The Punch List: March 2026
By Tim Dini | March 2026 | Issue #1
Welcome to the first Punch List
I’ve been saying for weeks that I’d start sending these. So here it is. No grand launch, no countdown timer, no “I’m so excited to announce” energy. Just the first one.
Here’s the deal: every month, I read a ridiculous amount of AI and search news so you don’t have to. Most of it is hype, recycled advice, or tools that solve problems nobody has. I throw out the 90% that doesn’t matter and send you what’s left. This month I found three tools worth mentioning, made two discoveries of my own that I haven’t seen anyone else talking about, and read one article that I think every business owner needs to see.
Let’s get to it.
The Required Reading
“Something Big Is Happening” by Matt Shumer
I don’t usually tell people to stop what they’re doing and go read someone else’s article. This is an exception.
Matt Shumer runs an AI startup and has been investing in the space for six years. He wrote this piece for the people in his life who keep asking “so what’s the deal with AI?” and getting the polite version. This is the honest version. The one that sounds a little crazy until you realize he’s not making predictions. He’s describing what already happened to his own job.
The part that should matter to you: Shumer describes telling AI what he wants built, walking away for four hours, and coming back to find the work done. Not a rough draft. The finished thing. He’s not talking about some future scenario. He’s talking about last Monday.
Here’s why I’m putting this at the top of the first Punch List: if you own a business, the people who work for you are either already using AI to do their jobs faster, or they’re about to be replaced by people who are. That’s not fear-mongering. That’s what’s happening right now in industry after industry.
Read the full article. Then read it again. Then forward it to someone who keeps telling you AI is overhyped.
Read “Something Big Is Happening” on Fortune
The Punch List
1. Your CRM and your spreadsheet can finally stop fighting
PipedriveSheets: Google Sheets add-on with real two-way Pipedrive sync
https://pipedrivesheets.com/
If your sales team lives in spreadsheets (and let’s be honest, they do), this one’s worth a look. PipedriveSheets is a Google Sheets add-on that does genuine two-way sync with Pipedrive. Edit deals in your spreadsheet, push updates back to the CRM with one click.
This isn’t a data dump that goes stale the second someone updates a deal. It’s live sync in both directions. The “which version is current?” problem that has quietly been costing businesses deals for years finally has a clean solution.
My Thoughts: I’ve watched businesses lose track of deals because someone updated the spreadsheet but forgot to update the CRM (or vice versa). It’s the kind of operational friction that doesn’t show up in any report but costs you real money. If you’re running Pipedrive and your team is toggling between the CRM and a spreadsheet, this eliminates that gap. Simple tool. Real problem. That’s the best kind.
2. AI meeting tools are getting uncomfortably good
Simplora: AI meeting prep, notes, and follow-up in one tool
https://simplora.ai/
Most AI meeting tools just record and transcribe. Simplora does something different: it preps research before your meetings, captures notes during, and generates follow-up tasks after. The “before” part is what makes it interesting.
Think about the last time you walked into a client meeting and spent the first ten minutes catching up on context you should have already known. Simplora does that homework for you. It pulls relevant background, surfaces key points from previous interactions, and gives you a briefing before you sit down.
My Thoughts: Whether this is worth adding to your stack depends on volume. If you’re doing 3-4 meetings a week, probably not. The overhead of another subscription isn’t worth it. But if you’re running 10+ client meetings a week (and in industries like insurance, legal, or home services, that’s pretty common), the math changes fast. The prep feature alone could save you 30 minutes a day. That’s 10 hours a month of context-switching you get back. I’d trial it for a month and see if the time savings are real for your specific workflow.
3. AI design tools: still not replacing your designer, but getting closer
Moda: AI design tool with a fully editable canvas
https://moda.app/
I mention this one because it solves a specific problem: AI-generated graphics that look like AI-generated graphics. You know the look. The weird hands, the text that’s almost English, that uncanny “a robot made this” energy that makes your brand look cheap.
Moda generates brand-aligned visuals on a fully editable canvas. Everything stays layered, which means you can fix the stuff AI always gets wrong. Need a quick social graphic or three ad variations? This gets you 80% of the way there, and you can polish the last 20% yourself without opening Photoshop.
My Thoughts: I want to be clear about what this is and isn’t. It’s not replacing actual design work. If you need a brand identity, a website redesign, or anything that requires real creative thinking, hire a designer. But for the weekly grind of social posts, email headers, and ad variations? This cuts the production time significantly. Useful for small teams that don’t have a dedicated designer on staff. Just don’t let the AI pick your brand colors. Trust me on this.
4. I found a schema markup gap that nobody’s talking about
Discovery: Rank Math puts freshness dates on the wrong schema node for AI crawlers
This one came from building this very site. While configuring Rank Math Pro (the most popular WordPress SEO plugin for schema markup), I discovered something that affects every WordPress site using it: Rank Math places datePublished and dateModified on the WebPage schema node instead of the Article node.
Why does that matter? Sophisticated AI systems like Google’s can follow the connection between WebPage and Article nodes and find the dates regardless. But simpler AI crawlers and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems often can’t. They look at the Article node, don’t see any dates, and treat your content as undated. In a world where content freshness is one of the top factors in AI citation decisions, having your dates invisible to half the AI systems reading your site is a problem.
I wrote a custom code solution that adds the dates directly to the Article node where all AI crawlers can find them, regardless of how sophisticated they are.
My Thoughts: This is exactly the kind of gap that exists between “technically correct” schema and “actually works for AI search.” The schema validates perfectly. Google’s Rich Results Test shows no errors. But simpler systems miss the freshness signals entirely. If you’re running a WordPress site with Rank Math (and millions of sites are), this affects you. I published the full technical breakdown with the fix in a separate post here: Rank Math’s Schema Freshness Gap: Why Your Article Dates Might Be Invisible to AI Search
5. Cloudflare quietly built the most granular AI permissions system on the internet
Discovery: Cloudflare’s Content Signals Policy for robots.txt
While setting up Cloudflare for this site, I stumbled onto something most people don’t know exists: Cloudflare’s Content Signals Policy. It’s an extension of the standard robots.txt protocol that lets you set different permissions for different AI activities, per crawler, per content section.
Standard robots.txt is binary. You either allow a bot or block it. Cloudflare’s system lets you say things like: “Google’s AI can read my content for search indexing, but not for training. Perplexity can access my blog posts but not my pricing pages. OpenAI gets nothing.” That level of control didn’t exist before.
For business owners, this matters because the default Cloudflare setup blocks all AI crawlers. If you set up Cloudflare and never touched the AI settings, you’ve been invisible to every AI search engine since the day you turned it on. You’re doing AEO with the front door locked.
My Thoughts: Two things here. First, if you’re on Cloudflare (and a huge percentage of websites are), go check your AI crawler settings right now. If they’re set to “Block all,” you’re actively preventing AI systems from finding and citing your content. Second, the granular control Cloudflare offers is actually smart. You don’t have to choose between “let everyone in” and “block everyone.” You can allow AI search indexing while blocking AI training, which is the sweet spot for most businesses. Full details on this are here: Cloudflare Is Probably Blocking Every AI Search Engine From Your Site Right Now
By the Numbers
58% of small businesses are already using AI in their operations
U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 2025
That number surprised me. Not because it’s high, but because the businesses driving it aren’t the ones you’d expect. A U.S. Chamber piece highlighted small businesses in Colorado using AI to handle product descriptions, customer inquiries, and marketing tasks instead of hiring additional staff. We’re not talking about tech startups in San Francisco. We’re talking about pet product makers and car detailers.
The businesses adapting fastest aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones with owners who got curious and started experimenting. Sound familiar? It should. That’s exactly what we’re doing here.
The Honest Bit
This is issue #1. The format is still evolving.
I told you this would be honest, so here it is: I don’t know if this format is right yet. The mix of tools, discoveries, and industry news felt right when I was writing it, but I won’t know if it actually works until I hear from people who read it. Maybe five items is too many. Maybe you want more tools and fewer of my technical deep-dives. Maybe the “Required Reading” section is exactly what you needed or maybe it felt like homework.
Here’s what I do know: every item in this issue passed the test. Would a business owner in a competitive industry find this useful? If the answer was no, I cut it. That filter isn’t changing. Everything else is negotiable.
If something here was useful, tell me. If something wasn’t, tell me that too. I read every reply.
That’s the List
Five items, zero filler, and one article I genuinely think could change how you think about the next two years of your business.
The Rank Math and Cloudflare discoveries have their own deep-dive posts with the actual technical details and fixes. If you’re running WordPress on Cloudflare or you’re using the Rank Math plugin, I recommend you read those.
If you found this through search and you’re not on the list yet: I send one of these a month. No spam, no sales pitch, no “growth hacks.” Just the stuff that actually matters, filtered through 32 years of operations experience and a low tolerance for BS.