About
Twenty Years of Getting Found
Hayden Bond started in SEO in 2004 as Head of SEO and Content Strategy at SkinStore.com, building organic programs across thousands of beauty and skincare SKUs before the company's acquisition. From there he led SEO and digital strategy at PeopleFinders.com, managing organic growth across millions of dynamically generated pages, working with engineering on crawl architecture and with legal on compliance. In 2008 he moved to Toronto as Director of Digital Strategy at Spark Internet Marketing, running integrated campaigns across SEO, paid search, and analytics for B2B, B2C, and service clients.
Alongside and after his agency work, Hayden ran an independent consulting practice for seventeen years. He worked across the U.S. mainland, Canada, Costa Rica, and India, holding work visas in both Canada and India. Clients included SaaS platforms, provincial tourism campaigns, DTC skincare and beauty brands, luxury hotels, travel companies, dating platforms, healthcare organizations, farms, agribusiness operations, surf businesses, and e-commerce stores. Industries that look nothing alike but share the same core problem: being found by the right people at the right moment. He built and managed teams on the ground in each market, including the Philippines and Barbados.
Plate Lunch Collective carries that full body of work. Every engagement at Plate Lunch Collective is shaped by two decades of building the entity clarity, content architecture, and technical infrastructure that AI retrieval systems now depend on.
The Work Has Changed. The Problem Hasn't.
Plate Lunch Collective is an AI search optimization agency. Getting ranked in Google used to be the whole game. Now the game includes being retrieved and cited when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question, searches on Reddit or TikTok, or uses voice search.
Plate Lunch Collective optimizes across all of these surfaces so brands appear in the answer, not just in the results.
Why AI Search, and Why Now
More than a year before the industry settled on what to call it, Plate Lunch Collective noticed consumers turning to AI for answers instead of search results. Search was not dying. Visibility was changing, and it was becoming multi-surface. Rather than appending AI to existing service names because the keyword had volume, Plate Lunch Collective started building frameworks for retrieval, entity authority, and citation architecture while the industry was still arguing over terminology.
Twenty-two years of traditional search work is what makes that early move credible. The retrieval mechanics that determine what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews surface are built on the same structural signals that traditional SEO has always optimized: entity clarity, content architecture, schema, and citation authority. Hayden Bond built those systems at scale before AI search existed. Plate Lunch Collective applies that depth to the surfaces where discovery is moving.
How We Work
Plate Lunch Collective runs AI search visibility engagements in focused intervals, scoped to each brand's retrieval gaps and optimized against the specific surfaces where their audience is asking questions. Each one scoped by triage, built around your business, your customers, and what is actually blocking visibility. The work is sequenced by dependency, not by calendar. You have direct access throughout.
The Name
Plate lunch is Hawaii's working meal. Two scoops of rice, macaroni salad, your choice of protein. It started in the 1880s on plantation camps where Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, Portuguese, and Hawaiian workers brought food from home and ate together. By the 1930s, lunch wagons were selling it across the islands. It's what happened when people from different places shared a meal.
That's the approach here. Approachable and relatable, not black box optimization or proprietary systems you can't understand. We take what works from different disciplines: technical SEO, content strategy, entity optimization, social signals. Put together in a way that makes your brand findable across the retrieval layer. Plate Lunch Collective started in 2025 because that retrieval layer needed someone paying full attention to it.
Plate Lunch Collective is an AI search optimization agency working across hospitality, skincare, SaaS, e-commerce, dating platforms, tourism, aviation, agribusiness, agritourism, manufacturing, transportation, local business, creators, and surf, fitness and lifestyle brands. Current engagements run in Hawaii, mainland US, Canada, the Caribbean, and Central America.