Practical thinking on technical SEO, content, and the changing shape of search. From the details that break a crawl to the decisions that build a business.
270 field notes · Page 15 of 23
The AI curation layer changed everything about Google Discover. Here's what actually happened to traffic, what the signals shifted toward, and how one lifestyle client tripled…
Read the field note ↗Google Publisher Center is gone. Here's what actually replaced it, what publishers lost, what they gained, and how to re-establish News eligibility without the old verification…
Read the field note ↗Google's 2025 freshness rebalance fundamentally changed Top Stories eligibility. What the change actually did, which publisher types got hurt most, and what the optimized approach…
Read the field note ↗6,400 Google Lens visual citations a month from one e-commerce client. Here's exactly what drove it, what Google Lens saturation means for visual SEO, and the framework for…
Read the field note ↗Published 19 May 2026. The protocol turned five this year and the anniversary coverage has been almost uniformly celebratory. Adoption dashboards. Partnership announcements. Blog…
Read the field note ↗Published 19 May 2026. The official documentation has not changed. Google still says the Indexing API is for pages containing JobPosting or BroadcastEvent (livestream) structured…
Read the field note ↗In January 2025, I started pulling weekly crawl reports for a mid-size e-commerce client with roughly 340,000 indexed pages. Nothing alarming triggered the audit — I do it quarterly…
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 ↗Forty-plus distinct AI crawlers are hitting sites right now. Here's the robots.txt I actually run, how it changed twice after bad calls, and what the bot landscape looks like as of…
Read the field note ↗Which anti-scraping techniques actually hold up in 2026. An honest look at tarpit patterns, Cloudflare and Fastly configurations, what survives adversarial AI scrapers, and what…
Read the field note ↗My client signed the contract on a Thursday. Forty-seven-month term. $1.2 million total. Structured as a $480,000 upfront licensing fee against quarterly royalty payments tied to…
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.
