Freshness signals and honest dateModified
What datePublished and dateModified mean, what Google's date guidance asks for, why a bumped date is a trust failure, and how to audit dates across a site.
fixes
13 posts
Prioritizing AEO fixes: severity × page value
A reproducible way to order AEO and GEO fixes: rate severity, page value, and effort in a spreadsheet, rank the list, then re-crawl to prove each fix landed.
Training vs. retrieval crawlers: the block decision
Should you block GPTBot? Which AI agents train, which search, which fetch for a user, what each block costs, and four robots.txt policies to copy.
What makes a page citable: stats, sources, quotable blocks
What the GEO research paper tested, what it found, and where it stops — then how to write citable sentences and count them across a site.
robots.txt patterns for AI: allow, block, and the middle
Four positions cover almost every site. The copy-paste file for each, the matching rules that quietly break them, and the maintenance the file needs.
Tables and lists that survive extraction
Real markup is only half of it. What flattening does to a table lifted out of your page, and the four fixes that keep one readable on its own.
Chunking: why passages have to stand alone
A page is retrieved in pieces of a few hundred words. What splitting does to ordinary prose, and the three edits that make a section survive it.
Five checks for a page that ranks but never gets cited
The five faults that keep a good page out of AI answers — each with a by-hand check, a way to run it across a site with or without a terminal, and the fix.
Question headings vs. keyword headings
When to phrase a heading as a question, when a keyword label is still the right call, and how to check every heading on a site in one pass.
Answer Engine Optimization: a page-level guide
What happens to a page between fetch and answer, the eight signals answer-readiness turns on, and how to check every one of them by hand and at scale.
How to check whether AI crawlers can actually reach you
Reading robots.txt tells you what you intended. Six checks that tell you what actually happens when an AI crawler requests one of your pages.
The 40–60 word answer block, and how to write one
The highest-weighted answer-readiness signal is a passage that answers its own heading in one breath. What it is, how to write one, how to check it.