My regular writing lives on Substack under the name Duane Forrester Decodes.
I cover the shift from traditional search to AI-driven discovery. How retrieval systems work. What’s changing for practitioners. Where the industry is headed and what to do about it. Occasional detours into career strategy, leadership, and the realities of building a professional reputation in a field that keeps reinventing itself.
New posts typically land weekly. Some are free, some are for paid subscribers.
Recent Posts
Google Now Has the Math to Rank Without an Index, and the Results Page Does Not Survive It
A DeepMind paper closes a five-year research arc toward a model that ranks by generating results, which makes page two something that never happens.
October 4, 2026
Consulting: SEO, GEO, AIOGoogle’s researchers have now proven, on paper, that a single language model can rank an unlimited number of documents without a separate index, and the practical consequence is that the ranked list stops being something you see and becomes something the model computes on its way to an answer. That is the key takeaway after reading the paper, and it is the reason I think this research matters more for practitioners than its modest experiments would suggest.Roger Montti covered the paper recently at Search Engine Journal, and his explanation of the mechanics is the one to read:...
AI Changed Your Buyer Faster Than Your Business Can Adapt
Buyers arrive confident and half-informed, businesses were built for a different customer, and the gap widens with every planning cycle that doesn’t address it.
September 27, 2026
SEO and GEO Consulting AvailableI am shopping for a truck, and last week I walked into a dealership knowing more about the vehicle on the lot than the person selling it did.That is not a claim about my research habits. I gave an AI assistant the VIN and asked it to tell me what I was looking at. Within a few minutes it had confirmed what the truck actually was, which matters because listings mislabel trims. It had reconstructed the truck’s market history across every site it had ever been listed on, so an asking price turned into “this vehicle...
LLMs Are Time Machines That Don't Tell You How Far You Went
Speed was never the problem. The signals that told you whether an answer was any good traveled with the journey, and they don't survive the trip.
September 20, 2026
I consult on GEO & SEO.An LLM takes present-you, the version with a question, and hands back future-you, the version with a decision.That is the trick, and it is a real one. Go back far enough and answering a serious question meant a library. You looked up books, read them, took notes, found references inside those books that sent you to other books, and after some number of days you knew enough to decide. Search compressed that into hours. You asked, you got results, you followed the clues inside those answers into better questions, and you built a picture until...
Three Predictions for 2027, and Why You Won’t Be Able to Check Them
Counted numbers and estimated numbers look identical in your dashboard. Only one of them can be checked.
September 13, 2026
Every practitioner reading this has already placed a bet on which interface survives. You made it when you decided where the effort goes this quarter, whether AI answers are a channel or a curiosity, and how much of your reporting still quietly assumes a click. Google has placed the same bet, with considerably more money on the table.What follows is tea-leaf reading rather than certainty. Three predictions about where Google sits by the end of 2027, and a fourth about whether anyone will be able to tell if the first three were right. I build measurement tooling in this space...
Everyone Is Quoting the Same Number and Getting Different Answers.
One metric, one publisher, one fully documented method, and figures that differ by a factor of thirty. Nobody lied, and that is the part worth understanding.
September 6, 2026
Anthropic’s crawl-to-refer ratio has been reported as 70,900 to one, 38,000 to one, 23,951 to one, 11,122 to one, 10,300 to one, 4,580 to one, and 2,237 to one. Every one of those figures is attributed to Cloudflare. Every one was published inside about thirteen months. Two of them claim the same month and differ by roughly a factor of seventeen.GEO & SEO Consulting With DuaneIf crawl-to-refer is not a number you track, the whole idea fits in a paragraph. Every AI company runs crawlers that fetch pages from your site. Some of those platforms also send you visitors, when...