01Notes

Notes on SEO and AI visibility

Working notes on things we have measured or read closely. Shorter than a guide, more specific than a service page, and published when there is something worth saying rather than on a schedule.

Why Perplexity Cites Your Competitors Instead of You Perplexity shows its sources, which makes it the one platform where you can diagnose the problem rather than guess. 30 August 2026  ·  7 min read Why Your Brand Is Missing From Google AI Mode AI Mode is a different surface from AI Overviews, and measuring one tells you almost nothing about the other. 29 August 2026  ·  7 min read Why Gemini Gets Your Company Wrong Gemini blends retrieval with model knowledge, so it can state something confidently with no source attached. 28 August 2026  ·  7 min read Microsoft Copilot: The Surface Nobody Measures It sits inside the tools enterprise buyers already have open, and Bing publishes citation data almost nobody looks at. 27 August 2026  ·  6 min read Getting Cited by Claude, and Why It Differs A smaller audience and a distinct one: developers, analysts and technical evaluators. Documentation beats marketing copy. 26 August 2026  ·  6 min read Grounding Queries: What Bing Exposed Bing publishes the queries behind its AI citations. The closest thing to watching an AI system show its working. 25 August 2026  ·  7 min read What Google Actually Says About AI Optimisation Google published guidance in May 2026 naming three things as unnecessary that much of the market sells. 24 August 2026  ·  8 min read Only 36 Brands Hold AI Visibility Across Four Engines Thirty-six brands globally held a top-100 position on all four dominant engines. Not per engine. In total. 23 August 2026  ·  7 min read Your US Prompt Set Measures Nothing in the UK The US and UK were the most divergent country pair for AI citations, despite sharing a language. 22 August 2026  ·  6 min read Content Consolidation Beats Publishing Ahrefs tracked a million new pages for a year. 1.74% reached the top ten. Your existing pages are the better bet. 24 August 2026  ·  7 min read AI Citations vs Backlinks: What the Data Says 72.8% of AI-cited pages had no page-level referring domains. What that changes about off-page work, and what it does not. 23 August 2026  ·  8 min read Internal Linking Is the Cheapest SEO Work No outreach, no approvals, nobody to wait on. And almost nobody does it, because nobody sells it. 22 August 2026  ·  7 min read Nine Names for Four Ideas AEO, GEO, LLMO, AI visibility. Most describe the same work. Which are real distinctions and which are invoice lines. 21 August 2026  ·  7 min read Making a Website Readable to an Agent Crawlers read pages. Agents try to complete tasks. The difference decides whether your site can be used or only indexed. 20 August 2026  ·  7 min read What Schema Is Actually For We tell buyers schema is not a ranking lever, so we owe them an explanation of what it does do. 19 August 2026  ·  6 min read

How these differ from the guides

The guides are complete answers to questions buyers arrive with, and they get maintained. These notes are narrower: one finding, one argument, one thing we read and wanted to write down.

Both name their sources. Neither will tell you something works when the evidence says otherwise.

02Common questions

About these notes

What is this blog for?

Working notes on things we have measured or read closely, published between the longer reference pages. Shorter than a guide, more specific than a service page.

How often do you publish?

When there is something worth saying. We would rather publish once a month with a real finding than weekly with filler, and a blog that stops is worse than one that never started.

Do posts get updated?

Yes, with a dated note describing what changed. Platform behaviour moves fast enough that a post accurate in August may not be in December, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

Can I reuse this?

Quote it, cite it, argue with it. Please attribute and link, partly out of courtesy and partly because the sourcing is the point.

Who writes these?

Shrawan Swami, founder. Every post names its author and its sources, and declares a commercial interest where one exists.

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The audit

Guides  ·  Pricing  ·  How we measure