Lily Ray is VP of SEO and AI Search at Amsive and founder of Algorythmic, the boutique SEO and AI search consultancy she launched while keeping her Amsive role. Based in Brooklyn, she is one of the most cited public voices arguing that durable search quality still decides what generative engines quote.
From NYU to Agency SEO
Ray grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and moved to New York at eighteen for college. As a junior at NYU studying politics and Spanish, she took a paid SEO and social role at an online education company and found the work combined technical, creative, writing, and marketing skills she already liked.
She spent about six years at Flying Point Digital, eventually leading the SEO department through the agency's acquisition path into Women's Marketing / Stella Rising. In 2018 she joined Amsive (then Path Interactive) as SEO Director. Over the next several years she was promoted through senior director and head-of-research titles into VP of SEO and AI Search, growing the organic team from roughly nine people when she arrived into a thirty-plus person practice serving ecommerce, publishing, B2B, SaaS, and YMYL categories such as healthcare, finance, and insurance.
Algorithm Research at Amsive
Inside Amsive, Ray built a research habit: watching Google algorithm updates, documenting how quality systems respond, and translating that into client strategy. Her writing and talks on E-E-A-T, Google Discover, news and publisher SEO, and search spam made her a regular conference and industry-press source. USA Today / List Wire named her among the most influential SEO experts in 2022, and her teams collected Search Engine Land, U.S. Search Awards, and Drum awards for campaign and team work, including enterprise SEO recognition.
That same habit shaped how she talks about AI search. In her MozCon / Amsive session separating fact from fiction across GEO, AEO, and LLMO, she argued that large language models still lean on search engines, so content that indexes quickly and ranks well tends to appear in AI answers, often within hours. She oversaw Amsive's expansion from classic SEO into answer engine optimization for ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, and related surfaces.
Warnings on GEO Spam Tactics
Through 2025 and 2026 Ray became a leading public voice warning that several fashionable GEO tactics were already drawing spam flags from Google and Microsoft. Scaled self-promotional listicles built mainly to manufacture citations sit in that bucket, as do prompt-injection patterns hidden in "summarize with AI" buttons and similar interface tricks meant to steer a model toward a preferred answer.
She has also said that AI search will not rescue thin or manipulative pages that already struggle in classic search.
Launching Algorythmic
After sixteen years of agency SEO, Ray launched Algorythmic as a selective SEO and AI search consultancy for 1:1 client work, hourly counsel, training, and speaking. She kept the VP of SEO and AI Search role at Amsive as strategic advisor, still overseeing SEO and AEO work and recommending the fuller Amsive bench when a brief needs that scale.
Outside work, she grew up drumming in Bay Area bands that signed local labels and gigged San Francisco venues, then later DJs house, techno, and downtempo in New York. The personal site lilyray.nyc keeps that biography next to the consulting practice.