Writing
Guides
In one sentence
The guides are how-to articles on the machine layer a site serves to AI crawlers and search engines — how to check whether GPTBot and ClaudeBot can read your site, how to write and test llms.txt and robots.txt agent rules, how to verify a sitemap and an entity graph, and how to measure AI visibility over time — each written from measurements on real sites and updated when the scanner changes.
How the machine layer actually behaves, and how to check your own. Each one ends with links to the findings its figures came from.
2026-09-05
YouTube SEO case study: a dormant channel with 81 videos rewritten, measured before and after
Terrarium Station’s channel had not uploaded in 19 months and was still growing 42% a year in search. Every title and description was rewritten in two dated batches. The baseline is published now so the after cannot be moved; the result is written on 3 October, flat included.
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2026-09-02
How to read a CrawlCheck report: the grade, the three stages, the fix list and the evidence
A report is six views over one record. This is what each one is for, what the numbers mean, and where the bytes behind every finding live.
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2026-09-02
How to check whether a GPTBot or ClaudeBot request in your logs is real
A user-agent is a claim. The address is the evidence. Here is how to adjudicate every crawler line in an access log in one paste, and how to read the three outcomes.
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2026-08-28
Is Cloudflare blocking AI crawlers on your site? What changes on 15 September 2026
A default is about to change, and the group it reaches hardest is the group that never opened the setting. How to find out which side of it you are on before the date, not after.
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2026-08-28
How to check whether AI crawlers can read your site
Five requests, ten minutes, no account required. What each one catches, and why opening the page in your browser is the one test that cannot find any of it.
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2026-08-28
AI visibility tools compared: what each one actually measures
Every tool in this category runs the same loop. The comparisons all sort on price and engine coverage. The difference that decides whether a tool can help you is which half of the problem it can see.
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2026-08-28
How to rank in ChatGPT: the part that is actually in your control
There is no position three. There is retrieval, and there are four conditions your site has to satisfy before anything you publish is eligible to be used at all.
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2026-08-28
Do AI crawlers respect robots.txt?
The named ones largely do. The problem in practice is almost never disobedience — it is that the file says one thing and the network in front of it does another, and nothing reports the conflict.
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2026-08-28
Does llms.txt actually do anything?
The honest answer has two halves, and the half nobody publishes is the one that decides it. Here is what is verifiable, what is not, and the test that would settle it for your own domain.
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2026-08-28
Do AI crawlers render JavaScript?
Assume not, and the question becomes much simpler: does your content exist in the response the server sends, before anything runs. Here is how to check in one request.
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2026-08-28
The AI crawler list: what each one is for, and which can be verified
Twelve names that show up in server logs, what each is actually doing, and the number that changes how you read all of them — how much of that traffic is not who it says it is.
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2026-08-28
GEO, AEO and LLM SEO: what the terms mean and which parts can be measured
Three names for one shift, sold as three disciplines. The distinctions are mostly marketing; the useful split is between the parts of the work that produce a checkable number and the parts that do not.
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2026-08-28
SEO audit tools compared: what each one actually fetches
Site crawlers, platform audits and Lighthouse are three different instruments pointed at three different things. The gaps between them are where defects live, and one of them cannot support a finding from a single run.
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2026-08-28
How to write an llms.txt, and how to check it is actually being served
The file takes twenty minutes. Confirming that the version a crawler receives is the version you wrote takes two more, and it is the step almost everyone skips.
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2026-08-28
Free AI visibility checkers: what the free tier actually measures
Most of them are lead magnets, which is fine — a lead magnet can still be a good instrument. The question is whether the check is hard enough to fail, and a surprising number are not.
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2026-08-28
Entity SEO: what a machine has to resolve before it can cite you
Being read is not being identified. If a system cannot tell you apart from a similar business two towns over, it will either name the wrong one or name nobody, and both look identical from your side.
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2026-08-28
How to measure AI visibility without trusting a vendor's score
Three measurements, in order, each of which you can reproduce yourself. Two of them are free, and the one people buy first is the one that depends on the other two being clean.
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2026-08-28
How to block AI crawlers, and what each block costs you
Blocking is a legitimate choice and this is how to do it properly. It is also three separate decisions that get made as one, and the one people regret is rarely the one they intended.
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