Contact, about, and the trust surfaces nobody audits
How to audit the about, contact, editorial, and policy pages behind a site, and keep organization details consistent across pages, footer, and markup.
fixes
16 posts
How to write a definition an assistant can lift
The genus-differentia pattern for one-sentence definitions, the five ways definitions fail, before-and-after rewrites, and how to check them across a site.
When your CDN or firewall blocks bots robots.txt allows
How CDN bot-management settings and firewall rules override robots.txt for AI crawlers, how to detect it, and how to write an allow rule that holds.
Freshness signals and honest dateModified
What datePublished and dateModified mean, what Google's date guidance asks for, why a bumped date is a trust failure, and how to audit dates across a site.
Prioritizing AEO fixes: severity × page value
A reproducible way to order AEO and GEO fixes: rate severity, page value, and effort in a spreadsheet, rank the list, then re-crawl to prove each fix landed.
Training vs. retrieval crawlers: the block decision
Should you block GPTBot? Which AI agents train, which search, which fetch for a user, what each block costs, and four robots.txt policies to copy.
What makes a page citable: stats, sources, quotable blocks
What the GEO research paper tested, what it found, and where it stops — then how to write citable sentences and count them across a site.
robots.txt patterns for AI: allow, block, and the middle
Four positions cover almost every site. The copy-paste file for each, the matching rules that quietly break them, and the maintenance the file needs.
Tables and lists that survive extraction
Real markup is only half of it. What flattening does to a table lifted out of your page, and the four fixes that keep one readable on its own.
Chunking: why passages have to stand alone
A page is retrieved in pieces of a few hundred words. What splitting does to ordinary prose, and the three edits that make a section survive it.
Five checks for a page that ranks but never gets cited
The five faults that keep a good page out of AI answers — each with a by-hand check, a way to run it across a site with or without a terminal, and the fix.
Question headings vs. keyword headings
When to phrase a heading as a question, when a keyword label is still the right call, and how to check every heading on a site in one pass.