Field Notes

Notes on AI search, written from inside the work.

A working journal — one essay at a time on what's changing in how customers find businesses, what compounds, and what to ignore. Written by Luke for owners who would rather read the practitioner than the press release.

Field Note May 11, 2026 6 min read

Search just split in two. Most businesses are still measuring the wrong half.

For thirty years, search meant one thing: a list of blue links. That assumption now costs businesses real revenue every single month, and most of them have no instrument to see it happening.

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Field Note May 4, 2026 7 min read

What 'recommended by ChatGPT' actually means in 2026

The phrase gets thrown around in marketing decks like it's a single thing. It isn't. There are at least four distinct mechanisms by which an AI assistant names your business, and understanding which one you're targeting changes the entire program.

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Field Note April 27, 2026 8 min read

Your website is a brochure. Your customers need an answer.

The most expensive website I ever saw a small business buy was a sixteen-thousand-dollar redesign that improved exactly one metric: how the owner felt looking at it. The work an actually performant 2026 website needs to do is invisible to the person commissioning it.

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Field Note April 20, 2026 5 min read

The thirty-articles-a-month rule, explained

Four articles a month sounds reasonable. It's a number agencies use because it staffs out cleanly. It also happens to be the number that almost guarantees a content program will fail to move anything.

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Field Note April 13, 2026 6 min read

Local businesses, generative answers, and the next decade of customer acquisition

If you run a service business that sells inside a thirty-mile radius, the next ten years of customer acquisition will be decided by whether your name shows up when a buyer asks an AI assistant 'who should I call.' It already is, in most of the country.

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Field Note April 6, 2026 6 min read

Pillar and cluster: the architecture Google now rewards

The keyword-by-keyword content strategy that worked for fifteen years is being quietly retired by Google's ranking systems. The architecture that replaces it is older than most marketing directors realize, and it works for AI search at the same time.

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Field Note March 30, 2026 5 min read

The death of the ten blue links wasn't sudden. It was a decade-long slide.

Marketing teams tend to talk about the shift to AI search as if it happened in 2024 when ChatGPT released. The actual decline of the ten blue links began closer to 2014. Recognizing the longer arc changes what you do about it.

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Field Note March 23, 2026 5 min read

Schema markup for owners who don't read JSON

Every consultant in 2026 mentions 'schema markup' as if the business owner is supposed to know what it is. Most don't. Here's the plain-English explanation, why it matters more this year than last, and what to do without reading a single line of code.

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Field Note March 16, 2026 6 min read

Measuring what AI says about your brand: a quarterly practice

If you cannot measure your AI-search visibility, you cannot manage it. Most marketing departments are flying blind here. The audit doesn't take long once you know what to ask — and the absence of one is the single biggest reason AEO programs underperform.

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Field Note March 9, 2026 5 min read

Five mistakes business owners make trying to rank inside ChatGPT

Most of the AI-search work I see commissioned by small and mid-sized businesses is well-intentioned, mechanically reasonable, and unlikely to move the metric. Here are the five most common reasons why, and what to do instead.

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