Issue No. 12 - August 25, 2026 When I first started using AI seriously, I read everything I could find about how to do it right. Set clear instructions. Tell it who it is. Tell it who you are. Give it context about your tone, your audience, your goals. The more specific, the better. So I did. I built it out carefully. Then I started seeing a different take. Creators I follow, people who work with AI every day, started posting about pulling back on instructions. The argument was...
18 days ago • 3 min read
Issue No. 11 - August 18, 2026 I've been cheating on my AI tools. Not dramatically. Just shopping around. For the last few weeks I've been deliberately splitting my work across different platforms. Strategy questions go to one. Creative work goes to another. Not because I made a formal decision to do it but because I started noticing the outputs felt different depending on where I asked. And once I noticed, I couldn't stop noticing. This isn't a platform review. I'm not going to tell you...
25 days ago • 3 min read
Issue No. 10 - August 11, 2026 The audit score came back. We passed. That should have felt like good news. It mostly did, except for the part I couldn't stop thinking about. A few weeks ago I started running free AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) audits. It's the practice of making your content easier for AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews to find and cite. Several free tools will score your site and flag the gaps. I ran a few, including ones through Google and...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Issue No. 09 - August 4, 2026 The AI ideas at JB Sales don't stop. That's not a complaint. Most of them are actually good. But somewhere in the last few weeks I started noticing a gap. The question we keep asking is "what can we do with AI?" And the answer is almost always: a lot. The harder question, the one we haven't been asking consistently, is "what should we do with AI?" Those are very different conversations. The difference between them is outcomes. At JB Sales, we have real business...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Issue No. 08 - July 28, 2026 I sat down last week to calculate how much time AI actually saves me each day. I couldn't do it. I've been using AI tools almost every day for months. I should have a number. But the honest answer is more complicated than I expected. When I started, I assumed the math would be obvious. Do something with AI, do the same thing without AI, count the minutes. The problem is it doesn't work that way in practice. Some things genuinely take less time now. Writing a first...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Issue No. 07 - July 22, 2026 I've been writing this newsletter for seven weeks. I've been posting on LinkedIn almost every day. The content is real. The voice is honest. I think the work is actually good. And for most of these seven weeks I kept asking myself why it wasn't reaching more people. The answer, when I finally looked at it directly, was uncomfortable. The content wasn't the problem. I hadn't built any distribution. I had treated publishing as the finish line. Write the issue, load...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Issue No. 06 - July 14, 2026 A few months ago I started documenting what it actually looks like to build an AEO strategy with no technical background, no agency, and no clear roadmap. Just a business problem, a lot of questions, and a willingness to figure it out one step at a time. That's been the whole point of this newsletter. Not the finished version. The muddy middle of it. This week I'm sharing something that came out of all of that work. Over the past several months, I've been deep in...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Issue No. 05 - July 7, 2026 Last week I was telling a friend about the GA4 (Google Analytics) setup I'd been working on. The containers, the custom channel groups, the UTMs. I wasn't showing off. I was just recapping what I'd done. She stopped me and said she never would have guessed I'd been scared to touch any of it. That stopped me for a second. Because I had been. For years, I'd heard about Google Analytics the way you hear about something that's clearly not for you. Developers used it....
2 months ago • 2 min read
Issue No. 04 - June 30, 2026 Last week I started a project I should have started months ago: setting up a real way to measure whether our AEO work is actually doing anything. That meant finally sitting down with GA4, which stands for Google Analytics 4, and which I'll now explain the way I wish someone had explained it to me. Think of it as the thing that tells you where your website visitors came from. Did they click a link from Google search, from LinkedIn, from an email, from typing your...
2 months ago • 4 min read