Industry Moves
Posts tracking how platforms, agencies, and technology companies are reshaping content infrastructure - and what those moves mean for provenance, machine readability, and open standards.
The big platforms are spending heavily on AI infrastructure. The open question is what they leave unbuilt - the layer that survives when content leaves the platform, the provenance record that travels with the file, the specification that no single vendor controls.
These posts track real moves: named companies, named products, named dates. Each post ends with what the move does not do and what remains open.
Posts
GEO Is a Tactic. MX Is the Specification.
Generative Engine Optimization has been around for years. It tells you to chase citations. Machine Experience tells you to build content that earns them, across every machine context, on any platform.
WPP Built Open. Omnicom Built Omni. Both Left the Same Layer Open.
The holding companies are spending fortunes on proprietary AI platforms. None of them writes a provenance record into the file, the layer that survives when content leaves the platform. That layer is open, and that is the point.
Microsoft Made the Trace Valuable. It Left It Unsigned.
Microsoft AI's Frontier Tuning turns the record of an agent's work into training data an organisation owns. That same record is the evidence of what the agent decided. Microsoft makes the trace valuable; it says nothing about how anyone establishes what is in it, who made it, or whether it has been altered.
Google Named GEO, Then Debunked Most of It
On 5 June 2026 Google's Search Central docs named generative engine optimization as a real thing, and in the same update told you most of what is sold under that name does nothing. The tactics it crossed out were never the MX claim. What survives is the floor MX builds on, plus the one layer Google Search is not in the business of giving you: provenance.