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 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...
Why Part of Your AI Authority Takes Years, Not Campaigns. And Why It Comes From Other People.
What models say about your company comes from how other people have described it over time. Today’s work shows up in the next model generation, not this one.
August 2, 2026
Need help w/these topics? Contact me.A reader left a comment on the entity mapping article suggesting that the obvious next move was to go win the parametric side. That piece had drawn a line between what a model retrieves at the moment you ask it something and what it already carries in its weights. That comment, I think, accepted the line was there, and then treated one half of it as a work item.The phrasing is everywhere right now. Influence the parametric side. Build parametric authority. Four words, verb first, sounding like something you assign to someone with a deadline.I...
Entity Mapping Works on Google. Does Any of It Reach ChatGPT?
Entity mapping treats Google and ChatGPT as one system. They are not, and knowing where the line falls is where the real value in this work sits.
July 26, 2026
I Have One Consulting Spot OpenIf entity mapping feels familiar, that is because you already ran this play. It is the knowledge graph conversation you were having in 2021, wearing a 2026 outfit. The vocabulary migrated almost intact: entities not strings, disambiguation, sameAs, relationships between nodes, feed the structure and the machine understands you. Pull a client deck from four years ago, swap “Knowledge Graph” for “the AI,” and most of the slides would survive the move. That is why the term is spreading, and it is also the reason to slow down before you buy it. The compressed version,...
Google Went “Not Provided” in 2011 and Blinded Us. ChatGPT Just Shipped Its Version.
The organic attribution you keep asking for structurally isn’t coming, and OpenAI’s own documentation shows why. Here’s what to measure instead.
July 19, 2026
The attribution you are waiting for from ChatGPT is coming, and it is not coming to you. I ran a survey this month (it’s still open - please take it) asking whether dedicated AI visibility platforms are worth paying for, and I deliberately never asked about attribution. It showed up anyway. One consultant wrote that the whole problem is tying visibility, citations, and mentions to dollars. An agency owner managing over a dozen clients answered the “what’s your biggest-unanswered-question” prompt with a single word and an exclamation point: attribution! Another respondent put it more wearily, that tracking is only the...