I started AEO-REX from my kitchen table in Birmingham, three kids around me, working a low income teaching job that didn't quite cover what we needed.
That sentence is uncomfortable to write, but it's the honest start. Most founder stories begin with confidence, capital, and a runway. Mine began with bills, a teaching timetable, and the certainty that the way UK small businesses found customers was about to change permanently.
The pattern I kept seeing
For fifteen years, UK SMEs have been told to "do SEO". Many did. They optimised their websites, paid for content, monitored rankings, and built businesses on the basis of being findable through Google. Then in 2024 and 2025, customer behaviour started shifting in a way the SEO industry was slow to acknowledge: people stopped searching and started asking.
Asking ChatGPT. Asking Perplexity. Asking Gemini and Claude. Asking the AI assistant on their phone or in their car. The mechanism that had powered fifteen years of small business growth was being quietly replaced by something completely different. And the businesses that had done everything right on Google were watching themselves disappear from the answers their own customers were getting.
I watched it happen as a teacher and as someone watching my own community. I started reading. I started running diagnostics on local businesses I knew. The pattern was consistent and brutal: enormous gaps, no awareness, and no UK consultancy doing anything about it specifically for SMEs.
What I brought to the work
Two things from outside the tech world made me good at this.
The first is physics teaching. Physics is a discipline of evidence over assertion. You don't believe a thing because someone confident said it; you believe it because the data and the method support the claim. That mindset, applied to AEO, immediately filters out most of what you'll read on the internet. The space is full of confident people repeating each other. The actual mechanisms by which ChatGPT decides who to recommend are knowable, testable, and substantially different from what most blog posts say. I treat AEO the way I treat a physics problem: structured observation, repeatable methodology, evidence on both sides of every claim.
The second is Les Mills group fitness instruction. I'm a Les Mills certified HIIT instructor. Teaching a 45 minute HIIT class to a room of 30 people, week after week, requires a specific kind of discipline: consistency in the execution, energy maintained when you don't feel it, and showing up every single time regardless of whether the room is full or empty. That same discipline transferred directly into AEO-REX. Visibility doesn't happen because of one big move. It happens because you do the structural work consistently, week after week, even when the results take months to compound.
Who I'm building for
AEO-REX exists for UK SMEs. Not enterprise. Not startups with VC backing and PR firms. Small businesses run by founders who are working harder than anyone realises and who genuinely cannot afford to be invisible to the next generation of customer search.
The standard AEO-REX consultancy work is straightforward: we audit, we fix, you keep the playbook. That's the right answer for most businesses. For founders who want to go further, Rex Commerce is the premium tier I built because some of you wrote to me asking for it. 12 businesses per cohort, Q3 2026 launch, deliberately small.
Why I'm still teaching
I haven't left BMet College. I'm currently delivering AI workshops to our students alongside my BTEC Applied Science teaching, because I think AI literacy belongs in every classroom and most curricula are years behind. The teaching keeps me honest. You cannot teach a sixteen year old something you don't actually understand. Every methodology I sell to AEO-REX clients has to survive the test of explaining it to a teenager in a science lab. If it can't, it isn't ready.
What I want you to take from this
If you're a UK small business owner reading this, the things you can do this week are concrete. Run the free AI Visibility Report. Whatever number comes back, that's where you actually stand. From there, the work is structured and learnable. Most of the heavy lifting is unglamorous and deeply repeatable, which is what I'm built for.
I'm not the founder with the polished story. I'm the one who started this from a kitchen table because the bills weren't going to pay themselves and I'd watched too many good people in my community quietly disappear from the answers their own customers were getting. If that resonates with where you are, you're in the right place.
I treat AEO the way I treat a physics problem: structured observation, repeatable methodology, evidence on both sides of every claim.
Shanaz Begum, Founder, AEO-REX
Related reading: more about Shanaz, the April 2026 masterclass recap, and why we're running AI workshops at BMet College.