Sitemaps in AI search: what still matters
Which AI search systems document using XML sitemaps, why lastmod has to be honest, how sitemap index files work, and where llms.txt fits beside them.
seo
7 posts
Titles and meta descriptions on answer surfaces
What titles and meta descriptions still do once a passage is extracted, what Google documents about title links and snippets, and how to write both.
nosnippet, max-snippet and data-nosnippet on AI surfaces
How Google's snippet directives apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode, how they combine, where an accidental max-snippet:0 comes from, and how to audit them.
AI Overviews eligibility: every technical requirement
What Google documents as the technical bar for AI Overviews and AI Mode: crawlable, indexed, snippet-eligible, and included. Plus what doesn't count.
Status codes, redirects, and canonical drift on AI surfaces
How redirect chains, soft 404s, 4xx and 5xx responses, and conflicting canonicals decide which URL gets fetched, indexed, and attributed — and how to check.
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.
SEO, AEO, and GEO: what actually changed
Three acronyms, one page. Here is what answer engines and generative search changed about optimization, and what they did not.