More than 20 years of getting found
Plate Lunch Collective is an AI SEO agency that gets brands named when buyers ask, in search, on social, and in AI. SEO is still the foundation of the work. AI search is built on top of it, and SEO on its own isn't enough anymore. Two principals in two countries, and a founder who has worked in search since 2004.
More than 20 years of search, in-house, agency-side and independent
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 more than 20 years 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.
Getting ranked in Google used to be the whole game. As we see it, more word of mouth now comes from AI. Someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI who to call, or searches TikTok or Reddit, and hears a few names. Then they might Google the one they like before they reach out. We get you named in those answers, make sure you look right when they search, and judge the work by your calls, bookings and sales against where you started.
Built for it from the first engagement
Plate Lunch Collective started in March 2025 around one observation: consumers were turning to AI for answers instead of search results. Search wasn't dying. People were finding businesses in more places, on Google, in AI answers and on social. So we built the practice for that from the first engagement, with SEO and AI search run together.
A practice, not a pivot
More than 20 years of traditional search work is what makes that a practice and not a pivot. What ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI choose to name still rests on what SEO has always built: a business search engines can recognize, pages that cover a subject well, clear details on the site, and other sites that vouch for you. Hayden Bond built those systems at scale before AI search existed. Plate Lunch Collective puts that experience to work wherever your buyers now search and ask.
An ongoing partner in quarterly cycles
Each cycle is scoped by triage: your business, your customers, and what's in the way where your buyers search and ask.
- 1
Triage
Each cycle starts from your business and your customers. The first one also puts tracking in place, so we know where new customers come from.
- 2
Sequence
We do the work in the order that makes sense: the fixes everything else depends on come first, like pages Google won't index or listings that disagree, then the pages, profiles and coverage that build on them.
- 3
Decide
Each quarter closes with a report on your business numbers, next to the starting point and the latest AI and Google answers. The next quarter's plan comes out of that report. You have direct access throughout.
Two principals in two countries
You work directly with both, wherever you are.
Hayden Bond
Hayden has worked in search since 2004, in-house and agency-side, across the US, Canada, Costa Rica, and India. He works from Aiea, Hawaii. He started Plate Lunch Collective there in 2025 to bring that SEO experience to AI search. The full history is above. He is the fractional CMO on the engagements that need one.
Ben Puzzuoli
Ben works from Plate Lunch Collective's Canadian office in LaSalle, Ontario, in Windsor-Essex. He has spent 25 years building and selling software: Robobak, a cloud backup company that grew to 30,000 protected sites before its 2011 acquisition by KineticD, and Cayzu, the help desk platform he and his partners still run. He also founded Not a Pour Decision, a content agency producing creator video and long form content for Canadian and US brands, and works as a creator himself with an audience of roughly 98,000 across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
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. Plain and approachable, with nothing hidden in a black box. We bring together technical SEO, content, listings and reviews, social search and earned coverage, so your brand comes up wherever your buyers search and ask. Plate Lunch Collective started in 2025 because that work needed someone paying full attention to it.
Fourteen industries, five markets
The work is the same in each: getting the brand named when its buyers ask, in search, on social, and in AI.
Where to go from here
- The AI Search Game Plan
AI Search Game Plan
From $1,500: how your buyers search and ask, which brands they hear about, and where you'd start.
- All services
Our services
Nine services built around one goal: getting your brand named when buyers ask.
- Read the blog
The blog
Practical writing on AI search, what gets businesses named, and what's actually changing.
Find out where your brand stands.
You'll talk with one of the two people who'd do the work. Send us a note, and we'll get back to you within one business day.