/// BLOG

LOG: BLOG

Ruminations on code, intelligence, and the architectural voids of the modern web.

2026-07-06

AI Crawlers — Who Scans Your Site and How to Manage It (robots.txt, Pay-Per-Crawl)

GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended — each does something different, and blocking the wrong one means vanishing from AI answers. The complete AI bot map, a robots.txt decision matrix, verifying impersonating scrapers, and the new crawl economy: Cloudflare's pay-per-crawl (HTTP 402) and the RSL licensing standard.

13 min

E-commerce SEO & GEO — How Stores Win Visibility in Google and AI Shopping

2026-07-05

AI & SEO

E-commerce SEO & GEO — How Stores Win Visibility in Google and AI Shopping

AI-driven shopping is already ~$21B in annual spend (4× YoY), AI traffic to stores grew by thousands of percent, and 83% of ChatGPT's shopping carousel data comes from Google Shopping. The complete guide: Product schema, the Merchant Center feed, AI crawler access, the ACP/UCP protocols and a store rollout plan.

14 min

2026-07-05

AI & SEO

Local SEO in the AI Era — Google Business Profile, Reviews and City Pages That Models Recommend

46% of Google searches carry local intent, and 76% of "near me" searchers visit a business within a day. AI changed the interface (AI Overviews on local queries, assistant recommendations), but the foundation stayed: a complete Google Business Profile, reviews and a consistent entity. The complete 2026 local SEO guide — with a step-by-step plan.

13 min

2026-07-04

AI & SEO

Digital PR and Brand Mentions — the New Currency of Visibility in Google and AI Answers

Brand mentions correlate with AI visibility over 3× more strongly than backlinks (0.66 vs 0.22), and 73% of page-one Google brands don't exist in AI answers at all. The complete guide to digital PR in the AI era: where models 'listen', tactics from original research to expert commentary, entity consistency and measurement.

14 min

Topical Authority — Building Topic Clusters and Internal Links That Google and AI Trust

2026-07-03

AI & SEO

Topical Authority — Building Topic Clusters and Internal Links That Google and AI Trust

The Google Content Warehouse leak confirmed that a domain's topical concentration is measured mathematically (siteFocusScore, siteRadius), and a 23-million-link study showed 4× more clicks for well-linked pages. The complete guide: the hub-and-spoke model, designing a topical map, data-driven internal linking and defending against cannibalization.

14 min

Google AI Overviews & AI Mode — How to Optimize Your Site So AI Cites You

2026-07-03

AI & SEO

Google AI Overviews & AI Mode — How to Optimize Your Site So AI Cites You

AI Overviews already trigger on a large share of queries, and a #1-ranked page loses up to 58% CTR when they appear. In May 2026 Google published its first official AI optimization guide. What's required, what's a myth (llms.txt, special markup), how AI Mode's query fan-out works, and what measurably increases your citation odds.

13 min

E-E-A-T in 2026 — How to Build the Trust Google Rewards and AI Models Cite

2026-07-02

AI & SEO

E-E-A-T in 2026 — How to Build the Trust Google Rewards and AI Models Cite

Google says it plainly: trust is the most important part of E-E-A-T. And AI search engines cite the sources they trust. What Google's systems and AI models actually evaluate, which signals you control, and how to turn them into a plan — with hard data from the GEO study (KDD 2024), SE Ranking and Ahrefs.

13 min

llms.txt — Does It Actually Help AI Visibility? The Complete 2026 Guide

2026-07-01

AI & SEO

llms.txt — Does It Actually Help AI Visibility? The Complete 2026 Guide

llms.txt is a Markdown file meant to point AI models to your most important content. But do Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity actually use it? The hard Ahrefs and SE Ranking data, Google's position (John Mueller), and the one case where llms.txt really works.

12 min

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