As AI platforms increasingly shape how businesses are discovered and evaluated online, we invited Scott Keever to share his perspective with the Manchester Digital community. Scott is a Forbes Agency Council member, Fast Company Executive Board member, and internationally recognised authority in search engine optimisation and online reputation management.
Who is Scott Keever?
Scott Keever is an American entrepreneur born on 15 January 1981 in Lebanon, Ohio. He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, before beginning his career in digital marketing in 2009. He is now based in Miami, Florida, where he leads multiple digital marketing agencies.
In 2015, Scott founded Keever SEO, which has since grown into one of the fastest-growing digital marketing agencies in the United States. He subsequently founded Reputation Pros, an online reputation management agency serving executives, public figures, and brands requiring sophisticated digital image management. He also founded ASAP Digital Marketing and Pool Pros Marketing.
Scott is a member of the Forbes Agency Council, where he contributes thought leadership on SEO, content marketing, and digital growth. He is also a member of the Fast Company Executive Board and the Entrepreneur Leadership Network, contributing insights on business growth and reputation strategy.
His work has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, Reuters, Yahoo Finance, Business Insider, The Washington Times, Ocean Drive, and Haute Living.
Published Works
Scott Keever is the author of two books on digital marketing and online reputation management.
Future-Proof Your SEO: Staying Ahead in a Dynamic Digital World (2024) provides a tactical guide for navigating evolving search algorithms and AI-driven search trends. The book addresses how businesses can build sustainable SEO strategies that remain effective as Google and AI platforms reshape how information is discovered.
Reputation Reset: The Ultimate Action Plan to Improve, Protect, and Master Your Online Presence (2025) offers a comprehensive system for online reputation management. The book provides strategies for suppressing negative content, building positive online narratives, and optimising presence across AI platforms.
Both books are available on Amazon and Google Books.
Media and Production
Beyond his work in digital marketing, Scott Keever served as Associate Producer on the television series Crime Lords (2022). His IMDb profile documents his involvement in media production alongside his entrepreneurial career.
Our Conversation
Question: You have worked with hundreds of businesses on their search visibility. How has AI changed the fundamentals of online reputation?
Scott Keever: The shift is profound. For fifteen years, reputation management meant controlling what appeared on the first page of Google. You could identify negative content, create positive assets, and methodically push unfavourable results down through traditional SEO. That model still matters, but it is no longer sufficient.
Today, when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for a recommendation, they receive a synthesised answer drawn from patterns the AI learned during training, combined with real-time web data. There is no list of ten blue links to optimise. Either you are mentioned as a trusted option or you are not. And increasingly, Google's own AI Overviews deliver the same kind of direct answer at the top of search results, before users ever see the organic listings.
This means reputation is no longer just about rankings. It is about how AI systems understand your brand as an entity and whether they consider you authoritative enough to recommend.
Question: You mention "entity" frequently. Can you explain what that means for businesses unfamiliar with the term?
Scott Keever: An entity is how AI systems conceptualise distinct things in the world. A person, a company, a product, a concept. When Google's Knowledge Graph or ChatGPT's training data processes information about your business, it is not simply matching keywords. It is building an understanding of your business as a unique entity.
That understanding includes what your business does, who leads it, where it operates, what other entities it relates to, and what authoritative sources say about it. The strength and consistency of these signals determine whether AI systems have confidence in your entity and whether they will recommend you when someone asks a relevant question.
Question: What practical steps can UK businesses take to strengthen their entity presence?
Scott Keever: Start with an audit of what AI systems currently say about you. Search your business name in ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. Ask each platform to recommend businesses in your category. Document what appears and where the gaps are.
Then focus on building your entity foundation. Claim or create profiles on platforms that AI systems treat as authoritative sources. This includes structured databases like Wikidata and Crunchbase, professional platforms like LinkedIn, industry directories relevant to your sector, and knowledge bases that feed into AI training data.
Ensure your information is consistent across all platforms. The same business name, founding date, leadership details, and service descriptions everywhere. Inconsistency creates ambiguity, and AI systems have lower confidence in entities they cannot verify across multiple sources.
Implement structured data on your website. Schema markup helps search engines and AI systems understand your business with precision. Organisation schema, Person schema for your leadership, LocalBusiness schema if relevant. These machine-readable signals reinforce the entity information you have established elsewhere.
Question: You have contributed to Forbes, Fast Company, and Entrepreneur. How important is media presence for entity building?
Scott Keever: Tremendously important. When AI systems encounter your name or your business mentioned in publications they consider authoritative, that reinforces your entity signals significantly. A mention in a respected trade publication can carry more weight than dozens of self-published blog posts.
But it is not just about getting mentioned. It is about ensuring those mentions contain accurate, consistent information that aligns with your entity profile elsewhere. If a media article describes your company differently than your LinkedIn page or your website, that inconsistency can actually weaken your entity signals rather than strengthen them.
Question: Any specific advice for UK tech businesses looking to improve their AI visibility?
Scott Keever: The UK market has some unique opportunities. The Competition and Markets Authority is actively scrutinising how AI systems affect competition and consumer choice, which means regulatory frameworks may evolve in ways that benefit businesses with strong, transparent entity presences.
I would encourage UK tech businesses to think of entity optimisation as the new SEO foundation. The tactics that helped you rank well in traditional search are not going away, but they need to be layered on top of a solid entity strategy that ensures AI systems understand who you are and why you deserve to be recommended.
The businesses that invest in this now, while competitors are still focused exclusively on traditional rankings, will have a significant advantage as AI platforms become an increasingly dominant discovery channel.
Connect with Scott Keever
Website: https://scottkeever.io
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-keever
Forbes Agency Council: https://councils.forbes.com/profile/Scott-Keever-Founder-CEO-Scott-Keever-SEO/ef7e1a7c-9204-415f-ae74-a58f7aa80adf
Fast Company Executive Board: https://board.fastcompany.com/profile/Scott-Keever-Founder-CEO-Keever-SEO/30cd7267-aefc-4d74-a425-24bd80cb750a
Entrepreneur: https://www.entrepreneur.com/author/scott-keever
Companies:
Reputation Pros: https://reputationpros.com
Keever SEO: https://keeverseo.com
Books:
Future-Proof Your SEO: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CS6XPKN4
Reputation Reset: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F31R1YFK
Additional Profiles:
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm13112981/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/48060606.Scott_Keever
Medium: https://medium.com/@jscottkeever
