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
SEO Is No Longer a Single Discipline
Why Modern Search Now Spans AI Retrieval, Brand Protection, UX, and Zero-Click Discovery
January 11, 2026
Read The Machine Layer Now via AmazonMost people have a favorite coffee mug. You reach for it without thinking. It fits your hand. It does its job. For a long time, SEO felt like that mug. A defined craft, a repeatable routine, a discipline you could explain in a sentence. Crawl the site. Optimize the pages. Earn visibility. Somewhere along the way, that single mug turned into a cabinet full of cups. Each one different. Each one required - none of them optional anymore.That shift did not happen because SEO got bloated or unfocused. It happened because discovery changed shape.SEO...
Being Right Isn’t Enough for AI Visibility Today
Why AI Answers Favor What They Already Trust, And What That Means for Visibility
January 4, 2026
My Book: The Machine Layer - Get It NowBias Is Not What You Think It IsWhen most people hear the phrase “AI bias,” their mind jumps to ethics, politics, or fairness. They think about whether systems lean left or right, whether certain groups are represented properly, or whether models reflect human prejudice. That conversation matters. But it is not the conversation reshaping search, visibility, and digital work right now.The bias that is quietly changing outcomes is not ideological. It is structural, and operational. It emerges from how AI systems are built, trained, how they retrieve and weight information, and how...
The Most Dangerous Phrase in Tech Transitions
Why “Nothing to See Here” Keeps Appearing Before Real Change
December 28, 2025
My New Book: The Machine LayerFrom Incentives to PatternsFor the final article of 2025, I’m going to dive a bit deeper into a recent topic. In an article published two weeks ago, “Who Benefits When the Line Between SEO and GEO Is Blurred,” I examined what happens when meaningful distinctions are blurred during periods of technological change. That piece focused on incentives and who benefits when complexity is smoothed over.This article takes the next step.Rather than asking who benefits, I want to look at how these moments tend to unfold. History offers a useful lens here. When systems change in...
Ironman, Not Superman
Why AI Works Best When You Stay in the Pilot’s Seat
December 21, 2025
My New Book is Now Out on AmazonI recently became frustrated while working with Claude and it lead me to an interesting exchange with the platform, which lead me to examining my own expectations, actions and behavior…and that was eye-opening. The short version is I want to keep thinking of AI as an assistant, like a lab partner. In reality, it needs to be seen as a robot in the lab – capable of impressive things, given the right direction, but only within a solid framework. There are still so many things it’s not capable of, and we, as practitioners,...
Who Benefits When the Line Between SEO and GEO Is Blurred
Why continuity messaging persists, how consumer behavior is changing, and what businesses miss as clicks stop telling the full story
December 14, 2025
My Book: The Machine Layer - get it now!The search industry is entering a transition that many people still treat as a footnote. The systems consumers rely on is changing, and the way information is gathered, summarized, and delivered is changing with them. Yet the public messaging around what businesses should do sounds as familiar as ever. The narrative says the fundamentals are the same. The advice sounds the same. The expectations sound the same. The message is that SEO still covers everything that matters.But the behavior of the consumer says otherwise. The way modern systems retrieve and present information...