I started at Discount Tire in 2011. I was twenty-something, I needed a job, and a tire shop seemed like as good a place as any. I did not expect to still be at the same company thirteen years later, leading search and AI strategy for one of the largest retail operations in the country. But here we are.
The years I spent on the store floor — mounting tires, doing alignments, talking to customers while they waited — are the most professionally valuable years of my career. Not because tire changing is transferable to search strategy. It isn't. But because the store floor is where you learn what the customer actually is before they become a data point in your analytics dashboard.
What the store floor teaches you
When someone walks into a tire shop, they are not in a good mood. Their tire is flat, or their tread is worn, or something is making a noise and they do not know what it means. They are stressed, slightly embarrassed that they let it get to this point, and hoping someone will just tell them what to do without making them feel stupid.
That is the customer. Not the session in Google Analytics. Not the conversion event in Adobe. The person who walked in stressed and is hoping for a straight answer.
Every single thing I know about conversion rate optimization — about why clear language outperforms clever language, why price transparency reduces bounce, why the first answer on a page matters more than the fifth — I learned watching actual humans try to make actual decisions under actual pressure. The A/B testing just confirmed what the store floor already told me.
Most digital strategists optimize for users. The problem is they've never actually watched one. I spent eight years watching people make decisions in real time, under real pressure, about things they didn't fully understand. That is not replaceable by a conversion funnel.
The gap most strategists never close
I see it constantly in the industry: brilliant people who can read a GA4 report, run a Screaming Frog crawl, and write a perfect content brief — who have never actually talked to a customer. Who have never had to explain something technical to someone who just wants to know if it's going to be expensive. Who have never had to earn trust in the first sixty seconds of an interaction.
Search is fundamentally a trust problem. A user types a query because they need something and they don't know where to get it. The search engine — or the AI — is selecting the source they trust most to answer. Every signal we optimize for, from entity strength to content structure to backlink authority, is a proxy for trustworthiness. And the best way to build trustworthy content is to genuinely understand what the person asking actually needs.
I learned that standing in front of people, not sitting behind a dashboard.
Why this matters for AI search specifically
AI search has made this more important, not less. When a user asks Perplexity "what's the best tire brand for my truck in Phoenix," the AI is not just matching keywords. It is synthesizing what it knows about the user's intent — their context, their constraints, their actual situation — and selecting the most trustworthy source of a complete, direct answer.
The content that gets cited is the content that sounds like it was written by someone who actually understands the person asking. Not a keyword density target. Not an SEO brief. A real person with a real answer to a real question.
My edge in GEO is not the thirteen years of technical SEO. It is the eight years before that, when I was the person a stressed customer talked to, and I had to figure out how to help them quickly, clearly, and in terms they could actually use.
What I'd tell anyone starting out
Go talk to your customers. Not through a survey. Not through a user research session. Go sit in your customer service queue for a week. Read the negative reviews. Call ten people who churned and ask them what they were trying to do when things broke down.
Then go look at your most important landing pages and ask whether someone who was stressed, confused, and hoping for a straight answer would get one in the first paragraph.
If the answer is no — and it usually is — you have found your highest-leverage optimization. Not a technical fix. Not a schema implementation. A writing fix that comes from actually understanding who you're writing for.
That's what the tire shop taught me. Everything else is just the tools I use to act on it.
If you want to see how this thinking applies to AI search visibility specifically, I write about the methodology at Sable Search. Or if you want to know where your brand stands in AI search right now, start with the free 5-prompt snapshot.