Duane Forrester
Author; advisor
Unbound Answers
Duane Forrester is the author of The Machine Layer and a former Bing product marketing leader who now advises organizations on AI-driven discovery. He helped launch Bing Webmaster Tools, worked on Schema.org, later led industry insights at Yext, and translates retrieval machinery into frameworks marketers can use without the hype.
Bing Webmaster Tools and Schema.org
Forrester spent years on the platform side of discovery at Microsoft as a senior product marketing manager on Bing. He led the launch of Bing Webmaster Tools, creating resources for publishers and developers who needed clearer guidance on visibility and site performance. During that period he also helped bring Schema.org to life, working at the intersection of structured data, search engines, and the open web.
His later writing tracks system shifts, from directories to links to intent signals to AI intermediaries, which he watched from inside a search engine.
Bruce Clay and Yext
Before and around the Bing years he also worked in-house on search and digital programs and led agency operations as VP of Operations at Bruce Clay, Inc., overseeing SEO, paid media, content, and platform strategy. Later, as Vice President of Industry Insights at Yext, he worked with hundreds of organizations on visibility, content, and discovery problems, translating how search systems behaved into guidance teams could staff.
Writing The Machine Layer
His book The Machine Layer is written for people who market products but need to understand how retrieval systems work. Forrester starts with tokenization, chunking, embeddings, and retrieval-augmented generation, then builds frameworks for earning trust with AI systems.
Advising Through Unbound Answers
Today Forrester advises through Unbound Answers and his personal site, helping leaders pressure-test assumptions about AI-driven discovery. His public framing is blunt: AI systems are intermediaries that decide what gets retrieved, summarized, cited, or ignored, with implications for trust and authority before a human ever sees a brand.
Away from screens he builds guitars, explores backcountry, and cooks, mostly barbecue. On duaneforrester.com he connects that patience-with-materials mindset to how he wants teams to treat discovery systems: plan carefully, adapt when the system does not behave as expected, and skip the silver-bullet pitch.
Unbound Answers sessions are pitched at senior people facing metrics or CEO questions the old SEO mental model cannot answer.