Piers Butler
Co-founder, Newsroom
Piers Butler is a co-founder of Newsroom. He works on how content earns visibility now that answer engines, not just search results, decide what people read, and has spent more than seventeen years in search and digital marketing.
At Newsroom he leads the approach the platform 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
- Content quality for AI search
- RAG analysis
- Content strategy
- AI search
- Digital marketing
Elsewhere
Published in the Newsroom
- The content guide
guide · 2 November 2026
How Newsroom tells an editor what to change on a page: four lenses (first-hand experience, facts and figures, sources and entities, what is new), each with evidence and specific edits. No score, and it never blocks publishing.
- AEO checks
guide · 2 November 2026
Newsroom's yes-or-no checks of whether a page is built so an AI answer can find, read and quote it: a draft profile that can block publishing, and a live-page profile that is advice only.
- 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.