Hi, I’m Cy De la Vega
SEO and AI Search Director
I lead SEO and AI search programs from Austin, Texas. SEO is search engine optimization, the work of getting a site found in search, and I’ve spent more than 15 years doing it for organizations that needed to be easier to find and understand. Today I also do Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), which gets content cited by the AI platforms that now answer questions directly.
Visibility starts with a site that crawlers can read, content that answers what people are looking for, and an architecture that keeps the useful pages easy to reach.
From the blog
Background
How I got into search
I started in El Paso as an independent consultant for small businesses, setting up Google Business profiles and fixing the on-page basics for fire protection companies and home services firms. Those owners judged the work by whether the phone rang.
From there I joined Geek Powered Studios, a startup agency in Austin, where I handled organic search for more than 60 clients, managed a team of five writers, produced content in English and Spanish, and built the site audit process the whole department used.
In 2018 I moved to Wunderman Thompson, which became part of VML in 2024, and started working on larger sites. I went from SEO specialist to senior specialist to manager, running enterprise programs in healthcare, financial technology, outdoor recreation, education, consumer goods, and government. The largest was a 21-month hospital program across 13 service lines and 443 content briefs. Every brief cleared clinical and compliance review.
Today I’m an Associate Discoverability Director at VML, a WPP agency. I lead a team of four to six senior SEO managers across 8+ enterprise accounts, including properties with 50,000+ URLs, sites spread across several subdomains, and Spanish-language experiences. I also built the department’s AI search practice, which I started at the end of 2022 when ChatGPT launched. It includes the measurement framework, the audit method, the tooling, and a training program 30+ people have completed. The automotive inventory program shows that method on one account. I do implementation, testing, and analysis myself as well.
Approach
How I think about SEO and AI search
AEO builds on SEO. AI answers rest on crawlability, indexation, search intent, authority, and internal linking, and AEO adds the work of making a page easy for an AI system to retrieve and cite.
My recommendations come from testing how search and AI systems behave, measuring the result, and keeping what holds up. Alongside rankings I track citations, answer visibility, zero-click results, AI referrals, and how answer engines and agents retrieve and act on what’s published.
Most of that is measurement. After a change I check whether citations, AI answers, or referrals moved, and I report it when they didn’t.
Industries and types of work
I’ve worked for local and regional businesses and for national and global organizations, in automotive, healthcare, ecommerce, service businesses, government, and B2B. The work has covered technical problems such as crawl budget, JavaScript rendering, structured data, and site migrations, and editorial ones such as content systems that run across hundreds of pages.
On a new site I start by finding the search problem and the systems around it, then pick the few changes most likely to matter.
Experience
Client names stay off this site because most of this work is under agency confidentiality.
- Associate Discoverability Director, VML (WPP) to present
- I lead a team of four to six senior SEO managers across technical SEO and AI search for 8+ enterprise accounts, and I built the department’s AI search practice, measurement framework, and training program.
- Discoverability Supervisor and SEO Manager, VML to
- I set the standards for the department’s AI search practice, and I managed and mentored senior SEO managers while running enterprise programs myself.
- SEO Specialist, then Senior SEO Specialist, then SEO Manager, Wunderman Thompson to
- I ran enterprise SEO across healthcare, financial technology, consumer goods, and government, including the 21-month hospital program. In late 2022 I started the group that became the department’s AI search practice.
- Senior SEO Specialist, Geek Powered Studios, Austin to
- I handled organic search for more than 60 clients in English and Spanish and managed a team of five writers.
- Independent SEO consultant, El Paso to
- I did technical SEO, content, and local search for small businesses.
I hold a Bachelor of Business Administration in Marketing and International Business from the University of Texas at El Paso. In 2026 I completed four Anthropic courses (Introduction to Model Context Protocol, Introduction to Agent Skills, Claude Code in Action, and Building with the Claude API) and three OpenAI courses (AI Foundations, Applied AI Foundations, and Agents and Workflows). The tools I work in most are Ahrefs and Brand Radar, Profound, Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, GA4, Adobe Analytics, Looker Studio, Semrush, n8n, Vercel, GitHub, Claude Code, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the standard that lets an AI model call outside tools and data. My full history is on LinkedIn.
Day to day
What I do as an SEO and AI search director
Day to day I work across technical SEO, organic search strategy, AEO, content systems, and AI search measurement, which covers citation share, AI share of voice, referral traffic from AI platforms, and what those visitors do next. I also build the internal tooling for that work, including orchestrator and sub-agent workflows and an MCP-driven visibility tool, and spend a growing share of my time on how AI agents read and act on websites.
Outside of search
When I’m not working I’m usually building small tools and testing how new AI and search features behave.
I’m bilingual in English and Spanish, and I’ve produced search content in both.
Want to talk search?
If something here is close to what you’re working on, or you’d like to talk about search or a role, I’m glad to hear from you.