👋 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...
26 days ago • 5 min read
👋 Hey Reader, Welcome back to another episode of the TechSEO Vitals Newsletter! Cloudflare is one of the most popular services for speeding up and protecting websites. Over 20% of all internet traffic flows through their servers. That alone makes it worth talking about the problems they can cause when used without proper knowledge. I’m a huge fan of Cloudflare. They offer some of the best tools on the market, many of them completely free. But today I want to focus on one specific area: their...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
👋 Hey Reader, Welcome back to another episode of the TechSEO Vitals Newsletter! Every website carries technical debt. Some of it started years ago. Some of it was there from day one. This is especially valid for enterprise sites with thousands of pages, where the consequences are brutal. I see it constantly. A company asks me to help with their Core Web Vitals. Within minutes, it’s clear the problems go much deeper. The foundation itself is broken. Technical debt works the same way as...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
👋 Hey Reader, Welcome back to another episode of the TechSEO Vitals Newsletter! The golden era when Google adapted to our slow, badly coded websites is over. Google is still patient, but dozens of AI crawlers play a completely different game. These crawlers behave differently than Googlebot. If your website is slow, they won’t wait. They’ll leave, and your content will never make it into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or other AI tools. ➡️ TL;DR AI crawlers make one request with no JavaScript...
2 months ago • 4 min read
👋 Hey Reader, Welcome back to another episode of the TechSEO Vitals Newsletter! The last few months have been confusing. What should we do with our websites to prepare them for AI? What should we avoid? Finding the right answers is harder than ever because multiple authorities are saying the opposite things. To figure out what actually improves visibility across AI search and tools, we need to go deeper. We need to understand how AI models work, what server logs reveal about crawler behavior,...
3 months ago • 4 min read
👋 Hey Reader, Welcome back to another episode of the TechSEO Vitals Newsletter! Staying rational is hard right now. The AI hype is everywhere, and the fear of missing out affects most people and businesses. In this episode, I will talk about the three biggest issues related to AI that I currently see. Disclaimer: I’m a huge AI fan and use it for hours every day. But it has to be used for tasks where it makes sense. Not blindly for everything. ➡️ TL;DR AI visibility tracking tools...
3 months ago • 5 min read
👋 Hey Reader, Welcome back to another episode of the TechSEO Vitals Newsletter! I recently worked with a website that had a huge indexing problem. The cause? A small mistake that was easy to miss. The site had content in multiple languages. Only the main language was ranking. Google completely ignored the other languages. It was like those pages didn’t exist at all. This is a common issue that can kill your international SEO efforts. Even when you have great content and quality translations,...
4 months ago • 3 min read
👋 Hey Reader, Happy New Year! After the Christmas and New Year break, I’m back with a new episode of the TechSEO Vitals Newsletter. This time, things will be a little different. I’m not sharing tips or case studies today. Instead, I want to introduce you to a new tool I’ve been building for the past six months. I named it VitalSentinel. Not John or Lily. For a “robot,” I didn’t want a human name. ➡️ TL;DR I launched an all-in-one Technical SEO and Web Performance Monitoring tool called...
4 months ago • 2 min read
👋 Hey Reader, Welcome back to another episode of TechSEO Vitals Newsletter! I’ll start with one anecdote. Would you go for a 3-day trek in the mountains with 8 kg extra in your backpack that you know you won’t need at all? Because that’s what we do with the majority of websites. On average, almost 50% of the code we require visitors to download goes completely unused. Mainly JavaScript and CSS. The impact goes beyond just performance and business metrics. Think about your smartphone battery....
5 months ago • 4 min read