Hi, I’m Cy De la Vega

I’ve spent my career helping organizations become easier to find and understand through search. Today that work spans traditional SEO, Answer Engine Optimization, and the AI-powered experiences changing how people discover information.

Search has changed a lot over that time. The fundamentals haven’t. Strong visibility still starts with technically accessible websites, useful content, clear information architecture, and a real understanding of what people are trying to find.

How I got into search

I started working in search before AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, or Answer Engine Optimization were part of the vocabulary. The work began with the fundamentals of organic search and expanded as the search ecosystem became more complex.

Early on, that meant the core disciplines of organic search: the technical foundation, the content, and the architecture that make a site legible to a search engine. As sites and search got more demanding, so did the work: larger properties, harder technical requirements, and strategy that had to hold up across thousands of pages rather than a handful.

Over time that has meant working across technical SEO, content strategy, large-scale site architecture, and structured data, and, increasingly, the systems that decide how AI platforms retrieve, cite, and interact with website content. Through all of it I’ve stayed hands-on: close to the implementation, the testing, and the analysis rather than stepping away from the actual work. Experience compounds. The earlier fundamentals didn’t get replaced, they became the base everything else builds on.

How I think about SEO and AI search

I don’t see AEO as a replacement for SEO. I see it as the next layer of the same problem: making useful information discoverable, understandable, and worth surfacing. AI answers still rest on the fundamentals: crawlability, indexation, technical quality, search intent, authority, internal linking, and sound information architecture.

I’m also skeptical of optimization advice built around whatever AI tactic is getting attention that week. The work I trust comes from testing how systems actually behave, measuring the result, and keeping the parts that hold up. It also means thinking about search more broadly than rankings, including citations, answer visibility, zero-click results, AI referrals, and how answer engines and agents retrieve and act on what’s published.

A lot of that comes down to measurement. It’s easy to claim an AI platform “prefers” one thing or another. It’s harder, and more useful, to check whether a change actually moved citations, answers, or referrals, and to be honest when it didn’t.

The experience behind the perspective

My work has ranged from local and regional businesses to large national and global organizations, across competitive categories and complex, content-heavy websites, in areas like automotive, healthcare, ecommerce, service businesses, government, and B2B.

Some of it has been deeply technical, like crawl budget, rendering, structured data, and site migrations. Some of it has been editorial and strategic, like building content systems that stay useful at scale. Most of the interesting problems live where those two meet.

That breadth made one thing clear: there’s no universal SEO or AEO playbook. The useful work starts with identifying the actual search problem, understanding the system around it, and prioritizing the changes most likely to matter.

What I work on today

These days my work sits across technical SEO and organic search strategy, Answer Engine Optimization and AI search, content systems, and search measurement, plus the growing question of how AI agents read and interact with websites.

Most engagements come down to the same thing: making a site technically sound, genuinely useful, and clear enough that both people and machines can find, understand, and trust it.

Outside of search

When I’m not working I’m usually experimenting, building small tools, testing how new AI and search behavior actually works, and figuring out where the hype ends and the useful part begins. I’m based in Austin, Texas, and work with organizations across markets.

I’m also bilingual in English and Spanish, which has shaped how I think about language, intent, and the difference between translating information and actually communicating it well.

Want to talk search?

If you’re working through an SEO, AEO, or AI search problem and think my experience could help, feel free to get in touch.

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