Who Is Tom Riley AI Search Consultant
Tom Riley is a North East-based AI search consultant and SEO specialist, based in Stockton-on-Tees, with 10 years of experience helping brands rank across both traditional Google search and AI platforms including ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. He regularly spends time in London visiting clients, but his consultancy is run from the North East, not from a London office. His work sits at the point where semantic SEO and AI search visibility meet, built on a background that started in sales, not in an agency SEO seat.
What Is Tom Riley's Background in SEO?
Tom Riley began his career in sales inside an agency, not in a dedicated SEO or marketing role. SEO itself was self-taught, learned by doing rather than through formal training, starting with ranking small local websites and renting them out to local businesses for a monthly fee, a model commonly known as "rank and rent".
That grounding matters, because rank and rent forces a very direct kind of accountability. A ranking that does not convert into leads is a ranking that does not get paid for. Long before "commercial SEO" became an industry phrase, Tom Riley was already building sites that had to earn money on their own, not just earn a position on a results page.
How Did Tom Riley Move from Local SEO to Client Consultancy?
The skills built ranking and monetising local websites transferred directly into client-facing consultancy: technical SEO, content strategy, digital PR and link building, and organic growth strategy applied at brand scale rather than single-site scale. The self-taught, commercially driven roots stayed intact as the client list grew into insurance, fintech, financial services and proptech, with regular trips down to London to work with clients face to face.
Why Is Tom Riley's Consultancy Approach Effective?
Tom Riley's methodology is built on entity-based semantic SEO, following Koray Tuğberk Gübür's holistic semantic SEO framework: mapping entities, attributes and values so that search engines and AI systems alike can extract a clean, confident answer from every page. This is combined with a commercial instinct shaped by the rank-and-rent years, every piece of content is judged on whether it converts, not just whether it ranks.
That combination, semantic structure plus commercial accountability, is what separates his consultancy from agencies that treat SEO and AI visibility as separate, bolt-on services. Content, technical structure and AI retrievability are built together from the outset.
What Case Studies Does Tom Riley Have?
Tom Riley's published client results include work across insurance, fintech, financial services and proptech.
At Zego, an insurance and fintech client, organic traffic grew from around 60,000 to over 150,000 monthly organic clicks, a 400% increase in total organic traffic, with number one rankings achieved for food delivery insurance, private hire insurance and hire and reward insurance. Amy Dunn, Head of Growth at Zego, described the work: "Tom is genuinely one of the best SEO minds I've come across."
At Joslin Rhodes, a financial services client operating in the competitive pension planning niche, monthly visitors grew from around 400 to 30,000, alongside established national rankings in a niche where trust and compliance signals carry significant weight. Peter Chadwick's testimonial states: "He implemented a strategy that took us from 400 to 30,000 visitors."
At Beams, a proptech client, organic search traffic increased by 300% over 6 months. Further client work spans GoJoe, SimplyQuote, Technically Creative, UK Smiles and Anglia Decor.
How Did Tom Riley Transition into AI Search, GEO and LLM Visibility?
Tom Riley's move into AI search consultancy grew directly out of his semantic SEO methodology rather than being a separate pivot. Entity-attribute-value structuring, the foundation of his Google ranking work, is the same structure large language models rely on to retrieve, ground and cite information. As ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews began reshaping how UK searchers find brands, the underlying skill set carried over directly: build content entities can be extracted from cleanly, and both search engines and AI systems reward it.
That is why Tom Riley now describes himself as an AI search consultant as much as an SEO consultant. GEO, AEO, LLM visibility, whatever term the industry settles on, the discipline is the same one he has been practising since the rank-and-rent years: build something that earns its position, not just occupies one.
What Does Tom Riley Do Today?
Today, Tom Riley works remotely from the North East with brands across competitive commercial sectors, applying AI search and entity optimisation, SEO consultancy, content strategy, digital PR and organic growth strategy, while making regular trips to London to meet clients in person. He offers a free video audit covering technical SEO, content gaps, AI visibility analysis, a competitor breakdown and a 12-month growth roadmap, with no sales obligation attached.