Olaf Kopp

Kopp trained as a wholesale and foreign trade merchant, then earned a business degree focused on marketing and e-business at HAWK in Hildesheim, Germany, with a thesis on word-of-mouth and viral marketing. After marketing and editor roles at a music and streetwear mail-order company, he worked as an online marketing manager at a Universal Music subsidiary around the bravado.de launch, then founded SEM Deutschland in Hanover in 2009.

In January 2012 he cofounded Aufgesang with Ulf-Hendrik Schrader. He served as managing director through 2015, then continued as cofounder, CBDO, and Head of SEO (later Head of SEO and AI Search), owning product development, SEO leadership, content, agency marketing, and sales. He also helped found the SEAcamp event for PPC professionals in the DACH region.

For more than a decade Kopp published deep technical explainers on semantic search, entities, the Knowledge Graph, and E-E-A-T for German and international trade press, including Search Engine Land, t3n, Website Boosting, HubSpot, Sistrix, and Oncrawl. In 2022 he was among Search Engine Land's top contributors, with multiple columns landing in the year's most-read SEO list.

He also taught SEO, Analytics, Ads, and content marketing seminars for IHK Hannover, Hochschule Hannover, and Steinbeis University, and authored Content Marketing along the Customer Journey plus later OMR reporting on AI search.

Kopp was writing about LLM optimization for Search Engine Land by October 2023, when many marketers were still catching up to the acronyms. Pieces such as LLM optimization: Can you influence generative AI outputs? and later decoding guides helped set vocabulary for how search practitioners talk about generative visibility.

He is especially associated with LLM readability: structuring passages so models can lift and cite them cleanly. Clear chunks with relevant answers are easier for retrieval and generation systems to use. Related ideas he promotes include brand context optimization and digital authority management, which sit next to classic entity SEO when the goal is to be understood and recommended by AI systems as well as ranked by Google.

Kopp also built the SEO Research Suite, a database of search patents and papers with an AI research assistant, so technical SEOs can ground speculation in primary documents instead of conference folklore.

At Aufgesang he still runs the SEO and AI search practice from Hanover and the Western Algarve in Portugal, pairing agency delivery with public research on kopp-online-marketing.com. German business press such as FAZ has cited him as a GEO expert.

He also hosts the OM Cafe podcast and reports on AI search for OMR.