Digital Surfer promotes Ryan Chilton to General Manager to lead its next growth phase

Digital Surfer, an award-winning Australian digital marketing agency, has built its reputation by helping clients Level Up. Now the Gold Coast-based search agency is taking its own advice, promoting Ryan Chilton (pictured above) to General Manager and handing him day-to-day operations as founders Peter and Renee Curran step back to focus on business growth.

Founded and built by the Currans, Digital Surfer has grown from a two-person operation into a full-service agency serving growth-minded businesses across Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and internationally. Promoting Chilton from within represents the first structural step in a deliberate growth plan, freeing the founders to concentrate on strategy, client relationships and service innovation while a dedicated GM manages operations.

“Promoting Ryan to General Manager is a landmark moment for us,” said Peter Curran, Co-Founder of Digital Surfer. “For years, Renee and I have run every part of this business ourselves. Ryan has earned this. He’s grown with us, done award-winning work, and knows our clients and our team inside out. Handing him the day-to-day means we can pour our energy into what actually moves the needle for our clients: sharper strategy, better results, and staying ahead of where search is heading. It’s a step up for the whole agency.”

Ryan Chilton is a two-time APAC Search Awards Emerging Talent winner who has come up through the business, providing clients with continuity and capability. In the GM seat, that’s expected to translate into faster response times, more consistent delivery, and greater capacity to take on ambitious clients.

“This business has built something rare, a genuine partnership approach backed by real results,” said Ryan Chilton, General Manager of Digital Surfer. “My role is to protect what makes that special while building the structure that lets us do it for more clients, more consistently. A big part of that is making sure we own the whole digital space for clients, Google, local results and, increasingly, the AI answers in Google and LLM’s. Developing our services to keep up with this is key to producing further results for our clients.”

The timing is deliberate. Search is changing fast, and the agencies that stay relevant are the ones keeping up with AI and how it’s impacting real clients’ businesses. Digital Surfer is working on building its AI SEO services to make clients the source that those answers cite. Chilton’s remit is to turn traditional SEO and AI from emerging ideas into repeatable, scalable services.

The appointment of a General Manager is as much about the team as it is about clients. Chilton’s leadership is set to give Digital Surfer’s search specialists clearer direction and stronger support, helping the people behind the results grow alongside the agency, and positioning the whole business to scale without losing the personalised, results-led approach that sets it apart.

“I’ve been part of the Digital Surfer story for a while now, and this business has built something rare, a genuine partnership approach backed by real results,” said Ryan Chilton, General Manager of Digital Surfer. “My job is to protect what makes that special while building the structure that lets us do it for more clients, more consistently. Every improvement we make to how the agency runs should show up as a better experience and better outcomes for our clients and for the team behind the work.”

For Digital Surfer, the through-line is its brand promise: Level Up. Investing in its own operational foundations, the agency argues, is what lets it keep doing that for the businesses it works with, at greater scale and without losing the partnership approach that set it apart in the first place.

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