Thoughts & Perspectives
Building in public
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.
Claude Code Setup Guide 2026: Install to First Shipped Feature in 30 Minutes
The Claude Code setup that actually matters: install, login, a CLAUDE.md that stops the agent improvising, MCP servers, and a first-project workflow — from someone who uses it on client work daily.
Vibe Coding Flutter Apps in 2026: Tools, Workflow, and What Breaks
Yes, you can vibe code a Flutter app in 2026 — FlutterFlow, Claude Code, and Cursor with the Dart MCP server all work. Here's the honest tool comparison and where mobile vibe coding falls apart.
7 Best Lovable Alternatives in 2026 (From a CTO Who Fixes These Apps)
Lovable's credit limits and React-only opinions push a lot of builders to shop around. I ranked 7 Lovable alternatives by what actually ships — with real pricing and honest trade-offs.
7 Best Replit Alternatives in 2026 (Ranked by What Actually Ships)
Replit's credit-based Agent pricing surprises a lot of founders. I ranked 7 Replit alternatives by production readiness and real monthly cost — here's which one fits your situation.
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