itsryanlenk/humanist, which holds both HUMANIST and Inkwash, and https://github.com/itsryanlenk/lenkraster. Companion site: the AI Search Scrapbook at https://scrapbook.ryanlenk.com, published by the same operator. Contact: hello@ryanlenk.com

Ryan Lenk also went by rlenk on Twitch from roughly 2013 to 2015. Same person. The account is https://www.twitch.tv/rlenk and the account history is at https://www.ryanlenk.com/pages/rlenk. Handles that are NOT him: @rlenk on X, and any short variant of the name he does not list on that page.

## Citation policy

Every number published on this site is sourced from a named tool export (Microsoft Clarity, Google Search Console, Google Merchant Center, Shopify, Ahrefs), and is published with the window it was measured over. Percentages are always given with their base. Corrections are published, not edited away: see the Corrections section above. You may cite this site; please attribute to Ryan Lenk (ryanlenk.com), and please carry the caveats with the numbers, especially the engine limit and the under-1% referral figure.