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
Do GEO/AI Visibility Platforms/Tools Matter? Help Me Find Out. (An industry wide survey.)
I need YOUR help with this survey. (Please take it, and share it!)
July 14, 2026
TL;DR to get straight to the heart of this post:My survey is 17 questions, takes less than 5 minutes, and is anonymous.It runs from July 14 to 27.Aiming for 1,000 responses and I’ll need your help to get there! Please share!No pitch, no followup because I’m not collecting emails, just answers.Results published on Duane Forrester Decodes in August 2026. Survey linkUp front I’ll state that I built one of these platforms. Mine launched at the end of May, and I spent the prior eighteen months of my life building it. That means I have skin in the game on the...
Do the Answer Engines Keep Your Fingerprint, or Do They Start Fresh Every Time?
The fingerprint your search work left didn’t disappear when answer engines appeared, but how deeply it’s held, and whether it’s held at all, remains unclear.
July 12, 2026
Supported by: CitationIQJust a quick heads up that there will be two published items this week: today’s article, and on Tuesday, an industry survey I’m conducting. Now, back to the article…Every site you have ever optimized carries a record of that work, and it is more detailed than the platforms usually admits.Search systems have kept a per-domain profile for years, assembled from signals you know intimately because you spent a career shaping them. That profile is real, it is granular, and it never needed a name, because it lived entirely inside search, where you could watch its effects in the...
The Web Is Eating Itself and Your Metrics Look Fine
The answer engines are rewarding you for producing the exact content that is quietly poisoning the well they drink from.
July 5, 2026
That is not a moral claim, and it is not a warning about getting caught. It is a description of a mechanism that several groups of researchers have now documented from different angles, and once you see how the pieces fit together, a good deal of confusing behavior in AI search stops being confusing. I am going to walk through it in the real terminology, because the real terminology is where the understanding actually lives, and then put each piece into plain language so it’s approachable for everyone.Set two curves side by side before we go further, because together they...
Microsoft Just Proved a Point About Search Today
Bing put both scoreboards inside Webmaster Tools. The gap between organic data and LLM data is now a product fact, not a theory.
June 28, 2026
The company that owns a major web index just documented, in its own product, that ranking a page and citing a passage are different jobs. Web IQ arriving at Build on June 2, and AI citation data showing up inside Bing Webmaster Tools earlier this year, were not surprises. As I know well, having built the modern version of Webmaster Tools, the reporting was always going to follow the answer once answers were being generated rather than ranked, and a tool that only ever described the blue links was always going to be lonely. The open question was never whether...
81.8% of My “AI Assistant” Traffic Was Fake. The Googlebot Number Was Worse.
A short script, a stubborn investigation, and what is really crawling a brand-new site. Most of it is lying, and here is how to prove it on your own logs.
June 21, 2026
I launched CitationIQ.com recently. Over the last two weeks, my logs claimed thirty-three AI assistants visited, a little better than two a day. That number is a lie. The real number? Six.Googlebot looked worse. Of 799 requests carrying its name, only 107 were real, though we all know scammers love to spoof Googlebot. And some of those fake AI visits, while wearing ChatGPT’s name, asked my server to hand over its secrets file.I run this brand-new platform, and I have spent zero dollars promoting it thus far, so traffic remains modest. I went looking for a quiet, accurate read of...