From equine-assisted learning to AI recommendation.

Most people in this space showed up in the last eighteen months with a new title and a lot of confidence. Therese came from equine-assisted learning, which sounds like a hard left turn until you see the overlap. Both jobs come down to the same thing: communicate clearly with something that can't tell you what it's thinking, or get nothing back. A horse reacts to noise. It only gives you the result you want when your signal is clear. AI works the same way. The market is loud right now. Clarity is what actually makes AI recommend you.

THE FULL STORY

Therese Grittner founded TaG Makes on Johns Island, Charleston. Her own site started at an ARO Score™ of 20 out of 100. She rebuilt it with the exact methodology she now uses for clients. Today it scores 94 and ranks #1 on Perplexity, Google AI, Gemini, and ChatGPT for "AI search optimization Charleston," ahead of agencies with full teams and far bigger budgets. Every test run in incognito, no history, no memory, because a ranking you can't reproduce in a clean session isn't real.

That number is the point. She didn't read about what works. She ran the experiment on the one business she could afford to get wrong, her own, and she can show you the before and after.

Outside the work, Therese is raising a seven-year-old daughter, and the two of them travel as often as they can. Closer to home there are the horses (Snuff, Briggs, and Roady) and the dogs (Kaija and Puddle). The animals keep the work honest. You can't fake clear communication with a horse, and you can't fake it with a machine reading your structured data. Both only respond to what's actually there.

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Verification Report · tagmakessc.com

ARO SCORE NOW 94

STARTED AT 20 / 100

PLATFORMS RANKED #1 #1

TEST METHOD Incognito / Clean Session

LOCATION Johns Island, Charleston SC

Every ranking test run in incognito with no history or memory. Results documented on the ARO Index results page.

View results on ARO Index →

Therese Grittner tested this on her own business before selling it to anyone.

From equine-assisted learning to AI recommendation.

See the data behind the claim.