Duane Forrester is a search industry veteran, advisor, and 🏷️#author specializing in AI-driven discovery, 📝generative engine optimization (GEO), and the strategic implications of LLMs as intermediaries between content and audiences. His career spans both the platform and practitioner sides of search: at 📝Microsoft he served as Senior Product Marketing Manager on 📝Bing, where he led the launch of Bing Webmaster Tools and contributed to Schema.org — the shared vocabulary for structured data adopted by 📝Google, Bing, and Yandex. He later became Vice President of Industry Insights at Yext and held VP of Operations at Bruce Clay, Inc., overseeing SEO, paid media, content, and platform strategy across hundreds of organizations.
His current focus is what he calls the "machine layer" — the AI systems now sitting between content and audiences, deciding what gets retrieved, summarized, cited, or ignored before a human ever sees a result. He advises enterprise and growth-stage teams, speaks globally on search and AI strategy, and authored The Machine Layer, a book framing AI-driven discovery as a structural shift in how businesses maintain visibility and trust. His public-facing work includes frameworks for GEO and GAIO strategy, an AI SEO Tool Quadrant, and training programs aimed at translating technical change into executive clarity. He has worked directly with over 1,000 organizations ranging from SMBs to Fortune 100 companies.
I'm tracking Duane as one of the more credentialed voices in the GEO/GAIO space.