NetContentSEO Research & Publishing

Articles

Research, experiments and analysis on AI visibility, generative search, SEO and how artificial intelligence systems understand the web.

The Famous “15% Wikipedia Traffic Loss” Was Revised Down to 5%—Because the Researchers Changed the Measurement
Search Ecosystem & Dialogue Engines Sep 14, 2026

The Famous “15% Wikipedia Traffic Loss” Was Revised Down to 5%—Because the Researchers Changed the Measurement

One of the most striking early estimates of AI Overviews’ effect on publisher traffic has been substantially revised. A University of Washington working paper that initially report...

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Amazon Fails to Restore Its Block on Perplexity’s Shopping Agent—Strengthening the “AI Is a User Tool” Precedent
AI & Search Sep 14, 2026

Amazon Fails to Restore Its Block on Perplexity’s Shopping Agent—Strengthening the “AI Is a User Tool” Precedent

Amazon has failed to persuade the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to reconsider a closely watched ruling over Perplexity’s AI shopping agent, leaving intact an opinion....

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AI Overviews Cover 57% of Manufacturing Search Volume—Yet AI Sends Just 0.48% of Website Traffic
ai Sep 14, 2026

AI Overviews Cover 57% of Manufacturing Search Volume—Yet AI Sends Just 0.48% of Website Traffic

Generative search is rapidly occupying more of the manufacturing search experience, but it is still sending remarkably little identifiable traffic to industrial websites. A new Sem...

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Cloudflare Can Now Rewrite Your Robots.txt From a Dashboard—So One AI Bot Setting Could Change Who Can Crawl Your Site
Search Ecosystem & Dialogue Engines Sep 14, 2026

Cloudflare Can Now Rewrite Your Robots.txt From a Dashboard—So One AI Bot Setting Could Change Who Can Crawl Your Site

Cloudflare is turning one of the web’s oldest crawler-control files into a dashboard-driven policy layer. With Bot Preference Sync, a site owner’s choices about AI Search, Agent an...

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OpenAI’s Next ChatGPT Ad May Keep the Click Inside ChatGPT—and Turn It Into a Brand Conversation
ChatGPT Sep 14, 2026

OpenAI’s Next ChatGPT Ad May Keep the Click Inside ChatGPT—and Turn It Into a Brand Conversation

OpenAI is testing a ChatGPT ad format that changes what an advertising click is supposed to do. Instead of immediately opening an advertiser’s website, the click can launch a brand...

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Two New ChatGPT Citations Disappeared After One Week—While the Same Perplexity Citation Survived 15 Straight Tests
ChatGPT Sep 13, 2026

Two New ChatGPT Citations Disappeared After One Week—While the Same Perplexity Citation Survived 15 Straight Tests

Two pages that earned their first ChatGPT citations disappeared from the same measurement panel just one week later, while a separate Perplexity citation survived its fifteenth con...

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AI Assistants May Care More About How Many Reviews a Local Business Has Than Its Star Rating
AI & Search Sep 13, 2026

AI Assistants May Care More About How Many Reviews a Local Business Has Than Its Star Rating

Local businesses trying to appear in AI-generated recommendations may have been watching the wrong review metric. A large Uberall analysis suggests that the number of reviews a loc...

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Google Indexed Every Tested Page It Crawled—and None It Didn’t. The Real Bottleneck May Be Getting Googlebot to Visit
Google Sep 13, 2026

Google Indexed Every Tested Page It Crawled—and None It Didn’t. The Real Bottleneck May Be Getting Googlebot to Visit

A small but unusually instrumented indexing experiment has produced a striking pattern: every tested page that Googlebot fetched entered Google’s index, while every page Googlebot....

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AI-Assisted Academic Writing Is Associated With 7% More Citations—But the Detector Cannot Prove Who Actually Used an LLM
ai Sep 13, 2026

AI-Assisted Academic Writing Is Associated With 7% More Citations—But the Detector Cannot Prove Who Actually Used an LLM

Academic papers whose abstracts contain writing patterns associated with large language models receive about 7% more citations than otherwise comparable papers, according to a new....

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A New GEO Platform Automates Daily AI Articles and Backlink Swaps—but Could the Network Become Its Biggest SEO Risk?
ai Sep 13, 2026

A New GEO Platform Automates Daily AI Articles and Backlink Swaps—but Could the Network Become Its Biggest SEO Risk?

A newly launched GEO platform is packaging several of the most aggressive ideas in AI-era search marketing into one automated workflow: keyword research, long-form AI articles, dai...

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An Open-Source SEO Agent Finally Separates AI Training Bots From the Crawlers That Control Search Citability
ai Sep 13, 2026

An Open-Source SEO Agent Finally Separates AI Training Bots From the Crawlers That Control Search Citability

One of the most consequential mistakes in generative engine optimization is also one of the easiest to make: treating every crawler operated by an AI company as though it serves th...

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