Two very different people type ai detector into a search box in the same hour. One is a marketing manager who has published forty pages drafted with help from a language model and has been told that Google will punish the site for it. The other has been accused of cheating because a tool returned a number and somebody...
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Articles on Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): making your content visible and citable in AI search engines and generative answers.
Multilingual SEO is usually presented as a translation problem with some technical markup attached. Running this site in twelve languages, English, Arabic, German, French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Romanian, Vietnamese and both written forms of Chinese, has made it clear that the translation is the easy...
A content refresh is the highest-return work available on most established sites, and it is unpopular because it produces nothing to announce. Updating a post that already ranks feels like maintenance. Publishing a new one feels like progress. The numbers usually disagree. The reason is that an existing page has...
Programmatic SEO means generating many pages from a template and a dataset, one per city, per product pair, per parameter combination. Done with a real dataset it is one of the most efficient things in the discipline. Done with a thesaurus and a spinner it is the thing search engines have spent two decades learning to...
Content pruning is the least intuitive thing in search optimisation, because every instinct says more pages should mean more traffic. Publishing feels like accumulation. Deleting feels like throwing away work somebody paid for. The mechanism that makes removal helpful is competition between your own pages. When two of...
Entity SEO starts from a fact that most optimisation advice still ignores: search engines stopped matching strings a long time ago. They match things. A page is not scored on whether it contains a phrase, it is scored on whether the system believes the page is about the concept behind the phrase, and on how confident...
Ranked but not cited is the specific frustration of doing search engine optimisation correctly and watching it produce nothing. The rankings arrive. The impressions climb. The clicks do not follow, and no amount of rewriting the title tag changes it. That is not a failure of your optimisation. It is what happens when...
The honest answer to whether llms.txt does anything yet is: almost nothing, measurably, and the people telling you it is essential for AI visibility are selling something. That is an uncomfortable position to hold while also recommending you publish one, so this post shows the numbers and then explains the...
Whether to block AI crawlers is presented as a technical question and it is not one. Blocking them is a few lines of configuration that takes ten minutes. The hard part is deciding whether you want to, and that decision is commercial: you are choosing between protecting content from being trained on and being present...
GEO for ecommerce is a narrower problem than GEO for content, and easier in one specific way: an assistant answering a product question wants facts it can state without hedging. Price, availability, dimensions, compatibility, return window. Those either exist in a machine-readable form on your site or they do not, and...