Memos by Ryan Edwards
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- Audience Mapping
What is audience mapping, and why it decides how good your content can be. Audience mapping identifies the distinct groups a brand needs to reach, and gets specific about each one. For every group,...
- Start at the End, The Secret To Good Strategy
Start at the End Why the best content strategy begins with the outcome and works backward The most reliable way to build a content strategy is to start at the end. Decide the outcome you want, then...
- Ryan Edwards
Ryan Edwards Welcome to my MythOS library. Enjoy, have some fun, kick the tires, and challenge my opinions about what I have to say, because that's how we can create some growth together.
- The Evolution of Shopping: From a Place You Went to a Conversation That Finds You
Shopping has changed more in the last three years than it did in the thirty before it. The strange part is how quietly it happened. For most of retail history, the store was a fixed point on a map....
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- Structured Data Standards for SEO and AI Search: Primary Sources and Measured Effect
Structured data is markup that tells search engines and AI systems what a page is. The authoritative rules for it come from a small set of primary sources, not from third-party studies. Adding it to...
- Personalization vs. Customization in Search
Search is moving from a personalization model to a customization model. The two terms are often used interchangeably, but they describe opposite mechanics. The difference is the locus of control:...
- Google launches Preferred Sources in AI Mode and AI Overviews, giving more control to the audience
For twenty-five years, the deal was simple: Google decided which sources you saw, and the whole SEO industry existed to influence that decision. On May 27, 2026, Google quietly changed the deal. With...
- Rank Is the Only SEO Metric That Matters for AI Citation
ChatGPT citation rate is 58% at retrieval position 1 — dropping to 14% by position 10. A mediocre page at rank 1 outperforms a great page at rank 6+. Rank overrides content quality every time. Domain...
- Measuring Content ROI in the Age of AI Search
The metrics built for search no longer measure what search actually does. Organic click-through rates on queries with AI Overviews dropped from 1.76% to 1.01% between June 2024 and September 2025....
- Impact of Markdown on LLM Bot Traffic: Experimental Analysis
We ran a controlled experiment in early 2026 to answer one question: if you serve AI crawlers Markdown instead of HTML, do they visit your pages more often? We tested 381 pages across six websites...
- Trust Fell. Usage Rose. Nobody Changed Their Strategy.
There is a chart inside the Morning Consult AI Trust Report that almost nobody is talking about, and it may be the most important thing published about AI adoption this year. It shows two lines...
- Subfolders vs. Subdomains: Which One Should You Use?
Subfolders are usually the right choice for content and growth pages in 2026, while subdomains are a specific tool you use when you genuinely need separation, like for a product, separate customers,...
- The AI Trust Report Everyone Is Misreading
A Morning Consult report published May 10, 2026 found that 63% of Americans trust AI only a little or not at all, and marketing circles have been using that number ever since to argue against...
- This Is Not a Permanent State. AI Models Change.
This Is Not a Permanent State. Models Change. describes how brand-site citation share in ChatGPT responses shifts significantly across model versions, and why building for long-term credibility...
- ChatGPT Cross-Checks Your Site Against Your Reviews
ChatGPT Cross-Checks Your Site Against Your Reviews describes the behavior by which ChatGPT reads a brand's owned site alongside external review sources in the same prompt and compares the two...
- Who Actually Gets Cited in the Answer
Who Actually Gets Cited in the Answer refers to the distribution of citation share across source types in ChatGPT responses, revealing a significant gap between brand-direct and open-ended query...
- ChatGPT Query Phase Flow
ChatGPT Query Phase Flow is a multi-stage web search sequence ChatGPT runs when answering questions with search enabled, where each call serves a distinct function and draws from a different...
- Google Has Become Your Sales Agent
Google Has Become Your Sales Agent describes the structural shift in how AI Overviews (AIO) have repositioned Google from a traffic referral engine into an active participant in the buyer journey,...