James Scherer is VP of Strategy at Foundation, where he leads AI visibility and generative engine work for B2B brands. After more than a decade in inbound marketing, including in-house work at a Vancouver tech startup and agency content programs for companies such as monday.com and ActiveCampaign, he now argues that GEO is about influence inside model answers.
A Decade in Inbound Marketing
Scherer spent more than ten years helping businesses grow through inbound marketing. He worked in-house at a tech startup in Vancouver, then moved into agency content leadership on programs for brands including monday.com, ActiveCampaign, Smartsheet, and Hims.
Foundation's team page describes a preference for merit-based growth and creative paths that do not simply copy the category template. He is based in Wales and lists folk playlists, breweries, and frisbee among his interests.
Separating SEO from GEO
In Foundation's public GEO explainers Scherer draws a clear line between classic SEO and generative work. One widely quoted line: "SEO is your space: your website, blog, technical optimization, etc. GEO is all that stuff plus external influences. We don't really optimize for generative engines; we influence them." Elsewhere he has argued that teams err when they try to measure GEO exactly like SEO, because the job is how models synthesize and name vendors, not only how pages rank.
That framing shapes Foundation's AI-visibility programs: baseline citation and authority research, content built for AI citation, and multi-channel distribution across surfaces models read, including on-site pages, YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, earned media, and reviews.
Share of Model and Attribution
Foundation's GEO metrics writing quotes Scherer on why ROI debates get messy: GEO operates in zero-click environments like ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and Reddit threads, and multi-touch attribution breaks down when the touch happens outside the brand's ecosystem. The firm's public measurement language centers Share of Model, citation, and sentiment across platforms rather than treating AI referral traffic as the whole story.
Scherer also stresses that influence is cumulative across sources. A brand's own domain may account for a small share of citations while Reddit, YouTube, and review platforms add more; together those surfaces can outweigh competitors who dominate only one channel.
Leading Strategy at Foundation
As VP of Strategy he translates that philosophy into client programs on AI visibility.
His public writing already outlines how Foundation baselines Share of Model for a category, which off-site surfaces matter for a client's buyers, and how the team avoids treating GEO dashboards as a twin of classic SEO rank tracking.