The Insights

You probably cannot guess the words your customers search. Real volume data shows why, and how to find the exact phrases that win in Google and AI search.

Chrome added an “Agentic Browsing” score to Lighthouse. You went to check yours, opened PageSpeed Insights or Chrome DevTools, and it was not there. You are not missing a setting. The score genuinely does not appear in the two tools most people use. Every guide currently telling you to “open PageSpeed Insights and check the […]

On May 27, 2026, Google extended its Preferred Sources feature into AI Overviews and AI Mode. It is one of the few levers in AI search that a publisher can actually pull. It is also one of the most misunderstood, because the vendor content that appeared within days framed it as something you can optimize […]

Key Takeaways How to Check if AI Search Is Citing Your Content AI citation visibility is something most businesses have never measured. They track Google rankings, monitor organic traffic, and watch Search Console data. But they have no idea whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews are referencing their content when users ask questions about […]

Google’s new AI optimization guide spends most of its word count saying the quiet part out loud: keep doing SEO, just be smarter about it. Buried in the “create valuable, non-commodity content” section is one line that does a lot of work without explaining itself: If you’re using generative AI tools to assist in content […]

LLMs.txt is the most-promoted, least-effective piece of “AI SEO” the industry produced between mid-2024 and mid-2026. Google made the position official in its May 2026 AI Optimization Guide. The hard data behind that position has been in server logs for over a year. I’ve been writing about it since October 2025. None of this is […]

Google’s new AI Optimization Guide landed in Search Central on May 15, 2026, and it’s the first official, vendor-neutral document the company has published on how to show up in AI Overviews and AI Mode. It also debunks five popular tactics the AEO and GEO industry has been selling for the past 18 months. That’s […]

Vibe coding and SEO have a problem with each other, and on Search Off the Record episode 110, Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt finally said it out loud. Sites built by AI tools like Lovable, Bolt.new, v0, Cursor, and Replit AI Studio look great in the editor, ship in days, and routinely fail at […]

Key Takeaways Gemini Tripled Its User Base While ChatGPT’s Growth Slowed The Datos/Semrush State of Search Q4 2025 report tracks desktop AI tool usage across the US, EU, and UK. The biggest competitive shift in 2025 wasn’t a new entrant. It was Gemini quietly tripling its user base while ChatGPT’s growth trajectory flattened. In the […]

Key Takeaways Search Query Length Is Shifting Toward Longer, More Specific Phrasing The Datos/Semrush State of Search Q4 2025 report tracked search query length distribution for the first time, covering 15 months of desktop data across the US, EU, and UK. The results show a consistent shift: users are typing longer, more detailed queries into […]