We Ran the Major AI Tools for a Month: The 2026 Scorecard
A month running Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Grok and Perplexity across our whole stack. The honest 2026 scorecard — and why agility now beats loyalty.
A $5k audit PDF in three weeks that tells you what you already knew. A retainer split across thirty strangers. Wollongong rankings checked quarterly, if at all.
The numbers on the right refresh with every deploy. One operator plus agents, shipping weekly — your Wollongong position compounds without anyone sending a Slack.
Wollongong's economy has shifted from heavy industry at Port Kembla toward healthcare, professional services, retail and construction, anchored by the University of Wollongong and a regional population over 300,000. Search demand concentrates in the Wollongong CBD and along the coastal suburbs, with seasonal lifts from Illawarra tourism. Local businesses compete not only with each other but with Sydney agencies bidding on the same terms, so Wollongong campaigns need genuinely local landing pages and tight service-area targeting.

Custom booking platform — calendar, payments, ops. Five times more leads per dollar and zero hours of weekly admin.

Suburb-page architecture + perf overhaul + Google Ads engineering.

Runtime-verified tracking + landing-page kit. Caught the silent drop a source-only audit missed.
Three things, run properly, forever improving.
Rank for the searches Wollongong actually makes — technical, content and authority, run by agents.
Every dollar traced to a lead. Bids tuned daily, wasted spend cut weekly.
Sites and platforms that load instantly and convert. No WordPress, no page builders.
Illawarra — New South Wales. Local search, local intent, local results — campaigns tuned to how Wollongong actually searches.


















A month running Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Grok and Perplexity across our whole stack. The honest 2026 scorecard — and why agility now beats loyalty.
Eleven days after the US government switched off the most capable public AI on earth, nobody official has given a return date. So we read the three things that actually move it — the export mechanism, the betting markets, and the community — and landed on a real window. No hype, all receipts.
Musk says China hits the frontier 'probably Q1'. In 2026 the AI race stopped being about the smartest model and became about cost. What it means for your business.
AI SEO audits are confidently wrong in predictable ways. Our process is built around a verification layer that catches them — here are the three failure modes we engineer against, demonstrated on our own site.
The Fable 5 shutdown was reported as a security story. Underneath sits a tangle of money, rivalry and government power. A map of the forces, the players, and the scenarios from here.
A $5k/month local ad budget rarely fails on the split. It fails on what you optimise to. Here's the allocation, the defaults to refuse, and the 2026 edge.
The same agent-run playbook, tuned to each market's own demand data — Wollongong is one node of 661 we cover.