Notebook
How I think about search, in public.
Working notes on technical SEO and AI search — the things actually changing, the things being mis-sold, and the bits worth your attention. Written by me, when I have something honest to add.
-
The three removals: getting off Google is now three jobs
-
Reputation work just became AI visibility work
-
The prompt is not the query. Stop optimising the wrong string.
All articles below ↓
The full archive
Filter by topic, or browse the lot. Newest first.
The three removals: getting off Google is now three jobs
Removal, deindexing, suppression: three outcomes the reputation industry calls the same thing. AI search made the differences matter more than ever.
Reputation work just became AI visibility work
Suppression used to work because attention followed a click curve. AI answers don't. The reputation playbook needs an update, and most agencies haven't noticed.
The prompt is not the query. Stop optimising the wrong string.
Prompt-tracking dashboards measure rank on a system that doesn't rank. Here's what LLM visibility actually depends on — and what to measure instead.
The measurement gap isn’t a tooling problem
Every AI visibility vendor is selling a dashboard for a game that can't be measured that way. The scoreboard itself is the wrong shape.
The measurement gap is the business model gap
Kevin Indig's H1 2026 report exposed the AI measurement crisis. The industry is treating it as a tooling problem. It isn't.
The GEO naming fight is a way to avoid the training
Three senior SEOs landed on the same take in a week: GEO vs SEO is the wrong argument. Here's what the naming fight is actually hiding.
You can’t campaign your way into a model’s weights
Duane Forrester is right — parametric authority in LLMs isn't a work item you can sprint. The GEO industry is selling something it can't deliver.
The web is quietly paying for the agent economy
Agentic traffic is generating billions of redundant requests against origins that see no revenue from it. Nobody's counting the bill. You should.
AI referrals land on your homepage. That’s the problem.
AI systems cite your deep pages and send traffic to your homepage. It's the oldest CRO mistake in the book — and nobody's fixing it.
Reddit’s daily-destination pivot is a bet against the web
Reddit's Q2 call reframes the platform from source to destination. It's a leading indicator of how every major site is rebuilding around user retention.
The Cloudflare toggle that just started blocking Googlebot
Cloudflare has reclassified Googlebot as a mixed-purpose bot. Its AI blocking toggles now take search indexing down too — and the default changes September 15th.
Paid search was never going to save you from AI Overviews
Tinuiti's Q2 2026 data shows paid search growth decelerating. The absorption thesis that comforted advertisers for 18 months just broke.
Kris Jones is right about awards. The industry was wrong.
Kris Jones says apply for every industry award if you want AI recommendations. He's right — and the SEO industry has been wrong to sneer at this for a decade.
Brand is the only compounding asset in AI search
Page-level SEO is running out of runway. In AI-mediated discovery, brand is the only asset that compounds across every channel simultaneously.
Google’s AI opt-out is now a Top Stories opt-out
Google's Search Console AI opt-out toggle just quietly became a Top Stories opt-out too. NewzDash data shows why publishers can't make this call cleanly.
Your product feed is an AI agent’s reading list now
AI agents are reading product feeds as their primary source, not as routing. Most e-commerce feeds fail badly when audited that way.
The OpenAI ad format that ends the click
OpenAI's chatbot-native ads replace the landing page with an AI agent. It's not a new format — it's a new economic model for the open web.
Google’s AI opt-out toggle is a governance question in disguise
Google's new Search Console AI opt-out toggle looks like a preference. It's a distribution decision most teams aren't equipped to make well.
Google Search Console just made YouTube an SEO channel
Google Search Console's Platform Properties makes YouTube a formal search property. The report is easy. The governance problem it exposes isn't.
AI search isn’t replacing Google. It’s stacking on top.
Similarweb's data shows 95% of ChatGPT users still use Google. AI search is layering, not replacing — and most 2026 budget decks have the maths wrong.
Google’s AI Search Console data is a metric trap
Google's new AI Overview reports in Search Console look like a measurement win. Eight weeks in, they're a trap enterprise teams are budgeting around.
The zero-click number everyone cites is the wrong number
iPullRank's 13 billion search analysis shows zero-click isn't one number — it's a distribution. Most SEO strategies are optimising for the wrong metric.
89% of AI search categories have no owner yet
Kevin Indig's ChatGPT dataset shows 89% of high-value AI search categories have no clear owner. The window to win one is open — but closing.
Perplexity cites YouTube, ignores Reddit. GEO advice has a problem.
Perplexity cites YouTube heavily and drops Reddit at the citation stage. The GEO playbook built on ChatGPT doesn't transfer — and nobody's saying so.
AI knows your brand. It just won’t recommend you.
AI describes 96% of brands accurately but recommends almost none of them. The recognition-mention gap is where most GEO strategy quietly fails.
The Claude chats leak is a robots.txt lesson we keep failing
Claude's shared chats got indexed because robots.txt was used where noindex was needed. It's the most durable misconception in SEO — now at AI scale.
The Google Ads bidding change is a tax on lazy targets
Google's August 17 bidding change removes the free efficiency budget-limited ecommerce campaigns have quietly enjoyed. Here's what to do before it hits.
The measurement collapse in AI search nobody talks about
Google reports revenue to the penny and reports web traffic in adjectives. The measurement layer marketing runs on has quietly broken. Here's what to do.
Google’s ranking volatility no longer means what it used to
Rankings moved again over the weekend. But the volatility trackers are measuring a game whose stakes have quietly moved elsewhere. Here's what's actually broken.
The X spam war previews what’s coming to your GBP
X removed 42,000 AI spam accounts in one sweep. The economic model behind it is coming for the review layer AI search actually reads.
HTTP 402 is quietly becoming an SEO visibility decision
Cloudflare and AWS now sell tolls for AI crawlers. Most publishers are treating this as a revenue question. It isn't — it's a visibility one.
Google’s own data just mapped where AI search hits first
Google's ATLAS report accidentally reveals which UK service categories AI search is eating first — and it's the ones you've built content around.
The AI local search story is really a review data story
Google and Yelp block LLM crawlers from reading reviews. Which means your AI-answer performance runs on a completely different data layer than you think.
Brand monitoring is the closest GEO has to real measurement
Prompt-tracking dashboards measure the wrong layer. Brand mention monitoring is the input side of AI citations — and almost nobody frames it that way.
OpenAI killed its browser because agents never needed one
OpenAI killed ChatGPT Atlas after nine months. The real lesson isn't that AI browsers failed — it's that agents were never supposed to need one.
Google’s search business just entered the compression phase
Alphabet's Q2 numbers, the publisher revolt, and $180B AI capex aren't three stories. They're one structural squeeze on Google's search business.
Rand Fishkin just conceded the paid promotion argument
Rand Fishkin's response to Tim Soulo's question about paid promotion is honest — and quietly concedes more than it means to. Here's what he missed.
The knowledge governance problem is what everyone calls GEO
Most GEO work treats symptoms of a knowledge governance problem. Here's why product data isn't decision data — and what actually moves AI citations.
The SerpApi ruling just made SEO’s data problem visible
Google lost its DMCA case against SerpApi. The real story isn't the ruling — it's what it reveals about the data supply chain SEO tools run on.
Category coding is the SEO story of the year
New research shows LLMs recommend brands based on category coding, not entity strength. It rewrites most of the current GEO playbook.
Google is now the second most-cited domain in AI Mode
Google.com is now the second most-cited domain in its own AI Mode. Citation share rose 8.4x in two months. Here's what it actually changes.
The AI accountability gap nobody is auditing for
AI systems return false facts about 64% of UK retailers. There's no dispute button, no correction surface, and no discipline that owns the problem.
The measurement layer of SEO is broken
Impressions, rank trackers, and AI visibility tools have all quietly decoupled from what they claim to measure. Here's the triangulation stack that still works.
AI visibility tools are measuring the wrong number
Prompt-tracking dashboards are rank tracking in a hi-vis jacket. Here's why they measure noise — and what to track instead.
Security interstitials are killing your indexing
Bot-check screens served to Googlebot are getting real pages deindexed and attributed to other domains. Nobody's auditing for it.
Gemini Notebook rebrand widens the extraction surface
Google's Gemini Notebook rebrand, the unverifiable 'billions of AI clicks' claim, and the publisher lawsuit all point at the same structural gap.
Google’s “billions of AI clicks” is a headline, not a metric
Google says AI features send billions of clicks a week. There's no baseline, no methodology, and Search Console still hides the click data. Here's what to do.
Quality now gates indexation. Your audit is wrong.
Google is quietly tying site quality to indexation itself, not just ranking. Most SEO audits are still measuring the wrong layer of the stack.
The Reddit AI citation number everyone will misread
Reddit now supplies 1 in 5 AI search citations. The industry is about to read that number wrong and sell you the wrong playbook.
The domain fingerprint doesn’t survive the transition
The Google fingerprint transfers into AI Overviews. Everywhere else, it's a marketing claim the variance research is quietly demolishing.
Personal Intelligence just broke the idea of a ranking
Google connected Calendar to Personal Intelligence in AI Mode. It quietly ended the idea that a ranking is something you can meaningfully check.
The information gain patent is a warning shot
Google's information gain patent describes how originality shapes what shows up next. In 2026, that logic collides with AI Overviews. Here's what changes.
Google just made AI Overviews generate their own images
Google added image generation to AI Overviews. It just closed the last SERP loop that reliably sent traffic to publishers. Here's who this hits.
The reputation playbook the industry hasn’t updated
AI Overviews are resurfacing old negative coverage that used to fade. Suppression is dead. Source authority displacement is the new ORM.
ChatGPT is eating informational search. Not commercial.
Bocconi's clickstream data shows ChatGPT is siphoning informational search, not transactional. The implications aren't evenly distributed.
The agentic web is arriving with the liability pre-assigned
WebMCP shifts security liability to publishers. AI visibility dashboards can't reliably measure it. Here's the honest playbook for the agentic web.
AI visibility dashboards are mostly noise, priced as signal
New IQRush research shows most AI citation ranking movement is statistical noise. What that means for the tools you're paying for.
WebMCP hands publishers the liability. Nobody’s saying so.
Chrome's WebMCP security guidance quietly shifts AI agent liability to publishers, not agent builders. The marketing industry hasn't noticed.
The CFO doesn’t care about your rankings deck
SEO teams keep losing budget conversations with CFOs. The deck isn't the problem — it's a symptom of a function still structured for a market that no longer exists.
Mueller’s markdown warning is the whole GEO argument
John Mueller just told sites to stop building markdown mirrors for AI agents. It's the clearest argument yet against half the GEO playbook.
The Google reviews bug is a preview of the AI problem
Google's latest GBP reviews bug is a rehearsal for the AI citation monitoring problem. Why your dashboard is not the source of truth.
The retrieval bias nobody wanted to talk about
New research shows AI retrieval systems have a measurable preference for machine-written text. Here's what that actually means for SEO strategy.
The people who drive GEO outcomes aren’t your SEO team
Tom Critchlow says brand teams drive AI search outcomes, not SEO teams. He's right — and it's been true for longer than the industry admits.
The experimentation dashboard is the new vanity metric
AI-assisted testing has collapsed the cost of running experiments. Test volume is up, decisions caused are flat. Here's what to measure instead.
ChatGPT is 92% of AI referral traffic. Stop hedging.
ChatGPT now drives 92% of trackable LLM referral traffic. Perplexity is down 61%. Copilot down 96%. Here's what that means for your visibility budget.
Safari’s MCP server is the quiet half of AI browsing
Apple's Safari MCP server sounds like a dev tool. It's the reading layer of the agentic web — and it changes what machine-readable means.
Google just settled the GEO debate by moving a button
Google added AI visibility reporting inside Search Console — not a separate tool. The location is the argument. Here's what it means for GEO vendors.
Google paused reviews to fix its own algorithm
Google admitted its review spam algorithm was aggressive enough to require pausing legitimate businesses. It's the same pattern as the DMCA problem.
DMCA is now an SEO attack surface Google won’t fix
Fake DMCA takedowns are erasing legitimate pages from Google. It's not a copyright story — it's a scalable attack vector, and there's no defence built in.
Lighthouse just failed a working llms.txt over syntax
Chrome's new Lighthouse audit fails llms.txt files that use plain-text links. The file works. The audit doesn't. Here's why that matters.
The Similarweb study answers the AI visibility question. Sort of.
Similarweb's new study finds AI mentions lift direct visits by 7-14% for known brands. What it proves, what it doesn't, and why the caveats matter.
Cloudflare’s September default will block Googlebot
Cloudflare's September 15 AI-crawler defaults will block Googlebot on sites that blocked training. Here's what to check before it hits.
The rank-to-citation delta is now a product feature
Bing Webmaster Tools now ships two reports — ranking and citation — because they're two different jobs. Most UK SEO scopes haven't caught up.
Google’s click-quality defence for AI Overviews just failed
A randomised trial tested Google's claim that AI Overviews only absorb low-value clicks. The claim failed. Here's what changes for your SEO work.
The publisher traffic collapse isn’t an AI story
UK publisher direct traffic is down 33% in three years. Everyone's blaming AI. The habit collapse started a decade earlier — and it's coming for you too.
How ChatGPT actually picks sources, and what it changes
Suganthan Mohanadasan read ChatGPT's network traffic instead of its outputs. The structural findings reframe almost everything GEO vendors are selling.
The first honest AI search measurement study has arrived
Similarweb's new AI visibility study is the first credible measurement work in the category. Here's what it proves, what it doesn't, and how to use it.
Brand is the only compounding asset in agentic search
Pichai says search is becoming an agent manager. The optimisation industry won't say what that actually means: brand is the only asset that survives.
The convergence is real. The optimisation advice isn’t.
Pichai, Fox and Reid all say AI search rewards great content. True, and useless. Why the optimisation advice has become a tautology.
The “one playbook” line is doing a lot of work it can’t carry
Google says AI search uses the same SEO playbook. True in principle, hollow in practice. Three shifts the line ignores — and what they mean.
The Father of SEO is gone, and the industry barely noticed
Bruce Clay died in late May. He coined the term SEO, invented content siloing, and shaped the industry's culture. The lessons matter more now, not less.
Retrieval poisoning isn’t a spam problem
Google now calls AI answer manipulation spam. The Cornell research shows it's an architectural flaw — and the defenses all break the product.
The broken form problem is about to get much worse
Danny Gavin's agency missed two months of leads to a silent form failure. With Smart Bidding, that mistake now compounds — fast.
The Maximize Conversion Value loophole nobody’s calling a loophole
Google Ads now allows Maximize Conversion Value bidding on Standard Shopping without a ROAS target. What that actually changes — and what it hides.
Your customer isn’t the job title you’re targeting
Rand Fishkin's SparkToro data on commercial backup power buyers reveals a gap in B2B targeting most businesses still haven't closed.
Your server logs are lying about AI crawler traffic
One site's logs showed 81.8% of AI assistant traffic was fake. Every AI visibility metric sits on top of unverified data. Here's what to do.
Google’s AI impression metric measures the wrong thing
John Mueller explained how Search Console counts AI Overview impressions. The metric measures the least interesting part of AI search visibility.
ChatGPT is just doing Google searches behind your back
Reddit lost two thirds of its ChatGPT citations when Google tweaked an API. The retrieval layer under AI search is more familiar — and more fragile — than vendors admit.
When the answer engine can be sued, small fish go unnamed
A German court made Google liable for what its AI Overview says. The discovery consequence: cautious systems name brands they can defend, and skip the rest.
The agent-ready web is being built without you
Six infrastructure giants are building a parallel web for AI agents. Most websites are architecturally unable to serve that visitor. Here's what to do.
Google’s quiet Friday update looks like a black hat hit
Google's unconfirmed Friday June 19 update hit black hat forums hard while trackers stayed flat. Here's how to tell if you're affected.
Websites are persuasion machines. Agents aren’t buying it.
Six infrastructure giants are building for AI agents. But your site's conversion funnel is the actual problem agents can't complete — and you can't see it.
The 2019 SEO framework is now the page AI Overviews skip
The forty-word-answer page that won featured snippets is the exact page AI Overviews now summarise and discard. The fix is editorial, not technical.
The deindexing panic is mostly a misdiagnosis problem
Most 2026 deindexing reports are ranking losses, canonical issues, or Search Console bug fixes. Misdiagnose them and recoverable drops turn permanent.
OpenAI just opened a UK ads dashboard. Here’s what it means.
OpenAI's ChatGPT Ads Manager is live in UK beta with no inventory to buy. The dashboard is the message — here's what UK advertisers should actually do.
The hidden-gem placement beats the Forbes link
Niche sites with 5,000 visitors deliver 1.7x more audience affinity than mainstream outlets. Here's why that matters more in AI search than classic SEO.
llms.txt: What It Is and Whether Your Site Needs One
Every few months a new file format promises to transform your search rankings. Most are noise. llms.txt is different — not because it’s a magic lever, but because it costs almost nothing to implement and solves a real problem: AI agents struggle to navigate websites built for humans, not machines. Here is what it actually […]
How to Rank in ChatGPT: What Actually Works in 2026
Most of the advice floating around about AI search visibility is either vague hand-waving or flat-out wrong. This guide cuts through that. You’ll learn exactly what ChatGPT looks at when it surfaces sources, what you can control, and what you cannot — so you can spend your effort where it matters. ## What “ranking in […]
The rank-and-cite gap is the real GEO measurement problem
Citation is a footprint. Recommendation is the answer. Most GEO dashboards are measuring the wrong one, and this week's research shows why it matters.
Self-promotional listicles now vote for your competitors
Lily Ray's analysis of 100 B2B AI Overview queries: self-promotional listicles get cited 69% of the time but recommend competitors instead of the publisher.
Bing just gave away the metric GEO tools were selling
Bing's new Citation Share metric in Webmaster Tools delivers free what GEO measurement tools have been selling for £1,800 a month. The squeeze is on.
HTML is still the contract. Markdown won’t replace it.
Google says don't build markdown mirrors for LLMs. They're right — and the reason matters more than the conclusion. HTML is still the contract.
The llms.txt audience isn’t AI search. It’s coding agents.
Ahrefs logged 137,000 domains: 97% of llms.txt files got zero requests, and AI retrieval bots were 1% of traffic. The file's real audience is coders.
The conversion pixel is about to stop working
Google is tightening bidding precision just as agentic commerce makes conversion signals noisier. The measurement gap is the actual blocker.
The zero-click number isn’t the story. The composition is.
68% of Google searches end without a click. The number isn't the story — what's left in the 32% is. Here's what UK businesses should do about it.
Stripe just split the agentic web in two
Stripe Projects splits agentic commerce into two protocols — one for buying things, one for buying capabilities. The discovery layer just changed shape.
Most GEO tactics are still SEO tactics wearing a lanyard
SEO Week's 38-million-datapoint study just confirmed traditional rankings still drive AI citations. Most GEO tactics are SEO tactics with new branding.
The Apple-Gemini deal turns Google against itself
Apple's new Siri runs on Google's Gemini and lives inside Spotlight. Google just licensed the model replacing its own front door on a billion devices.
Tennessee just made SEO a jurisdictional problem
Tennessee's new search blacklist law isn't a regional quirk. It's the start of state-by-state platform accountability — and SEO's first compliance layer.
The measurement industry is about to eat GEO
GEO is becoming a measurement industry. Citation trackers, sentiment monitors and impression data will get sold to you hard. Here's what's actually worth paying for.
AI bots are now a tax on your hosting bill
AI bot traffic is up 300% and 80% of it exists to train models. It's no longer an ethics question — it's a line item on your hosting bill.
Brand consistency is breaking across AI engines
Your brand lives in two memory systems across five AI engines that don't agree. The platform-by-platform GEO framing misses the structural problem.
Gemini is becoming the front door of local SEO
Google is connecting Gemini directly to Business Profile. It's not a productivity feature — it's Google turning the chat window into local SEO's front door.
AI engines role-cast your content. Most SEOs missed it.
AI engines don't just retrieve sources — they assign them roles. Most GEO strategies count citations and miss the context that actually matters.
Reuters just blocked the bots by default. Big shift.
Reuters flipped robots.txt from blocklist to allowlist. It's the first credible response to the 68% zero-click problem — and the future of the open web.
68% of Google searches end without a click. Stop defending the other 32%.
Zero-click Google searches just hit 68%. The click isn't being defended — it's being repriced. Here's where your budget actually needs to go now.
The Burson credibility report is GEO inventing its next product
Burson's new AI credibility report uses a proprietary model to score 55,000 AI answers. It's not analysis — it's the GEO industry inventing its next product.
Business data is becoming a ranking signal
Ask Maps and agentic search reward data completeness, not just content. The SEO industry's vocabulary hasn't caught up to where visibility now lives.
Google’s new SEO guidance is a slow-motion power grab
Google's Friday docs aren't isolated housekeeping. They're part of a 12-month consolidation that makes Google the publisher, measurer, and editor of SEO.
Google just declared itself the only legitimate SEO source
Google's new guidance positions itself as the canonical source of SEO truth. The third-party ecosystem isn't a competitor — it's the immune system.
Google’s SEO guidance now tells you to call the FTC
Google's updated SEO hiring page tells businesses to report shady SEOs to the FTC, casts doubt on third-party tools, and quietly formalises AEO.
The agent knows the answer before it reads your page
Gemini Deep Research Max ships blended retrieval — agents arrive with private context fused into the query. Your content competes with the user's own data.
The measurement gap Google just made permanent
Google's new AI search reports give us impressions, not clicks. The industry is treating that as the new ranking. It isn't, and the gap is structural.
Wikipedia is the AI search index nobody’s optimising for
Wikipedia accounts for nearly half of ChatGPT's citations. It's the highest-leverage surface in AI search and almost nobody treats it that way.
Semantic similarity scores are not ground truth
Vector embedding scores look like measurement. They're a higher-resolution approximation. Treating them as ground truth is the next SEO failure mode.
Your audience may have left Google before you noticed
SparkToro's developer data shows Claude over-indexing by 299% and Google under-indexing by 14%. The audience is the variable SEO strategy ignores.
Google finally gave us AI visibility data. Half of it.
Search Console's new AI performance reports ship today for UK sites. Impressions only — no clicks, no queries. Useful, incomplete, and worth reading carefully.
Google’s ad stack got more useful. Its organic story didn’t.
DV360, Data Manager API, and Commerce Media Suite all got upgrades yesterday. The asymmetry with Google's organic measurement story is the actual story.
EntityMap and schema can’t fix what’s actually broken in AI search
EntityMap entered consultation today. It's useful work. But the attribution problem in AI search lives after retrieval, where no publishing standard reaches.
Machine Media is here. The playbook is two years behind.
Mike King and Rand Fishkin diagnosed Machine Media correctly. The operational response has been weak. Here's what UK businesses should actually do next.
Amazon vs Perplexity decides who your visitors are
On June 11 the Ninth Circuit hears Amazon v Perplexity. The ruling decides whether AI agents count as authorised visitors to your website.
The May 2026 core update is the last of its kind
The May 2026 core update is normal. The environment around it isn't. Why this is the last core update the old SEO playbook fully applies to.
Tom Capper just dismantled the rank-tracking industry
Tom Capper's SEO Week data showed branded search now predicts rankings better than domain authority. The industry has been selling the wrong metric.
The attribution crisis is the real I/O story
Google's agentic search demos quietly killed the attribution model SEO was built on. The transaction stays. The intent data doesn't.
Ranking number one now means nothing. The pixel does.
57% of #1 results sit below the fold on desktop. Rank tracking is measuring a coordinate the user never sees. Pixel visibility is the real metric.
The AI search measurement problem is a definition problem
Every GEO tool measures one of four AI visibility layers and sells it as the whole picture. The measurement gap isn't tooling. It's definition.
Google’s Merchant Center pivot quietly contradicts its GEO line
Google just shipped AI visibility metrics in Merchant Center that Search Console still refuses to add. The asymmetry tells you everything.
The judgment layer is the only part of AI that pays you
Most senior practitioners use AI for drafts and summaries. The actual leverage is in four modes nobody has built a workflow around.
Google just made AI Overviews a popularity contest
Google's Preferred Sources now shape AI Overviews citations. It quietly grafts a follow-graph onto AI search — and the SEO industry hasn't noticed.
The death-of-the-web pieces argue for building one
Mike King and Rand Fishkin both wrote eulogies for the open web this week. Read carefully, both arguments lead to investing in owned media, not abandoning it.
Gmail is now a ranking signal. Nobody asked for that.
iPullRank tested Google's Personal Intelligence. Gmail content lifted brand citations in AI Mode by 46 points. The discovery layer just went private.
The tool registry is the new search index
LLM tool registries are an unregulated ad market. Puffery wins, disclosures fail, and almost nobody in SEO is talking about it yet.
Rand Fishkin is right. “Inimitable product” is the wrong frame.
Rand Fishkin's call to build inimitable products is half right. The problem isn't your product. It's that AI just nationalised the discovery layer above it.
Reddit is the loudest input. That makes it the cheapest target.
Reddit dominates AI search citations. The SEO industry sees opportunity. The real story is a structural vulnerability with a closing window.
The AI search measurement layer is being built by outsiders
Cloudflare, Microsoft and independent researchers are building the AI search measurement layer. Google isn't. The gap tells you everything.
Google and Bing now run opposite GEO playbooks
Google says GEO is just SEO. Bing built tools for it. When two competitors describe the same tech in opposite terms, the asymmetry is the signal.
The Agent Readiness Score is useful. The number is a trap.
Cloudflare's Agent Readiness Score measures real things. The composite number is structurally misleading — and the industry is about to misuse it.
OpenAI’s Ads Manager update is the story I/O obscured
OpenAI quietly shipped DMA targeting, daily budgets, and dynamic CTAs in ChatGPT this week. It matters more than anything Google announced at I/O.
The machine-readability problem is the SEO problem now
AI search visibility isn't a content problem. It's a knowledge architecture problem — and most businesses are paying agencies to solve the wrong one.
Mike King vs Google is the only fight that matters
Mike King's three pieces this month form the sharpest critique of Google's GEO posture in years. Why the SEO industry is wrong to nod and move on.
The intelligent search box is the end of the keyword
Google's redesigned search box isn't a UI tweak. It's the end of the keyword as the organising unit of search marketing — and most tooling won't survive it.
Gmail is now a ranking signal. You can’t audit it.
Google Personal Intelligence makes Gmail an AI Mode ranking signal — and the first major signal publishers cannot see, audit, or optimise conventionally.
Agentic RAG is real. The GEO industry isn’t ready.
Mike King's right that AI search has moved to agentic retrieval. The implications for the GEO consulting industry are worse than his piece spells out.
Mt. Stupid has a pricing page. And it’s been busy.
AI builders publicly admit they don't know how their models work. AI optimisation consultants sell guaranteed outcomes. The gap is the story.
90% of brands have zero AI mentions. That’s the opportunity.
A new study found 89.8% of brands have zero AI search mentions. That sounds like a disaster. Read properly, it's the opposite.
Citation is not traffic. Don’t confuse the two.
AI citation counts are about to become the new keyword rankings — a real number that mostly misleads. The substitution gradient is what actually matters.
Mike King is right about Google. And right about Bing.
Mike King's read on Google's GEO guidance is correct. So is his read on Bing. But 'more candid' isn't 'more correct' — both platforms have incentives.
Google just published the GEO playbook. It’s the SEO playbook.
Google's new generative AI optimisation doc kills the GEO consulting playbook. The myth-busting section is the most important thing it's published in a year.
Web Bot Auth is the story. Robots.txt isn’t.
Google-Agent ignoring robots.txt is the boring half of the announcement. Cryptographic bot identity via Web Bot Auth is what actually changes things.
Google-Agent doesn’t read your robots.txt. That’s the small problem.
Google-Agent bypasses robots.txt — but the real story is what agents do to attribution, conversion data, and the single-bucket model of 'Google traffic'.
Meta is dying. Google just told you why.
Meta is losing users while Google publishes documentation calling GEO 'still SEO.' Same week, same story: who knows what business they're in.
The AI citation trap: when being cited costs you more
GA4 just made AI assistant traffic visible by default. The Ahrefs schema data is more damning than people noticed. The GEO industry has a measurement problem.
Mike King’s case for cloaking LLMs is right. And a trap.
Mike King's case for JavaScript-cloaking AI crawlers is technically sound. It still solves the wrong problem for almost everyone who'll deploy it.
AI visibility isn’t a content problem. It’s a diagnosis problem.
Duane Forrester's three-layer AI visibility model is right. But most marketing orgs can't use it, because the diagnostic step doesn't exist in the workflow.
Lily Ray just put a number on the AI content collapse
Lily Ray tracked 220+ sites named in AI content vendor case studies. The pattern: climb, plateau, collapse. The press release is never the whole story.
Why your SEO doesn’t ship, and what to do about it
SEO work doesn't ship because the org design is wrong, not the tickets. The implementation gap is structural — and AI search is making it worse.
Scaling AI content is the strategy. The strategy is the problem.
Enterprises ranked scaling AI content as their #1 AI search priority. The same report's experts called it a likely cause of visibility collapse.
The enterprise AI content scaling strategy is a coordination failure
Conductor's 2026 report shows enterprises ranking AI content scaling as their #1 AI search priority. The experts in the same report think it's a mistake.
Schema markup doesn’t move AI citations. Stop pretending.
Ahrefs ran a controlled test on 1,885 pages. Adding schema didn't increase AI citations on any platform. The GEO pitch needs revising.
The data retention cliff nobody is pricing in
Google Ads is capping reporting history at 37 months just as AI agents take over campaign management. The audit trail is thinning at the worst possible time.
The protocol layer is eating the SEO stack
UCP, 499 eligibility gates, and schema deprecations describe one shift: a protocol layer between your data and AI systems that most SEO teams aren't auditing.
Google killed FAQ rich results. Good.
Google deprecated FAQ rich results this week. The feature died in 2023. The real story is the industry's refusal to update its schema playbook.
Google’s UCP update is the agentic commerce story SEOs are missing
Google's March UCP update added carts, live catalogues and loyalty linking. The agentic commerce protocol layer is moving faster than SEO is tracking.
Google’s bounce clicks defence just collapsed under a test
A randomised experiment removed AI Overviews and clicks rose 38% with no satisfaction drop. Google's bounce-click defence doesn't survive the test.
Google’s link expansion is a confession dressed as a feature
Google's five new AI search link features arrived without click data. The pattern of how Google talks about AI Overview clicks is the real story.
The 499 status code is the AI search problem no one audits
Mike King's new data shows HTTP 499s and slow origins quietly remove pages from AI citations entirely. Most SEO tools can't see the problem.
The agent runtime is the new SEO evaluation layer
AI models don't read your website. The runtime does, and hands the model whatever survived the fetch. That changes the optimisation stack.
Rand Fishkin tested AI rank tracking. The answer matters.
Fishkin's new research with Gumshoe shows AI rank tracking is mostly noise — but visibility share is real. The distinction is where the money goes.
The ROI conversation about AI traffic uses the wrong vocabulary
AI systems were never built to route traffic. Measuring AI visibility with SEO-style ROI metrics is asking the wrong architectural question.
Bing just told the industry what GEO actually is
Microsoft's Bing team published the clearest engineering spec we've had for AI search grounding. The GEO industry should be paying closer attention.
The bit of GEO advice that doesn’t survive the architecture
Pedro Dias called out the GEO industry's load-bearing claim today. Schema doesn't 'ensure' anything in a probabilistic system — and most of the playbook collapses with it.
OpenAI’s self-serve ads turn ChatGPT into a media channel
OpenAI just opened self-serve ChatGPT Ads with CPC bidding and conversion tracking. The GEO industry's measurement story just got harder to defend.
Execution stopped being the constraint. Most agencies haven’t noticed.
Kevin Indig's piece today framed it as an existential moment. The deeper story: SEO agencies are still priced around a constraint that no longer exists.
Browsy queries are the SEO concept that needed a name
Liz Reid named a category Google's been using internally for years. 'Browsy queries' reframe most current GEO advice as wrong.
The website-as-source thesis is the argument that matters
Every current SEO debate is downstream of one shift: your website is a source, not a destination. Here's what that actually means in practice.
The March core update was a referendum on aggregators
Google's March core update demoted aggregators and lifted first-party brands across travel, jobs, and health. The pattern matters more than the headline numbers.
Your website is becoming a wire service
AI agents are reading and recompressing your website before humans see it. The brochure model is dying. Here's what replaces it.
Google’s agent-friendly guidance is just accessibility, finally winning
Google's new web.dev guide tells developers to build for AI agents. The recommendations are the same accessibility checklist we've ignored for 15 years.
The Google Network is shrinking and nobody will say what it means
Google Network revenue fell below $7bn while programmatic grew 20%. The publisher economy is being squeezed and the SEO industry isn't covering it.
Preferred Sources is the first ranking signal you can’t earn, only be granted
Google's Preferred Sources went global this week. The framing is wrong — it's not a publisher tool, it's the first ranking signal that explicitly…
The bounce-click defence is a measurement story, and Google is losing it
Google's Liz Reid keeps arguing AI Overviews only remove low-value 'bounce clicks.' A new randomised trial says otherwise — and Google still…
Bing just hit a billion users and the SEO industry is still pretending it doesn’t exist
Bing crossed a billion monthly active users and grew ad revenue 12%. It's also the index under ChatGPT. Why the SEO industry's dismissal of Bing…
Your brand is now in comparisons you’ll never see, being judged by reviews you didn’t know existed
AI assistants are pulling negative reviews into comparisons users never asked for. Why this isn't traditional reputation management and what UK…
How to Measure AEO/GEO: Visibility, Mentions & Leads
Measure AI Search Optimisation (AEO/GEO) properly. Track AI visibility, citations, referral traffic, brand mentions and—most importantly—leads.
Google: The Fishing Easter Egg
If a Google search returns nothing, look closer. Buried on the no-results page is a cartoon Yeti with a fishing rod — click him and he yanks a random object out of the ice.
No articles in this category yet.
Working notes, by email
Occasional — only when I’ve actually written something worth sending. Unsubscribe in one click.
Reading is one thing — doing the work is another.
If anything you’ve read here applies to a problem on your site, that’s a useful conversation to have.