Logo
Search
Home
Premium
Logo
Oliver Buchannon
Kevin Indig

Advisor to the world's most successful tech companies Author of the Growth Memo

AI Research

Vector (embedding)

Jul 6, 2026

•

2 min read

Vector (embedding)

An embedding is the representation your content competes as inside an AI engine, and identical text can produce different embeddings across models.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

AI Research

Top-k retrieval

Jul 6, 2026

•

2 min read

Top-k retrieval

Top-k retrieval makes AI citation a zero-sum game with far less surface than 10 blue links, often fewer than 10 chunks per query.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

AI Research

Hallucination

Jul 6, 2026

•

2 min read

Hallucination

LLMs can make things up in a very convincing way, and being the well-grounded, clearly attributed source is your best defense.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

AI Research

Synthetic personas

Jul 6, 2026

•

2 min read

Synthetic personas

Traditional personas are descriptive; synthetic personas are predictive. One documents a segment, the other simulates it.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

AI Research

Embedding similarity thresholds

Jul 6, 2026

•

2 min read

Embedding similarity thresholds

The cutoff score that decides whether a chunk is close enough in meaning to a query to be retrieved or cited at all.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

AI Research

Chunking

Jul 6, 2026

•

2 min read

Chunking

Chunks are the retrieval unit, not pages, so a long pillar page competes as many fragments and its weakest paragraph can disqualify its strongest.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

AI Research

Semantically aligned language

Jul 6, 2026

•

2 min read

Semantically aligned language

Phrasing content in the same meaning-space and words your audience and the model use, so it gets retrieved for the right queries.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

Foundations

Training data

Jul 6, 2026

•

2 min read

Training data

LLMs are biased by training data, so brands established before a model's cutoff carry an authority advantage newer entrants can only close through retrieval.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

AI Research

Semantic similarity

Jul 6, 2026

•

2 min read

Semantic similarity

The question shifts from "does my page contain the query" to "does my page sit close to the query in meaning-space."

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

SEO

SEO persona

Jul 6, 2026

•

2 min read

SEO persona

Personas built from organic queries and prompts are one of the few forms of market intelligence that scale across every team.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

AI Research

Google Bard

Jul 6, 2026

•

2 min read

Google Bard

Bard was the first big opportunity for a Google competitor to take share, and it launched with a stumble that cost Alphabet $100B.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

AI Research

Turn 1

Jul 6, 2026

•

2 min read

Turn 1

Turn 1 is the first prompt and answer in an AI conversation, and it is often the most valuable moment because many users stop there.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

AI Research

Human test-retest consistency

Jul 6, 2026

•

2 min read

Human test-retest consistency

Ask the same person the same question 2 weeks apart and they're about 85% consistent with themselves.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

AI Research

Microsoft Prometheus

Jul 6, 2026

•

2 min read

Microsoft Prometheus

Prometheus gave Bing its first real shot at gaining more than its 6% market share by pairing the Bing index with a large language model.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

Behavior

Validation click

Jul 6, 2026

•

2 min read

Validation click

A validation click is the click a user makes to verify an AI answer, and it is one of the few click types that survive in AI search.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

AI Research

Google SGE (Search Generative Experience)

Jul 6, 2026

•

2 min read

Google SGE (Search Generative Experience)

SGE was Google's first iteration of AI-generated answers inside Search, and it pushed the whole SEO industry to learn new skills.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

SEO

Programmatic SEO

Jul 6, 2026

•

2 min read

Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO is the most effective way to scale SEO: build a large number of same-structure pages to target a query pattern.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

Behavior

Astroturfing

Jul 6, 2026

•

2 min read

Astroturfing

Astroturfing manufactures fake grassroots popularity to game algorithms, and it is the opposite of the trust marketplaces work to earn.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

AI Research

Vectorization

Jun 24, 2026

•

2 min read

Vectorization

Vectorization collapses synonyms and paraphrases into the same mathematical neighborhood, which kills exact-match keyword strategy.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

AI Research

Vector database

Jun 24, 2026

•

2 min read

Vector database

A vector database is the index layer of AI search, which turns clean chunking from a content nicety into a technical SEO concern.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

AI Research

Generator

Jun 24, 2026

•

2 min read

Generator

Being retrieved is necessary but not sufficient: the generator runs a second contest that decides which chunks get cited and which get dropped.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

AI Research

Retriever

Jun 24, 2026

•

2 min read

Retriever

The retriever is the first filter in AI search, and it runs before the model writes a single word.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

AI Research

Generative AI Search

May 12, 2026

•

2 min read

Generative AI Search

Generative AI fundamentally shifts how users interact with search results and where your traffic comes from.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

Behavior

First-click behavior

May 12, 2026

•

2 min read

First-click behavior

Understanding first-click behavior helps you recognize that your content's value is no longer tied primarily to generating clicks.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1

AI Research

Entity score

May 12, 2026

•

2 min read

Entity score

Entity scoring turns that blind spot into a trackable number you can monitor month over month and use to make evidence-based decisions about content investments.

Amanda Johnson
Kevin Indig
Amanda Johnson, +1
Load more

Growth Memo

© 2026 Growth Memo.
beehiivPowered by beehiiv