Explore generative search, AI visibility, and the changing ways people discover answers.
23 field notes · Page 1 of 2
When Google announced BERT in October 2019, the SEO community's initial response was predictable: keyword density adjustments, entity stuffing, and "write naturally" platitudes.…
Read the field note ↗The AI content debate is mostly over. Google's position has been clear since 2023 and has not materially shifted: content generated by AI is not prohibited; content generated by AI…
Read the field note ↗The search landscape fractured in 2023 and has not healed. Traffic that once flowed predictably through ten blue links now gets absorbed by generative engines that synthesize…
Read the field note ↗Generative Engine Optimization is not a rebrand of SEO. It is a structurally different discipline that emerged from a structurally different information retrieval paradigm. When a…
Read the field note ↗Google's AI Overviews have done what no previous SERP feature managed: they have restructured the click-through rate curve for every position on the page, not just the top result.…
Read the field note ↗Eighteen months tracking 4,847 brand mentions across ChatGPT Search reveals six citation patterns that drive AI traffic. Real data, real experiments, one public mistake.
Read the field note ↗Perplexity's Comet browser integration changed how citations work in ways most SEO advice hasn't caught up with. What 312 tracked Perplexity citations show about the new mechanics.
Read the field note ↗Claude's native web search launched with different citation priorities than any other AI engine. Eight months of ClaudeBot behavior analysis shows what actually drives citations —…
Read the field note ↗Gemini 3 powers AI Overviews 2.0, Gemini.google.com search, and Google Lens deep answers. One structural optimization approach reaches all three. Here's what the data actually shows.
Read the field note ↗I manage SEO across a portfolio of 47 client sites. Different verticals, different sizes, different content strategies. When Google began the phased AIO 2.0 rollout in October 2025,…
Read the field note ↗Sometime in late 2024, AI scraping became genuinely unmanageable. Traffic from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and a dozen lesser-known LLM crawlers was eating 40–60% of my server…
Read the field note ↗Two and a half years into llms.txt, adoption is real but messy. A working SEO practitioner's honest read on spec drift, who's actually parsing it, and the advice I give paying…
Read the field note ↗Get a focused SEO audit or a consultation on your next technical decision. We’ll agree on the scope and fee before any work begins.
