Always have. Always will.
Spent decades helping businesses get found, grow, and matter online. Now building OG01 — the platform that measures how AI systems perceive your business and tells you exactly what to do about it.
Founder, OG01 · Orange Gorilla Pty Ltd · Byron Bay, Australia
The short version is in the headline. This is for anyone who wants to understand where this all comes from.
I started on a Commodore 64. Moved to Apple II and DOS 3.3 through the school computer club. Got onto AARNet — Australia's first internet — before most people had heard the word. Taught myself TCP/IP, built servers, helped introduce Cisco's MPLS-VPN to the market. Set up servers in underground bunkers. Worked as a webmaster in Spain, Holland, Denmark, Russia, and the USA before coming home. This isn't a career I fell into. It's one I've been building since the beginning.
"Musicians, scientists and analysts all have a common goal — order. That's what this has always been about."
The through-line across all of it — the data analysis, the traffic, the rankings, the strategy — is the same question asked a thousand different ways: how does a business get found, trusted, and chosen by strangers who have never heard of it? For a long time the answer was search engines. Then social. Then content. Now it is something more fundamental. AI systems are making recommendations on behalf of billions of people every day, and most businesses have no idea whether those systems know they exist, let alone trust them enough to recommend them.
That gap is what I have spent the last several years closing. OG01 is the instrument I built to measure it — a scored Authority Rating across five intelligence dimensions, with Ruby AI to tell you exactly what to fix first. Not a dashboard. Not a rank tracker. A credit score for how AI perceives your business.
Alongside that I run Digital Dominator in Byron Bay. Educated at UNE Armidale (Arts) and the University of Queensland (Commerce). Did some guest lecturing in digital marketing before the institute that ran the program was acquired — right place, right time.
OG01 is something I co-founded — a platform that pulls together everything I have learned about digital authority over three decades and turns it into a scored, actionable intelligence tool for businesses navigating AI search. Built in Byron Bay, with a great team around it.
The music thread goes deeper than most people know. I recorded with Daniel Jones from Savage Garden, released tracks signed to Quiksilver for Kelly Slater, and had songs selected by Kirk Pengilly of INXS for Layne Beachley's Life in The Fast Layne. Artist liaison at Bluesfest Byron Bay through Browndog Productions. And for many years — performer, administrator, set builder and concept developer for Splendour in the Grass, working alongside Andy Forbes and the late Andy McDonell — one half of the legendary festival clown act Wacko and Blotto, and one of the most extraordinary performers this country ever produced. I also spent time as Dubbo the roller skating chimp, which remains one of the better things I have done professionally.
None of it is a detour. It is the same instinct — pattern recognition, timing, and knowing when to play the note and when to leave the space.
After two and a half decades watching businesses struggle to get found — first by search engines, now by AI — I built the platform I always wished existed. One that tells you your score, shows you the signals, and gives you the roadmap to fix them.
OG01 measures how AI systems — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity — perceive and rank your
business. It scores you across five intelligence dimensions, places you on the Authority Ladder,
and gives you Ruby AI — a co-pilot that tells you exactly what to fix first.
Think of it as a credit score for your digital authority. Delivered in 48–72 hours.
No demo. No sales call. No guesswork.
My Byron Bay digital agency — SEO, strategy, and content for Australian businesses. Running since 2017. The work that funded the thinking that became OG01.
digitaldominator.com.au →I write about AI authority, digital strategy, and what's actually happening at the intersection of search and AI. No hacks. No fluff. Just signal.
Most businesses focus on traffic. The ones getting recommended by AI systems focus on authority. Here's the difference — and why it compounds while everything else just moves.
44 elements. 8 groups. The full framework for what drives AI authority in 2025.
If you're building something in the digital authority space, thinking about AI search, or just want to know where your business sits on the ladder — I'm easy to find.