Blog.

Forty years of holding brands together, and I'm watching the thing come apart at the seams — not because of the AI, but because nobody has written the rules for using it.

Five ways it costs an agency money, a client, or a copyright you promised somebody you had — and the much larger space where none of it applies.

You can rent the same database everyone else rents, or you can go and find the people who've already raised their hand at somebody else. One of those is a service you can charge for.

Nobody at a fifteen-person agency was hired to chase press. It still has to happen, because without it the SEO never moves. Here's what that work actually costs, and what changed about it this year.

Three quarters of SEOs pay for links, and the price tells you everything — because earned coverage doesn't have one. What that money is really covering, and what it stops buying you this year.

For one brand they're four dollars apart and the difference is engine coverage. For an agency running twenty clients, neither of them publishes a price at all. Here's the whole picture, including the cheaper options.

I asked five AI engines 2,500 live questions about ten national brands and read 2,357 of the pages they cited. Almost none of them belonged to the brands. You can't do on-page work on somebody else's page.

Everybody's asking about it. Almost nobody's buying it yet. Here's what to sell, which of your clients will actually pay for it, what to charge, and the one thing you must never promise.

They're the best channel you've got and they're the reason you never built a second one. What two-thirds of your business arriving unbidden actually costs you.

I read 2,357 of the pages five AI engines cite about ten national brands. Almost none of them belonged to the brands. Here's the order I'd check a client in, cheapest first.

Your client signed off on an ad campaign — the hooks, the copy, the visuals. Something else is running. Here's what creative automation actually does, what the ad networks change without asking, and where all of it can blow back on you.