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
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...
When AI Has Nothing On Your Company, It Describes Someone Else.
The substitution arrives at full confidence, it happens in a place you do not own, and no content audit you run will ever find it.
August 30, 2026
Consulting Available NowWhen an AI model has nothing on your company, it does not tell anyone. It does not decline, it does not hedge, and it does not mark the spot where its evidence ran out. It reaches for the nearest well documented thing, which is usually a competitor, a category average, or a version of you from three years ago, and it delivers that substitution in the same confident register it uses when it actually knows.That much has been discussed. What has not been discussed is the part that should worry anyone running this work: you cannot find this...
AI Search Didn’t Remove Cognitive Load. It Moved It.
As AI takes over more retrieval and synthesis, consumers do less searching and more verification. That changes what information needs to survive between retrieval and belief.
August 23, 2026
Open for Consulting & AuditsFirst off, I need to thank someone I’ve known and respected for years, for getting a back-channel discussion going around the topic of AI and Cognitive Load. Shari Thurow dropped me the link to Mr. Nielsen’s article, which got me thinking of how it would apply to SEOs and our work. And as you know, for most of search’s history, the bargain was simple. The search engine gave us candidates, and we did the rest. We chose words for a query, scanned the results, opened pages, compared sources, refined the search when necessary, and eventually assembled...
The Keyword Universe Was Always Smaller Than We Thought
AI answers are settling phrases, not ranking them. The space of real opportunities was never as large as the space of phrasings.
August 16, 2026
Contact me for ConsultingCitation tools are fundamentally different from rank trackers, and that difference is almost always seen or stated as a limitation.One respondent to my recent survey of digital marketing practitioners put the case plainly. You cannot reverse-engineer what is working when the answer changes every time you ask, so what you are left with is closer to a brand awareness signal than a diagnostic. I have heard some version of that from enough people now that it functions as the default reading in this space, and it is a fair one. That survey deliberately presented what respondents said...
The GEO Tooling and Data Market Has a Trust Problem
Not a pricing problem. 163 respondents value the data and won’t fund the tools that produce it.
August 9, 2026
Over three weeks in July I ran a survey asking people who work on AI search visibility what they think of the platforms built to measure it. 163 responses. This is a self-selected sample recruited through my own network and its re-shares (as well as paid ads on LinkedIn and X), so it describes engaged practitioners in and around one corner of the industry, not the entire industry. Percentages here carry roughly a seven-point margin, and I’ll come back to the sample size at the end, because it turned out to be part of the story.Here’s what came out of...