Writing on SEO, AI search, marketing, philosophy, and assorted other things by Tom Dehnel.
ChatGPT ads are now running product carousels pulled straight out of retailer feeds, and Google onboards merchants to its commerce protocol through Merchant Center. The work that decides whether an assistant can sell your product is feed hygiene, not an AI search retainer.
Generality is not solving millions of tasks quickly. It is creating new explanations. Scaling an optimizer gets you a better optimizer.
Nearly half of Google searches now end without a click, and the rate climbs the younger the searcher gets. No court order is going to hand those clicks back, so build for the 86% of clicks that go to businesses nobody was looking for.
Most SEO teams get worse results because they are too clever. Almost everything that matters comes from two levers: the best content you can make and as much offsite coverage as you can earn. Do those relentlessly and ignore the rest.
AI search visibility is one of the fuzziest numbers in marketing, and we keep treating it like hard proof. Move fast on intuition when you have to, just stop pretending the dashboard settled anything.
Narrative seeding is when a story gets planted in smaller outlets first, wrapped in a friendlier frame, so that by the time it reaches the big papers the framing is already settled.
Cloudflare added a Content Signals directive that lets you tell AI to leave your content alone. Google just confirmed no crawler or LLM honors it, so all it really gives you is the feeling of having opted out.
Citation counts are a bad explanation of AI visibility. An AI answer can recommend your brand four times and hand the citation to someone else. Measure mentions, impressions, and outcomes instead.
There's a belief I keep running into, usually from people who are proud of how hard they worked to learn something. They say you can't really know a field unless you've struggled through it yourself.…
Most people think science comes from "induction", which is the process of distilling laws from repeated observations.
I've gotten some reactions from people who have sort of “midwit” interpreted some of my past writing as anti-AI, but that is completely wrong and I love using AI and I think it’s great.
The island gives us what we need. And no one leaves.
People assume that STEM fields are somehow more valuable or serious because they are "reality-based," while the humanities are merely matters of opinion.
The "freedom of speech isn’t freedom from consequences" line has become one of the more common online canned responses in debate. It's a conversation-ender designed to sound like common sense. But it's actually a rhetorical…
The short answer is yes. While system prompts generally do not contain a list of specific trusted publishers with associated scores (e.g., "Weight the New York Times at 1.0 and a Blogspot site at 0.2"),…
For 99% of human history, our default culture has been static. Most people never saw any real improvements in their lives. And if nothing can improve, why even try?
To show up in AI search results, you’ll need to make a few tweaks to your SEO program. The good news is if you’re already doing SEO at a high level (like my clients), then…
Smart people may be dumber than dumb people, because they have access to more ways to fool themselves and overestimate their understanding.
One thing these beliefs have in common is to the person who holds them, it really feels like they are doing something positive. In actuality the beliefs are self-defeating and the according behaviors stifle progress…
For years, producing SEO content has been a grind. Companies aiming to dominate organic search faced an uphill battle to meet the demand for fresh, high-quality content.
With a lot of Amazon returns, it’s a pointless waste of time to send the thing back to Amazon and you should throw it away instead.
I don't mean this post to be critical so much as descriptive. A lot of times when people say something is "woke" they are trying to describe it, not necessarily be pejorative. So I figured…
A reminder of what things were like from 2020 to 2023.
People often think of democracy as a sort of "majority rule" system, where everyone gets to vote on leaders and laws and the result is that the largest number of people are happy.
Capitalism is the only economic system that includes reliable, built-in incentives to solve problems by organically removing bad ideas, products, and companies, and replacing them with better ones in a reasonable time frame, without violence.
The growing use of the word "impact" to speak passively is weakening the English language.
They say you can be anything you want to be, but they never mention the cost of maintenance.
1. Writing out my thoughts helps me find errors in my thinking. 2. Stating my principles publicly helps me stay accountable.
By now, anyone with even a single toe dipped into the SEO world has heard Google’s message loud and clear: Page speed and experience are ranking factors (and have been since 2010) and can directly…
I’ve been asked a couple of times by clients whether they should make a Wikipedia page for their brand. Usually, they want to know if a Wikipedia page will be a good thing for SEO.
In this post, I'll show you the method I use with my clients to identify and fix broken backlinks.
What kind of exercise plan could you do for the next 100 years?
If you want to do SEO well, you’re going to have to learn to make better quality content.
Russell Conjugation is when someone chooses different words to describe something, depending on how favorable they want to be to the thing they are describing.
I work from home every day as an SEO consultant, and I've got a few years of work-from-home experience that I think would be useful to share.
Updated September 2020.
I wrote this article to help content writers use keyword research in their writing. It assumes the keyword research is already completed, and you're sitting down to write/edit with that list of keywords in front…
As an SEO Consultant, one of the questions I hear a lot is “Do you mainly do SEO for B2B companies, or are you more of a B2C consultant?”
I used to think time management was about designing the perfect schedule. It seemed like if I crack my own code and discover the optimal time to complete tasks throughout the day, I could tailor…
As a small businesses owner, the deck is stacked against you when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). You’re often competing in the search results page with websites and businesses much larger than yours,…
Take a walk south of Market Street here in San Francisco and you can't help but feel it. From the well-known tech logos displayed on the buildings to the electric bicycles, skateboards, and unicycles zipping…
At age 14, my first job ever was "hot dog man" at a baseball stadium. In hot dog sales you have a very simple script: Take this tray of hot dogs and walk around the…
Instead of forcing a customer to fill out a lead form, why not discover their information the same way real people do? I think it's really cool that any business can have a basic lead…
Obsessively persistent. That’s how brands have to be if they want to deliver good content marketing results. It’s definitely not good enough to have a writer churning out blog posts once a month. You have…