About Iida Lehtonen
I help organizations get found, and turn that visibility into growth that shows up in the numbers.
I am responsible for SEO and generative engine optimization (GEO) in-house in Finnish telecommunications, on a site running to tens of thousands of pages.
When search visibility is built properly, the effect on the business can be much larger than people expect. In one established consumer product area, rebuilding the entire content and search setup drove an 800% increase in organic traffic over three months. Organic conversions were 40% higher than in the preceding three-month period.
What I do
I find the organic growth a business is missing, and build the strategy and content that captures it.
Technical SEO, content SEO and information architecture, plus the standards that keep a large site working when nobody can review it page by page. I work with the business managers who own those areas on what gets built and what gets retired, and I report on what the work produced.
How generative engines retrieve, synthesise and cite sources, and what that means for a brand. GEO is a young field in which commercial certainty often runs ahead of the evidence, so I run my own weekly measurement across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Claude and publish what the data supports, including when it undercuts a conclusion I would prefer.
Content is where most customers form their first impression of a company, and one of the most direct levers on growth there is. I plan it around what the customer is actually trying to do, and keep it working from launch through its whole lifecycle.
Measuring whether the work produced anything, and building the tools that make that practical. A Search Console change detector that turns a day of spreadsheet work into a fifteen URL shortlist, an FAQ generator, this website. I am not a developer, but I build when building is the fastest way to test an idea.
Search is no longer confined to a results page. Organizations still need the foundations of good SEO, while also learning how their brands, content and third-party presence are interpreted and cited in AI-generated answers. The evidence is still developing, which is why I measure before I recommend.
How I think about this field
Search marketing has a chronic credibility problem. Every eighteen months a new acronym arrives, usually invented by someone who sells software for it, and the claims run several years ahead of the evidence.
I try to work the other way round. When I make a claim, I want to be able to point at either a controlled study, a dataset, or something I broke myself. When the evidence is thin, I say so — including when it is thin in favour of a conclusion I like.
Frequently asked
I'm a digital strategist based in Finland, working on SEO, AI search (GEO), content strategy and AI-assisted workflows. I lead organic search and generative engine optimisation in-house for a large Finnish consumer-facing organisation, where my work connects search visibility directly to business results. I've worked in digital marketing for over nine years, and I write about search and AI here at iidalehtonen.com. Several people in Finland share this name — this site belongs to me, the Iida Lehtonen who works in SEO and AI search.
I work full-time on SEO and GEO in Finland, in-house rather than agency-side, on a website in the tens of thousands of URLs. Everything I publish about generative engine optimisation, AI search citation behaviour, technical SEO and AI-assisted marketing workflows is based on my own testing at scale — not on vendor claims. My focus is on what actually moves numbers: traffic that converts, visibility that supports business goals, and strategies that hold up as AI reshapes how brands are discovered.
I write about SEO, AEO and GEO and how they differ; whether FAQ content matters for AI search; how website rendering affects what AI systems can read; monitoring search performance at scale; and building websites and tools with AI as a non-developer. Increasingly, I also write about where discoverability is heading as AI becomes the first touchpoint between brands and customers — and what marketing teams should do about it now.
Browse all writing →Yes — I give talks, trainings and workshops on GEO, AI search visibility and AI-assisted marketing workflows for marketing teams and leadership. If you'd like to discuss a talk, a workshop or a collaboration, get in touch: iida.e.lehtonen@gmail.com or LinkedIn.
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