Duane Forrester has spent 30 years in search and digital strategy. He built Bing Webmaster Tools during his time as Senior Product Manager at Microsoft and was part of the team that co-launched Schema.org, the structured data standard used across the web.
His career includes leadership roles at Bruce Clay Inc. and Yext. He founded Unbound Answers and created CitationIQ, a tool for measuring visibility in AI responses. His book "The Machine Layer" outlines frameworks for becoming visible and trusted in AI-powered search.
On the podcast, Duane introduced the concept of "machine comfort bias," the tendency of LLMs to favor sources that provide complete, trustworthy information without requiring additional verification. He argued that content structure matters differently for AI: rather than reformatting pages into 300-word chunks, the key is placing facts, figures, and bullet points at the top where LLMs can find them. His "Ironman vs Superman" analogy captures his view on AI: these systems amplify your existing skills rather than replacing them, and hope is not a strategy. Trust, he argues, has become the new algorithm.
