About Lauren M. Wilson
Lauren is a person who approaches her work with an appreciation that every topic is always—always—more complex than it seems. It is in the folds of complexity, the threads of nuance, and the mending of contradictions that she weaves together meaning as an author, a search strategist, and a curious human being.
How Lauren Got Here
After earning a Bachelor of Commerce in Marketing at Montreal’s McGill University and working in the environmental non-profit sphere, Lauren decided to switch gears and did chef training at George Brown Chef School in Toronto, Canada. She has since worked in various capacities in the food and hospitality industry in both Toronto and New York City, and it was in the world of food that she got her start writing.
She has built a career on tumbling down cultural rabbit holes. Her work has focused on digesting big topics and distilling them into fun and approachable formats, whether they be freelance articles or fully-realized books.
Five Published Books
Lauren Marita Wilson writes under the name Lauren M. Wilson. She is the author of five books, including the bestsellers The Art of Eating Through the Zombie Apocalypse: A Cookbook and Culinary Survival Guide, The Walking Dead: The Official Cookbook and Survival Guide, and Healing with CBD: How Cannabidiol Can Transform Your Health Without the High. Most recently, Lauren wrote The CBD Solution: Wellness and The CBD Solution: Living.
Two of the are survival cookbooks wrapped up in the premise of a zombie apocalypse. The other three are science-forward books aimed at untangling the knotted balls of misunderstanding surrounding the Cannabis sativa L. plant family, two written in partnership with Snoop Dogg’s media outlet MERRY JANE and Chronicle Books. She has spent much of the last decade working to move the cannabis conversation forward through education.
From Books to Search Engine Optimization
Writing about CBD in 2017 meant writing for people who had already gone looking and come back empty. Her readers were not short on information, they were short on anyone willing to separate what was actually known from what was being sold to them.
Working out what those readers were really asking, and in what order they needed to hear it, is how a book gets structured. It is also how a content strategy gets built.
Lauren started practising search engine optimization in 2020, as a freelance writer taking SEO briefs from brands who had already worked out which questions they needed answered. But two years of that is a useful education, and she moved into search full-time in 2022.
Director of SEO at MediaJel
Lauren is currently Director of SEO at MediaJel, a digital marketing agency specializing in ad tech for cannabis, hemp, and other regulated industries. She leads a cross-functional team and owns organic and AI search strategy across a client portfolio that runs from multi-state dispensary operators to national ecommerce to B2B software.
Her work there has been less about producing content one piece at a time and more about building the systems that produce it: an AI-assisted production workflow that cut time-to-publish roughly in half without giving up brand voice or regulatory compliance, and the editorial standards underneath it. These living standards encode how search actually behaves right now, covering query fan-out, LLM retrieval versus generation, and what makes a page eligible to be cited at all.
Her focus is now heavily on AI search, and what happens to a person’s search journey when the answer arrives before the click. She built MediaJel’s practice for it and the measurement underneath it, bespoke GA4 tracking and recurring AI Overview visibility analysis, at a point when the platforms offered no native way to measure any of it.
Lauren is a certified Google Cloud Generative AI Leader, and is currently working through Python, pandas and SQL, the languages analytics and AI tooling are both built in. Search leadership is moving toward people who can read the systems and not only their outputs.
Why Words Matter More Now Than Ever
Search engines were built on words, and for a long time they were built on words very literally. A page ranked because it contained the string a person typed, which is why an entire industry once spent its days counting keyword density. Google has spent the two decades since getting better at it: synonyms, then entities, then intent, then models that read a query as a sentence rather than a bag of terms. Large language models sit at the far end of that same line. They fetch relevant sources, they synthesize across these sources, and then they generate an answer. What they do not do is replace the retrieval step.
Many AI tools still sit on top of a search index. Some vendors built their own and some licence someone else’s, but none of them answer from nothing: a set of related searches runs first, against an index, under the ordinary rules of search visibility, and the model writes its answer from what comes back. The interface changed. The index did not go anywhere.
So the words now have to do two jobs. They still have to get the page retrieved, which has been and continues to be the work of a traditional search index, and is still substantially a matching problem. And they have to hold up when something that actually comprehends them reads the page and decides whether it answers the question at hand. The second job used to be done by humans on the SERP, but now AI does it for us and it puts more weight on the writing itself than search has ever placed on it before.
The work of a writer has always been to take something complicated, work out what a person actually needs from it, and hand it over in an order they can use. Lauren has done that for readers holding a book, for readers who arrived from a search box, and now for readers who may only ever see a single sentence of it quoted back inside an answer. The delivery keeps changing. The work does not.
Lauren lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her mischievous cat Sheldon.
For book queries, please contact Lauren’s agent Deborah Schneider. For freelance queries contact Lauren directly.