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
Crawl budget used to be a concern mostly for enormous e-commerce sites with millions of URLs. In 2026 it’s relevant to almost everyone, for a reason that has nothing to do with site size: your pages aren’t just being crawled by Googlebot anymore. They’re being crawled by a growing list of AI bots, each with … 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
Schema markup sounds more intimidating than it is. Here’s the whole idea in one sentence: search engines read your page as text, and schema is a label maker that tells them what that text means. This number is a price. This block is a recipe. This name is the author. Nothing more mysterious than that. … 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
If you’ve seen a plugin or a guide telling you to add an llms.txt file to your site “so AI models can find you,” it’s worth understanding what that file actually is before adding one — because the honest answer is more modest than most of the marketing around it suggests. What llms.txt actually is … Read more
I spend most of my working hours inside WordPress sites — diagnosing why a plugin conflict tanked someone’s Core Web Vitals, or why a theme update broke schema output. A pattern shows up constantly: sites treating SEO and performance as separate projects, when in 2026 they’re close to the same project. Performance is an SEO … Read more
Every few months someone asks me, half-joking, whether SEO is already dead. It isn’t — but the ground underneath it has shifted more in the last two years than in the previous ten, and the data now backs that up with numbers instead of vibes. The clearest long-running measurement of this comes from Rand Fishkin’s … Read more