Essays & Notes

Notes on the new search.

How AI decides who to recommend, what it means for your company, and what actually changes who it picks. Written by the people doing the work — not a content calendar.

August 2026The New Search

Your buyers are asking AI before they ask you.

The first conversation about your company now happens in a box you can't see. Most companies find out about it years too late.

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July 2026The New Search

The report your web agency sends you, decoded.

Impressions are up. Enquiries are flat. The report doesn't explain why — because the report was never designed to.

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June 2026The Method

The quiet cost of a beautiful website.

Your website can win every design award and still lose every AI recommendation. Beauty and clarity are different things.

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June 2026The New Search

Who does AI actually recommend — and why?

When a buyer asks an AI assistant for a recommendation, it doesn't pick the best company. It picks the one it can understand most easily. That's a different list — and it can be changed.

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May 2026Visibility

You're not in the answer. Nobody told you.

The most expensive sentence your competitors will never see: when a buyer asks AI who to call, and your company simply isn't there. You didn't lose the sale. You never knew the question was asked.

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April 2026Strategy

Owned visibility, or rented visibility?

Paid search was rented visibility: it worked until it got more expensive. Social reach was rented too. The visibility that lasts is the kind you earn in the places you control — which is exactly the kind AI trusts.

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March 2026Positioning

Good, Better, Best — and the list AI gives buyers

Most companies are lost in a category of dozens of lookalikes. AI assistants were built to collapse that problem into three names. Being distinctive is no longer a marketing preference. It's the highest-priority factor in who gets named.

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February 2026The Method

What AI is skeptical of — and what it trusts

Models are professionally suspicious. They've been trained on a web full of claims, so they look for the same evidence a careful buyer would: real customer language, verifiable proof, and plain English.

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January 2026The Purchase

The blue check moment: when buying becomes a verdict

The moment that decides most B2B sales happens before a buyer talks to you: when they delegate the shortlist to an AI and the recommendation turns into a verdict. We call it the purple drop.

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Reading about it is one thing. Knowing where you stand is another.

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