Zach Chahalis is VP of Relevance Engineering and Analytics at iPullRank, the technical SEO agency founded by Mike King. A technical SEO with about 16 years in search and analytics, he has led more than 100 site migrations and replatformings and now studies how brands can measure and improve their visibility in AI search.
Search Discovery and Apartments.com
Chahalis built his early career at the analytics consultancy Search Discovery, managing SEO for brands such as GameStop and Michaels Stores. He later moved in-house as director of inbound marketing, analytics, and insights at Global Payments, then became VP of SEO and content for Apartments.com and its parent, CoStar Group.
His specialties stayed technical throughout: website replatforming, structured data, log file analysis, and JavaScript SEO. His consulting site describes a "teach them to fish" approach, training client teams so they can keep SEO work going without depending on outside help.
Returning to iPullRank
Chahalis had worked at iPullRank once before. Garrett Sussman, who calls him "the Boomerang," says the agency had to win him back, and he returned as senior director of SEO and data analytics. In a pre-conference SEO Week interview he told Sussman that AI search had "reignited my love for this area of marketing" at a point when classic SEO had started to feel stale to him.
During iPullRank's 12th-anniversary week in 2026, the agency promoted him to VP of Relevance Engineering and Analytics, citing his habit of digging into data and his generosity in sharing what he knows with clients and teammates.
Measuring Visibility in AI Answers
His public talks focus on measurement. He told Sussman that many large clients treat AI search as "a black box," and that the market has plenty of tools for tracking visibility but few that help marketers improve it. He welcomes the growing pressure to tie search work to return on investment: "As a data person and analytics-type person, I think everything should be tied to some type of an ROI."
He also argues that SEO and GEO overlap without being identical. His example is JavaScript: Google's crawler handles it far better than it once did, while many AI crawlers cannot render it, so content that loads late may reach those crawlers only in part or not at all.