Why AI Assistants Cite the Wrong Source
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.
SEO
Local SEO and Google Business Profile: What Actually Moves Rankings
Google names three local ranking factors directly: relevance, distance, prominence. Here’s what the data says actually moves the local pack in 2026.
INP Replaced FID: What Actually Changed in Core Web Vitals
FID is gone from Core Web Vitals. INP measures every interaction, not just the first, with a strict 200ms bar most WordPress sites haven’t tested.
Should You Block AI Crawlers? A Practical Decision Framework
GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot: not all AI crawlers do the same thing. A practical framework for deciding which to block, and which not to.
Google’s Site Reputation Abuse Policy: What It Actually Targets
Google’s site reputation abuse policy targets rented-out domain authority, not guest posts. Here’s exactly what it punishes and what it doesn’t.
ChatGPT Search and What It Means for Publishers
ChatGPT Search now sends real, measurable referral traffic to publishers. Here’s what the actual numbers show, and what they don’t yet prove.
Building an AI Search Visibility Strategy When You Can’t Measure It Yet
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
The Future of SEO: What Google’s Own AI Optimization Guide Actually Says
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 in the Age of AI Bots: What’s Actually Crawling Your Site
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? What the Quality Rater Guidelines Actually Say
“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