Brian Winum

I've spent the last twenty years in the trenches of search — as an entrepreneur, an in-house business development specialist, and now agency-side, where I've owned organic strategy for everything from regional service businesses to enterprise catalogs with millions of URLs. The thread through all of it: figuring out how discovery actually works, and engineering for it before everyone else catches on.

Right now that frontier is generative search. Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity are rewriting the rules of who gets found — and most brands are flying blind. At MAXPlaces I lead our GEO and AEO practice, building the audits, content systems, and entity work that get our clients cited inside AI answers rather than buried beneath them.

I write here to share what's actually working — tested on real client accounts, not theory. If it didn't move a needle I can measure, it doesn't make the blog.