End-to-end operator-grade playbooks — the actual systems we run on our own brands and our clients'.
30 essays tagged playbook
GEO GEO is how you get cited inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. This is the complete operating manual: how citation works, what to change on your site, and how to measure it — with no overlap with classic SEO fluff.
GEO llms.txt is a plain-text index at the root of your domain that tells AI engines which pages are canonical and what each covers. It takes an hour, costs nothing, and measurably increases citations. Here's exactly how to build one.
SEO Local search now has three surfaces to win: the Map Pack, classic organic, and AI answers that recommend a single business. Here's the 2026 local SEO playbook for a business that serves a place — the fundamentals that still rank and the AI layer most local businesses are ignoring.
SEM Performance Max is Google's black-box, all-inventory campaign type. It can crush — or quietly cannibalize your branded traffic and hide where the money went. The honest guide to when to use it, how to fence it in, and how to read its opaque reporting.
SEO Programmatic SEO can build thousands of pages that rank — or thousands that get your whole site demoted as spam. The 2026 line between the two is sharper than ever now that AI makes mass page generation trivial. Here's how to scale on the right side of it.
SEM AI Overviews pushed paid results further down the page and changed which queries are worth bidding on. Here's the honest 2026 SEM playbook: where paid search still wins, where it's bleeding money, and how to structure an account Google's automation can't ruin.
BRAND Anticipatory design — interfaces that predict what users want before they ask — moved from concept to reality with AI in 2024-2026. The real question for builders now is when to predict for users vs. when to give them the dignity of choice.
PR · GEO Most PR advice is still teaching pitch templates from 2018. The 2026 reality: TechCrunch gets ~600 pitches a day, Forbes pays-to-play contributors are dominant on the surface but the staff-written stories that actually matter happen differently. Here's the framework we use to actually land them.
SEO Ten SEO tactics that survived AI Overviews and still move traffic in 2026. Not the obvious ones — the ones working operators are quietly using while the rest of the industry panics.