What we're seeing, running an AI-native agency
Local SEO, measurement, and the build itself, written from our own work and checked before it ships.
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Ten shelves, each with the posts that belong on it
- AI Native Ops The operator's view of running an agency crew built on AI tools: supervision, trust, and the habits that make it reliable.
- Local SEO Field Notes What the search data actually says for local service businesses, told straight, including the parts that did not work.
- Measurement Truths Tracking, analytics, and attribution: what the numbers really show once you check the pipeline that produced them.
- Behind the Build Web craft, design, and performance lessons from building and rebuilding our own site and our clients' sites.
- Ads Lab Notes from running paid channels for local service businesses: what we tried, what we measured, and what we changed.
- Honest Marketing Claims, trust, and compliance: how we keep marketing copy accurate and what happens when we catch ourselves overstating something.
- Founder's Notebook Realizations and principles from running the agency, told in the first person and labeled as opinion.
- Toolbox The tools we use and recommend, with the real gotcha we hit along the way and a link to the official docs.
- Your Website, Protected Hacked sites, lost sites and the plugin and hosting risks behind them, explained for business owners, with what to check this week.
- Trade Guides State-by-state licensing and insurance guides for garage door and locksmith businesses, written so an owner can check each requirement at its source.
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Latest Articles
Notes from the work, in the order we published them
What to fill in first on a service area Business Profile
If you go to the customer's house, should your address show on Google? Here is the order we fill in a service area listing, and how to grade the one you already have.
Three doors into a hacked WordPress site
Plugins, a database behind your forms and code that builds each page on every visit are three doors an attacker can try. Here is each one, in plain words.
Why a 20 minute arrival promise needs a qualifier
A stopwatch line sells, but only the version your dispatch records can back is safe to run. Here is how to find it.
How to make every AI helper follow your house rules
A punctuation habit we had ruled out kept returning in helper output, because the helpers never saw the rule. Writing it into each helper's own instructions fixed it.
Did the scheduled job run, or only fire?
A scheduled job can start on time and leave nothing behind. Here is the one quick check per job that separates fired from done.
Three schedules that must agree: ads, phones and your listing
Your ad schedule, your phone hours and your listing hours should say the same thing. Here is a five minute check, and what a one hour gap costs.
Test your site on phones before it ships
A site that looks right on a laptop can slide sideways or hide its call button on a small phone. Here is how to check before launch.
An alert that cries wolf stops being read
Our own update scanner kept flagging a tool that was never behind. We fixed the check instead of muting it, and you can do the same.
How to work through a Business Profile checklist written for your trade
A generic profile checklist skips the categories, services and photos that matter in your trade. Here is how to work through a trade-specific one in order, and how often to run it again.
Google cannot hear your phone ring, but it can see who gets the next call
Google never hears your phone ring. It can see what a caller does next, and a caller who comes straight back to dial a competitor tells it plenty. Our theory, and our fix.
PHP2Shell isn't a WordPress bug. Your WordPress site still runs the thing that broke.
The defenders are right: it is a PHP bug, and WordPress builds its pages with PHP. What to ask your host this week, and why a site that only gets leads may not need a PHP server at all.
Should your analytics live in the tag manager?
Analytics belongs in the site code, where every build can check it. The tag manager should hold only short-lived ad tags, and a quarterly check keeps it that way.
Want to talk through your marketing?
Tell us where things stand and we'll tell you plainly what we'd do next.