What's on the table this week.
A "now" page. What I'm reading, thinking, building, watching. Snapshot, not a blog post. Updated when there's something worth saying.
Last updated: 8 June 2026
Building
Just added two free tools to sit alongside the free LLM visibility audit: a schema sniffer and an ask volume checker. Small, sharp, no sign-up. The plan is a little bench of things that answer a real question in ten seconds, not another gated ebook.
Also in the workshop: extending my LLM brand visibility audit methodology to cover Google AI Overviews citation tracking more rigorously. The interesting question right now isn't "does AI know about my client?". It's "when AI cites the answer, who gets the link?". That's where the meaningful traffic of the next 24 months is decided.
Most recent piece: The clicks aren't dying. They're emigrating..
Reading
A short, biased list of what I've been saving lately. It refreshes itself from my reading each week.
- Beyond RAG: why every AI search platform is now agentic. The clearest piece I have read on why AI search stopped being simple retrieval, and what that does to whose content gets surfaced. searchengineland.com
- How to train Claude to sound like your brand. If the model keeps writing beige, the problem is usually the brand rules you never gave it. Matches my own experience exactly. searchengineland.com
- The LLM speed paradox: why fast AI loses the big decisions. A good contrarian nudge. The fastest model is rarely the one you want on the decisions that actually matter. seonotebook.notion.site
- Your website footer can be a sneaky SEO killer. Read this the same week I renamed a footer column on this very site. Footers leak more signal than people think. nick-nolan.medium.com
- I wasted 6 months using Claude Code wrong. A useful corrective. Most of the gains in Claude Code are hiding in the commands nobody reads the docs for. pub.towardsai.net
- swyxio/skills: an open library of agent skills. A growing open collection of agent skills for Claude Code. Worth a rummage if you build with it. github.com
Thinking about
How small the gap is, right now, between "I have a working agent stack" and "I have an LLM-visible brand". Most of my consulting hours go on the first half of that journey for clients. The interesting work is recognising they're the same project.
Also: how unusable most "AI strategy" decks are. There's a real opportunity for someone to write the practical, opinionated counter, the one that says what to actually build, in what order, with what budget. The kind of thing a CMO could hand to a CTO without losing them.
And, idly: how completely markdown has won. Plain .md text files are now the format the big models most like to be fed, and the one they reach for when they answer. There are probably more .md files in the world right now than there ever were WordPerfect documents, and WordPerfect once ran every office on earth. The dullest format in the building, quietly eating the lot.
Watching
- The shape of Google's AI Overviews monetisation experiments in the US. They're already shifting which CTR cohorts get traffic.
- Perplexity Pages / Comet. Perplexity is doing more interesting product work than it gets credit for, and the page-publishing angle has GEO implications people are sleeping on.
- Anthropic's Skills API, for the agent-tooling side. The next plateau of agent capability is mostly about better composability, not better models.
Where I'm spending too much time
Tuning. Both site-tuning (you should see what the canvas in the hero used to look like) and tuning my agent stack (adjusting prompts, swapping models, watching for drift). Useful, but I notice when a Tuesday afternoon disappears into it.
And chasing new models. Every time a lab ships something I'm straight back into the agentic workflows to see how it holds up against the last one, which is equal parts research and procrastination. MiniMax M3 landed last week and has me particularly nosy right now.
Open offer
If you've got a brand and you're wondering what AI actually says about you right now, I'll run a selection of tailored, customer-relevant prompts through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity and send you back the raw output, no commitment. It's quick. It's free. It's a strong indicator of whether we should talk.