Field notes
Every piece here publishes something you won't find anywhere else: real data from our own outreach, negotiations, and monitoring, anonymized and sourced. No filler.
Mentions correlate about three times more with AI citations than backlinks. What that means, why Google and AI reward different things, and where earned editorial coverage fits.
ONLY HERE: An honest read of the mentions-versus-links data for AI visibility: what the largest public study shows, what each system actually rewards, and a plain rule for where an existing mention beats a new link and where it can't.
66.5% of links built since 2013 are already dead, and almost nobody who sells them looks again. How our monitoring works, our drop record, and a 40-minute vendor audit.
ONLY HERE: A working description of a production link-monitoring pipeline (six link states, a rolling 7-day re-verification cycle, same-day drop flags) plus our complete drop record to date: 2 dropped, 2 caught by monitoring, 2 replaced free. No vendor we know of publishes this.
84% of AI citations go to earned editorial coverage, 0.3% to paid catalogs. What engines cite, why mentions rival links, and the measurement protocol you can audit.
ONLY HERE: The complete playbook we run for clients, in order: what AI engines cite and why catalogs are citation-dead, the mention data most link builders ignore, and our full measurement protocol, published so you can audit it.
Our 65% counter rule, two rounds then walk, and the one question that repriced a bundle to about £200 a slot: real publisher negotiation from our own reply threads.
ONLY HERE: Real negotiation patterns read directly from our classified reply threads: the decline taxonomy we act on, the 65% counter and two-rounds-then-walk rule, and an actual three-placement bundle at 600 GBP. Agencies don't publish their side of the haggling. This is ours.
Real reply rates from 3,945+ tracked sends: 5.8% human, not the inflated 7.1% headline, plus the blind pitch-copy tests and the mistakes that quietly kill threads.
ONLY HERE: First-party reply-rate data from 3,945+ tracked sends, a blind-judged pitch-copy tournament, and the exact failure modes our internal audit caught. None of this exists anywhere else.
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