AI Thoughts

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 […]

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

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” —

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

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.

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

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

Every SEO has been there. You present a clear fix to a problem, “Put the FDIC disclosure in text on the Certificate Deposit product page”, and instead of agreement, the resistance begins: On the surface, these sound like fair questions. In reality, they’re stall tactics. They’re symptoms of something more profound: organizational drag, the cultural,

Turning the Signpost Into an Exit Ramp In Part 1, we reframed the collapse of the continuum. In Part 2, we introduced the signpost metaphor: visibility without action is just scenery. Now comes the tactical fix: embed Intent Connectors that transform signposts into exit ramps back into your ecosystem. Now comes the practical question: How