Content strategist.

Yes — AI accelerates research, outlining, fact-aggregation, and first-draft scaffolding. AI does not ship. Every piece is human-edited end-to-end before publish: fact-checked against primary sources, voice-calibrated, structured for AEO (TL;DR + structured Q&A + citable stats), and read aloud once for cadence. AI-only content tanks AEO performance — Google + ChatGPT + Perplexity + Gemini all detect and downrank pure-AI content. Our editorial standards (see /about/editorial-standards/) document exactly how AI is used and bounded.

Yes — voice calibration runs week 1, before any scaled production. We sample 10–20 existing pieces of your strongest content, interview brand leads (founders, CMO, sales lead) for tone preferences, draft a voice document with do/don't guardrails, then validate the first batch with you before scaling. Most clients sign off on the voice document by end of week 2; the first piece publishes by week 3. Re-calibration available quarterly as your brand evolves.

Yes — where it makes sense and where it will not get penalised. Strong fits: comparison pages ("X vs Y" at scale), integration pages (your platform + each major partner), location combinations for multi-location services, feature × use-case matrices, and inventory-driven eCommerce. Bad fits: thin scrape-and-republish content, doorway-page tactics, AI-only spam at scale. We will not ship programmatic for its own sake; Google's helpful-content classifier penalises bulk-thin programmatic at scale.

Yes — pillar repurposing into social, video, audio, and visual formats is part of every Senior tier engagement. Long-form essay → social carousel + video script + audio outline + designer brief. Senior strategists know how to structure a brief that production teams (in-house designers, freelance editors, paired video pod) can execute against without 5 rounds of revision. On Full Pod tier, pairing with our in-house creative team is automatic. Most engagements ship 1 long-form pillar per month + 5–8 repurposed assets across formats.

Indexing in major search engines: 1–2 weeks. Rankings on competitive commercial queries: 3–6 months for new content; 1–3 months for refreshes of existing high-authority pages. AI citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews: 4–8 weeks for cited-brand candidates (existing entity footprint via Wikipedia, Wikidata, third-party mentions). Compounding citation density 6–12 months in. We track AEO performance via AthenaHQ + Profound + monthly manual audits and report month-over-month.

72-hour replacement during the first 14-day fit window if voice or working style is not the right match — either side can call it, no further obligation, pro-rata refund for unused days. After day 14, replacement runs through standard 30-day notice with handover (voice document, content roadmap, in-progress drafts, briefing notes) from the outgoing strategist. We send a 600-word voice-test piece for sign-off before the engagement starts so voice mismatch is caught up front, not at week 6.