Thoughts & Perspectives
Building in public
Generative AI Consulting: What It Is and When You Actually Need It (2026)
Generative AI consulting vs classic ML consulting, what a gen AI engagement actually contains in 2026, the current trends in AI consulting, and when DIY beats hiring anyone.
10 Questions to Ask Before Hiring an AI Consultant (2026)
The 10 questions that separate AI consultants who ship from consultants who present — with the good answer and the bad answer spelled out for each, plus when you shouldn't hire one at all.
How to Choose an AI Consultant: What to Look For in a Top Firm (2026)
The 5-filter framework for choosing an AI consultant or consulting firm in 2026: shipped products over decks, fixed pricing, named tools, implementation capability, and right-sizing to your revenue.
What Is AI Consulting? What You're Actually Buying in 2026
AI consulting, defined by someone who does it: the three engagement types, what the deliverables actually look like, advisory vs implementation, and what any of it should cost a small business in 2026.
How to Track Your Brand Mentions in ChatGPT, Perplexity & AI Search (2026)
Three ways to track what AI engines say about your business: manual spot-checks (free, 1 hour/month), paid tools ($29-$499/month), or build your own checker on the Perplexity API for about a penny per query. I built mine — here's the full playbook.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): The 2026 Playbook
AEO is how you become the source AI engines quote instead of the site they skip. This playbook comes from someone whose pages earn named Perplexity citations: answer blocks, entity consistency, schema, the Princeton GEO tactics, and the off-site work that predicts visibility 3x better than backlinks.
Best AI Visibility Tools in 2026: An Honest Comparison
Profound, Peec AI, Scrunch, Otterly, LLMrefs, plus the Semrush and Ahrefs bolt-ons — compared honestly by someone who built his own tracker instead. Prices run $29 to $2,000+/month, and none of them fix what they find.
What Is AI Visibility? The Complete 2026 Guide
AI visibility is whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI mention your business when buyers ask for recommendations. 65% of consumers now research purchases with AI. Here's how the engines pick who to recommend — and how to become one of them.
AEO Tools: What You Actually Need in 2026
Most 'AEO tools' are SEO tools with a new landing page. Here's the short list organized by job — monitoring, schema, content structure, indexing — including the free options and the parts I just built myself.
AI Search Optimization: The Practical 2026 Guide
AI search doesn't rank pages — it extracts passages. Query fan-out, 134-167-word answer chunks, and why ChatGPT search runs on Bing. The mechanical guide to optimizing for AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT, from someone who runs the stack himself.
LLM SEO: How to Get Large Language Models to Recommend You (2026)
LLM SEO is the practice of getting ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini to mention and recommend your business. Here's what actually drives it — brand mentions (r=0.664), entity signals, structured data — from someone whose site gets cited by name.
Best AI SEO Tools in 2026 (Tested by a Practitioner)
I run my own AEO stack and got my site cited by name in Perplexity. Here's an honest breakdown of the AI SEO tool market — content generators, visibility monitors, and the suites — with real pricing and verdicts per use case.
Ready to scale your product vision?
I help high-growth startups bridge the gap between technical complexity and business revenue.
Book a Strategic Call