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
The Shift from Search Sessions to Decision Sessions
What Google’s personal AI push signals about owning the decision layer
February 1, 2026
My Free AI Visibility FrameworksThis one started with a question from Adorján-Csaba Demeter, a subscriber in Romania, who asked how big the behavior change could be after Google’s AI Mode Personal Search launch, and it pushed me to think past the product announcement and into the habit shift underneath it.AI changing search is a foregone conclusion. The real story is what happens to people when search stops acting like a library and starts acting like a helper that knows what you meant, what you like, and what you have coming up next.When effort drops, behavior changes first. Then business models...
The New Content Failure Mode: People Love It, Models Ignore It
How to detect the gap, prioritize fixes, and improve inclusion
January 25, 2026
Free Frameworks From My BookYou publish a page that solves a real problem. It reads clean. It has examples and it has the edge cases covered. You would happily hand it to a customer.Then you ask an AI platform the exact question that page answers and your page never shows up. No citation, no link, no paraphrase. Just omitted.That moment is new. Not because platforms give different answers, as most people already accept that as reality. The shift is deeper. Human relevance and model utility can diverge.If you are still using “quality” as a single universal standard, you will misdiagnose...
Download: Product Rewrite Guide for AI Platform Optimization (PDF)
This is a resource guide for my paid subscribers.
January 18, 2026
Here’s the PDF download for the Product Rewrite Guide for AI Platform Optimization. The guide lays out an 8-step rewrite process designed to improve clarity, fit, and selection logic in AI-mediated environments, plus layouts to help you run controlled experiments and learn what actually holds in your vertical. Subscriber resource for Duane Forrester Decodes (paid members).Product Rewrite Guide For Ai Platform Optimization360KB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownload DuaneForresterDecodes is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. ...
When Platforms Say “Don’t Optimize,” Smart Teams Run Experiments
A public e-commerce test shows measurable differences in what gets selected by LLMs, and why your next move is replication, not reassurance.
January 18, 2026
The Machine Layer on Amazon NowA quick note up front so we start on the right foot.The research I’m about to reference is not mine. I did not run these experiments. I’m not affiliated with the authors. I’m not here to “endorse” a camp, pick a side, or crown a winner. What I am going to endorse, loudly and without apology, is measurement. Replication. Real-world experiments. The kind of work that teaches us in real time, in real life, what changes when an LLM sits between customers and content. We need more tested data, and this is one of those...
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...