Articles

How to be the answer, not the tenth link.

Search engines rank pages. Assistants read them and quote one paragraph. These are the working notes on what that changes — written the way we argue every company should write: the answer first, the specifics attached, and a date saying when it was last checked.

Latest 1 September 2026

What to report to the board about AI search

Report four things: whether assistants describe you and how accurately, which pages machines are reading, how impressions move against clicks, and the share of new conversations that begin already informed. Show no figure that cannot be traced to where it came from.

In shortA one-page reporting structure that survives a sceptical question, using only figures that can be traced to a source.Read it

AI search

How assistants choose what to read and what to quote, and what that changes about being findable.

AI search 7 min

Your clicks are falling while your brand is being read more

The pattern behind flat impressions and falling clicks, and how to tell a genuine visibility problem from a changed results page.

2 June 2026

AI search 7 min

Should you block AI crawlers in robots.txt?

Training crawlers and retrieval crawlers are different things with different consequences. A decision framework rather than a slogan.

12 September 2026

AI search 5 min

llms.txt explained: what it is and whether it matters

A plain account of the llms.txt proposal, who honours it today, and what to do instead while that question is unsettled.

10 September 2026

AI search 6 min

How to get cited by Perplexity

Perplexity shows its sources by number, which makes it the most legible AI assistant to work against. Here is what the visible pattern rewards.

21 April 2026

AI search 7 min

How Google AI Overviews pick their sources

What the pattern of links under an AI Overview tells you about which pages get used, and what to do with pages that get read but not clicked.

8 September 2026

AI search 8 min

How ChatGPT decides which sources to quote

What is observable about source selection in assistants that browse — the search step, the reading step, and what makes a page survive both.

8 September 2026

AI search 6 min

SEO, AEO and GEO: what actually differs

Three acronyms, one body of work, three different definitions of winning. A plain comparison of what each one optimises for.

9 March 2026

AI search 8 min

What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?

GEO is the work of being present and correct inside an answer a model generates, whether or not that answer links back to you.

2 September 2026

AI search 7 min

What is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)?

AEO is the practice of writing and structuring pages so a machine can lift a correct answer out of them. Here is what changes, and what does not.

28 August 2026

Structure & schema

How to shape a page, a hub and a site so both a reader and a machine can take the answer out of it.

Structure & schema 7 min

Entity SEO: teaching engines who you are

How search and assistant systems build a picture of a company, and the unglamorous consistency work that improves it.

9 June 2026

Structure & schema 6 min

Internal linking for machine readers

How internal links are read when the reader is a retrieval system, and the five patterns worth applying across a knowledge hub.

26 May 2026

Structure & schema 7 min

Topic clusters when the engine reads instead of ranking

Why the pillar-and-cluster model survives the shift to AI search, with one change: the cluster pages get more important than the pillar.

12 May 2026

Structure & schema 6 min

Subdomain or subfolder for a knowledge hub?

The trade-off in plain terms, the cases where each one is right, and why the decision is harder to reverse than it looks.

28 April 2026

Structure & schema 7 min

Schema markup that actually earns citations

Which structured data types are worth the effort for a knowledge site, how to connect them, and what to leave alone.

14 April 2026

Structure & schema 7 min

FAQPage schema: a practical guide

What FAQPage and QAPage markup still do, where each one belongs, and the mistakes that get a page's structured data ignored.

6 September 2026

Structure & schema 8 min

How to write an answer an engine will quote

A working method for the opening paragraph, the headings and the specifics that decide whether a passage gets lifted or skipped.

4 September 2026

Structure & schema 7 min

What is an answer hub?

An answer hub is a section of your own domain where each question your market asks has its own page, written to be quoted.

30 August 2026

Practice

Getting what a company already knows out of inboxes and calls and onto a page that answers it once.

Practice 6 min

Why generic AI content fails and specific AI content does not

The difference is not whether a model was involved. It is whether the page contains anything only your company could have said.

11 August 2026

Practice 8 min

GDPR, AI writing and your knowledge base

What actually needs checking when a company uses AI to help write its published answers, from a European data protection point of view.

14 September 2026

Practice 7 min

E-E-A-T for European companies

Experience, expertise, authority and trust, translated into things a European company can actually publish and verify.

14 July 2026

Practice 8 min

Running a multilingual answer hub in Europe

Which languages to publish in, how to handle a market where buyers search in two, and the hreflang mistakes that cost the most.

30 June 2026

Practice 7 min

Writing content that survives being summarised

When a machine compresses your page into two sentences, some writing survives intact and some becomes wrong. The difference is learnable.

16 June 2026

Practice 8 min

Turn the questions your sales team answers daily into pages

The highest-intent content a company owns is already written, in sent items. A method for getting it out and onto your own domain.

1 September 2026

Measurement

What can honestly be counted when the answer is read inside an assistant and no click ever arrives.

Measurement 6 min

Reading Search Console for signs of AI search

Five patterns in Search Console that indicate an answer is being given before the click, and what each one should change.

18 August 2026

Measurement 6 min

Crawler traffic is not an audience

AI crawlers can be a large share of requests to a knowledge site. How to separate them, what they tell you, and why they must never be counted as visits.

4 August 2026

Measurement 7 min

Attribution when there is no click

How to account for influence that never produces a session, without inventing a number to put in the model.

7 July 2026

Measurement 8 min

How to measure visibility inside AI assistants

Four things that can honestly be measured about your presence in AI answers, and the popular figures that cannot be obtained at all.

16 September 2026

Looking for something shorter? Everything people ask us is our own answer hub — the same thing this product builds for a customer, running on our own domain.