Blog
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The Smartest Thing You Can Do in SEO Is Get Dumber on Purpose
Most SEO teams get worse results because they are too clever. Almost everything that matters comes from two levers: the best content you can make and as much offsite coverage as you can earn. Do those relentlessly and ignore the rest.
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Almost Every AI Visibility Case Study You Have Read Is Superstition
AI search visibility is one of the fuzziest numbers in marketing, and we keep treating it like hard proof. Move fast on intuition when you have to, just stop pretending the dashboard settled anything.
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What is Narrative Seeding?
Narrative seeding is when a story gets planted in smaller outlets first, wrapped in a friendlier frame, so that by the time it reaches the big papers the framing is already settled.
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You Cannot Opt Out of AI With a Line in Your Robots.txt
Cloudflare added a Content Signals directive that lets you tell AI to leave your content alone. Google just confirmed no crawler or LLM honors it, so all it really gives you is the feeling of having opted out.
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Your AI Visibility Dashboard Is Measuring the Wrong Thing
Citation counts are a bad explanation of AI visibility. An AI answer can recommend your brand four times and hand the citation to someone else. Measure mentions, impressions, and outcomes instead.
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The Labor Theory of Knowledge
There's a belief I keep running into, usually from people who are proud of how hard they worked to learn something. They say you can't really know a field unless you've struggled through it yourself.…
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The Myth of the Data-Driven Discovery: A Popperian Critique of Induction
Most people think science comes from "induction", which is the process of distilling laws from repeated observations.
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Content Writing Guidelines: Writing for Human Trust (Which Drives AI Citations)
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The End of Best Practices: How AI Forces Us to Finally Be Creative
I've gotten some reactions from people who have sort of “midwit” interpreted some of my past writing as anti-AI, but that is completely wrong and I love using AI and I think it’s great.
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Moana is a story about today
The island gives us what we need. And no one leaves.
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The Myth of STEM and the "Hard" Sciences
People assume that STEM fields are somehow more valuable or serious because they are "reality-based," while the humanities are merely matters of opinion.
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The "freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences" fallacy
The "freedom of speech isn’t freedom from consequences" line has become one of the more common online canned responses in debate. It's a conversation-ender designed to sound like common sense. But it's actually a rhetorical…
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Do LLMs trust some sources more than others?
The short answer is yes. While system prompts generally do not contain a list of specific trusted publishers with associated scores (e.g., "Weight the New York Times at 1.0 and a Blogspot site at 0.2"),…
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The culture of progress
For 99% of human history, our default culture has been static. Most people never saw any real improvements in their lives. And if nothing can improve, why even try?
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Simplifying SEO & AI Search
To show up in AI search results, you’ll need to make a few tweaks to your SEO program. The good news is if you’re already doing SEO at a high level (like my clients), then…
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Dunning-Kruger But for Smart People
Smart people may be dumber than dumb people, because they have access to more ways to fool themselves and overestimate their understanding.
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Cultural problems preventing progress
One thing these beliefs have in common is to the person who holds them, it really feels like they are doing something positive. In actuality the beliefs are self-defeating and the according behaviors stifle progress…
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Big Progress
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Why You Need an Expert to Manage Your Link Building
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How AI Changed the SEO Content Game (And What Still Matters)
For years, producing SEO content has been a grind. Companies aiming to dominate organic search faced an uphill battle to meet the demand for fresh, high-quality content.