Business
Are Websites Dead? Why AEO Makes Them Stronger Than Ever
Everyone says websites are dead and AI is where traffic goes. It is backwards. AI pulls from sources, and your site is the source. Why AEO matters more.
Working notes from a professional ghostwriter — on the craft of writing, the business of publishing, the psychology of authors, and the changing landscape of books in the AI era.
These articles come out of 113+ books authored and 54+ ghostwritten. They cover what's actually working in publishing right now, what isn't, how AI is changing the work for both writers and readers, what executives and founders get wrong when they try to write their own book, and what they get right when they bring in help.
No SEO listicles. No content-marketer fluff. Just observations from inside the work — written for people who care about books and the craft behind them.
Everyone says websites are dead and AI is where traffic goes. It is backwards. AI pulls from sources, and your site is the source. Why AEO matters more.
AI search is worth pursuing and badly broken: opaque, slow, wrong about you with no appeal, corruptible by rivals. The flaws to know, and the one fix.
The early web belonged to people, not brands. SEO buried the individual, AI search is a second and higher wall, and the fun is dying. Here is what was lost, and what it now takes to claw visibility back.
UCLA’s 2026 Hollywood Diversity Report shows diverse films earn the most while the industry funds fewer of them. What that gatekeeping means for every author.
Most ghostwriters jump straight into writing the full manuscript. I write one chapter first, then ask the author a single question: does this sound like you? That question separates a book that feels authentic from one that sounds like someone else thinking your thoughts.
After fourteen years of ghostwriting, I turn down more projects than I take. When Joe Rockey approached me about writing his business book, I listened for three specific things before saying yes, and he had all of them.
The biggest mistake ghostwriters make is starting to write too soon. Before I put a single word on the page, I spend weeks interviewing my client across multiple recorded sessions, asking hard questions and following the threads that matter, because the pages you write before you truly understand the person are pages you’ll eventually throw away.
Most business books fail at the one job that actually matters: getting their author more clients. The problem is almost always the same, the author built the wrong kind of book by trying to write for everyone instead of the specific people who need to hire them.
Most people think ghostwriting starts with one long conversation and ends with a finished book. What actually produces a good book is the opposite: hours of structured interviews that push a client’s thinking deeper, until they start surprising themselves with what they actually believe.
The title of a business book is the first argument it makes, the concept an author will repeat in every conversation for as long as the book is in print. Finding the right one for Joe Rockey’s book required understanding what it actually argued, not just what it was about, and a single word that changed everything.
When you’re writing a book about something you’re genuinely good at, you face a real problem: how much do you actually reveal? Give away everything and you’ve written expensive free consulting. Stay vague and nobody trusts you. The answer lies in understanding what belongs in the book and what belongs in the paid work.
An outline for a business book is not a table of contents. It’s the thinking itself, tested against your central argument before you write a single word, where every chapter has to move the reader from one belief to another.
The US government switched off Anthropic’s top AI models overnight. Here’s the lesson for writers: never build your business on access you don’t own.+
Musk became the first trillionaire, but the money is just fuel for Mars. The people building the multiplanetary age are making history almost no one records.
Trolls do not pick targets at random. Here are the 16 online behaviors that attract them, how a skilled troll operates, and what to do when one finds you.
Clients are not using AI to replace ghostwriters. They use it to collaborate, and they expect a writer fluent in the same tools. What the shift means for you.
A sale through Amazon means giving up roughly 65 percent of the cover price and your customer list to a company that competes with you. A direct sale through Shopify, Payhip, or your own site means keeping more margin and building a list of buyers you can sell to again. For autho
Most book proposal advice is written for authors with a large platform. If you have a small audience but a genuine expertise, the proposal has to do more of the work that platform would have done. Here is what changes in the proposal, what publishers actually look for from low-pl
Authority experts are watching peers use AI to publish books in weeks instead of months. The fear is that the AI-published competitor will land the speaking gigs and the consulting deals first. The reality is that speed-to-market in authority publishing has never been the moat. H
Co-author and ghostwriter are not the same deal in different wrappers. They are structurally different agreements with different IP outcomes, different revenue splits, and different effects on the book’s commercial life. Here is how to choose between them, when each one is the ri
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