Articles
Research, experiments and analysis on AI visibility, generative search, SEO and how artificial intelligence systems understand the web.
Google Tests a Faster Photo-Based Verification for Local Businesses
Google appears to be testing a simpler way for some storefront businesses to verify their Google Business Profiles: submit one photo showing the business’s permanent sign and the e...
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Google Jobs May Be Hiding Fresh Listings While Still Showing Stale Results
Google’s job-search experience appears to be suffering from a freshness problem for at least some users, with recent vacancies becoming unusually difficult to find while older list...
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ChatGPT Is Building the Ad Stack It Needs to Compete for Search Budgets
ChatGPT’s advertising business is starting to look less like an experimental placement and more like a full performance-marketing platform. OpenAI is expanding self-service access....
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Google Search Went Down for Some Users — but Its Official Dashboard Reported No Incident
Google users in the United States reported widespread problems across Search, Images, Gmail and YouTube on Sunday, September 6, creating an unusual split between what people were e...
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Daily Sitemap URL Changes Can Confuse Crawlers Instead of Accelerating Indexing
Changing a sitemap URL every day may look like a clever way to make Google treat the file as fresh, but Google’s John Mueller says the tactic sends the wrong signal. Instead of acc...
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Daily Sitemap URL Changes Can Confuse Crawlers Instead of Accelerating Indexing
Changing a sitemap URL every day may look like a clever way to make Google treat the file as fresh, but Google’s John Mueller says the tactic sends the wrong signal. Instead of acc...
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Before Building Markdown for AI Bots, Check Whether Any AI Bot Actually Requests It
Before a publisher builds and maintains a second Markdown version of an entire website for AI crawlers, there is a simpler technical question worth answering: are the crawlers visi...
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Fixing the SEO Problem Doesn’t Mean Google Will Restore Rankings Quickly
Fixing the problem that caused a major Google ranking loss does not necessarily start an immediate climb back to the previous position. According to Google’s John Mueller, sites af...
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Product Pages Earn Six Times More B2B AI Citations Than Reddit and YouTube
For B2B marketers chasing visibility in AI answers, product pages may deserve considerably more attention than the current obsession with Reddit and YouTube suggests. A new evaluat...
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AI Search Engines Don’t Share One Ranking — They Run Four Different Source Pipelines
Marketers often talk about “ranking in AI search” as if ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews were four interfaces sitting on top of roughly the same source hierarchy...
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ChatGPT’s Citations Depend More on the Question Type Than the Industry
Brands trying to earn citations in ChatGPT may be focusing on the wrong variable. A new cross-industry study suggests that whether ChatGPT cites a source can depend far more on the...
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