Therese Grittner was the owner nobody could find, so she built the instrument and measured it.

Empathy. Therese founded TaG Makes on Johns Island, Charleston, and she knows the spot an owner is in when a buyer asks AI for a business like theirs and the answer is somebody else. Her own site was that business. Nobody could tell her whether AI would pick her, and nobody had a way to check.

Authority. So she built the instrument. She created ARO™ and runs the ARO Index™, then proved it on herself first. The original-method read of her own site was 20 out of 100. She rebuilt it with the exact methodology she now uses for clients, and the Sept 22, 2026 read is an ARO Score™ of 94, #1 in Charleston, with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity all recommending it (4 of 4 models). Every test runs in incognito with no history and no memory, because a ranking you can't reproduce in a clean session isn't real. She can show you the before and after.

Now. Therese is an AI Recommendation Researcher. She runs the Index, and she does the builds through TaG Makes, so the person who measures is the person who fixes and then re-measures.

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.

She talks about AI the way most people should but don't.

No hype, no jargon for its own sake. Therese brings the perspective of someone who came to AI sideways, through horses and equine learning, and ended up building a methodology that measures what AI recommends. She talks about what AI actually is, what it means for small businesses, and the bigger questions underneath all of it: how we communicate, what clarity costs, and why the technology is only as good as the human signal it reads.

If you're hosting a podcast and want a guest who has done the work and can hold a real conversation about where AI is taking us, reach out.