About
The short version: I've been ranking websites since before most SEO consultants were born. The longer version is below.
I'm Annette Thompson.
In 1995 I founded adoption.com. The web was barely commercial. AltaVista was new. The phrase "search engine optimization" didn't exist yet. I figured out what made pages rank by reading server logs and watching traffic patterns. By the time people were calling it SEO, I'd been doing the work for years.
My academic background is medical technology and biochemistry, with a BS from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. That training made me think like a scientist: form a hypothesis, test it, measure the result, throw out what doesn't work. It's exactly the right mindset for SEO, where the incentives push toward confident-sounding guesses and the market rewards people who actually measure things.
I've operated digital businesses across multiple verticals since the 1990s, including an international ESL teacher certification and recruiting platform, five years at Bone Voyage Dog Rescue (where I led SEO and operations), and the relocation content platform AjijicRelocationGuide, which I still own and run. Every case study on this site is something I built and ranked myself.
Why "Believer"?
When AI search tools started getting good, a large portion of the SEO industry decided the game was over. I watched the takes multiply. "SEO is dead." "Google is finished." "Just do LLM optimization now." Most of the people saying this had been doing SEO for 5-7 years.
I've watched the game change three times now. Every time, the people doing the actual foundational work kept winning, and the people chasing the new shiny thing churned. AI changed the execution. It didn't change the fundamentals.
The "Believer" part isn't faith. It's evidence. My properties kept ranking through every update. The approach that built Bone Voyage from DR 0.8 to DR 62 still works. I named the consultancy after the thing I'd tested and confirmed, not the thing I wished were true.
What actually changed with AI search
What didn't change
- Having real expertise in what you write about
- Technical fundamentals (crawlability, speed, structured data)
- Authority signals (backlinks, citations, verified business info)
- Freshness and specificity
- Consistent NAP data across the web
- Content that actually answers the question
What you need to add now
- Schema markup that AI crawlers can parse
- An llms.txt file that tells AI systems what's useful on your site
- Authoritative bylines and visible expertise signals
- Content structured for retrieval, not just reading
- Citations in the places AI training data comes from
- Weekly tracking of AI search visibility, not just Google rankings
I run weekly AI citation audits on my own properties. I track how often ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity cite my sites when asked relevant questions. I do the same for clients. It's new data that most SEO consultants aren't collecting yet, and it matters more every quarter.
The timeline
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Cytogenetics is the study of chromosome structure and function. Three years of biochemistry coursework at Texas A&M first. The scientific rigor has been more useful in SEO than I expected.
Built on ColdFusion, before anyone called it SEO. Figured out organic search the slow way: reading server logs, watching what ranked, testing what didn't. The site sold years later. The pattern recognition stayed.
International ESL teacher certification and recruiting, built and operated through the web's second wave. Multiple domains, programmatic content at scale before anyone called it that.
Led SEO and digital operations at a Mexico-to-US dog rescue. Grew domain rating from 0.8 to 62 with zero paid advertising. Placed 4,000+ dogs into US homes through organic traffic. Rescue operations wound down in 2024. The site still runs as a publisher asset.
Built and operate a niche authority site for the Mexico expat relocation market. Multi-domain play across ajijic.org and ajijic.net. Growing AI search citations as the platform develops.
Opened the consultancy in November 2026. First client: Rebuilding Seminars. The model is simple: I rank what I own, I measure what I claim, and I do the same work for clients.
Want to see if we're a fit?
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