Illyism.wiki

A reference biography

Biography

Ilias Ism

Belgian software engineer, SaaS founder, and search strategist

Last reviewed · 23 references

Ilias Ism (born 1993), also known by his full name Ilias Ismanalijev and the handle illyism, is a Belgian software engineer, SaaS founder, and search strategist.⁠[1] He is known for building compounding organic distribution and agentic SEO systems for software products. He co-founded the Ghent-based HR platform Officient, which the Dutch business software group Exact acquired in 2020,⁠[2] and he is the creator of LinkDR, GenPPT, SEO Roast, and the open-source seo-skills library.⁠[3]⁠[4]

Born in Kyrgyzstan and raised in Ghent, Ism began as a web developer and open-source author before moving into company building.⁠[1] Since 2021 he has run a portfolio of small software products that grow mainly through organic search, and has published essays, interviews, and open-source tooling on link acquisition, programmatic SEO, and visibility in AI search systems. He is the author of Blitz SEO, a book on organic search, AI answer engines, and the agentic web.⁠[5]

Early life

Ism was born in 1993 in Kyrgyzstan and grew up in Ghent, in the Belgian province of East Flanders. He holds Belgian nationality.⁠[1] By his own account he finished school in Belgium at 18 with training in graphic design and web development, and began freelancing for remote clients in place of salaried work at home.⁠[6]

His early work was published under his full name, Ilias Ismanalijev, which still appears in photo credits and in some interviews.⁠[7]⁠[8] He works professionally as Ilias Ism, the form used on his website and products.⁠[3]

Career

Early open-source and web projects (2013 to 2016)

Between 2013 and 2016 Ism released a series of consumer web projects and open-source tools, and organized developer meetups in Ghent. He has described building open-source tools with Vue.js, React, and Next.js during his early career.⁠[6]

How Clothes Should Fit Creator · Former

Illustrated web guide to the fit of men’s shirts, jackets, trousers, and jeans. Business Insider featured the guide in January 2014 and credited its illustrations to Ilias Ismanalijev.⁠[7]

Reddit Music Player Creator · Open source

Free, open-source web application that builds a continuous music stream from links posted to Reddit communities.

GMusic-MPD Author · Open source

Open-source helper script that connects GMusicProxy to the Music Player Daemon (MPD).

Vue.js Belgium Organizer · Former

Developer meetup series for the Vue.js JavaScript framework, which Ism organized and hosted in Ghent.

Officient (2017 to 2020)

In 2017 Ism co-founded Officient, a cloud HR software company based in Ghent, with Michiel Bearelle, Willem Delbare, and Michiel Crommelinck, and served as its chief technology officer.⁠[1] The platform let employers manage payroll data, contracts, absences, fleet records, performance reviews, and personnel files in one system, and it integrated with Belgian payroll providers.⁠[2]

Within three years Officient reported more than 4,000 client companies, which together employed more than 35,000 people. In September 2020 the Dutch business software group Exact announced that it was acquiring the company.⁠[2] Later profiles date the acquisition to October 2020.⁠[1]

Software portfolio and search systems (2021 to present)

After the acquisition Ism turned to building and operating independent software products, combining product engineering with programmatic search distribution.⁠[1] He documents the shared method on his website: pages generated from structured data, comparison and listicle content, and links placed on pages that already rank.⁠[3]⁠[9]

LinkDR Founder · Active

Backlink outreach and authority-placement platform. It concentrates on securing links on pages that already rank in organic search, and is sold as outreach software and as a managed service.⁠[10]

GenPPT Co-creator · Active · since 2024

AI presentation generator co-created with Siyabend Ozdemir and launched in 2024.⁠[1] It turns notes, outlines, and PDF documents into slide decks that export to PowerPoint or PDF.⁠[11] Its revenue is published on TrustMRR, which lists more than $180,000 in Stripe-verified revenue.⁠[12] By Ism’s account almost all of its traffic comes from organic search and ChatGPT, and a single listicle placement produced its best revenue month.⁠[1]

SEO Roast Founder · Active

Productized service that delivers a recorded video teardown and audit of a software company’s website and search performance.⁠[13]

seo-skills Author · Open source

MIT-licensed collection of 30 deterministic SKILL.md workflows for the coding agents Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex, published as Illyism/seo-skills on GitHub and browsable at il.ly/skills. Each workflow encodes an SEO task as a fixed procedure that ends in a pull request or a file in the user’s repository.⁠[4]⁠[14]

Scribiz Creator · Active

Transcription tool that produces transcripts, summaries, and subtitle files from video and audio.

XOutlier Creator · Active

Browser extension that ranks the posts of an X account by how far they outperform the account’s usual reach.

Awesome Tools Creator · Active

Directory of software reviews organized by category.

AI SEO Tracker Founder · Active

Tool that tracks whether AI search systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews mention and cite a brand.⁠[3]

MagicSpace SEO Founder · Active

Boutique technical SEO consultancy for software companies.⁠[1]

Ideas and frameworks

Ism’s published work treats search marketing for software companies as an engineering problem with measurable outputs. Three ideas recur across his essays, interviews, and open-source releases.

Blitz SEO

Blitz SEO is the name Ism gave, in a May 2025 essay, to an iterative concentration strategy for search marketing.⁠[15] In place of publishing a high volume of top-of-funnel articles across hundreds of keywords, an operator selects one to three high-intent commercial queries at a time and directs all effort at the single page chosen to rank for them: on-page changes, internal links, new backlinks, and contextual posts on Reddit, Quora, and X. The essay presents the work as a 30-day sprint of daily iterations, in which each change is logged and the page’s position is checked every day, and reports that the sprint it describes moved a page from position 11 to position 3 on Google.⁠[15]

The method is developed at book length in Blitz SEO, which extends it from Google rankings to AI answer engines and the agentic web.⁠[5] The book treats the live search results page for each query as the brief for the format of the page to build. The operator seeks a place in the listicles and community discussions that already rank for the query, and publishes product comparison pages backed by first-hand “proof of work”. Links and partnerships are chosen for the search traffic of the page that carries them, in preference to domain-wide authority scores. The book also maps five stages of buyer awareness across social and video surfaces, and recommends exposing structured facts, an llms.txt file, SKILL.md playbooks, and actions reachable through a command-line interface (CLI), an API, or the Model Context Protocol (MCP), so that AI answer engines and autonomous agents can retrieve and act on them.⁠[5]

Ranking-page link acquisition

Ism advocates choosing link targets by the search performance of the individual page. Backlinks and listicle insertions are sought on URLs that already rank in positions 1 to 20 for commercial queries, and Domain Rating (DR) is treated as one signal among several, alongside page-level search traffic, topical relevance, referral clicks, and the placement of the link.⁠[16] He set out the method in episode 1210 of The Edward Show, hosted by Edward Sturm, where he said he would pay between $1,000 and $2,000 for a link from a suitable ranking page.⁠[16]

Generative engine optimization and agentic SEO

Ism has written and spoken on generative engine optimization (GEO), the practice of making content likely to be cited in answers from retrieval-augmented AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.⁠[17] His recommendations center on clean server-rendered HTML, first-hand data and receipts, comparison pages, and presence in the third-party listicles and directories that these systems cite.⁠[17]⁠[8]

He uses the term agentic SEO for search work carried out by coding agents inside a site’s repository. The seo-skills library encodes this as executable SKILL.md files, including a triage rule that sorts every finding into four tiers (FATAL → REVENUE → COMPOUNDING → FLUFF). The first tier covers problems that block crawling, indexing, or rendering of a revenue page, and lower tiers wait until the higher ones are empty.⁠[14]⁠[4]

Writing and media

Ism publishes essays and guides on his website, il.ly, covering search distribution, programmatic SEO, and product building.⁠[3]⁠[9] He contributed an article on content strategy to Entrepreneur in December 2023,⁠[18] where he has an author page,⁠[19] and he is listed as an author on the StoryChief blog.⁠[20] He also posts search experiments and product metrics on X and LinkedIn.⁠[21]⁠[22]

Interviews include In the Pit with Cody Schneider (July 2025), an episode on AI search in which he is credited as Ilias Ismanalijev,⁠[8] and The Edward Show (October 2026), on paid link placements.⁠[16] Founder profiles of Ism appear on IndieMakerList,⁠[1] TrustMRR,⁠[12] and Inc.⁠[23]

Books

  • Blitz SEO: The Focused Playbook to Win Google, AI Search, and the Agentic Web Book on organic search, AI answer engines, and the agentic web. It covers focused sprints on bottom-of-funnel keywords, five-stage buyer journeys across search, social, and video surfaces, product comparisons built on first-hand proof of work, authority earned through links on pages that already rank, brand consensus in AI answer engines, and discovery that autonomous agents can execute. First Edition

Working life

Ism is a location-independent founder and has written about choosing remote work at the start of his career.⁠[6] He keeps roots in Ghent and has worked for extended periods from Switzerland, Chiang Mai, Bangkok, Barcelona, San Francisco, and New York.

Photographs

Ilias Ism wearing dark-framed glasses and a dark shirt standing beside Kasra Dash in front of a conference backdrop in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Fig. 1 Ilias Ism (left) with SEO entrepreneur Kasra Dash in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in November 2026.
Group photo of the Officient team in blue company T-shirts holding an Officient flag in front of a wooden treehouse. Handwritten text reads “Our 1st year” and an arrow points to Ilias Ism in the back row.
Fig. 2 With the Officient team in Ghent, Belgium, marking the company’s first year.
Ilias Ism sitting on a mountain rock formation with a laptop open on his knee, overlooking an alpine valley and lake in Switzerland.
Fig. 3 Working from a laptop in the Swiss Alps.
Close portrait of Ilias Ism smiling, wearing round dark-framed glasses and a navy T-shirt against a yellow backdrop.
Fig. 4 Portrait from the same studio session as the lead image.

References

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j “Ilias Ism: GenPPT Creator, Revenue & Now”. IndieMakerList. Updated 29 October 2026. indiemakerlist.com. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  2. ↑ a b c Rani Cromphout (24 September 2020). “Exact neemt Gentse HR-cloudsoftware leverancier over” [Exact acquires Ghent HR cloud software supplier]. Made in Oost-Vlaanderen. In Dutch. made-in.be. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  3. ↑ a b c d e “Ilias Ism: Founder & Builder”. il.ly. il.ly. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  4. ↑ a b c “Illyism/seo-skills”. GitHub. github.com. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  5. ↑ a b c Ilias Ism. “Blitz SEO: The Focused Playbook to Win Google, AI Search, and the Agentic Web”. il.ly. il.ly. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  6. ↑ a b c Ilias Ism (2 August 2023). “Why I Chose a Location Independent Lifestyle”. il.ly. il.ly. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  7. ↑ a b Hayley Peterson (17 January 2014). “How Men’s Clothes Should Fit”. Business Insider. businessinsider.com. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  8. ↑ a b c Cody Schneider (28 July 2025). “AI SEO Crash Course: Pick One Keyword and Build Brand Mentions”. In the Pit with Cody Schneider (Apple Podcasts). podcasts.apple.com. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  9. ↑ a b Ilias Ism (22 November 2023). “What is Programmatic SEO & How to Do It (with Examples)”. il.ly. il.ly. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  10. ↑ “Managed Backlink Building Service for Google & AI Search”. LinkDR. linkdr.com. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  11. ↑ “AI Presentation Maker & PowerPoint Generator”. GenPPT. genppt.com. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  12. ↑ a b “Ilias Ism (@illyism), founder profile”. TrustMRR. trustmrr.com. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  13. ↑ “Video SEO Audits for SaaS Founders”. SEO Roast. seoroast.com. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  14. ↑ a b Ilias Ism (12 November 2026). “30 Open-Source SEO Skills for Claude Code & Cursor (2026)”. il.ly. il.ly. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  15. ↑ a b Ilias Ism (2 May 2025). “Blitz SEO: the 30-day sprint to rank one page”. il.ly. il.ly. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  16. ↑ a b c Edward Sturm (27 October 2026). “The Backlinks Worth Paying $2,000 For (w/ Ilias Ism)”. The Edward Show, episode 1210 (YouTube). youtube.com. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  17. ↑ a b Ilias Ism (30 July 2025). “What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?”. il.ly. il.ly. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  18. ↑ Ilias Ism (6 December 2023). “10 Creative Content Ideas Inspired by Gary Vee”. Entrepreneur. entrepreneur.com. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  19. ↑ “Ilias Ism, author page”. Entrepreneur. entrepreneur.com. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  20. ↑ “Ilias Ism, author page”. StoryChief. storychief.io. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  21. ↑ “Ilias Ism (@illyism)”. X. x.com. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  22. ↑ “Ilias Ism”. LinkedIn. linkedin.com. Retrieved 12 November 2026.
  23. ↑ “Ilias Ism, profile”. Inc. inc.com. Retrieved 12 November 2026.