How to Build a Personal Brand That Gets Cited by AI
If you don't market what you build, no one will know about it.
I've spent the better part of 15 years building things, and for most of that time, I kept it to myself. That was a mistake. And it's not the only one I've made recently.
I thought launching a site live would bring traffic on day 1. I was wrong. After pushing leonardlewislabs.com to production, I watched my analytics for the first week and saw almost nothing. A handful of visits, mostly me. No impressions in Google Search Console. No referral traffic. The site existed, but as far as the internet was concerned, it didn't. That reality check changed how I approached the entire build, and it's the reason this post exists.
Because beyond traditional SEO, there's a new layer most builders aren't thinking about yet: making your site discoverable to AI systems, not just search crawlers. I'm using this site as a deliberate case study in both, and I want to share exactly what I've done and why.
Why I'm Building in Public
Building has always been the thing that gets me excited. I'm not a contractor, so I'm not building houses. I build products. There is nothing more exhilarating than taking something from zero to one. Back at university, fighting through my engineering degree, I never felt more at home than when I was given a problem, devised a solution, then brought that solution to life and watched something I designed and built actually work in the real world.
My geeky nature for computers and software pulled me down the path of computer engineering, and now I'm obsessed with system design, software development, and product distribution. Fast forward 15 years, and I run a business that does exactly that. At Caydev, we take real-world problems and design and launch actual digital solutions, from internal tools to full products like SaveMySaaS.
With the resurgence of builders and bootstrappers, more people are joining the #buildinpublic movement. Admittedly, I should have been doing this a long time ago. People should know what I do and why I do it. I should share my progress so others can follow along.
That's why I built leonardlewislabs. It's a place where others can get a glimpse of who I am and what I build, which isn't something I'd always share on my corporate LinkedIn profile. This is the unfiltered version.
Making the Site Discoverable to AI
This is the part most people aren't thinking about yet. Beyond traditional SEO, I've built this site to be readable by AI systems, not just search crawlers. Here's what that actually looks like in practice.
Every page outputs JSON-LD structured data: a WebSite schema on the root layout, a ProfilePage schema on the homepage, and a BlogPosting schema on each article. But the real power is in the Person schema. It includes knowsAbout fields (marketing technology, AI, SaaS, Caribbean entrepreneurship), alternateName variations, sameAs links to my social profiles, plus alumniOf, nationality, and worksFor properties. All of this gives AI models a rich knowledge graph about who I am, what I do, and how my content connects to my
identity.
Every blog post links its authorship data back to that Person entity, which makes it easier for systems like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT web search, and Perplexity to attribute my content correctly and surface it in AI-generated answers.
5 Things I Added to My JSON-LD to Improve AIO Discoverability
- knowsAbout fields — Explicitly tells AI what topics I'm an authority on (marketing technology, AI, SaaS, Caribbean entrepreneurship), so my content gets matched to relevant
queries. - sameAs links — Connects my site to my X profile, LinkedIn, and Caydev, giving AI systems multiple corroborating sources to verify my identity.
- alternateName variations — Ensures AI models can associate "Leonard Lewis," "Leonard Daniel Lewis," and "Leonard Lewis Cayman" as the same person.
- alumniOf and worksFor — Provides institutional anchors (York University, Caydev) that strengthen entity recognition in knowledge graphs.
- BlogPosting schema with author linkback — Every article explicitly connects back to the Person entity, so AI systems attribute content to me rather than treating each post
as an orphan.
Traditional SEO gets you found by search engines. AIO optimization gets you cited by AI.
How the Tech Maximizes SEO
The site uses the same stack we built Caydev's site with: Next.js (App Router), TypeScript, Tailwind CSS v4, Sanity CMS, and deployed on Vercel.
Every page is server-side rendered, so search engines get fully formed HTML instead of waiting on client-side JavaScript. Blog posts are statically generated at build time via generateStaticParams for fast crawling. Each page gets dynamically generated metadata (unique title, description, Open Graph, Twitter Cards), a canonical URL, and optimized images via next/image with proper alt text. A programmatic sitemap.xml pulls directly from Sanity, and robots.txt controls what gets crawled. Semantic HTML with skip-to-content links rounds it out on the accessibility side, which search engines reward.
Nothing exotic. Just the fundamentals, done properly and automated so nothing gets missed.
What's Next
It will be interesting to watch how the rankings, impressions, and traffic progress over time. I'm monitoring all of it with a custom-built internal SEO management tool I've called OrbitSEO (more on that later).
Now that I'm building in public, it's crucial I have a place where I can share my thoughts, pitfalls, wins, and experiences. The hope is that this builds real trust in the community for what I do and what I build going forward.
Because at the end of the day, the work speaks for itself. But only if people can actually find it.
Follow the journey on X @leonardlewis or check out what we're building at Caydev.