AI

A $60M/year Google-Reddit deal coincided with Reddit’s search visibility growing 191% in a year. Here’s what the data actually shows, and doesn’t.

AI Overviews can be accurate and still misattribute the claim to a source that never said it. Here’s what the research on ‘ungrounded’ citations shows.

GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot: not all AI crawlers do the same thing. A practical framework for deciding which to block, and which not to.

ChatGPT Search now sends real, measurable referral traffic to publishers. Here’s what the actual numbers show, and what they don’t yet prove.

Here’s an uncomfortable fact for anyone trying to build an AI search strategy in 2026: right now, nobody can measure it properly. Not you, not the plugin vendors, not Google itself in a usable way. Before a “strategy” is worth anything, it’s worth understanding exactly how limited the visibility into AI search actually is — … Read more

In May 2026, Google did something it rarely does: it published an official guide telling SEOs, in plain terms, which of the popular “AI optimization” tactics are worth their time and which aren’t. It’s a short, unusually direct document, and I think most of the industry hasn’t actually read it — they’ve read summaries of … Read more

“Does Google penalize AI content?” is the single most common SEO question I hear — from support tickets, from friends starting blogs, from people building automation projects like I do. The honest answer is buried in a 182-page PDF almost nobody reads: Google’s own Search Quality Rater Guidelines. I went and read the actual document, … Read more

“AI Overviews” and “AI Mode” get used interchangeably in a lot of SEO writing, and it’s causing real confusion about what to actually worry about. They’re different products, at very different stages of adoption, with different implications for how you should spend your time. Here’s the distinction, as clearly as I can put it. AI … Read more

Answer Engine Optimization — usually shortened to AEO, and sometimes called GEO, Generative Engine Optimization — is the closest thing the industry has to a name for “SEO, but for getting cited inside an AI-generated answer instead of just ranking a blue link.” It’s not a replacement for SEO. It’s an additional lens on top … Read more