The Thought I Can’t Shake Since my last rant, “The New Gold Rush – What AI Search is SO Easy to Game,” about how easy it’s become to game AI search, my inbox hasn’t slowed down.Every day, I get another pitch: “We can make your content top the AI results!” Half sound like hustlers from […]
The Question That’s Been Bugging Me Lately, I’ve been inundated with emails, three to ten a week, from self-proclaimed “GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AI SEO” firms promising their tools will generate magical content and listicles that “instantly rank” at the top of generative search results. It’s baffling. These people sound precisely like the content
For decades, the web has relied on a fragile courtesy system called robots.txt. It was never law, never binding, and never secure — but it worked well enough because major search engines like Google and Bing chose to respect it. Now, Cloudflare wants to extend this convention with a new directive called Content Signals. The
Cloudflare’s Content Signals: A Courtesy Rule Becomes an AI Compliance Weapon Read More »
From Skepticism to Stress Test If you’ve been following the AI search chatter lately, you’ve heard the mantra: “You need to build your brand,” and one of the top tactics is to ensure your brand is listing and promoting it everywhere. I’ve never been against brand-building, but I’ve been wary of this recent advice to
The Brand Gate in AI Search: What Vodka Taught Me About Eligibility Read More »
Stop Chasing Shadows in AI Search The AI search industry loves its mantras. “Entities matter.” “Brand signals are everything.” “Google rewards authority.” These phrases get repeated like gospel at conferences and webinars. But for all the energy poured into them — and for all the content teams who’ve slaved over creating “the right signals” —
In-Model vs. RAG Knowledge: Why the Distinction Matters for GEO and AI Search Read More »
When people talk about Google’s dominance in AI, the story usually starts with scale: billions of searches a day, petabytes of data, and cutting-edge compute. That story isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete. The truth is, crawling the web — as vast as it is — was never going to be enough on its own. Crawls
Google’s AI Moat: Why Crawling Alone Wasn’t Enough Read More »
Most people think search engines simply “look up” the words you type. Type “best CD rates”, and it outputs a neat list of banks with interest rates. But under the hood, before any ranking, scoring, or answer-writing happens, your query is subjected to a quiet but critical process: Eligibility Gates. These gates act as pass/fail filters.
Eligibility Gates: The Hidden Filters Behind AI Answers Read More »
A Query Is Not Just Words For decades, search engines treated a query as a handful of words to match. Type “best CD rates” and the machine would go hunting for pages with those exact words. That era is coming to an end. Today, a query is more than a string of words. It’s a
From Words to Answers: How AI Handles Queries and Prompts Read More »
“Let Me Get Right on This” That was my snarky headline for a keynote presentation where I shared an interesting request from a large industry trade group. For more than a decade, marketers have been chasing the mythical easy button. The fantasy goes like this: Back in 2013, this fantasy sounded like “all-in-one SEO dashboards.”
The Myth of AI and the Easy Button Read More »
Forget the hype. Forget the dashboards and “AI SEO kits.” Before you spend a dollar, you need to know one thing: how AI engines describe your brand today. This isn’t about buying tools. It’s about running a quick, no-nonsense test to see your current state. You can do it in 30 minutes with nothing more
The 30-Minute GEO Reality Check Read More »