Piers Butler

Piers Butler is a London-based digital marketing consultant specialising in answer engine optimisation (AEO): making brands and the people behind them the trusted, retrievable answer across Google and AI search. He has worked in search since 2010, sixteen years across iProspect, Croud, Brainlabs, Big Group and Skittle, running SEO, paid search and data teams for enterprise and considered-purchase brands. Since May 2025 he has built Laurelin Labs, the Telperion Insights platform and Newsroom Studio, and the free tools and 330-check audit on this site. His identity is verifiable on Wikidata, ORCID, LinkedIn and Companies House, which is the same test he applies to every client.

His grounding is integrated performance: combined paid search and SEO at Croud and Brainlabs, search and data at Big Group, performance marketing at Skittle, and owned media strategy at iProspect. He thinks in terms of the whole funnel, not channels in silos.

Today he builds at the AEO frontier: entity-authority and schema tooling that optimises people and brands as entities for AI retrieval. It is live work, not theory. The methodologies on this site run in client engagements and in the tools he builds through Telperion Insights.

He founded Laurelin Labs Limited (Company No. 16724815) as the consultancy and content engine behind that work. The name draws from the Two Trees of Valinor, a symbol of light, growth and enduring craft.

What is his point of view on AI search?

SEO competes on keywords; AEO competes on entities. For most organisations the most important entities are the company and its leadership team, and almost all of them are currently invisible or ambiguous to the models. Making genuine, earned authority legible to the machine is the highest-leverage marketing move available right now, and the window is open but closing.

Where has he worked?

What has he built?

Laurelin Labs, the consultancy and content engine. Telperion Insights, the SaaS platform where the tooling lives. Newsroom Studio, the content production platform. Explore the frameworks behind the work or the lab where new ideas are tested in public.