About Plate Lunch Collective

Plate Lunch Collective is an AI-native marketing consultancy based in Hawaii, helping businesses adapt to how discovery actually works today. We serve businesses navigating both local and mainland markets.

We were never an SEO or digital marketing agency that pivoted to AI buzzwords. We believe that AI is fundamentally changing the look of traditional 'search' interfaces: whether that's voice search, augmented reality overlays, Google's AI-generated summaries, chat interfaces like Perplexity or Claude, or social media platforms that have become less social and more about search and discovery.

Plate Lunch Collective was founded on the premise that AI will change all traditional interfaces, and that nothing is inherently 'dead.' Everything is rapidly evolving. Founded in April 2025 by someone with 20 years of SEO experience dating back to 2004, we've always stated that our main goal is to optimize for the retrieval layer: the infrastructure where AI systems access, evaluate, and synthesize information before presenting it to users.

The retrieval layer isn't a single platform. It's fed by everything: your website's technical SEO, your social media presence, your structured data, your citations across the web, your content quality. When ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Gemini retrieve information to answer questions, they're drawing from all of these signals simultaneously.

We don't claim SEO is dead or that social media marketing is obsolete. We help businesses understand that these channels now serve a dual purpose: reaching humans directly and feeding the systems that mediate AI-powered discovery. Our 90-day knowledge transfer model teaches you how your existing marketing efforts create AI-legible signals across the retrieval layer, then helps you take ownership of that optimization moving forward.

We help brands build discoverability across search, social, and AI-generated results. Our work spans marketing operations, brand strategy, performance diagnostics, and fractional leadership—all designed around how discovery actually works today.

For Hawaii businesses, that means navigating unique challenges: tourism seasonality, cultural context, and mainland audience targeting. We focus on how your existing marketing efforts create signals across the retrieval layer, then help you take ownership of that optimization.

The 90-Day Model

We typically work in focused 90-day engagements designed around knowledge transfer, though we adapt based on your team's structure and capacity. Whether you have internal resources we're training or you need us to stay embedded longer, we build systems that create lasting capability.

The 90-day engagement was never designed as a shortcut or a clever packaging trick. It exists because most businesses don't know how their signals look inside the retrieval layer, and they need a contained window of time to see the truth of their own marketing architecture. Ninety days is long enough to surface what's working, what's missing, and what's misleading, without pretending that deep authority or long-term discoverability can be manufactured on a deadline.

The first stretch is diagnostic. We map how your business is currently represented across the retrieval ecosystem: the structure of your site, the completeness of your schema, the clarity of your entity definition, the stability of your citations, the alignment of your content, and the health of the signals coming from social channels and third-party data sources. We look for contradictions, omissions, and unresolved identities. It's less about fixing anything at this stage and more about seeing the actual landscape instead of the assumed one.

From there, the work shifts to actionable corrections. We clean up structural issues so AI systems can interpret your business without guessing. We implement the schema you should have had from the beginning. We tighten content so it becomes retrievable rather than decorative. We address gaps in entity clarity and begin shaping the signals that will compound over time. Some clients contribute resources here; some ask us to handle the implementation. Either can work, as long as the goal remains accuracy over speed.

Throughout the process, we transfer knowledge. You learn what signals matter, why they matter, and how they converge inside AI systems. That understanding is the real output of the 90-day model. Once you see the retrieval layer clearly, you stop chasing platforms and start building systems that make sense.

At the end of the ninety days, the engagement resets. Not because the work is finished, but because you now know what the work actually is. Some clients continue into fractional leadership. Some prefer quarterly strategy reviews. Some take the blueprint and run with it internally. The point is not dependency. The point is clarity. Ninety days gives both sides enough information to decide what comes next without guesswork or inflated promises.

This isn't about adding more channels or chasing platform trends. It's about understanding how AI systems retrieve information, and ensuring your business shows up accurately when it should.

We care about clarity, methodology, and outcomes that persist beyond the engagement. If you're looking for someone to observe what's actually happening in your marketing ecosystem and help you adapt to it, that's what we do.

Let's talk about how your business gets found. Contact us to start the conversation.