There are more than 110 articles on this site and you do not have time for more than 110 articles. So this page is organized by the problem you walked in with rather than by date, category, or which one I happen to be proudest of.
Find your sentence below. Read the two or three underneath it. If none of them is your sentence, the fastest way through the whole archive is the first piece on this page, because most of the rest is downstream of it.
If you only read one thing
Why the company that keeps score never has to rent an audience. Publish the number your industry argues about and you stop buying attention and start being cited. This is the single idea underneath most of what I do, and it is the one that costs the least to start and takes the longest to copy.
The companion piece, and the more practical of the two. What to count, how often to publish it, and why one recurring figure with a stable methodology outperforms a year of blog posts. Read the Referee piece for the argument and this one for the instructions.
“I asked an AI who does what we do, and it named three competitors and not us.”
This is the fastest-moving problem on the site and the one I get asked about most. Read in this order.
Become an Entity: Why Being Findable Online Isn’t the Same as Being Recognized by AI
Before an answer engine quotes you, it tries to work out whether you are a real, resolved thing that multiple independent sources describe the same way. If it cannot resolve who you are, how well you wrote the page stops mattering. Ten questions, including an honest answer about schema markup that contradicts what most marketing blogs will tell you. Start here, because the identity layer is what everything else sits on.
40 Things to Make Your Website More Visible to AI Search
The tactical list, ranked by how much pain each one costs you: twenty that are free, ten that require real change, ten that mean rebuilding. Sourced throughout. Do part one this week; none of it needs a developer.
Audit the Machine: How to Know You Have Gone Invisible Before the Traffic Tells You
Everybody is publishing AI search tactics. Almost nobody is publishing a way to check whether any of it worked. Thirty fixed prompts, five assistants, the same week every month, and three things worth scoring instead of the one thing everybody scores. If you are going to spend money on visibility this year, build the measurement first or you will not be able to tell what happened.
Being Mentioned Is Not Being Recommended
The follow-up, and the sharper of the two. Why mention rate became the vanity metric of AI search and the one column that fixes it. If you have a dashboard that says your AI visibility is improving, read this before you believe it.
The Dead Company That Still Outranks You
Answer engines keep recommending businesses that closed, got bought, or changed their name. Why it happens, how much traffic it eats, and how to take that spot. This is the cheapest opening in AI search right now and it closes as the models refresh.
“Customers love us. Strangers cannot find us.”
Eight of the Most Frequent Errors and Oversights in Web Marketing
Twenty panel groups were asked for their top three errors. Sixty answers normalized into twenty problems, and not one of the top eight is exotic. Every one is cheap to fix, which is the bad news, because cheap and unfixed means nobody has been checking. Start here if you want a to-do list rather than an argument.
64 Thoughts on How to Build a Top Competitive Website That Google Can Find
The oldest piece on this list and still the one I run every client site against, item by item, in the first week of every engagement. Nothing on it is clever. That is the point.
Why Family-Owned Companies Get Skipped in AI Search Results
Written for family businesses and true for any firm that is beloved locally and invisible nationally. Three fixes that cost less than a vet bill, a ninety-day schedule, and the honest reason charm does not parse.
Somebody already wrote the most believable thing that will ever be said about your company, and they did it for free, at eleven at night, on a review site. Fifteen ways to go find it and use it without being creepy about it. Written for recruiting and it works anywhere you need proof that is not in your own voice.
“We have six services, nine kinds of buyer, and no idea what to say.”
Seven bullets on a services page describe capacity, not a position. Removing two of them is the fastest positioning work available to a firm, and it is free. Nine short points, ten minutes, and it will make you uncomfortable in a useful way.
Why Naming Your Method Beats Naming Your Rate
Why an unnamed process gets priced by the hour and a named one gets priced by the outcome. Four conditions a process has to meet before it deserves a name, and the one everybody skips: a stranger has to be able to repeat it correctly after hearing it once.
Why the person who explains it out-earns the person who knows it. Written for insurance and true everywhere. If you have ever watched a brilliant colleague lose a room, this is the mechanism.
Why the label stopped being a magnet in 2026 and started working like a coupon, with the 1998 dot-com naming study that measured the same effect going both directions. If you are debating whether to put AI in the name, settle it here in ten minutes.
“We lose deals and I do not believe the reason in the CRM.”
Price is the polite answer and almost never the true one. Ten phone calls, four questions, twenty minutes each, and no defending yourself. The single fastest positioning diagnostic that exists, and the only thing standing between you and it is that nobody enjoys making the calls.
Why Do 42 Out of Every 100 Buyers Never Call You Back?
The group that will not take a meeting but will read everything you publish is usually larger than your pipeline, and almost no marketing plan is built for them. Why an appointment beats a newsletter, and why the date matters more than the content.
Pass the Physical: Win the Security Review Before Sales Ever Sees It
Your deal is not dying in the pitch. It is dying six weeks later in a spreadsheet opened by somebody in Legal whose name you never learned. Publish the answers before anyone asks. Written for software and applies to any regulated or procurement-heavy sale.
Marketing That Is Real and Useful, and Not Weird and Creepy, Seems to Work Well
Two minutes and one chart. The share of people who have stopped buying entirely because of retargeting, next to the share who engage when the marketing is actually useful. Worth reading before your next agency conversation.
“Everything runs through me and I cannot hand any of it off.”
Turning Down Work: Capacity, Credibility, and the Profitable No
The hard decline is not the bad engagement. It is the good one you cannot do well this quarter. Publish a capacity policy before you need one, decline early in writing with a referral attached, and notice that your referral network is built entirely out of your no’s.
Everyone who has worked with you, for you, or at a client is now sitting inside another company carrying an accurate opinion of you into every conversation you are not in. A spreadsheet and twenty minutes a quarter. Almost no small firm maintains one and every large one that does swears by it.
Award Something: Build the Prize Your Market Wants to Win
Every market has a status hierarchy everyone privately agrees on and nobody has written down. Writing it down costs about one afternoon a year and permanently changes who your industry treats as its adult. Includes the honest case against, which is real.
“I need to know what a customer is actually worth.”
Price the Churn Like a Reserve
Actuarial reserving applied to customer lifetime value. I spent eight years as a practicing casualty actuary before I did this work, and this is the piece where that shows most.
Warren Buffett’s Thoughts on Marketing
Sixty years of shareholder letters from a man who never used the phrase brand equity, never drew a funnel, and paid cash for several of the most valuable brands in America. What marketing is worth, according to somebody who kept the receipts.
If you run a startup
When Rivals Raise Big: A Seven-Day Panic Playbook
What actually changes the week a competitor announces a monster round, what does not, and why a funding headline is a receipt rather than a scoreboard. One day at a time, Monday through Friday, with a memo to send at four o’clock.
Why 5.7 million Americans a year are now filing to start something, what four earlier booms say about how this one ends, and the uncomfortable part nobody puts on the podcast: capital is concentrating, not democratizing, and the middle is vanishing. Plan to be profitable rather than funded.
The Trillion-Dollar Anthropic-OpenAI Wedding
A structural argument about what happens when two rivals in a capital-incinerating category cannot kill each other. Mostly here because it is the clearest example on the site of how I build an argument and then attack it.
If you run an insurance or actuarial firm
The AI Search Models Are Picking Insurance Sides
Lemonade outdraws State Farm and Root outdraws Progressive in AI answers on a fraction of the domain authority, and what decided it was not their content. It was everyone else’s.
Unsolicited: Liberty Mutual, Full Audit and Strategy
Nobody asked for this one. A complete public-information audit under ten headings, published in full. If you want to know exactly what a paid document looks like before you spend anything, read this instead of a services page.
Unsolicited: Berkshire Hathaway, the Two-Page Free Read
The other end of the same method. Two pages on a company with arguably the strongest brand in American finance and a retrievability problem anyway.
If you run a staffing or recruiting firm
Why Time-to-Submittal Is the Metric Your Marketing Should Be Built Around
Clients grade you on how fast a name hits their inbox, and almost no agency website says a word about it. Measure it for ninety days, segment it by role type, put it above the fold, and write it into the SLA rather than the deck.
How AI Search Now Answers “Best Staffing Agency for X”
When a VP of Talent types that query, three or four names come back. If yours is not one of them you did not lose the deal, you were never in it. Includes the three content changes that measurably move citation rates and the one that actively hurts.
What a Staffing Agency’s ATS Choice Actually Reveals to a Buyer
Why the software in your back office reads to an acquirer the way a credit score reads to a lender. Relevant well before you plan to sell, because the fix takes longer than the diligence does.
Client Case Study: The Salary Survey Actuaries Actually Trust
Eleven free, ungated salary surveys, cut by exams passed and credential rather than the vague bands most firms hide behind a lead form. It became the number the industry cited, and everybody who wanted it came to us to get it. The Referee Advantage, executed over a decade, with my own money on the line.
If you run a family business
Family Businesses Run 60% of the American Workforce. So Why Can’t Anyone Find Them Online?
The size of the sector against the size of its findability gap, sourced inline throughout, with the five things to do about it that cost nothing.
Family Business Succession: The Straight Answers
Only 30% survive the first handoff and 12% reach a third generation. The failure is almost never the product. It is that nobody wrote the plan down, nobody built a bench, and nobody made the business legible to an outsider.
The Family Business Down the Street Is Telling You Everything
How to mine local and trade-press coverage for the exact words your buyers use, for the 99.99% of American businesses that do not file with the SEC.
If you just want to enjoy something
Four pieces that use Mad Men to make arguments that hold up against real effectiveness data. They are some of the most-read things on this site and I am not entirely sure how I feel about that.
It’s Toasted: What Don Draper Still Knows That Your AI Stack Doesn’t
Six lessons, stress-tested against effectiveness research and against the last time a technology made a whole country lose its mind.
Seven lessons from a fictional copywriter, tested against linear television’s collapse and an algorithm that does not care how clever you think you are.
Roger Sterling Was Right About Everything Except His Own Job
What it costs when the rainmaker never takes himself seriously, in real companies, between 1965 and last Tuesday.
Everybody remembers Don Draper. Nobody quotes the accountant. That is the mistake.
Three ways to spend your time here
Twenty minutes. The Referee Advantage, then Kill a Service Line. One tells you what to build, the other tells you what to delete, and between them you will have a decision to make by lunch.
One afternoon. Become an Entity, then 40 Things, then Audit the Machine. That is the entire AI-visibility argument in order: fix who you are, then fix what you publish, then build the instrument that tells you whether it worked.
One weekend, and you want to see the work rather than read the arguments.
The case studies and full audits are at 1000startups.com/work-samples. The unsolicited audits are the useful ones, because they are built entirely on public information about public companies, which means you can check every fact in them yourself. Start with the Chubb full audit or the UnitedHealthcare free read. If you want to know how any of it gets made, that is at 1000startups.com/how-i-work.
And if you want this done for your company
The free two-page read is genuinely free. Email claude@1000startups.com with your web address and I will send back what I can see from the outside: where you are losing prospects and what I would change first. No call required, and you keep it either way. Everything else is at Work With Me.