About Ryan Lenk
I'm Ryan Lenk. I help small businesses and e-commerce stores get found and cited by AI. I'm the operator, not the theorist.
Most people teaching "get found by AI" have never done it to a business they actually answer for. Here's my lab: my mom's boutique, Krafty Bandit. A real Shopify store with real products, real customers, and a real budget (which is to say, almost none). In mid-2026 I took the kind of technical SEO playbook that usually lives behind enterprise retainers and ran the whole thing on her shop, by hand and with a team of Claude-based AI workflows I built myself.
The receipts
Every number below comes from a named tool export, and I keep the originals. Where a figure was published imprecisely before, it is corrected here rather than removed; the corrections are listed at llms.txt.
- 143 AI citations (June 10 to July 23, 2026, Microsoft Clarity AI Visibility export, pulled July 28, 2026), and 13 more between July 25 and July 28. That number covers Microsoft Copilot and its partner surfaces only, not ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews. "Cited" means AI answers pulled from her pages on how-to questions. I do not claim AI is recommending the shop to buyers.
- 29.79% share of authority across the queries where the shop gets cited at all, with 61.54% on the strongest single query and no query reaching 100% (Clarity, same window). That share only counts queries she already appears on.
- Google Merchant Center approved 0 of 1,795 products before the work. The full catalog went live on June 16 to 17, 2026 (Merchant Center product status history). The prior state was "Limited", not "rejected": zero were approved to show.
- Organic clicks up about 1,006% from a base of 16 clicks in the prior period (Merchant Center, Online store report, June 14 to July 27, 2026). The base was tiny, which is why the percent looks wild, and that figure moves as the comparison window fills in. I republish it with its window and its base every time.
- 2,810 product image filenames rewritten in one weekend by the AI team, zero failures, plus real alt text across the catalog (about 990 images had none at all). 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. Every change has a changelog entry.
- An 8-question FAQ rebuilt into 34 questions with matching structured data, and 52 vendor mislabels corrected.
What I don't claim
The shop's sales grew a lot over the same stretch. I don't credit the SEO for that, because attribution is messy. Most orders happen at the register, and the growth has at least four parents: foot traffic, social, some paid ads, and plain momentum. Anyone who says "SEO tripled my sales" without showing you their attribution model is selling something. The wins I do claim (citations, approval, shopping clicks) are the ones with clean receipts and $0 in ads behind them.
I also don't claim the citations sent traffic. They sent well under 1% of sessions. Being cited and being visited are two different scoreboards, and I keep them apart on purpose.
Why I do it this way
The enterprise SEO world already has this knowledge. I watched it stay locked behind retainers small businesses can't afford, and behind consultants who won't take a 15-minute call with a shop that's "too small." So I do the work in the open, on a store you can actually walk into, and I publish the method, including the experiments that flopped. If a strategy can't survive contact with a real shop and a real budget, I won't hand it to you. The method itself is free and written down: start with What is GEO?, the plain-English guide, then run the 10-minute check to see if AI can read your store.
Questions people ask me about my background
What makes you qualified to teach GEO and AEO?
I run it on a business my family depends on, and I publish the exports. That is the whole claim. I am not certified in this and there is no certification worth much yet, since the field is about two years old. What I have is a real Shopify store, a dated folder of tool exports going back to the start, and a habit of publishing the corrections when I get a number wrong. The receipts are the part you can check. Judge me on those.
Why should I trust a small operator over an agency?
You should not, automatically. An agency with real case studies and named clients may well serve you better, particularly at scale. What I offer is narrower: everything I teach has been run end to end on one real store by one person, so nothing in it assumes a team or a budget you do not have. The trade-off is real. My sample is one shop in one niche, and a good agency has seen a hundred.
What did you do before SEO and AI search?
I spent nearly a decade in fire protection, which is where I learned to read real systems and find the part that is out of spec while everything still looks fine. Before that I served twelve years in Army National Guard intelligence. Neither is an SEO background, and I think that is part of why the measurement discipline stuck: both jobs punish you hard for reporting something you have not verified.
Off the clock
One more receipt, from outside the work. Between May 2025 and mid-2026 I lost about 50 pounds: intermittent fasting, no processed sugar, 10,000+ steps every single day, and 7 to 8 hours of sleep, no excuses. In April 2026 I won the men's walk at the Mt. Summit Challenge; the local paper wrote it up. I mention it because it's the same method as everything else on this page: pick a process, publish the numbers with their base, show up every day, and let it compound. It works on a Shopify catalog and it works on a body.
Where to find me
Everything lives under one name and one handle: @itsryanlenk on YouTube, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and GitHub, where the Candor AI-employee skills from the launch video are free and public. Business inquiries: hello@ryanlenk.com.
If you knew me twelve years ago as rlenk on Twitch, that whole story, sources and all, is written down here.