01 / INDEPENDENT PRODUCT EVALUATION — AI SEARCH & VISIBILITY
I pressure-test AI Search and Visibility products through hands-on use, real customer workflows, and competitive analysis.
You'll learn what works, where the product falls short, and which improvements deserve your team's engineering time.
Feeling stuck?
20-minute introductory call
02 / THE COST OF PRODUCT DECISIONS
Your backlog keeps growing. Customer requests, competitor releases, and internal ideas compete for development time. Which ones actually deserve investment?
Customers sign up, but some struggle to get useful results or understand what to do next. The team needs to know where the experience is falling short.
Larger customers ask harder questions about evidence, accuracy, workflows, and value. Product shortcomings can put important sales opportunities at risk.
AI can reduce the cost of code and content. It cannot make an unused three-month build a good investment.
03 / PRODUCT EXPERIENCE
CITEDBY / THRIVESTACK
8 recommendations implemented during the evaluation.
Tested the product across two real client environments, compared it with a competing platform, and worked directly with the product team to identify and address issues during the evaluation.
WORDLIFT / RAPTIVE
Worked directly with WordLift while implementing and refining their technology at Raptive, including knowledge-graph applications, API integrations, publishing workflows, and production troubleshooting.
04 / THE PRODUCT PRESSURE TEST
I evaluate your product from the perspective of an experienced search and growth operator, with an understanding of the customers you're trying to win and what your team intends to deliver.
The review examines four areas.
Is your product designed for an SEO practitioner, an agency, or an enterprise team? Each has different expectations for data, analysis, reporting, and implementation.
I examine whether the product's capabilities and complexity match the work your intended customers need to do, and whether you're adding features to meet customer needs or simply to keep pace with competitors.
AI Visibility measurement is becoming more common. The value increasingly depends on what customers can learn from that measurement.
I test prompt relevance, citation evidence, competitive comparisons, and the product's ability to explain changes. I also examine whether advanced capabilities provide enough additional value to justify the work required to use them.
Identifying a visibility problem and knowing how to address it are different tasks.
I examine whether the evidence supports the recommended actions, whether the recommendations make sense for the customer's business, and whether the product provides enough information to make a decision.
I compare your product with relevant alternatives, evaluate the experience across real customer workflows, and identify which capabilities deserve further investment.
The findings distinguish between improvements that support your intended customers, features that have become common across the category, and complexity that adds little value.
05 / WHAT YOU GET
You know your product better than anyone. You know why each feature exists, how it's supposed to work, and what your team intends to build next.
I approach it with a different perspective: years of experience doing the work your customers are trying to do, without the familiarity that comes from building the software.
From onboarding through advanced workflows, I examine where the product meets user expectations, where it creates unnecessary work, and whether its claims hold up under actual use.
You'll see where an experienced user hesitates, gets confused, questions a result, or needs additional work to complete a task. Each finding explains what the user was trying to accomplish, what they expected, and what got in the way.
You'll receive specific recommendations supported by examples and an explanation of the underlying user problem. Your team can understand why a change matters and decide how best to address it, rather than simply working through a list of requested fixes.
I'll identify where the product asks customers to learn too much, interpret too much information, or make too many decisions before reaching a useful result. I'll also identify where advanced capabilities justify the additional effort they require.
You'll know which parts of the product are working well, which need attention, and which changes are most likely to improve the experience for your intended customers. That includes where I'd invest engineering time, what I'd leave alone, and what I'd stop building.
If your product makes a claim, I'll pressure-test where it holds up and where it doesn't.
AI Search and Visibility products make claims about measurement, accuracy, competitive performance, and recommended actions. I'll examine the evidence behind those claims and whether an experienced practitioner could trust the conclusions enough to act on them.
I'll share findings as I work through the product, giving your team the opportunity to ask questions, investigate issues, and test changes during the evaluation.
You'll receive an independent written assessment documenting the workflows tested, supporting evidence, user expectations, recommended changes, and product priorities. We'll review the findings together with your team.
The objective is a product that better serves the customers you're building it for, with fewer unnecessary steps and stronger reasons for users to trust what it tells them.
06 / WHY HANK
I've spent more than 20 years working in search, audience growth, analytics, and digital publishing, including senior leadership roles at Raptive and Refinery29.
I've been responsible for choosing technology, implementing it across large publishing operations, and making decisions about where to invest time, people, and money. I've also worked directly with software companies like WordLift and citedby to help improve the products themselves.
That experience has shaped two things I bring to every evaluation.
Knowing what matters and what deserves investment.
I've managed large-scale search and growth programs where product decisions have real operational and financial consequences. I know how to weigh evidence, question assumptions, and distinguish a useful capability from one that simply adds more work.
Knowing what good software should feel like to use.
Years of evaluating, buying, and implementing search technology have given me strong opinions about how software should work. I recognize when a product makes a difficult job easier, when its design creates unnecessary work, and when the experience falls short of what an experienced user expects.
I still work directly with AI Search, technical SEO, analytics, and growth systems. My standards come from using this technology every day, with real clients and real business problems.
07 / INDEPENDENT PRODUCT EVALUATION
20-minute introductory call · Limited slots available each month.