Context Window

Last week, I made the case that external B2B creators on LinkedIn can anchor and supplement Layer 3 of the Source Signal Stack (the layer where AI search systems look for independent, named-human entities) for companies that don't have internal SMEs willing or able to publish under their own names. Today, I want to go deeper on the B2B creator piece. In this edition, I’ll be answering questions like: How to identify a valuable Layer 3 creator/influencer How to structure partnerships that...

Last week, I published a piece on the Source Signal Stack, a four-layer framework for thinking about which content signals LLMs actually trust when they decide who to cite in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Mode. The TL;DR: the stack starts with brand-owned content at the bottom and ends with earned community mentions at the top, and the further a signal originates from brand control, the more weight LLMs give it. That piece argued Layer 3, with internal subject matter experts...

You've read the AEO playbooks, and you understand what needs to happen: Your employee subject matter experts (not just the CEO, but also the PMs, solutions engineers, and VPs of customer success) should be publishing under their own names, consistently, with a defensible point of view. The problem is that you're running a team already stretched past its limit. Your SMEs have jobs to do, and nobody has thirty free hours a month to figure out which experts to activate, what they should say, how...

Here’s a stat from AirOps that should make every B2B content team genuinely uncomfortable: 85% of AI citations come from third-party platforms, not brand-owned sites. Not your blog. Not your resource hub. Not the content you've spent years building, optimizing, and promoting through every owned channel you have. Third-party platforms. Sources you don't own and often can't control. Now pair it with this finding from Moz’s analysis of 40K queries: 88% of Google AI Mode citations aren't even in...

AI content is still newish on the scene, but it's already making B2B content all blend together. You know what I’m talking about: The long-form articles that all follow the same structure and tone, with definitions, tables, comparisons, and stat-heavy paragraphs all built for LLM extraction. It’s a formula…and sure, it might appease the LLM method of information parsing. But for the human readers (you know, the ones making the decisions and spending the money to buy your thing?) They’re...

Last week, I ran a quick experiment. I pulled the top 20 traffic-driving pages from a client's blog. Every single one ranked on page one for its target keyword, had solid click-through rates, and good engagement metrics. By every traditional SEO measure, these pages were performing well. Then I tested how often those same pages were cited in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. The results were not great. A handful showed up occasionally, but most didn't...

First things first: This newsletter has a new name! Welcome to Context Window, where I'll be sharing everything I'm learning about AI search. (Your girl is over here cooking on a website rebrand, and this is part of it.) Today, we're going to talk about the fact that your content might rank on page one and still be invisible. As you know, Google AI Overviews now answer queries directly at the top of the results page, pulling from multiple sources to construct answers, often without anyone...

Last week, we talked about why the subject matter expert (SME) interview is an important step in the AI-optimized content production process. This week, I want to go deeper into that and tie it into the larger idea/strategy of reputation engineering (as it relates to AI search visibility). This newsletter is brought to you by the lovely folks at AirOps. Your buyers are getting answers from ChatGPT. Are you in them? AirOps analyzed 15M+ AI queries and turned the findings into a 4-play...

There's a step in the AI-optimized content production process that doesn't get talked about enough, and it's the one where most projects quietly fall apart. It’s the subject matter expert interview. An important piece of creating content that LLMs cite in AI summaries includes getting fresh, original insights from experts (both internal and external to your organization). This is part of "owning your topic" efforts we talked about last week. AI can’t (yet) conduct those interviews, so it’s...