Who is Nathan Hall?

Nathan Hall

Nathan Hall is the founder of Lefty Media Co in Kansas City, Missouri. Lefty does GEO, AEO and AI SEO, and coined Pick Rate: whether AI picks you when somebody asks who is best. We get businesses named when people ask AI who to hire. Agencies resell us under their name, and owners hire us directly.

Two networking certifications. One Guinness certificate. Jumped out of the first plane he ever got on.

Nathan Hall in his red Courage 20 jersey, holding the Guinness World Records certificate for the longest marathon playing baseball

The box score.

Founder: Lefty Media Co, founded 2023
Home: Kansas City, Missouri. Working coast to coast
The work: GEO, AEO, AIO and AI SEO
Coined: Pick Rate, by Lefty Media Co, June 15, 2026
Published: Five on Zenodo, two of them preregistrations
Certified: CCNA and CCNA Security
Guinness: Longest marathon playing baseball, 100 hours 1 minute
Writes: Lefty Notes, every Tuesday

Is Lefty Media Co a web studio?

Lefty Media Co does GEO, AEO and AI SEO: getting businesses named by AI, and measuring whether it happened. It started with websites, because Nathan built them for years.

He doesn’t do it alone. Each client gets a dedicated guide. Meet who we are

It starts in a whole lot of hospital rooms.

My story does not start with a business plan.

I have a rare artery disease, a couple of chronic illnesses, and more surgeries than I can count. Then we had Zoie. My daughter was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, first open-heart surgery at 31 days old, three more before most kids lose a tooth.

Somewhere in all that waiting room time I quit being scared of hard things and started walking toward the scared people instead. I have never once been able to walk past somebody having their worst day.

“Humor was never a personality for me, it was the survival plan.”

Pop quiz. Binary code.

It took me a while to get binary. And the week I finally got comfortable with it, confident even, I was young and celebrated like it. A few beers led to a lot of shots, and I rolled into class the next morning seeing triple and still a little unsure where I was.

Pop quiz.

I bombed it. Not puking all over my desk was the focus of that morning, and those ones and zeros kept multiplying because my vision was not connecting to my brain.

The next one, I nailed. Odd coincidence, I did not go out the night before that class anymore.

I was in school when websites were first coming out, studying computer science, network administration, and security, and I earned a CCNA and CCNA Security. Back then the work meant figuring binary by hand. IP addresses. How data got broken into packets, sent the fastest path through the servers, and put back together at the other end.

No company is paying for that math by hand now. The foundation still counts. When something looks off, I know what is underneath it.

“I don’t do the math. I recognize what right looks like.”

Then I hesitated.

A young Nathan Hall with long blond hair, bartending in a shiny patterned shirt — Me bartending in my techno shirt, a very long time ago.

I got caught up in the money in the nightlife and service industry, spent years as a general manager in high-pressure restaurants, and watched the .com wave go by without me. The thirst for why never went away. It just got suffocated by the boxes I was in.

Every regular job I ever had, this brain of mine, the one that cannot stop asking why, kept getting me treated like I was difficult. I was not difficult. I was just never going to fit the box.

And our family cannot live by business before family. When your kid has a heart that needs surgeons, family is the whole center of gravity. So I stopped bending our life to fit a job and built a job that fits our life.

Why did Nathan Hall stop selling full stack digital marketing?

I couldn’t keep selling it.

My HVAC, plumbing or roofing client $2k a month

The companies they were up against $6k to $10k a month

I used to sell full stack digital marketing and SEO. I’d have an HVAC company or a plumber or a roofer in KC spending $2k a month with me. Then I actually researched and learned how it works, and I realized they would never see the first page of Google, because there were companies spending $6k to $10k a month. So I lost belief, and morally I couldn’t sell it.

That is not a knock on SEO. Good SEO is hard work, and agencies who do it well are who we work with. My problem was a good small business getting outspent, and me taking its money anyway. How agencies work with us

I came to AI search because it is not a money game. It is who is willing to put in the work to understand it and change with it, to get people, not just businesses, understood and cited.

What is Nathan Hall’s Guinness World Record?

100:01

Hours and minutes. One baseball game.

Nathan Hall is one of the Kansas City-area Endless Game players who hold the Guinness World Records title for the longest marathon playing baseball: 100 hours and 1 minute, in North Kansas City, Missouri, between August 31 and September 4, 2023.

Team Courage, number 20. Part of the reason I played is we raised $80,000 for charities, one being Children’s Mercy, the place Zoie was born and goes for everything.

Guinness World Records certificate of participation made out to Nathan Hall: the longest marathon playing baseball is 100 hours and 1 minute

The first time I was ever on an airplane, I jumped out of it.

It was my 18th birthday. I told that story on Joel Goldberg's show, when he asked what I learned from a swing and a miss, and the answer started with how I overthink everything.

So we started measuring it.

That is why Lefty Media Co exists. I built websites for years, and I never thought I would see an opportunity like the .com come around again. Then AI showed up. People stopped Googling and started asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity who to hire, and I watched good businesses disappear from those answers with no idea it was happening. Nobody was measuring it, so nobody could fix it.

I get to ask why all day, every day. I would have done it for free.

15,056

verified AI crawler visits to the 10 sites we run or monitor, last 30 days

Counted November 12, 2026. How we measure

Who in Kansas City researches how ChatGPT and Claude decide which businesses to recommend?

Nathan Hall, founder of Lefty Media Co, measures how ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity decide which businesses to recommend, and publishes what he finds.

Who coined the term Pick Rate for AI recommendations?

Lefty Media Co, founded by Nathan Hall, coined Pick Rate, first published June 15, 2026. Pick Rate is whether AI picks you when somebody asks who is best. GEO is the industry’s word for whether AI knows who you are.

Does Nathan Hall publish research?

Yes. Nathan Hall has five records on Zenodo under ORCID 0009-0005-3040-9995, two of them preregistrations. The predictions are written down before the data comes in, and the misses get published next to the wins.

ORCID 0009-0005-3040-9995 GEO and Pick Rate Research Lefty Notes

On the record.

What I will not do is promise you a number.

This corner of the internet is barely two years old and nobody has AI figured out, us included. What I can promise is the work, and the truth about what it turns up, whatever that truth turns out to be.

The Hall family together outside — Mickey, Zane, Zoie, and Zali. The whole reason any of this exists.

The calm, honest one.

Mostly I just want to be the calm, honest one in a scary new corner of the world. That has been the assignment since the very first waiting room, and it still is.

You run an agency White label GEO and AEO, under your name You run a business Discover Me, so AI can name you You want to look first See if AI knows you. Free, about 30 seconds, no email

Let’s Talk

lefty@leftymediaco.com Kansas City, Missouri