Methods catalogue
Methods is where we publish the arguments behind the work.
I don't have a proprietary seven-step framework to sell here, and renaming an SEO checklist wouldn't make it more useful.
These are the search principles we use when the answer isn't sitting neatly inside one channel: how we decide what to measure, where AI changes the work, where it doesn't, when a new label is useful and when the industry is mostly renaming something we already know how to do.
Some of these ideas will change as the evidence changes. Publishing them means being willing to change them.
Methods
AI answers
organic results
Maps
paid search
PROOF
Research
Releases
AI answers, organic results, Maps and paid search can all expose different parts of the same demand.
The teams running them don't always share what they learn, even when one channel has evidence that would change another team's decision.
If you change the site before you know the starting point, the later story gets very easy to improve in hindsight.
We establish a repeatable baseline first, including the uncertainty in the measurement.
AI changed the interface and added new retrieval and recommendation surfaces.
It did not make crawlability, information architecture, useful content, entities, authority or search demand irrelevant overnight.
There are too many acronym fights in a field where the labels still overlap.
We use the terminology when it helps describe a real difference in the work, and stop when the label becomes more important than the search problem.
A brand mention, a cited source and a recommendation are different observations.
We look at which sources are being used and how citation behaviour changes without pretending we have access to the ranking systems behind the answer.
AI can take a lot of manual work out of search, but speed is only useful when the right decisions still have an owner.
We keep decision rights, evidence and review gates visible around the parts of search where mistakes have consequences.
AI made content production cheap enough that volume is no longer impressive.
Cheap production does not give the page a reason to exist.
Next step
If one of these arguments can't survive contact with actual search data, it shouldn't stay a company belief because we already designed a nice page for it.
Methods links straight into PROOF and Research so the ideas have something observable to answer to.
The thinking lives here. The observations live there.
For client work, start with AI Search. For a practical reference instead of an argument, open the AI Search Field Guide.