From the author
Google's new robots.txt explainer confirms that an invented instruction may be ignored. Here is how to separate crawl rules, Search visibility controls, and Google-Extended's AI use preferences.
Google confirmed keywords in URLs are a light ranking signal. Run this 60-minute audit to set slug rules, skip needless migrations, and keep URLs clean for AI citations.
Compare stable and experimental CrUX metrics for a single-page application, then turn the differences into a route-level investigation without confusing a measurement change with a speed improvement.
Perplexity says its in-house Photon engine cut retrieval and ranking p99 latency from about 800 ms to 65 ms, and shipped a Fast Search tier at $1.00 per 1,000 requests.
Google added a multimodal search type to Search Console on September 24, 2026. Here is what it covers, what it does not, and a 30-minute audit to run on your own data.
Internal linking is thousands of yes/no decisions, which is exactly what a decision model is for. It is also where Laya's wide-option weakness bites hardest. Here is the workflow, the limit, and the cascade that works around it.
Similarity search finds passages that look related. It does not find passages that actually answer the question. Here is how to add a local Laya reranking stage, how to measure whether it helped, and where it fits in SEO work.
Laya has no per-call cost, but self-hosting is not free. Here is the real cost model: latency by hardware tier, throughput planning, a break-even calculation, and the point where a hosted API is still the better choice.
A Jev internal-link run proposed 679 links across 566 pages in under six seconds for 27 cents. An editorial pass kept 287 of them. Here is the full attrition, the rubric rewrite that improved recall from 45% to 65%, and how to run the same benchmark on your own site.
A complete walkthrough for building one Grok Bot that audits your site, reads Search Console, and reports back, without giving it permission to change anything until you have verified it.
A tiered map of the data sources AI answers actually pull from, plus the API or MCP path that lets Codex, Claude Code, Hermes Agent, OpenClaw, Pi Agent, Grok Bot, and Meta Muse read each one directly.
A real build teardown: how a Jev-powered internal-link analyzer crawls a site, narrows candidates with TF-IDF, extracts the exact sentence to link from, and proposes anchor text that already exists on the page — for about the price of a coffee.
A runnable pipeline that turns a crawl export into a reviewed internal-link and merge worklist. Two-stage candidate selection, exact Jev question schemas, confidence routing, and the checks that keep you from shipping bad links at scale.
A Codex skill that splits one domain question into three: free registry state from RDAP, free Cloudflare prices from a public socket, and the token-gated check.
Cloudflare split AI bot traffic into Search, Agent, and Training on September 15, 2026, and ad-supported sites now get Training and Agent blocked by default. Here's how to check where you landed and configure each category on purpose.
A repeatable way to identify the AI agents hitting your site, separate verified search crawlers from unverified agent traffic, and set access rules you can defend.
We connected four SEO MCP servers and asked each one for its tool list. They returned 42, 21, 4, and 1. That spread is the whole decision: a wrapper, a gateway, or a single gimmick.
Copilot in Bing Webmaster Tools answers questions about your site data in plain language. Here is a step-by-step 2026 workflow for asking the right questions, verifying every answer, and turning it into a weekly review habit.
Google's John Mueller told a publisher on 7 September 2026 that its systems may have lost faith in his site based on old programmatic pages. The full thread is more specific, and more useful, than the quote going around.
Google is testing paginated follow-up responses in AI Mode with a skip button, changing how conversational AI search presents multi-turn interactions.
Google's John Mueller warned that programmatic SEO strategies can cause Google's systems to lose faith in an entire site, with recovery timelines comparable to spam penalties.
Apple updated its Applebot documentation to explicitly state that Applebot-Extended directives do not affect search rankings, clarifying the separation between AI training opt-outs and search visibility ahead of iOS 27.
OpenAI's ChatGPT operates a multi-layered retrieval system internally called Labrador — a family of at least 12 specialized indexes covering general web, PDF, YouTube, news, arXiv, Wikipedia, local businesses, finance, legal, medical, shopping, and images.
