Piers Butler
Founder, Laurelin Labs
Piers Butler is the founder of Laurelin Labs, the digital marketing studio behind Newsroom. He works on how content earns visibility now that answer engines, not just search results, decide what people read.
He developed the four-pillar framework, the Non-Commodity Score and the RAG analysis method that Newsroom uses to help publishers and content teams get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode while still ranking in the search results that drive clicks. His writing here covers answer engine optimisation, generative engine optimisation, and the practical mechanics of building pages that AI systems retrieve, trust and quote.
Areas of focus
- Answer engine optimisation
- Search engine optimisation
- Generative engine optimisation
- The Non-Commodity Score
- RAG analysis
- Content strategy
- AI search
- Digital marketing
Elsewhere
Published in the Newsroom
- AEO Gate Checks
guide · 22 August 2026
The AEO gate checks, originated by Laurelin Labs: 130 technical foundation checks that decide whether a site can be indexed, rendered and quoted before any content work can matter.
- Non-Commodity Score
guide · 21 August 2026
The Non-Commodity Score (NCS), originated by Laurelin Labs, measures whether content deserves an AI citation across four vectors: information gain, experiential evidence, telemetry and connectivity.
- RAG Analysis
guide · 20 August 2026
RAG analysis audits content the way AI retrieval actually reads it: query fan-out, embedded passages and citation assembly. The approach, the insight, and three case studies.
