Notes on AI search,
SEO, and the
boring fundamentals.

15 Jun 26Explainer Bing AI Performance vs the third-party AI trackers.One source is measured, the others are modelled. When to trust which. → 14 Jun 26Explainer AI Overviews vs AI Mode: what the SEO difference actually is.Same foundation, different retrieval. The side-by-side on what to optimise for each. → 13 Jun 26Playbook How to rank in Google AI Mode.You don't rank in AI Mode, you get cited. The step-by-step playbook for getting there. → 13 Jun 26Playbook The prompts I use to test AI search visibility.A copy-paste set for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini, plus why they disagree. → 6 Jun 26Playbook Most link building is theatre. Here's what actually compounds.The tactics that dominated five years ago either don't work or actively harm you. → 6 Jun 26Explainer Your site looks fine in a browser. Googlebot sees something different.How the JS rendering pipeline works and what it means for indexation. → 5 Jun 26Playbook Your most important pages are probably the least linked.PageRank pools in the wrong places on most B2B sites. Here's how to fix it. → 5 Jun 26Explainer Most of your site isn't indexed. Here's why.Crawling and indexing are two separate processes. Conflating them leads to the wrong fix. → 4 Jun 26Series Training Data Is the New Ranking Factor: The Common Crawl AI Visibility Audit Explained.If a site isn't in the crawl, it isn't in the model. The upstream check most GEO frameworks miss. → 3 Jun 26Series Constitutional AI vs RLHF: Why the Alignment Method Affects What Gets Cited.ChatGPT and Claude are aligned differently. At the margin, that difference matters. → 3 Jun 26Series The GEO Documentation Gap: Why Three Platforms Haven't Told You How to Rank in Their Systems.Understanding why is more useful than waiting for guides that may never arrive. → 2 Jun 26Series Why the Bing AI Performance Report Is the Most Underused Tool in GEO.The only first-party citation dashboard in AI search, and almost nobody is using it. → 2 Jun 26Explainer Source-worthiness, explained for SEO teams.The off-site work that compounds in LLM citations. → 2 Jun 26Playbook When to merge, when to kill: a content portfolio decision tree.For the team staring at 8,000 URLs. → 2 Jun 26Essay The B2B IA mistakes that quietly kill organic.Three template-level fixes most teams miss. → 2 Jun 26Playbook Entity coverage maps: a working template.How I scope what models know, and don't, about a brand. → 2 Jun 26Essay Citation share is the new keyword ranking.Why the metric you report is about to change. → 2 Jun 26Opinion Why "AI SEO" advice on LinkedIn is mostly wrong.Theatre vs. work. A field guide. → 2 Jun 26Essay Why your Knowledge Panel is doing more SEO work than your homepage.The five-step audit I run before anything else. → 2 Jun 26Essay How to measure AI search ROI when there's no click to track.Four signals that hold up without last-click attribution. → 2 Jun 26Playbook The B2B GEO roadmap I'd build if I started today.Four phases, one prioritisation matrix, zero guesswork. → 1 Jun 26Series How to Be Surfaced in AI Search: What Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Perplexity's Own Documentation Actually Says.First-party guidance, synthesised and made actionable. → 1 Jun 26Series How Google AI Overviews and AI Mode Actually Work: Why Your SEO Rankings Don't Guarantee AI Visibility.The gap between organic rank and AI citation, explained. → 1 Jun 26Series The AI Search Race: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, and Perplexity. A Technical Timeline.How five different architectures approach the same retrieval problem. → 1 Jun 26Series What Is RAG: the Only Thing That Matters for AI Search.Retrieval-augmented generation, explained without the hype. → 1 Jun 26Series How Large Language Models Actually Work: Tokens, Context Windows, and Why Your Content Gets Ignored.What's happening inside the model when it reads your page. → 1 Jun 26Series Attention Is All You Need: The Google Paper That Accidentally Ended Google's Search Monopoly.The 2017 transformer paper and why it matters now. →