👋 Hey Reader, Welcome back to another episode of the TechSEO Vitals Newsletter! Go into AI Mode and ask it to find something you’d actually buy. A laptop, a hotel for the weekend, an app your team needs. Watch what happens before a single link shows up. It compares options. It filters on price, delivery, region. By the time a URL appears, the decision is already made. The click used to start the research. Now it comes after it. Zero-click took your informational traffic. This takes the part...
15 days ago • 6 min read
👋 Hey Reader, Welcome back to another episode of the TechSEO Vitals Newsletter! Last year, blocking AI bots felt like the obvious move. Cloudflare made it one click. A lot of people pressed it. In a few weeks, that click starts blocking Googlebot. Not a warning. Not a preference in a text file. Cloudflare blocks the request before it can read your robots.txt file. ➡️ TL;DR Cloudflare now judges crawlers on all their behaviors, not one – and the most restrictive rule wins Googlebot crawls for...
29 days ago • 6 min read
👋 Hey Reader, Welcome back to another episode of the TechSEO Vitals Newsletter! Plenty of iPhone users already use AI. Just rarely. They open ChatGPT when a question feels big enough to bother – twice a week, maybe less. That's what changes this fall. How often. Because now it's built into the phone. Always there, before they even think to open an app. Occasional use becomes constant – not by choice, but because it's frictionless. You already know what it does. Same as ChatGPT or Gemini – ask...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
👋 Hey Reader, Welcome back to another episode of the TechSEO Vitals Newsletter! Run a few brand prompts in ChatGPT or Claude with web access turned off. No search. Just the model talking from memory. Some brands get a clean answer. Category, products, who it's for. Others get "I don't have detailed information about that company." One brand made it into the training data. The other didn't. Today I want to talk about which side of that line your brand sits on. Everyone in AI search is obsessed...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
👋 Hey Reader, Lighthouse shipped a new agentic audit a few weeks ago. One of the things it checks is whether you have an llms.txt file. The same month, Google's own guidance on AI search listed llms.txt under the things you don't need to do. One company. Telling you to build the file, and telling you not to bother with it. Same month. No wonder everyone's confused. The confusion clears the moment you stop treating llms.txt as a search thing. It was never a search thing. Here's where I land....
2 months ago • 6 min read
👋 Hey Reader, You submit 48K URLs in your XML sitemap. 11K get indexed. You keep asking why Google won't crawl more. You have it backwards. Google crawled plenty. It just disagreed with your definition of "worth indexing" on 77% of what you submitted. The pattern is almost always the same. Sitemaps full of pages nobody would defend in a content review, submitted on autopilot, signaling to Google that the overall quality of your site is weak. You're probably treating your sitemap as a list. A...
3 months ago • 6 min read
👋 Hey Reader, Welcome back to another episode of the TechSEO Vitals Newsletter! I’ve had this conversation three times in the past month. A site ranks fine in Google. Decent traffic, decent positions. Then someone runs a few brand prompts in ChatGPT or Claude and gets nothing. Or worse, gets a clean citation for the competitor down the road. The site owner is confused. We’re #2 in Google for that query. How are we invisible here? The answer is almost always the same. The site has been getting...
3 months ago • 5 min read
👋 Hey Reader, Welcome back to another episode of the TechSEO Vitals Newsletter! I see this on more sites than I’d like to admit. Someone wants to allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot to crawl their site. So they add a clean Allow: / block for each one. Their wildcard rules already disallow /admin/, /cart/, /checkout/, and a few other paths they don’t want crawled. It looks correct. It reads correctly to a human. It’s completely wrong. GPTBot just got permission to crawl /admin/, /cart/,...
4 months ago • 6 min read
👋 Hey Reader, Welcome back to another episode of the TechSEO Vitals Newsletter! Every time ChatGPT gives up on one of your pages, it leaves a trace in your server logs. Almost nobody looks for it. It might be the best signal you have for whether AI tools can actually read your content. ➡️ TL;DR A 499 error means a bot (or visitor) closed the connection before your server finished responding ChatGPT-User has a brutally short patience window and dominates 499s on most sites The bot gets nothing...
4 months ago • 5 min read