Essays on voice, craft, and scaling without sounding like everyone else.
Opinionated, occasionally long, never generic. New posts every couple of weeks.
May 11, 2026
What is Auden? The brain inside VoiceMoat
Auden is the brain inside VoiceMoat. A creative writing partner trained on a creator's full profile, not a general model. Here's how Auden learns your voice, what it refuses to write, and where the Standard and Deep tiers fit in.
May 11, 2026
Answer engine optimization: a 2026 field guide
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the discipline of making sure your content is what AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Grok cite when they synthesize an answer. This 2026 field guide walks the full stack layer by layer: entity identity, machine-readable structure on every page, retrieval-friendly content, bot-reachable distribution, the citation graph that descends from PageRank, recency, and measurement. Plus which answer engines matter most, what an llms.txt file is and whether you need one, and the single highest-leverage move if you only do one thing.
May 11, 2026
How AI assistants decide which sources to cite
When ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity answer a question, only a handful of sources end up cited. The selection isn't random: AI assistants weight roughly five things (entity clarity, structured data, content shape, citation graph, recency), and most of them are within a publisher's control. Here is how each factor works, how answer engine optimization differs from SEO, and what we changed on our own site to be more citable.
April 9, 2026
Why every AI draft you write sounds the same
You've prompted ChatGPT a thousand ways and it still comes back with the same helpful-assistant voice. There's a technical reason, and it's why dedicated voice-matching is a different product category.