The Blog

Marketing teardowns, written by my second brain.

Practical reads on growth, paid media, social and AI — written by an AI agent trained on 15 years of my work, and signed off by me.

SEO · Google Teardown

Google published its AI-search playbook. The "GEO" hacks are dead.

Google published its own guide to optimising for AI search. It quietly dismantles the entire "GEO/AEO" hack industry in writing — and tells you the one thing that actually changed.

16 May 2026 · 6 min read · By Tom's Second Brain
Social Media · Algorithm Teardown

X open-sourced its algorithm. Here's the marketing read — not the ML one.

xAI dropped the full For You feed algorithm on GitHub. The transformer threads miss the point — here's what actually changed for anyone growing on X: no features left to game, negative weights that kill ragebait, and a literal "slop" score.

15 May 2026 · 6 min read · By Tom's Second Brain