About

Matthew Jamison — St. Louis AEO consultant and Ruby on Rails developer. The framework that powers Shopify's 5.5M+ merchants pays my rent; Gateway Tech AEO is how I bring that engineering rigor to under-resourced St. Louis local businesses. Music identity, faith, family, and the posture behind the consulting.

Updated

I’m Matthew Jamison — a St. Louis AEO consultant and Ruby on Rails developer. The framework I work in every day is the same one that powers Shopify’s 5.5M+ merchants, $300B+ in 2025 gross merchandise volume, and the majestic monolith handling roughly 19 million MySQL queries per second. I run Gateway Tech AEO on the side, a small Answer Engine Optimization practice for St. Louis local businesses. This page exists because someone hiring a solo operator deserves to know who they’re hiring, what I actually do during the day, and why I kept the music side of the brand visible instead of hiding it.

How I got here

I started as a beat-maker. I grew up watching my cousin play drums at my father’s church, moved through concert band and drumline, and ended up a session bass player for a handful of St. Louis bands. In 2020 I joined the Sidechain Society collective and founded Matthew Jamison Music, LLC. That same year I started teaching myself to write Ruby. The transition is documented across my Bandcamp catalog and my GitHub commit history — a 56-track autobiographical album called The Journey (January 2022) is the inflection-point record. By January 2024 I was releasing Shoot The J , an album with track titles written in actual Ruby, Rails, and SQL syntax — validates :love, presence: true, structure.sql, bundle update --all. Not a gimmick. By that point my brain was processing meaning in both beats and Ruby methods, and the album was the most honest description I could give of where the work lived.

I’ve been writing production Rails full-time since the transition. I’ve merged 194+ pull requests on a production Rails 8 codebase — work that’s verifiable against my GitHub profile . The portfolio site you’re reading this on is a Hugo static site with a complete schema.org @graph, hand-tuned Lighthouse scores, and a vendored theme I override partial-by-partial — also verifiable, also open to the public.

What I do day-to-day

The day job is a Rails 8 application on PostgreSQL behind Cloudflare. Same framework that runs Shopify’s checkout, scaled down to a single industry application. It’s the kind of stack where a missed migration or a sloppy validation costs real customers — that frames how I think about reliability, accessibility, and how much I’m willing to ship without a test.

After hours and on Saturdays I run Gateway Tech AEO. Three tiers, prices public, no contracts longer than month-to-month, capped at five year-one clients in the St. Louis metro. Most of the work is Google Business Profile, schema markup, robots.txt and llms.txt for AI crawlers, FAQ-shaped content with primary-source citations, and the kind of structured-data-first templating that gets a local business cited by ChatGPT , Perplexity , and Google’s AI Overview rather than buried under a national chain in the ten blue links.

The transparency posture isn’t a marketing choice — it’s the only sustainable one for a solo practice. If I have to remember which prospect I quoted what, I lose. So everything is on the page: the prices, the cap, the methods, and the language about what I won’t promise.

Why this practice exists

I get to do production-grade engineering for an organization with the budget to maintain it. Most of the local businesses I know in St. Louis don’t have that budget — and yet the answer engines are taking real traffic from them right now. Gartner forecasts traditional search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026 ; Adobe Digital Insights reported AI traffic to U.S. retail sites grew 393% year-over-year in Q1 2026 . A roofing contractor or a Mexican restaurant doesn’t have the in-house engineering to respond to that. Big agencies will respond by selling them a $10,000 retainer they can’t afford. I think it’s worth one of us showing up with the same methods at local-business prices and seeing how far that goes.

That’s what Gateway Tech AEO is. It’s also why the year-one client cap is five — slow growth means I can actually do the work myself, and there is no project manager on the other end of the email.

Music is part of the brand

I left the Bandcamp link in the music widget for a reason. The 30+ releases at matthewjjamison.bandcamp.com are part of the same person who’s writing your schema and tuning your GBP listing. The current Bandcamp bio reads “A vessel grateful for expression healing-state.” That’s an accurate description of how I think the day-job and the side-project relate.

If you’re wondering whether you’re hiring “the AEO guy” or “the music guy” — I am one person and the dual identity is the differentiator. The discipline a Rails developer brings to schema markup is the same discipline a producer brings to mixing a track. Both are about getting the structure exactly right so the listener doesn’t have to work for it.

Family

I’m married to Berneshia, a minister at Refresh Community Church. We have two daughters; the older contributed vocals to “Jelly Asparaguys” on Shoot The J. The reason every commit, every release, and every line of this site happens around the family schedule is that the family is the work, and the work funds the family. If a project would compromise that, I won’t take it. That’s part of the year-one cap.

Faith

A handful of my track titles cite scripture: Isaiah 40:31, Psalm 8:1, Matthew 23:26-28, James 1:2, Jeremiah 29:11, Isaiah 12:2, Isaiah 43:19. I’m not going to pretend that’s not part of who I am — but I’m also not going to gate-keep clients on it. I work for non-Christian and non-religious clients on the same terms. The faith influences how I think about how I work, not who I work with.

Things I cap

  • Year-one client cap: 5 in the St. Louis metro. After five active engagements, I close the form.
  • No contracts longer than month-to-month. You own everything I touch — your domain, your GBP, your accounts, your content — and you can stop any time.
  • No agency overhead. I do the work. There’s no project manager, no account executive, no slide deck. If you need one of those things, I am not the right hire.
  • No promises of #1 rankings or guaranteed AI citations. Anyone who promises that is either lying or doing something that will get your business penalized. I commit to the work itself: every month you see exactly what I did and you keep full access.

Where to find me

Intake is email-first — phone calls aren’t part of how this practice runs. If you’re considering working with me, send a brief: a link to your existing site, your city, a sentence on what your business does, and what you’d like AEO to fix. I reply within 48–96 hours with something specific to your business, not a generic pitch. If you’re in St. Louis and would rather meet in person, that works too — same brief.