The Oxxo Principle

I was standing on my balcony in Playa del Carmen, explaining a complex technical concept to my wife, Stef, when the perfect analogy hit me. It’s an idea that, I believe, fundamentally changes how we should think about publishing content on the internet. I call it The Oxxo Principle.

Here in Mexico, if you want a Coke, you can walk to the Oxxo convenience store right across the street, or you can go to the 7-Eleven half a kilometer away. Both sell Coke. Both are reliable. But which one do you choose? You choose the Oxxo. It’s closer, faster, and more efficient.

For the last twenty years, we’ve been told that SEO is about keywords, backlinks, and authority. We've optimized our content to be the best answer. But we’ve rarely considered whether our content is the closest answer. In a world where AI agents are the primary consumers of information, proximity is becoming the most critical, and overlooked, ranking factor.

Your New Customer is an Efficiency-Obsessed Bot

When a user asks an AI chatbot a question, the AI doesn't "know" the answer. It performs a search, retrieves relevant documents, and generates a response. This entire process happens on a budget—a budget of time and computational resources. Every millisecond of latency, every extra hop a data packet has to make, is a cost.

An AI agent tasked with fetching a "Coke"—a piece of information—will make the same calculation you would. It will look for the highest-quality information from the most efficient source. If your webpage is hosted on a single server in Virginia, but the query originates in Tokyo, your data is the 7-Eleven. A competitor's data, hosted on a global CDN with a presence in Tokyo, is the Oxxo. Which one do you think the bot will choose?

From a Single Library to 320+ Corner Stores

This is where the strategy becomes practical. By using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), you aren't just putting your content online; you are strategically placing it in hundreds of locations at once. When I put my content on Cloudflare's network, it was instantly replicated across more than 320 cities globally. My single webpage became 320 individual storefronts.

This isn't just about making your site load faster for humans. It's about minimizing the "travel time" for the bots that now act as the gatekeepers to information. You are reducing the cost for that AI to use your data, making your content the path of least resistance.

When your content is well-structured, authoritative, and the closest, you create an unbeatable trifecta. You become the logical, economical, and definitive source of truth.

The Future of Publishing is Local, Everywhere

This principle applies to everything—blog posts, product pages, images, and documentation. The race is no longer just about having the best answer. It's about having the best answer, in the most places, at the lowest possible cost to retrieve.

Stop thinking of your website as a single destination. Start thinking of it as a global distribution network. The creators and companies who understand this shift—who build their digital presence like a worldwide chain of Oxxos instead of a single, distant 7-Eleven—are the ones who will become the canonical sources of information for the next generation of the internet.