Field Notes.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of engineering content for citation and visibility inside AI-generated responses, while SEO optimizes content for traditional search engine...

Kurt Fischman · Mar 15, 2026

Brand visibility in AI answers measures whether and how AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity include your brand when responding to user queries. Unlike traditional search rankings,...

Kurt Fischman · Mar 13, 2026

your-generic-schema-is-useless

Kurt Fischman · Feb 22, 2026

AI search optimization is the engineering discipline that structures digital content for citation by large language models and AI-powered search engines. It targets inclusion in synthesized...

Kurt Fischman · Feb 17, 2026

A modular knowledge object is a discrete content unit architected for machine retrieval rather than linear reading. Modular knowledge objects restructure information into atomic, self-contained...

Kurt Fischman · Dec 8, 2025

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is a discipline that remaps buyer discovery from click-based funnels to AI-mediated surfaces where large language models, AI overviews, and answer engines compress...

Kurt Fischman · Dec 6, 2025

Algorithmic literacy is the operational capacity to engineer content that satisfies both machine retrieval systems and human decision-makers. In an era where 40-50% of organic search traffic is...

Kurt Fischman · Dec 3, 2025

AI search is not a separate channel waiting for its own line item. It is an answer layer already draped across your entire funnel, shaping how buyers discover, compare, decide, and implement. This...

Kurt Fischman · Nov 17, 2025

AI search is not a speculative technology bet. It is a revenue channel that intercepts natural-language intent, reduces discovery friction, and converts earlier in the buyer journey than...

Kurt Fischman · Nov 16, 2025

The search stack has undergone a structural inversion. What began as a crawl-index-rank pipeline for sorting documents by link authority has become a retrieve-generate-cite pipeline for...

Kurt Fischman · Nov 3, 2025

llms.txt is a lightweight, machine-readable markdown file placed at a site's root that tells large language models what a brand is, where to find clean source material, and how to cite it...

Kurt Fischman · Nov 3, 2025

A canonical identity registry is the single, machine-readable record of who an organization is, expressed as stable identifiers, typed attributes, and resolvable links to external knowledge...

Kurt Fischman · Nov 3, 2025

Jobs-to-be-done is the framework that strips AI search optimization down to the only two things that matter: revenue creation and cost reduction. By mapping the specific jobs that AI search...

Kurt Fischman · Nov 3, 2025

Wikidata is the structured knowledge layer that gives AI systems the stable identifiers they need to disambiguate, retrieve, and cite real-world entities. This article explains how QIDs, property...

Kurt Fischman · Oct 30, 2025

AI search optimization is the practice of engineering content and structured data so large language models retrieve, cite, and recommend your brand with confidence. This article introduces the...

Kurt Fischman · Oct 30, 2025

Entity-centric architecture is the knowledge design framework that organizes all content, data, and structured markup around disambiguated entities rather than keywords or pages. Entity-centric...

Kurt Fischman · Oct 30, 2025

Embeddings are the numerical representations that AI systems use to measure, compare, and retrieve meaning. An embedding translates text into a vector, a list of numbers in high-dimensional space,...

Kurt Fischman · Oct 30, 2025

Chunk engineering is the discipline of structuring content into self-contained, semantically complete units that AI retrieval systems can extract, embed, rank, and cite independently. This article...

Kurt Fischman · Oct 30, 2025

Structured data mastery is the discipline of engineering machine-readable markup that transforms generic web pages into entity-resolved, AI-retrievable knowledge assets. This article covers the...

Kurt Fischman · Oct 30, 2025

Key performance indicators for AI search optimization measure whether large language models recognize your entity, retrieve it under relevant prompts, and cite it when generating answers. This...

Kurt Fischman · Oct 30, 2025