Ben Harris
← All work Work / Cut the Waffle
Cut the Waffle is the little consultancy I started once it became obvious that search was quietly changing under everyone's feet. The whole point of it is to help B2B companies show up in Google and get name-dropped by the AI engines people now ask before they bother clicking anything. I built the brand, the site and the actual playbook myself, and I tried the whole lot out on my own site first so I wasn't handing anyone a theory I hadn't tested.
organic traffic in six months at Author-it
AI citations on my own site, 117 to 8,505 a month
years across SaaS, corporate and ecommerce
operator. No agency, no producer named Brad
The why
By 2026 a lot of B2B buyers are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI what they should be looking at well before they click a single normal search result. If the model doesn't bring you up you're just not in the conversation, and the slightly awkward truth is that most B2B sites are still built for the way Google worked years ago.
Cut the Waffle is my answer to that. I treat SEO and AEO as one job rather than two line items, because underneath they're mostly the same work with a handful of important differences. And because it's just me rather than an agency, there's no layer of project managers to wade through and the work tends to land in days rather than after some drawn-out onboarding.
What I built it to do
Audits, schema, topical authority and content architecture.
“Honestly, most of the B2B sites I look at are still set up the way Google liked things years ago, so the biggest win is usually just reorganising what's already there until the search engines and the AI models can actually follow it.”
The work that gets a brand mentioned inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews.
“This is the bit I'm most nerdy about right now, and I ran the entire playbook on my own site before I ever put it in front of a client.”
Claude Projects, custom GPTs, prompt libraries and guardrails.
“When people tell me their AI keeps making things up, it's almost never the model's fault. It just hasn't been given the context, so it fills in the gaps itself. Sort the foundation out and it stops guessing.”
ROI calculators, configurators and explainers that actually pull in pipeline.
“These are the ones that get the biggest reaction out of me. People stick around three or four times longer, the bounce rate drops off a cliff, and they capture far more leads than a gated PDF ever managed.”
Positioning, ideal customer, demand gen and sales enablement.
“So much B2B marketing falls over in the gap between what marketing makes and what genuinely helps sales close, and that gap is exactly where I like to spend my time.”
Sales decks and brand systems that get to the point.
“Buyers have usually made their mind up by around slide five, so I build decks that get there quickly instead of spending ten slides warming up.”
A few things I've built
A mix of interactive tools, sales collateral and campaigns. This is the sort of thing you get.
The interesting bit
Here's the part nobody really warns you about. For the first couple of months it genuinely looks like nothing is happening, and then the AI engines retrain, the citations start turning up and the whole thing goes vertical almost overnight. The real skill is keeping your nerve through those quiet early months, because that's exactly where most people give up right before it starts to pay off.
The product I shipped
This is the free Chrome extension I built for Cut the Waffle, and it's probably the quickest way I've found to explain what AEO even is without sending anyone to sleep.
You click it on any page and it reads that page the way an AI engine would, then hands you back a plain-English score along with the specific things worth fixing. It looks at the title, the structured data, how the answers are laid out and the trust signals, and it turns what is usually quite an abstract argument into something you can actually see in a couple of seconds.
How it works
No calls and no discovery deck. You send me what's broken, a bit of context and whatever you've already tried, and I come back with sharp questions rather than a sales pitch.
Then we cut out whatever isn't earning its place, whether that's the site, the content, the AI setup or the funnel, and rebuild it around one clear story that both your buyers and the AI engines can actually follow.
You get live pages, working AI projects and all the schema and llms.txt sitting in your own stack. Most of it ships in days, and the SEO and AEO side lands over that three-to-six-month curve.
Cut the Waffle is my agency, and it's just me, so you deal with the person doing the work. If you want the SEO, the GEO, the AI setup or the tools, this is the door. The whole site was rebuilt from scratch as the guinea pig for everything you've just read, so head over and click around the real thing first.