IndexNow
Automating IndexNow: what you actually have to build
The API call is ten lines. The system around it is the work. A complete list of what a production IndexNow integration has to hand...
· 3 min read
Blog
Indexing, search and AI visibility
How search engines and AI assistants discover, read and use your content — written without the usual SEO hand-waving.
AI search
Getting cited by AI answer engines: what actually seems to matter
AI assistants increasingly answer questions instead of listing links. What we can reasonably say about being the source they cite...
· 3 min read
Indexing & crawling
Getting sitemap lastmod right (and why yours is probably wrong)
lastmod is the most useful and most commonly broken field in an XML sitemap. What it should mean, what breaks it, and how to check...
· 3 min read
IndexNow
Does IndexNow actually work? A sceptical assessment
Setting aside the marketing on both sides: what IndexNow demonstrably does, what it demonstrably does not, and how to evaluate it...
· 3 min read
Ecommerce
Ecommerce indexing: keeping stock and prices current in search results
Stale prices and out-of-stock listings in search results cost you clicks and trust. How to keep a large, frequently changing catal...
· 3 min read
AI search
AI crawlers and robots.txt: who is visiting and what to allow
A field guide to the AI user agents hitting your site, the difference between training crawlers and retrieval crawlers, and how to...
· 3 min read
Indexing & crawling
Crawl budget for small sites: what actually matters
Crawl budget advice is written for sites with millions of URLs. Here is the version that applies if you have a few hundred.
· 3 min read
IndexNow
IndexNow error codes: fixing 400, 403, 422 and 429
What each IndexNow response code actually means, the specific misconfiguration behind it, and how to fix it.
· 3 min read
AI search
llms.txt explained: what it is, what it is not, and whether to bother
A clear look at the llms.txt proposal — the format, how it differs from robots.txt and sitemap.xml, the honest state of adoption,...
· 3 min read
Indexing & crawling
Why is my page not being indexed? A diagnostic order of operations
Discovery, crawling and indexing are three separate stages, and a page can fail at any of them. Work through them in order instead...
· 3 min read
IndexNow
How to set up IndexNow on WordPress (without breaking anything)
Three ways to add IndexNow to a WordPress site, what usually goes wrong with each, and how to tell whether it is actually working.
· 3 min read
IndexNow
IndexNow vs Google Search Console: what each one actually does
They are often compared, but they solve different problems for different search engines. Here is what each tool does, where they o...
· 3 min read
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