Social Listening Experts 2025

Helping companies get mentioned in LLMs and gaining a deep understanding of why and where they need to be cited.

With over two decades of experience shaping and scaling digital ecosystems for enterprise and franchise brands, I specialize in the intersection of SEO, AI-Search (AIO), GEO, and structured data strategy — transforming complex algorithms and emerging AI behaviors into actionable, measurable business growth. As a technical strategist and AI adoption leader, I bridge data, content, and automation to future-proof digital visibility. My work focuses on how AI-driven search, voice interfaces, and structured data are redefining discoverability, authority, and conversion — both for brands and the evolving user experience. I’ve led cross-disciplinary teams delivering top-tier results across hundreds of markets, aligning marketing operations, content systems, and analytics pipelines with modern AI-search readiness standards. My approach blends creative insight with analytical rigor, ensuring each initiative contributes to a unified performance architecture — from schema-first frameworks and entity optimization to AI-assisted content production and voice-search strategy. Recognized for thought leadership in SEO innovation, AI implementation, and structured data excellence, I actively contribute to advancing the dialogue around where organic search, automation, and generative models converge. Core Expertise: SEO & AI-Search (AIO) • Local & GEO Optimization • Structured Data & Schema Architecture • Voice Search & Conversational AI • Content Intelligence Systems • Technical SEO • Data-Driven Strategy & Analytics • AI Implementation & Automation Leadership

Jason Barnard is the world’s leading expert on how brands and individuals are perceived and understood by search engines like Google and AI-powered answer engines such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. His authority is built on three pillars that make his insights uniquely valuable for journalists: - unparalleled experience, - a proven track record of dominating search (and now Ai), - an unmatched dataset of 9.4 Billion brand datapoints collected from Google and AI since 2015. He has been at the forefront of digital marketing since 1998 (the year Google was incorporated). As an entrepreneur, he built an EdTech platform to one billion pageviews in 2007, competing with giants like Disney and the BBC. His analysis today is drawn from a proprietary Kalicube dataset of 9.4 billion data points tracking 70 million brands, with a deep focus on over one million entrepreneurs. This combination of hands-on experience and vast, proprietary data makes him the definitive source for journalists explaining the intersection of branding, search, and AI. ----- Area of Expertise Jason is a leading authority available for comment and expert analysis on: - AI Search and Optimization (Google, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, ChatGPT, Perplexity) - Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) for appearing in AI-generated answers - Answer Engine Optimization (he coined the term in 2018) - AI Assistive Engine Optimization (AIEO) - Online Reputation Management (ORM) in the AI Era ------ Proven Track Record and Media Presence Jason is not a theorist; he is a practitioner who has founded and scaled multiple profitable companies across music, EdTech, and digital marketing. His insights are already trusted by the world's top marketing publications. - Bestselling Author: His book, The Fundamentals of Brand SERPs for Business, is the foundational text in its field. - Academic Contributor: He has co-authored academic articles on the implications of AI in search marketing, published in The Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing. - Trusted Media Source: He provides ongoing contributions and expert insights for major publications, including Rolling Stone, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Sky News, and Search Engine Land.

Fey is an innovative social media professional with over a decade of experience. She's helped build online communities from the ground up for multiple organizations, and she's cultivated social media followings ranging from a few hundred all the way to over 10 million. She has designed memorable brand moments for companies like Best Buy, Geek Squad, and Starkey. She holds multiple degrees from the University of Minnesota. Looking to connect on an article or speaking engagement? Fill out this form: https://forms.gle/AwBqPthkzyHc1vfn6.

I run Elevated Signal. Before that, I spent years building data-intensive products, which is a fancy way of saying I got very used to reading source documents nobody else wanted to read. The firm does competitive intelligence, market research, and customer sentiment work for smaller companies that can't afford the big consulting firms and don't trust the software that promises to replace them. Most research in this industry is recycled. One report quotes another that quotes a survey nobody's read in years. I got tired of that, so we built something that actually reads the source material. SEC filings, patent applications, court records, H-1B data, FDA recall databases, whatever is sitting in a public archive. We also read real customer conversations on public forums, so when a client asks "what do people actually think about this brand," the answer isn't a vibes check or a small survey. It's real sentences from real buyers in their own words. I'm happy to talk about: How competitive intelligence actually works, and why the tools that promise to automate it mostly produce noise. The difference between "primary source" research and the stuff that calls itself primary source. Most of what's labeled that way isn't. AI in research and analysis work. It genuinely helps with pattern extraction across huge piles of text. It flat-out fails at specific facts, novel judgment, and honest citations. Telling the difference matters. What it's like running an intelligence firm on a solo-team budget while the big consultancies charge six figures for work AI can now do in minutes. Customer sentiment, and the gap between what people say in surveys and what they say in public when they think nobody's asking. Quick on deadline, happy to give original quotes or dig into a specific company or industry question.

I’m a digital growth strategist who loves turning data and creativity into measurable business growth. My work focuses on SEO, automation, and content strategy, helping brands improve visibility, streamline workflows, and build trust through authentic online presence. I believe that when data meets creativity, sustainable growth follows.

I help... - Enterprise teams achieve growth at scale through technical SEO across traditional and emerging platforms - Founders launch digital products that thrive across search/social/marketplace platforms

Darren Tarbat is a search strategist with 10+ years of experience helping brands earn visibility in an increasingly AI-driven landscape. He specializes in SEO, answer engine optimization (AEO), and generative engine optimization (GEO) — with a particular focus on how large language models and AI-powered search tools discover, surface, and cite content. As SEO & AEO Director at LYNX SEO, Darren has built search strategies for brands in cannabis, cybersecurity, data infrastructure, and craft brewing — regulated and competitive categories that demand both technical depth and content credibility. His work spans technical audits, schema markup, hub-and-spoke content architecture, and programmatic SEO at scale. Darren is available to comment on topics including SEO strategy, AI search and LLM visibility, content architecture, technical SEO, digital marketing for regulated industries, and the relationship between traditional search and generative AI tools.

Founder of AI Brand Track, an AI-powered platform that helps businesses monitor their brand visibility and competitor rankings. I specialize in brand tracking, SEO, and how AI is changing marketing analytics. I've helped companies understand their online presence and turn data into actionable insights."

Yogesh Chavda is a global marketing executive and founder of Y2S Consulting and Yogi AI, an agentic strategic brand management platform. His 25+ year career includes senior leadership roles across Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, Amway, Spotify, Pinterest, and WS Audiology, where he led transformational brand, insights, and innovation initiatives across six countries. Yogesh spent 16 years at Procter & Gamble, shaping brand-building and consumer understanding across Geneva, Caracas, Jeddah, Istanbul, London, and Cincinnati. He also served as a lecturer at the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business, teaching Strategic Marketing & Planning, Applications of Insights, AI in Marketing, and Consulting Capstone courses for Seniors and MBA students. Through Y2S Consulting, Yogesh partners with a diverse set of corporate organizations to embed AI-driven workflows, redesign insights processes, and help brands adapt to the realities of agentic commerce. He has delivered keynotes, talks and workshops for SME Digital Conference, Naturals Forum in Chicago, TMRE, AMA Houston, and multiple internal corporate summits (Delta Airlines, GSK, Mondelez, Clorox, Coinbase, LinkedIn, Semaine Health), focusing on how AI, agentic workflows, and synthetic data are reshaping digital, marketing and insights. His approach is grounded, practical, and rooted in real operating experience. Yogesh also writes a weekly LinkedIn newsletter, In Search of Normal, covering AI in marketing and the future of brand-building. He hosts The Next Frontier in Insights podcast, featuring conversations with marketing, insights, and AI leaders. His content is available on LinkedIn, Spotify, YouTube and Substack. Yogesh is the recepient of INSIGHT250 award and has been inducted into the Market Research Council in 2026.

Anton is the founder of Semantica AI — an analytics platform for measuring and growing brand visibility in AI-generated responses across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, DeepSeek, and Google AIO. He specializes in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): the discipline of making brands consistently cited by AI assistants rather than just ranked in traditional search. His clients see steady, measurable growth in AI visibility across competitive niches — including documented cases reaching 91% citation rate in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. Anton combines deep technical expertise in LLM behavior with practical GEO strategy, helping businesses navigate the shift from keyword rankings to AI-driven brand presence.

Digital Solutions & E-commerce Expertise (20+ years) in Omnichannel Marketing & CX | Customer Insights & Market Intelligence. PhD candidate in Human-Computer Interaction. Independent consultant with 8+ years coaching micro, small and medium enterprises in digital transformation and online business development. Proven track record supporting 3.000+ SMEs across Latin America, Central Asia, and Africa through international development programs (UN-ITC), and national business accelerators. Expert in e-commerce platforms, digital marketing, SEO, and online business strategy with extensive workshop facilitation and mentoring experience.

Jussi Viljanen is a senior-level SEO consultant and the founder of Gainline Ltd, with 10+ years of experience helping businesses grow through search. He works hands-on with a deliberately limited number of clients at a time - no middlemen, no juniors - so each one gets a senior practitioner from strategy through execution. His focus is Ecommerce SEO & B2B search engine optimization: getting companies found at the moment a buyer is actively looking for a solution, and measuring success by lead quality and revenue rather than vanity traffic metrics. He pairs data-driven, semantically structured SEO with visibility in AI-powered search as well. Jussi has delivered results across a range of B2B sectors, from 3D modeling and insurance brokerage to SaaS and professional services, where even modest gains in organic visibility have led to high-value new client relationships. He also specializes in international SEO, helping global companies enter the Finnish market and Finnish businesses expand abroad. He's available to comment on: technical and B2B SEO, lead-focused search strategy, how AI and generative search are reshaping organic visibility, international and local SEO, and the realities of running an independent, premium consulting practice. More at https://jussiviljanen.com/en/.

I'm Sonia Urquilla, founder of SEO BY SONIA. I help coaches, consultants, and service-based businesses become easier to find on Google, ChatGPT, and other AI search tools through SEO, Local SEO, and Brand Optimization. I specialize in how search is changing, from AI search and Google Maps AI to digital PR, online authority, and customer-first content. My clients have generated millions of organic impressions, earned leads through Google and ChatGPT, and built long-term visibility by becoming the trusted answer instead of just another search result

I am the founder and CEO of LLM Authority Index and CiteWorks Studios, where I study how brands, experts, and companies are surfaced, cited, compared, recommended, or overlooked across AI systems, search engines, social platforms, and digital media. My current work focuses on AI search visibility, LLM-driven buyer behavior, digital authority, brand attribution, online reputation, consumer trust, and the sources that influence answers generated by platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews. I develop research frameworks and datasets that examine AI recommendations, citation patterns, competitor inclusion, sentiment, source quality, prompt behavior, and the relationship between online evidence and buyer choice. For journalist requests, I can provide concise commentary, original data, cross-platform comparisons, trend analysis, and evidence-backed insights. Where useful, I compare responses across multiple AI systems and public datasets to identify areas of consensus, disagreement, bias, or emerging change. Before entering AI search and LLM visibility, I spent more than a decade building and leading digital marketing, publishing, affiliate, and content operations. I have managed strategy for more than 250 content creators across 30 geographic markets, overseen networks producing more than 2,000 articles per month, and helped scale affiliate and content businesses generating eight figures in commissions and more than $100 million in client-side revenue. I have also built and exited an affiliate business, developed seven-figure recurring revenue programs, and led growth initiatives across financial services, consumer products, online media, local services, and direct-response marketing. Earlier in my career, I practiced law and served as managing partner of a law firm focused on consumer protection and real estate litigation. My legal background continues to shape how I approach research: I evaluate competing claims, assess source quality, identify gaps in the evidence, and translate complex findings into clear, defensible commentary. I am especially useful for stories involving artificial intelligence, AI search, digital marketing, online reputation, consumer trust, search behavior, content strategy, affiliate marketing, online reviews, social proof, brand visibility, and the changing ways consumers discover and evaluate companies.

I studied criminology before moving into marketing, so I’ve always been more interested in what people actually do online than what they say they do. Over the years I’ve worked across search, growth and audience strategy with brands like monday.com, Riverside.fm, HubSpot, Zapier and LeoVegas. Most of my time now is spent exploring how AI is changing marketing, creators and online business. I write about AI, internet culture, audience growth.

ORM Agency is a leading Online Reputation Management (ORM) company dedicated to helping individuals, professionals, executives, entrepreneurs, and businesses protect, restore, and strengthen their online reputation. In today's digital world, a single negative article, review, forum discussion, or misleading search result can significantly impact personal credibility and business growth. Our mission is to ensure that your online presence accurately reflects your achievements, values, and professional identity. With years of expertise in reputation management, search engine optimization (SEO), content removal, and digital brand protection, our team develops customized strategies designed to solve even the most challenging online reputation issues. Every client receives a personalized approach because no two reputation challenges are the same. Our services include negative content removal, search result suppression, review management, reputation monitoring, privacy protection, personal branding, executive reputation management, business reputation management, crisis response, and SEO-driven content promotion. Whether the objective is removing harmful content, improving Google search results, or building a stronger digital footprint, we focus on ethical, transparent, and long-term solutions. At ORM Agency, we combine advanced SEO techniques, legal content removal procedures where applicable, authoritative content publishing, digital PR, and continuous reputation monitoring to help clients regain control of their online image. Our strategies are designed to improve search visibility while reducing the impact of outdated, misleading, or damaging content.

Founder & CEO of www.localseoguide.com a leading search consultancy with a specialty in SEO for multi-location businesses, enterprise-level search marketing, and corporate training. He is a regular contributor to SearchEngineLand.com, author of the definitive Google News Ranking Factors survey and AppleMapsMarketing.com, a blog focused on helping businesses navigate Apple Maps and SIRI. Andrew has decades of Internet experience. He was a founding member of NBC’s Internet group and a former GM of NBC.com. He helped start Insider Pages, a pioneering local-social search engine, which was acquired by CitySearch in 2006.

Monica is the Founder and CEO of Monic AI Systems, where she helps small and mid-sized businesses become visible inside AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI. With over 20 years of experience across companies including BP, ExxonMobil, and NTT Data, she has led large-scale digital transformation and data initiatives that have driven more than $300M in measurable business impact. Today, she focuses on what she calls “AI Visibility” — helping businesses get recommended by AI instead of lost in traditional search results. Her work combines content strategy, entity positioning, and AI-driven marketing systems to help companies attract customers in a world where “AI does not rank, it selects.” She is frequently sought after for commentary on how AI is changing marketing, search behavior, and customer acquisition.