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Technical SEO, split-testing, local search and algorithm analysis from independent practitioners and specialist agencies — SearchPilot, Lumar, Sistrix, Sterling Sky, Marie Haynes and others.
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Yes, Google does legitimately call businesses, but Google does not make unsolicited automated sales calls or ask you to pay to maintain, verify, or reinstate a Google Business Profile. Google may…
Read on Sterling Sky →Getting a negative review on your Google Business Profile, previously known as Google My Business, can be one of the most frustrating parts of being a business owner. Understanding how to remove bad…
Read on Sterling Sky →The Google Business Profile Performance report shows how people find and interact with your Business Profile on Google Search and Google Maps. It includes data about searches, views, calls, website…
Read on Sterling Sky →No, businesses generally cannot turn off Google reviews themselves. There is no setting in your Google Business Profile that allows you to disable reviews. However, Google may temporarily or…
Read on Sterling Sky →TL;DR We ran a direct comparison of 346 matched prompts to see whether ChatGPT-5.6 Luna behaved differently from GPT-5.5 GPT-5.6 Luna used web search more often but ran fewer queries, resulting in…
Read on Seer Interactive →Andrew Shotland & Mark Kabana join us for Part 2 to discuss what "AI visibility" actually is as an agency product, why nobody can tie it to revenue yet, and how ads are quietly taking the clicks that…
Read on Near Media →Most SEO tools scream at you to keep title tags short, ideally under 60 characters. But we have found that this is advice that you should ignore. I have seen over and over that a longer SEO title…
Read on Sterling Sky →What Is Google Review Gating? Google review gating is when businesses filter customers before asking them to leave a Google review. Businesses review gate by sending customers an email template that…
Read on Sterling Sky →Buying journeys are better modelled as conversations, not prompts, and randomness at every step means that prompt tracking misses a lot of the picture.
Read on SearchPilot →What's my favorite horror movie? When I patted myself on the back for setting up an ~autonomous workflow~ that kept our newsletter subscriber hygiene clean by automatically unsubscribing anyone who…
Read on Seer Interactive →SISTRIX SectorWatch reports show you the blueprints for success. We surface and analyse the leading URLs in SEO and GEO so that you can gain an advantages from them. Now you can get even more data by…
Read on Sistrix →AI can read most webpages just fine without a single line of schema. Large…
Read on Oncrawl →Andrew Shotland & Mark Kabana join us fresh off Brighton SEO for a wide-ranging, no-fixed-agenda convo about what the conference said about local's place in the industry, why a single search rank is…
Read on Near Media →I like making bets about the future. Not because I think I am especially good at predicting it, but because writing down exactly what you think will happen forces you to be more precise.
Read on SearchPilot →Every rigorous SEO test needs a single primary metric. For us that's usually organic sessions to the tested pages, because it's high-volume enough to reach statistical confidence and close enough to…
Read on SearchPilot →Six experts. Six myths about how search engines and AI systems actually work, and…
Read on Oncrawl →Your content may be useful and relevant, but that doesn’t guarantee it will be seen. Use this practical GEO diagnostic checklist to investigate what may be limiting your content's visibility in AI…
Read on Lumar →I turned my 15-year archive of Google algorithm updates into an official Model Context Protocol (MCP) server at algo.mariehaynes.com. Here is how it was built, the architecture behind it, and how you…
Read on Marie Haynes →We take a first look at new consumer-journey research Near Media ran for Lastmile Retail, work through the EU's DMA self-preferencing decision, an audit of Google's hotel results in Europe versus the…
Read on Near Media →TL;DR If your performance numbers are down, your single-axis maturity model might be telling you to solve for the wrong problem A true framework should factor in two variables: what the market is…
Read on Seer Interactive →Traditional ranking metrics can only tell us so much about GEO performance. In this article, we explore what a GEO analytics stack could look like, with layers covering candidate page selection to…
Ranking & Algorithms Measurement AI Search & Visibility
Read on Lumar →We’re packing our bags for our 4th trip to San Diego, heading back to one of our favourite events of the year: brightonSEO San Diego. This year’s edition takes place on the 15th and 16th September,…
Read on Screaming Frog →Technical SEO has a direct line to revenue, but not every website needs a…
Read on Oncrawl →TL;DR Claude’s watermark only flags that Claude was “likely involved,” so it can’t tell a fully AI-drafted piece from a human draft Claude lightly edited It’s an EU compliance requirement (Code of…
Read on Seer Interactive →Damian Rollison, Senior Director of Market Insights at SOCi, joins us to walk through SOCi's third annual consumer study whose headline finding is that local discovery no longer runs in a straight…
Read on Near Media →TL;DR AI is more than just a summary or synthesis tool for project managers, and the best PMs will use it to become a better strategic partner PMs can use AI to spot ongoing friction and pinpoint the…
Read on Seer Interactive →Authority can influence whether a source is considered in generative search, but its role varies depending on the query. Explore how authority appears to work in GEO, which signals may contribute to…
Read on Lumar →Stay Visible is my monthly personal update for the SEO, GEO and SISTRIX community. In this edition I talk about the Deep Dive chat feature, the Google ‘goto’ redirection problem that has been solved,…
Site Architecture AI Search & Visibility
Read on Sistrix →TL;DR Everyone measuring AI search is defaulting to the same KPIs, but there is no one-size-fits-all AI search KPI New research shows 54% of AI search categories lack a clear category owner, and…
Read on Seer Interactive →Lake Ontario FiascoAs trade negotiations with Canada fell apart, Trump issued an order renaming Lake Ontario "Lake America" A petty rebuke, it follows a similar episode in January 2024, when Trump…
Read on Near Media →We connect three stories that are really one story: Apple's launch of ads in Maps, Google's move to charge for more Local Services Ads leads and expand ads across the results page, and Meta's ~$18…
Read on Near Media →A session in partnership with Page 2 Podcast
Read on SearchPilot →TL;DR We realized AI platforms were relaying an inaccurate narrative about Seer Interactive, so we ran a full analysis to find out what else they were saying — and whether the info was accurate Of…
Read on Seer Interactive →The evolution of NLP methods and what that means for AI search Before AI,…
Read on Oncrawl →Welcome back to our GEO series! Your content can be highly relevant to a query and still never make it into an AI-generated response. In the previous article, we touched on one reason why: a relevant…
Content & Quality AI Search & Visibility
Read on Lumar →This regularly updated list of the top 100 domains in US search includes analysis and highlights. The list is created using the SISTRIX Domain Visibility Index values, an indicator of footprint and…
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