Google published a guide to optimizing for its generative AI features, last updated in July 2026, and most of the AI-SEO industry appears not to have read it. Its position is blunt: optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the…
Topical Authority in the AI Era: What the Evidence Actually Shows
Both sides of the topical authority argument are running on bad evidence. The people selling you a thirty-article content cluster cannot point to a study. The people telling you Google debunked topical authority are citing a one-word Reddit reply from 2023….
In-House vs Agency for AI Search in 2026: A Cost and Capability Breakdown
One in-house marketing hire costs between roughly $9,100 and $14,400 per month once you account for what employment actually costs, against agency retainers of $1,500 to $8,000. So for most US businesses, the honest answer is that a single hire is…
Bot Traffic Is Eating Your Google Ads Budget. Here’s How to Find It.
If a click-fraud tool has shown you a dashboard claiming thousands of dollars of bot traffic in your Google Ads account, here is the first thing to know: Google says much of what those tools flag was already filtered and never…
Digital PR for AI Citations: Why Being Mentioned Beats Being Linked
In the largest study available on what correlates with being mentioned by AI platforms, branded web mentions scored between 0.66 and 0.71. Backlinks scored, in the researchers’ own words, very weak. So yes, the claim going around is directionally right: mentions…
Branded Search Was the Safe Harbour in AI Search. September Closed It.
In September 2026, Google started showing AI Overviews on most searches for brand names. Two independent trackers agree it ended the month above 80%. They disagree substantially about where it started, nobody has measured what it costs in clicks, and neither…
AI Chatbots on Service Websites: When They Generate Leads and When They Kill Them
A chatbot on a service website generates leads when it answers questions a visitor would otherwise have to phone to ask, and it kills leads when it stands between a ready-to-buy visitor and a human being. The difference is not the…
Does ChatGPT Recommend Local Businesses? What 2,975 Tested Businesses Reveal
If your business has fewer than 25 Google reviews, ChatGPT names you in roughly 3.4% of relevant local searches. Above 1,000 reviews, that rises to 22.2%. Those figures come from a study of 2,975 businesses across 39 trades and 49 cities,…
The Zero-Click Strategy: How to Win When 68% of Searches Never Leave Google
Sixty-eight percent of US Google searches now end without a click to anywhere. Not to your site, not to a competitor, not even to a paid result. That figure comes from SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb clickstream data covering January to April…
Is AI-Generated Content Bad for SEO? What Google’s Documentation Actually Says
Is AI-generated content bad for SEO? No. Google’s documentation does not prohibit AI-generated content, and the relevant policy says so explicitly. What it penalises is content produced at scale to manipulate rankings rather than help anyone, and the policy applies to…