👋 Hey Reader, Welcome back to another episode of the TechSEO Vitals Newsletter! Open the last three sites you worked on. View source – the raw response, not the elements panel – and search for the first sentence a visitor actually reads. On at least one of them it won’t be there. A shell, a root div, a stack of script tags. Those sites usually have a second symptom. Changing a paragraph takes three weeks. Headless CMS. Framework front end. Nobody in marketing can publish a sentence without a...
19 days ago • 6 min read
Hey Reader, Welcome back to another episode of the TechSEO Vitals Newsletter! A technical SEO audit gets delivered. 90 recommendations, screenshotted, ranked by severity, exported into a 40-page PDF. Eight months later, someone opens the doc again. 12 of the 90 are done. The other 78 are still sitting there in a file nobody touches anymore. Nothing in the audit was wrong. The crawl issues were real. The canonical conflicts were real. It just never left the PDF. Producing the audit was never...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
👋 Hey Reader, Welcome back to another episode of the TechSEO Vitals Newsletter! Recently I worked on a site using a language code that doesn’t exist. Not a typo in one template. One market’s code, invented, sitting in the head of every page on the site. One version stopped being an alternate and became a competitor. It got indexed alongside the others. Rankings flipped between them week to week. The client thought they had a content problem. They had a two-letter problem. ➡️ TL;DR An invalid...
about 2 months ago • 7 min read
👋 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...
2 months 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...
2 months 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...
3 months 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...
3 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....
4 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...
4 months ago • 6 min read