Essays
The operator blog.
Methodology notes, build updates, and the unsexy decisions behind the portfolio. Closer to a public record than a marketing channel. Roughly one or two pieces a month — when one has earned its place, not before.
These essays are also the manuscript-in-progress for a methodology book on getting cited by AI search.
Essay · 09
What ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI answers each reward, and where they diverge
The four AI engines get treated as one channel. They aren't: same buyer question, same day, four different reading lists. What each engine rewards, the shared foundation they all reward first, and the three places (only three) where the divergence should change your plan.
· 7 min read
Essay · 08
How do I measure whether my brand is being cited by AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity?
There's no out-of-the-box dashboard for AI citations, so you measure it directly. A repeatable method: buyer-intent queries, run across all four engines on a cadence, counting structured citations only — and the list of who's cited instead of you becomes your target list.
· 6 min read
Essay · 07
Who can I hire to get my company cited by AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity?
There's no certification, no directory, and nobody you can pay to be listed inside an AI engine — so you vet on evidence, not credentials. Your three options, what a good specialist actually does, the five-question vetting checklist, and the red flags to walk away from.
· 6 min read
Essay · 06
How to get your company cited by AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity
There is no submission form and no paid placement — you earn the citation. The four levers that actually do it: let the crawlers read your site, write pages shaped to be quoted, get onto the third-party sources engines actually cite, and measure your citation rate. In the order I'd do them.
· 7 min read
Essay · 05
Your CDN might be hiding you from AI search — and you'd never know
Since July 2025, Cloudflare blocks the AI crawlers by default on new sites. Most owners have no idea, because the only place it shows is a file they never read. I found it on my own site. Here's the receipt, the honest nuance, and a thirty-second check.
· 5 min read
Essay · 04
Google's new knowledge format is real. Three of the loudest claims about it aren't.
Google Cloud published the Open Knowledge Format (OKF) — a spec for filing business knowledge as markdown for AI agents. I read the spec instead of the hot takes. It tells an AI how to read your business, not how to find you — and the three loudest claims about it (llms.txt discovery, a buy/sell marketplace, "the new schema") aren't in the document.
· 6 min read
Essay · 03
The week AI search became a property market
Seven separate AI-search headlines in one week were really one story: the answer surface grew the institutions of a property market — a land registry, a zoning board, tolls, the first sale of the land. Why that makes "how do I get traffic from AI search" the wrong question.
· 7 min read
Essay · 02
Which AI SDR tools do the answer engines actually recommend? I measured it
I ran the buyer queries a VP of Sales actually types into AI search and tallied which AI SDR tools get cited. One company shows up in every answer; a cluster of well-funded names shares the next tier; and almost all of them have the same blind spot.
· 7 min read
Get new essays as they land.
One or two a month on getting cited by AI search. No cadence padding, no sales sequence.
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