# Skill Trade (Ron Kagan)

> Ron Kagan is a hands-on B2B demand generation and marketing operations leader. This site
> holds his resume, his writing, open-source tools for measuring whether AI answers cite your
> brand, and explainers on how the zero-click era changed when featured snippets gave way to
> AI Overviews. Proof points: OnPay measured as the third most-cited domain in AI payroll
> answers, 100 sales meetings generated in one quarter, a 14% prospect-to-meeting rate across
> a 350+ person cohort. Based in Olmsted Falls, Ohio. Contact: ron@skilltrade.marketing

Fourteen years in B2B demand generation, nine of them running the function rather than a channel
inside it. Most of that career has been in regulated markets: fraud and financial crime at
Feedzai, payroll and HCM at OnPay, life sciences at Within3, insurance data at Advisen. He builds
the measurement before buying the platform, which is why the tools below exist.

The distinction this site is most concerned with: an AI Overview *appearing* on a keyword and your
brand being *named inside it* are different measurements, and most tooling reports only the first.

## Core

- [The Answer Layer](https://www.skilltrade.marketing/answer-layer/): Why AI Overviews matter more
  than featured snippets ever did. A featured snippet was one slot with one winner; an AI Overview
  cites several sources at once. Measured across six domains: the citable surface roughly doubled
  while the slots a brand can win rose about twenty-fold. Also covers why retrieval and training
  data are different levers, and why only one of them is measurable.
- [Answer Engine Optimization](https://www.skilltrade.marketing/answer-engine-optimization/): What
  AEO is, how it differs from SEO, and how to get cited by AI search.
- [AI Overview Optimization](https://www.skilltrade.marketing/ai-overview-optimization/): How to
  show up in Google AI Overviews, and how to measure whether you did.
- [Tools](https://www.skilltrade.marketing/tools/): Two open tools. `citation_meter.py` measures
  how often a domain is cited across Perplexity, OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini using each engine's
  own citation API. `sparktoro.py` decides which engines are worth metering for a given buyer,
  from clickstream panel data.
- [Resume](https://www.skilltrade.marketing/resume/): Full career history, downloadable as PDF.

## Writing

- [The Failover Economy](https://www.skilltrade.marketing/blog/the-failover-economy/): 30 months of
  Ramp AI Index data on OpenAI versus Anthropic paid business adoption, with the dataset embedded
  as JSON.
- [Make Your AI Agent Replaceable](https://www.skilltrade.marketing/blog/make-your-ai-agent-replaceable/):
  How one file and a symlink keep an AI-assisted body of work portable.
- [People Want Deals Now](https://www.skilltrade.marketing/blog/people-want-deals-now/)
- [Twitter Tailored Audiences From Lists](https://www.skilltrade.marketing/blog/twitter-tailored-audiences-from-lists/)
- [Speed Up Your Work Using Free Tools](https://www.skilltrade.marketing/blog/video-speed-up-your-work-using-free-tools/)
- [Blog index](https://www.skilltrade.marketing/blog/)

## Practice areas

- [Marketing Operations](https://www.skilltrade.marketing/marketing-operations/): Salesforce,
  HubSpot, Marketo, 6sense, Gong. Attribution, routing, lifecycle and pipeline-velocity reporting,
  plus audits and automation architecture.
- [Demand Generation](https://www.skilltrade.marketing/demand-generation-resources/): Paid media,
  ABM, SEO and SEM, partner marketing, and the operations underneath them.

## Contact

- ron@skilltrade.marketing
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronykagan

## Optional

- [Answer Layer Blueprint](https://www.skilltrade.marketing/files/answer-layer-blueprint.md): The
  method used to research, structure and source the Answer Layer page, written to be reused.
- [Privacy](https://www.skilltrade.marketing/privacy/)