Raleigh, NC · Technical SEO & Applied Machine Learning

I build the bridge between
search and machine learning.

I'm JR Oakes, VP of Technology at LOCOMOTIVE Agency. For more than a decade I've worked at the seam where technical SEO meets applied ML: crawling and indexing systems, entity and embedding models, and, lately, the LLM and agentic tooling that's reshaping how people find information.

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01 · About

A non-linear path to search.

I didn't start in tech. For a decade I ran an architectural glass studio in Raleigh, designing and fabricating leaded and carved glass for clients including the Angus Barn, SAS, NC State, Coach K, and CliffyB of Epic Games. That work taught me how to take a vague idea and engineer it into something beautiful. My mission is to create things of value and beauty.

I moved into software as a programmer in 2011 and into search shortly after. Since then I've led technical SEO at Consultwebs and LOCOMOTIVE, in roles from Director of Technical SEO to VP of Technology. Along the way I've published with Search Engine Land, contributed open-source tools the SEO community actually uses, and helped found /r/TechSEO.

These days a big part of my work is people, not just systems: developing talent and building teams around a clear mission. That work has helped grow LOCOMOTIVE from seven people to nearly eighty across three continents.

My current focus is context governance, evaluation, and SOP and skill development: giving agentic harnesses access to clear, high-signal context, RBAC-safe access to marketing data, and workflows developed by experts. I want to automate the mundane, so that there is time for the extraordinary.

What's stayed constant is the engineering instinct: read the system, model it, test it, and let the data, not the hype, tell you what's true.

02 · What I work on

Where search is heading next.

Technical SEO at scale

Crawling, rendering, indexing, canonicalization, log-file analysis, and Core Web Vitals across large, JavaScript-heavy sites and documentation properties.

AEO & GEO

Answer Engine and Generative Engine Optimization: structuring knowledge so LLM-powered search can retrieve, ground, and trust it. I argue the future of SEO is governance, not volume.

Applied ML & LLMs

From early word vectors to today's frontier models: embeddings, entity graphs, query classification, anomaly detection, and forecasting applied to real search problems.

Agentic systems & MCP

Building agent tooling and Model Context Protocol servers that give agents safe, deterministic access to data, plus the context governance and evaluation that keep them reliable.

Experimentation

Designing controlled tests on websites: hypotheses, statistical rigor, and results translated into decisions, not dashboards.

Data engineering

Search Console to BigQuery pipelines, GA4, and the analytics plumbing that turns messy signal into something a team can act on.

Tools I work with

Languages & libraries
PythonJavaScriptSQLReact / Next.jsPandasNumPyPyTorch
AI, LLMs & agents
RAGManaged agentsHugging FaceLangChainFastMCPLLM RouterVertex AIRunPodCursorOpenClaw
Cloud & infrastructure
GCP Cloud RunCloudflare WorkersRenderDockerSupabaseLogflareTailscale
SEO & search intelligence
AhrefsSemrushSistrixSimilarwebScreaming FrogSearch ConsoleNozzle.ioAthenaHQProfoundDataForSEO
Data, crawling & platforms
Bespoke crawling & extractionBright DataScrapingBeeWebPageTestSpeedCurveLooker StudioLinearHubSpotAdobe Experience ManagerBuilder.io

03 · Selected work

Open source & tooling.

A sample of the tools I've built and shared. Eighty-plus repositories live on GitHub.

  • Python

    TechSEO Crawler

    A miniature, three-domain internet built on GitHub Pages and Wikipedia, plus a crawler that crawls, renders, and indexes it: a sandbox for understanding how search engines actually work.

  • BERT · NLP

    querycat

    Uses Apriori and FP-Growth to categorize search queries, and BERT to visualize period-over-period change. Embeddings applied to keyword strategy before it was common.

  • Forecasting

    ForecastGA

    A Python tool that forecasts Google Analytics data using several popular time-series models behind one clean interface.

  • GCP

    GSC Logger

    A Google Search Console logger for App Engine that quietly archives Search Analytics data to BigQuery, solving the 16-month data-retention problem.

  • Shingling

    Screaming Frog Shingling

    A shingling algorithm over Screaming Frog text extraction to measure content duplication across a crawled site.

  • LLM · MCP

    MCP & agentic tooling

    Recent work building Model Context Protocol servers and agent workflows that connect LLMs to live data sources, internal tools, and SEO datasets at agency scale.

04 · Writing & talks

Selected work.

I write and speak about search, machine learning, and where the two collide, mostly at Search Engine Land, the LOCOMOTIVE blog, and Red Hat's opensource.com.

05 · Speaking & community

Building the room, not just speaking in it.

I co-organize Tech SEO Connect, a conference for the technical end of the search field, and the Triangle SEO Meetup here in Raleigh.

I'm a founder and moderator of /r/TechSEO, a community of more than 52,000 technical SEOs, an author at Search Engine Land, and a frequent conference speaker. Recently I spoke at SEO Week 2025 in New York on LLMs versus traditional search, and I'll be back on stage at Tech SEO Connect 2025 in Durham, NC. I care about the craft of the field and the people learning it.

06 · Contact

Let's talk.

Open to conversations about technical SEO, applied ML, and the future of search. The fastest way to reach me is email.