Write Passages That Survive Being Read Alone
Retrieval systems lift chunks, not pages. Here is what that changes about how you structure a paragraph.
Read: Write Passages That Survive Being Read AloneAI Search
Assistants answer before anyone clicks. These pieces are about what that does to a business that has spent years earning positions in a list of ten blue links.
What is AI search optimisation?
It is the work of making a page easy for a language model to retrieve, quote and attribute: a clear claim near the top, facts stated once and stated plainly, an entity the model can resolve to your organisation, and enough corroboration elsewhere that naming you is a safe choice. It is not a new channel so much as a new reason the old fundamentals matter.
Written on AI Search
Which AI Crawlers Should You Allow, and What Happens When You Block Them
A plain explanation of the main AI crawlers, what each one is used for, and how to decide which ones get access.
Read: Which AI Crawlers Should You Allow, and What Happens When You Block Them
Measure Your Own AI Overview Click Loss Before You Believe Anyone Else’s Number
Published studies disagree by a factor of four. Here is how to work out what is actually happening on your own queries.
Read: Measure Your Own AI Overview Click Loss Before You Believe Anyone Else’s Number
llms.txt: What It Actually Does, and What It Does Not
A short, honest read on the llms.txt proposal, which engines pay attention to it, and whether it is worth your time right now.
Read: llms.txt: What It Actually Does, and What It Does Not
Cited, Not Ranked: What Changes When AI Writes the Answer
Ranking first and being quoted are different outcomes with different inputs. Here is what actually decides which sources a model reaches for.
Read: Cited, Not Ranked: What Changes When AI Writes the AnswerHow we think about this
The honest position is that nobody has five years of data on this. What can be observed is narrower and more useful: which of our pages get quoted, which get paraphrased without a name, and which never surface at all. The difference between the three is rarely the writing. It is whether the page states something specific enough to be worth quoting and whether the organisation behind it can be identified without guesswork.
The second thing worth watching is the shape of the loss. When an assistant answers a question completely, the click that used to follow does not happen, and the pages that lose it first are the ones that only ever answered that question. A page that explains what a 301 redirect is was always going to lose. A page that explains what to do when a migration has already gone wrong was not. Sorting your own library into those two piles is the most valuable half day you can spend on this.
The work behind these pieces
Where this subject turns into something we are paid to do.
Generative Engine Optimization
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