Ellie Russell

A brand might appear regularly in ChatGPT recommendations while showing up less frequently in Gemini, Perplexity, or Google AI Mode.

Each platform uses its own retrieval systems, available sources, and methods for generating answers. As a result, the same question can produce different brand recommendations depending on where someone asks it.

Someone sent me a bug report that made me sit back and stare at the wall. Not because it was harsh. Because they were right, and it was a fundamental problem, and fixing it properly meant rebuilding something I had built a year ago and was proud of.

For about an hour I did not want to do it. I wanted to close the tab and pretend I had not read it. The whole thing felt like being told my house had a bad foundation and the roof was fine.

I learned more from a failed launch than I have from every book I have read on the subject.

The books made sense. The principles were clean and the examples were instructive. And none of it stuck until I had felt the thing go wrong in my own hands.