Notes from inside
the answer box.
Plainspoken writing on answer engine optimization - how AI search actually decides who to cite, what we learn watching it every day, and how to win ground back without the hype.
What answer engine optimization actually is in 2026
Search did not die - it moved inside a sentence. Here is a grounded, jargon-free model of how answer engines decide whose name ends up in the answer, and what you can actually do about it.
Local-first
Run the model on your laptop. The meter never starts.
Why a local Gemma model changes the economics of monitoring, and how often you can really afford to re-check.
Deep dives
Why your brand vanished from Perplexity overnight
A walk through one real disappearance: what moved, how the change log caught it, and the brief that won it back.
Playbooks
How to write a brief an answer engine will actually cite
The structure, evidence, and schema that make a page legible to an LLM instead of invisible to it.
One honest note on AI search, every couple of weeks.
No growth-hacks, no spam. Just what we're seeing change across the answer engines, and what we'd do about it.