Thinking out loud.
Essays on strategy, measurement, AI search and the business of SEO — working through the problems, not delivering tidy conclusions.
SEO froze brand strategy in 1961
SEO inherited advertising's obsession with measurement and its language of differentiation — and then stopped reading. Brand science spent fifty years proving how brands actually grow. AI search just made the old laws impossible to ignore.
Read →Forecasting SEO traffic — and a free tool to do it
The much-missed Distilled forecaster is gone, so we rebuilt it — free. What statistical forecasting is good for, how to use it, and where it quietly misleads you.
Read →The metrics we built are breaking. SEO success needs to look different now.
We dressed up correlation as causation, called it attribution, and rode the numbers as long as they kept going up. AI didn't break measurement — it revealed what was already broken.
Read →Who watches the watchmen? What we don't know about AI training should worry us.
We're optimising for systems whose training data, labour and governance we can't inspect. The labs have wildly different levels of accountability — and most of the gaps are invisible.
Read →Content consolidation: a meta-study
Everyone has an opinion on whether consolidating content works. Few have looked across the evidence. A pass through what the studies actually show, and where the consensus breaks down.
Read →Strategy and tactics: no, they aren't the same thing.
Strategy is the framework — the why. Tactics are the how. Most published "SEO strategy" is a list-dump of tactics that never answers the only question that matters.
Read →Need this thinking on your problem?
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