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.
SEO
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
Does Schema Markup Help You Get Cited by AI? The Evidence Says No
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 Mode vs. AI Overviews: Why the Difference Actually Matters
“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 (AEO): A Practical Guide
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
llms.txt Explained: What It Actually Does (and Doesn’t) for AI Visibility
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
WordPress SEO and Performance in 2026: Where Sites Actually Lose Speed
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