We ran our own customer case studies page through a machine’s reading process: ten real project photos, and the whole page yielded just 13 characters of text. Along the way we found an empty heading and one spot where the heading didn’t match the content. We also cover the most practical question of all —…

A previous post noted that none of the top 20 results for a category keyword belonged to a company’s own website. This time we found a counterexample: one company’s own site took 3 of those spots, powered by a batch of “list-style articles.” We took one “Top 10 ranking” piece apart to see how it…

Our “About Us” page lists every one of them — ISO 9001, ISO 20000, and 21 software copyright registrations. Yet one AI said it “could not find any qualification certificate information for this company.” After searching around, we found the pattern: every company that gets surfaced for “having certifications” relies on a standalone article titled…

We ran a controlled experiment: give the AI only a company name and the official website ranks at the very top; add “how is it” and the website disappears entirely; ask “which one is best” and not a single company website shows up in the top 20 results. The reason is simple — when it…

Previous posts covered what to write for human readers; this one covers what to write for machines: structured data — restating “who our company is” in a format machines can read directly. It addresses two failure modes: getting it wrong and leaving it out. We have seen AI misspell our company name with a homophone,…

A hidden problem: each page looks well written on its own, yet two pages are competing for the same keyword. Search engines usually pick only one page per site to compete for a given keyword, so you put in three times the effort and none of it ranks. In our own audit we caught a…

Earlier posts covered how to check indexing, rankings, and crawler activity. The most common question after that audit is: “I know I’m on page two—so what do I change?” The answer is to start with page titles. They take only minutes to fix, affect both search rankings and whether AI systems cite you, and most…

Being indexed and being usable by AI are two different things. When AI goes online, it only looks at the top batch of results, so ranking 3rd and ranking 300th both count as indexed. We paged through the results to check where we stood, and the outcome was unexpected: we were not missing from search…

“Can our company self-host an AI? We don’t want our data going outside” — the question we’ve been asked most often lately. Yes, you can — but before you spend money on hardware, think through four things: (1) when self-hosting is genuinely worth it (data that cannot leave the internal network is the only reason…

The most common GEO mistake is treating all AI assistants as a single thing to optimize. In practice, each AI assistant queries its own search engine when it goes online, so “an AI doesn’t recommend you” really means “you aren’t indexed, or don’t rank, in that AI’s search.” We ran that check ourselves: one major…

Most claims about “how AI sees you” are indirect guesswork. Only server logs are direct evidence: who came, how often, which pages they fetched, and whether you shut them out at the door. This article gives a three-step check (count each crawler’s fetch volume, see whether status codes show rejections, see whether the pages fetched…

A client exported three days of firewall threat logs — 1,080 entries — and asked whether any of them needed handling. The answer after analysis: hold off. These logs have three problems that make them nearly unusable. ① 88% of the alerts point to the company’s own internal gateway (upstream address translation erased the real…