Dan Petrovic

Dan Petrovic founded DEJAN, an Australian agency known for publishing detailed technical analyses of AI search. Rather than keeping grounding research behind a sales wall, Petrovic's team often puts the methods and findings in public posts that other SEOs can reproduce or argue with, including how Gemini grounds its answers.

A notable thread of that work examines how Google grounds Gemini's answers in web pages. Those write-ups matter because they connect generative answers back to concrete retrieval and citation behavior instead of leaving "grounding" as a vague buzzword.

Publicness is part of the contribution. When reverse engineering stays private, only one agency learns. When DEJAN publishes, the whole technical community can update its mental model.

The Australian base has not kept the work provincial. DEJAN's posts circulate among technical SEOs globally because the artifacts are reusable: grounding notes, model cards and experiment write-ups that do not depend on a local market anecdote.

DEJAN also maintains dozens of open models on Hugging Face aimed at probing how models read queries and entities. That infrastructure turns curiosity into experiments: teams can test hypotheses about entity interpretation without waiting for a private lab.

On the TGA 20, Petrovic sits among the architects because his contribution is evidence and tooling, not only client delivery. The open models are a gift to practitioners who want to inspect behavior rather than guess from screenshots.

Taken with the Gemini grounding research, the Hugging Face library makes DEJAN feel less like a conventional content shop and more like a small public lab attached to an agency.

Open probing tools also lower the cost of skepticism. A practitioner who disagrees with a DEJAN claim can often run a related test instead of arguing from vibes.

Public reverse engineering has a cultural effect too. It normalizes showing your work in a field that otherwise rewards private mystique.

Start with DEJAN's research on how Gemini grounds its answers. It shows the house style: specific mechanism, public artifacts, and enough detail for a technical reader to follow without a sales call.

Architects on this list earn their seat by changing what peers can know. Petrovic does that by shipping inspectable artifacts, which is a stricter standard than publishing opinions about what Gemini might be doing.