Notes from inside the work
Writing on SEO, AEO, GEO, paid media, lifecycle, subscriptions, user journey, and conversion optimization — from someone who builds these systems.
Everything here comes out of work I am actually doing: a measurement result that contradicted the dashboard, a structural fix that changed how an engine read a site, a retention problem that turned out to be a payments problem. If a post makes a claim about what worked, it will also say how that was established.
The four lanes — SEO/AEO/GEO, paid media, lifecycle, and user journey — are one system, so the categories below overlap on purpose. A post about why a funnel leaks is often really a post about which channel sent unqualified traffic into it.
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Platform ROAS is grading its own homework
Every ad platform reports the conversions it can see and stays silent on the counterfactual. How to tell how much of your reported return is actually real.
A real lift or just noise? The testing discipline most CRO programs skip
Most 'winning' A/B tests are false positives. Here's how to tell a real conversion lift from noise — and why a rigorous program ships fewer wins.
Where intent dies: mapping the real path to conversion
The funnel you drew is an org chart, not a buyer's path. Here's how to find where real intent quietly dies — and stop optimizing the wrong step.
The unit math that quietly kills subscription businesses
Your 3:1 LTV:CAC can hide an insolvent business. The model lives or dies on cohort decay and contribution margin, not headline averages.
Your churn is a payments problem more often than a loyalty problem
A large share of subscription churn isn't customers leaving. It's failed payments nobody owns. Find the leak before you write another win-back email.
The saturation point: finding where the next dollar stops working
Average ROAS tells you nothing about scaling. The only number that matters is the return on the next dollar — and it's lower than you think.
One citation play per engine: ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity don't read you the same way
GEO isn't one channel. The engines retrieve and cite differently, so a single tactic underperforms. Here's the play per engine and how to measure it.
Winning the answer box when the click never comes
The click is disappearing because answer engines satisfy the query on the page. That's a positioning win, if you stop measuring it like a traffic loss.
Entities, not keywords: architecting a site search engines can actually model
Search ranks entities and topics, not keyword strings. Most sites are a pile of unrelated pages. How to build one an engine can actually model.