The Skyscraper Technique, Modernized: What Still Works in AI Era
Brian Dean published the original skyscraper technique in 2013. The premise was simple: find content that already earns links, build something better, and reach out to the people linking to the original. It worked well enough that it became one of the most referenced content marketing frameworks of the 2010s. Thousands of agencies ran it. […]
How to Optimize Content for AI Mode Selection: A Formatting and Structuring Playbook
Google AI Mode does not rank pages. It selects them. That shift from ranking to selection changes what good content looks like. A well-written 1,500-word post in prose form may rank on page one of traditional search but get skipped entirely by AI Mode in favor of a shorter, more structured competitor page that formats […]
How to Win Citations in Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity
Three platforms now control how hundreds of millions of people find information: Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. Each one generates synthesized answers instead of returning a list of links. Each one cites the sources it draws from. If your brand is not among those cited sources, you are invisible to a growing share of […]
AI Optimization (AIO) Explained: From AI Mode to Search Agents and Beyond
The search landscape has fractured. In 2023, most marketers needed to think about one thing: ranking in Google. Nowadays, the surface area for visibility has multiplied. Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and a growing ecosystem of AI search agents now each have their own ways of discovering, evaluating, and surfacing content.AI Optimization, […]