What actually changes when a customer asks an AI instead of Google — reported from real, dated measurements, not guesses.
Nearly half of local searches now start with an AI assistant, not Google. Here is exactly how to check whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude name your business — or a competitor.
August 19, 2026
Google has shipped four spam and core updates since March 2026, several explicitly targeting AI-generated content and AI Overview manipulation. Here is what the evidence actually supports.
August 19, 2026
What GEO actually means once you strip out the hype: robots.txt for AI crawlers, structured data, and — the part most guides skip — being cited requires being crawlable by a search-and-answer bot, not just a training bot.
August 19, 2026
llms.txt is a well-intentioned proposed standard with a real adoption problem: as of 2026, none of the major AI labs actually consume it. Here is the honest state of it, and where to spend the effort instead.
August 19, 2026
There's no notification when ChatGPT stops mentioning your business. No ranking drop to watch, no email alert. The first sign is usually just: fewer calls, and nobody knows why.
August 19, 2026
Google's own policy language is method-agnostic: it targets low-value content at scale, not automation itself. Here is what that means for anyone still trying to do programmatic SEO in 2026.
August 19, 2026
Four different assistants, four different underlying search and citation systems, four different answers to the same question. Here is what we've observed running real multi-assistant sweeps.
August 19, 2026
Most SEO effort goes entirely to Google. Here is the one extra setup — Bing Webmaster Tools plus IndexNow — that covers three other engines at once, and why DuckDuckGo and Yahoo don't need separate work.
August 19, 2026
A blanket "block all AI bots" line in robots.txt usually blocks the wrong ones. Here is the practical distinction between training crawlers and retrieval crawlers, and how to configure each.
August 19, 2026
Google says no special schema is required for AI Overviews. That's true and also slightly misleading — here's the actual, more useful answer.
August 19, 2026
A dental practice can rank #1 on Google Maps and still be invisible when a patient asks ChatGPT who to call. Here is why, using real measured data.
August 19, 2026
A single AI query is a data point, not a verdict — answers genuinely vary between runs. Here's why ongoing monitoring catches what a one-time check misses.
August 19, 2026