I'm Tori. I write about search and how it keeps reshaping itself, and I do it from Nairobi. The short version lives below, in the voice of a machine. The real one is mine.
That's how the machine tells it. Here's how I actually got here.
I live in Nairobi and I work online, but I didn't start there. I got here sideways, through a string of jobs I took because they paid, and one decision that changed everything.
I started in sales, working physical stalls, pushing the products nobody else wanted to push. You stand in front of strangers all day, you get told no, you keep going anyway. I walked out of it with a different relationship to my own confidence.
Then I moved online. Transcription first, then essay writing, the way a lot of people in Nairobi get started on the internet. You take what pays, you watch accounts close without warning, you spend long stretches broke. What I kept from those years was tenacity, and one realisation: if I wanted to make it, I had to upskill on purpose.
So I asked Reddit what was marketable, and copywriting kept coming up. I joined a Discord called the Copywriting Collective and I'm still grateful to those people. Office hours, copy annotated line by line, teardowns I sat all the way through. That community is where I actually learned to write.
From there I landed a content writing role at an Australian agency, mostly content marketing, and stayed two years. Long-form, SEO-heavy work across a lot of different industries, with high standards. That is where the craft got real.
After that, a US-based digital marketing agency, and the full stack of it. I rotated through more roles than I can cleanly list. I like to be challenged, and they kept letting me move: pulled into a department as the fresh pair of hands for some new process, get it working, write the SOP, get moved again.
Today I do SEO and GEO for a portfolio of personal brands on Nick Gray's team. Search stopped being ten blue links. AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity answer the question directly now, and getting named in that answer is its own discipline.
I also built the system this work runs on, from scratch. A whole repo of directives, services and orchestration so SEO across dozens of sites stays deterministic and repeatable instead of one-off. I think in architecture first, then write from inside the engine I designed.
A lot of it runs through Claude Code: research, building the tools, rendering reports and presentations, putting the SEO newsletter together. The craft now includes directing the machine well, and knowing what is worth keeping.
"I do my best work when I'm put on something I haven't done before." What I've learned about myself
Organic isn't free. It's the most misunderstood phrase in SEO, and quality keeps widening the gap.
Content drawn from real work outranks content drawn from other content. Almost every time.
When the search engine is an AI, the whole game is being named in the answer.
I'm not the loudest voice in this space. I'm in it every day, on real sites, watching what moves.
Field notes on what's actually changing in search: who AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity decide to name, and what holds up underneath. Written from real sites.
