People of AI Search – Richard Maurer, CTO at Slopelift
“I kind of lost my first ambition, to be very good at SEO. The topic changed in a direction that I could not really go with.” — Richard Maurer
The short version
- Richard Maurer left SEO for infrastructure when the discipline tilted toward content — and calls it “a natural shift,” not a defeat.
- His core argument on marketing data: you can capture every data point, but capturing everything is not the same as capturing what matters.
- The most common mistake he sees: brands engineering tracking setups as if they were paying enterprise licence fees, then hitting the limits of the free tier.
- Where AI earns its keep in his week: optimizing BigQuery SQL. Where he still says no: anything he writes, and anything he has to trust.
- On GEO: “It’s obviously the next thing.” The same content-shaped shift that pushed him out of SEO is happening again — and this time it moves faster.
Richard Maurer is the CTO at Slopelift, the performance, social and data marketing agency operating across DACH and CEE. He did not start there. He started as what he calls “a technician” — the technical half of an SEO team, back when technical SEO was where the wins were. Somewhere between 2014 and now, the discipline moved toward content, Richard moved toward analytics, analytics moved into the cloud, and Richard moved with it. Today he owns the agency’s infrastructure: which devices the team uses, which software, which cloud services, and how all of it holds together.
It is an unusual career line for an agency, and an unusually honest one. Most people in search describe their pivots as strategic. Richard describes his as a decision to stop competing in a game he had watched change: “I’m not a really good writer. That’s why I thought other people are just better at the job than I am.”
For this episode of People of AI Search, we sat down with Richard to talk about what a CTO actually does at a search agency, why most marketing data setups are over-engineered before they are useful, where he draws the line on AI, and what he makes of GEO arriving as the second great content shift of his career. It is the third conversation in our Slopelift series, after Head of SEO Marietta Robitza on the shift from SEO to AI search and Chief AI Officer Florian Fischer on running an AI mandate across 80 people — and the first one from the infrastructure side of the building.
The SEO who followed the technology
How did the transformation from Head of SEO to CTO happen?
“It was kind of a natural shift for me. I started as a technician — I was rather on the technical side of SEO. But I quickly realized the whole SEO scene was shifting towards content. Not that technical SEO wasn’t important, but the success was more and more content.”
The pull in the other direction was already there. “I’m always tinkering around with technical stuff, interested in new technology. And I always had an analytical side that I wanted to apply. That’s how I shifted to analytics. And then, with many analytics services and database services being in the cloud, I took charge of the whole cloud thing.”
Then the part most people leave out of the origin story: “I kind of lost my first ambition, to be very good at SEO. I lost it because the topic changed in a direction that I could not really go with. I’m not a really good writer. That’s what I would say, and that’s why I thought other people are just better at the job than I am.”
It takes a particular kind of self-reflection to say that out loud about your own specialism — and to route around it rather than defend it.
What surprised you most on the way?
Not the technology. The people.
“The first employees we had in the SEO area were not really technicians. I was quite surprised how they picked up technical topics very fast. Not on the level that I do, not in the first place, but they had strong gains in a very small time. They were more studied in literature, for example, and they applied the knowledge really fast. I didn’t first think this would work that well, but it worked perfectly.”
What a CTO at a search agency actually does all day
Walk us through a typical day.
“It’s actually not that technical. It’s a little bit more about leading teams than it is about spending my whole day in the tools myself.”
The shape of it: team meetings in the morning, then a pass over the live cloud projects and release candidates, then health checks on the servers. He still keeps a handful of client relationships — “but it’s getting less and less.”
That trade — depth of hands-on work for breadth of technical decisions — is the actual content of the CTO role at an agency of this size. The tools are the easy part. The judgment about which tools, for which client, at which cost, is the job.
The focus problem in marketing data
What’s the main challenge you see on the data side, for the agency and for clients?
Richard’s answer is the thesis of the whole conversation, and it is a subtractive one.
“The most important thing is to focus on what’s really important. You can capture every data point. There are a lot of things you can track, a lot of things you can capture. But especially if time is a limiting factor as far as technical implementation is concerned, you have to focus on the most important things — and you have to blend out things that you don’t need.”
The second half of the challenge is keeping up. “There’s a lot of niche knowledge for some platforms that you have to apply to be successful. To stay informed about that is also quite important.”
So which data points actually matter?
“It depends, but as we have many clients in e-commerce, it’s rather sales data, e-commerce standards. And figuring out how you best lead such a project with a client — that’s the biggest challenge.”
Is end-to-end tracking even the right goal anymore, or is first-touch and last-touch attribution enough?
Neither, and both. “It’s always a mixture of views that you have to apply. The more perspectives you can gain on your data, the better informed you are. The more tools you can use, the better informed you are.”
It is the same instinct that makes a single-number view of AI search misleading, which is why we keep arguing that the ROI of AI search has to be read across several signals rather than one.
But more perspectives is not more events. “It’s important in these huge datasets to find what you’re really looking for, but also not to over-engineer your database in terms of how many data points you track, how many tracking requests you send. It just depends on your company: how much effort can you really put into tracking measures? Is this really the most important thing you can do right now?”
How Slopelift builds a data setup, in four moves
What are the key ingredients when a brand asks you for a better data setup?
Richard’s sequence, in his order:
- Choose the vendor first. “For me it’s very depending on which vendor you want to choose in the first place, to be honest. And from that point you can individualize such a setup.” Everything downstream — event naming, consent handling, cost ceilings — is a consequence of that one decision.
- Assume a server-side component. “Normally we would say we track client side, but we always have a server-side component, no matter which vendor you use — Google, Adobe or stuff like that.” Server-side tracking means the tracking request is sent from a server you control rather than from the user’s browser, which is what makes the setup survive ad blockers, browser tracking restrictions, and consent constraints. It is a default at Slopelift, not an upgrade.
- Define the success events before the tracking plan. “It’s important to review the nature of the business. In many cases it’s an e-commerce store that we deal with, but there are special cases where you have to figure out first: what are your success events? What are you aiming for?”
- Work backwards from the output platforms. “Then we take a look at marketing measures — which platforms do you use to advertise? And then we individualize all the tracking requirements, all those basic requirements, on every output platform.”
The order matters more than the list. Most tracking projects start at step three or four, pick a vendor by default, and discover the constraint later. It is the sequence Slopelift’s data and analytics practice runs on.
The biggest mistake: engineering for a budget you don’t have
What’s the biggest mistake you see brands make when implementing a new data strategy?
“Sometimes it’s over-engineered. For example, you use GA4 free, you don’t have the premium product, and you have so many events that you actually get banned from GA4. That’s a classic case where you would say, ‘Okay, I want to capture everything’ — but everything is not the most important thing.”
The failure is a mismatch between ambition and licence. “That’s what I see very often: they engineer projects like they would spend tens of thousands of dollars for the analytical products, which is just not the case.”
There is a second mistake, and Richard treats it as the more serious one: “I see some cases where they would not take the privacy of the client seriously. For me it’s always about guaranteeing a kind of security for the client.”
Worth sitting with, given how much of the current AI-search conversation is about capturing more signals from more surfaces — brand sentiment, citations, AI Overview appearances, referral traffic. The constraint has not gone away. It has moved.
Where AI earns its place, and where it doesn’t
AI-assisted and AI-first coding are everywhere. What are your AI principles?
“I wouldn’t say I’m a vibe coder. I’m not coding applications from scratch. Especially navigating in the cloud gets much easier. But I would say I don’t use it as much as others do.”
Where it does deliver, it delivers narrowly and enormously: “What I mostly succeed in is gaining performance. What agents and AI can do best is optimizing queries. Huge performance gains — if you take a look at user queries you have in BigQuery, SQL statements that you check, they can just be so enhanced with it. That’s very fascinating for me.”
And where do you say no?
Two hard lines.
Anything he writes: “I’m not using it at all for any content that I write. I would never use it, because I think it’s obvious that I didn’t write the email.”
And anything he has to be certain about — specifically, tracking bugs. “Despite the fact that Claude can crawl the site and analyze the streams: if I see a bug and it’s really important to capture it, I would just take a look myself. I can’t rely on it and just accept it as faulty. I would always take a second look at least.”
Note what the line actually is. It is not “AI is unreliable.” It is that for verification tasks — where the whole value is the certainty — an answer he still has to check twice has not saved him anything.
Three tools in 2014, twenty today
How has the agency’s tech stack changed since you started?
“When we started, we probably had three tools that we used regularly. Now we have twenty.”
The bigger change is not the count. It is the ceiling. “Scaling is one thing that drastically changed. If you had a tool and some server, there was a limit to how fast you could scale. With cloud it’s just so enhanced. You could basically do everything. Now, especially if we’re talking about vibe coding, you could literally do anything.”
Slopelift was not cloud-based in 2014 — “I’m not even sure how the state of cloud was back then,” Richard laughs. Now the principle is fixed: “Nowadays we are cloud first. That’s for sure, because the reliability is just so different. Also how we code apps, how we deploy — it’s just drastically different. For teams especially, it’s so much more transparent how apps work.”
Transparency is the underrated half of that. A cloud-first stack is not only more elastic; it is legible to more of the team at once, which is what lets a non-technical SEO department pick up technical topics fast — the thing that surprised him in the first place.
“GEO is obviously the next thing”
You left SEO because it got more content-focused. Now AI search is reshaping it again. How do you read that from the outside?
Richard sees his own history repeating, with the clock sped up. Slopelift now runs GEO as a standing service line — a move we covered in how the agency turned GEO from a buzzword into something clients actually buy.
“GEO is obviously the next thing, right? When I say I shifted my job because of a shift to content focus, I think there is a new focus coming up. We know how it looks like, how we optimize on it. But it’s still evolving and it’s still changing. The more dynamic you stay in this time and the more you pick up on new trends, the better.”
How ready are clients for it?
Split neatly along one line: whether they were already investing.
“If you worked with us in the SEO department, it will be a smooth transition. But of course you can be very surprised about the changes on the market. If you haven’t thought about SEO until now, GEO will again change anything that you think about this whole topic.”
Which is the quiet argument for having done the boring work. The brands that built a defensible content and technical foundation for search are the ones now describing GEO as an adjustment, and the ones best placed to act on what we know about optimizing content for AI search and how to actually get cited. The brands that skipped it are meeting two shifts at once.
One last prompt: what surprises the old Richard about the new one
We end every episode with a version of the same question. For Richard, it turned into the most interesting answer of the conversation.
“I’ve been quite dynamic in what I do, how I change things, how I pick up new topics. But what surprises me a little bit is that earlier, if you would ask me if I’m a GEO expert, I would probably say, ‘Yes, I’m totally into this topic.'”
He would not say that now. And that is the point.
“I’ve settled down a little bit on the cloud topics. I know there are things coming up in all the other departments, but I’m good where I stand. You don’t have to know everything about everything. There’s too much to know.”
In an industry currently rewarding the loudest generalist, a CTO drawing a clear boundary around what he owns — and declining the rest — is close to a contrarian position. It is also, on the evidence of his own career, the thing that let him change direction cleanly when the ground moved the first time.
People of AI Search is an OtterlyAI x Slopelift series with the practitioners shaping how brands show up in AI answers. Previously: Marietta Robitza, Head of SEO and Florian Fischer, Chief AI Officer.
Want to know how visible your brand is in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews? Start monitoring with OtterlyAI.
Connect with Richard: Richard Maurer on LinkedIn Learn more about his agency: SlopeLift — GEO & SEO, Data, AI & Analytics, Server-Side Tracking
