Organic search visibility and traffic
More and more people meet your work in a feed or an AI answer and never visit your site. What to publish when the click does not come, on LinkedIn, in a newsletter and on answer first pages, and how to measure it through brand search and by asking people.
How to grow a business by being genuinely useful in Reddit, Discord, Slack and trade communities: why communities push marketers out, the one rule for every post, when to mention what you sell, the UK law on undisclosed posting, and how to measure what analytics cannot see.
Most links are passed on privately in WhatsApp, Slack, Teams and email, and your analytics files those visits under direct. Where the famous 80% figure really comes from, why a shared link loses its source, how to measure private sharing without tracking anyone who said no, and how to make recommendations more likely.
Four acronyms for four outcomes: found, lifted, cited and recommended. What SEO, AEO, GEO and AIO each mean, what actually moves each one, how they stack, what the lost clicks cost in numbers, and how to measure all four without buying a dashboard.
A checked list of 44 small fixes across the website, SEO, AI search, email and paid advertising, each one something you can start in an afternoon. Invented impact figures removed, every outside number sourced, and the consent rules built in.
Shoppers increasingly ask an assistant instead of typing keywords. What that means for a shop's product pages, descriptions and structured data, with UK dates from Google and a Rails example.
Since 2012 Google has tried to recognise things, not strings. What that means for your pages, what structured data really does (and does not do) for rankings, and how I make a business unmistakable to a machine without a keyword density target in sight.
A Google results page is boxes, maps, products, videos and stars as well as links. How to read the intent behind a query from the page Google builds, which features a business can earn, the rules Google publishes for each, and how to measure what you hold.
Google's SGE experiment became AI Overviews and AI Mode, and both now sit in front of your organic results. What the click studies actually measured, how to estimate and measure the effect on your own site, and the controls you have since 2026.
Building many pages from one template is fine. Building the same page 400 times with a different town in the headline is spam. How to tell the two apart, and how to build the first kind.
DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and Brave Search carry about 1% of UK search referrals, and most borrow Bing's or Google's index. The bigger privacy shift is in the browser and the law, and that touches every visitor you have.
Google never started indexing passages. It ranks whole pages, and since 2021 it can notice the one good section inside a long one. What that means, what it does not, and how I structure long pages so the right section is found, quoted and linked.
Chrome kept its third party cookies, but most of your visitors are already out of reach. How to turn organic search into first party data you can use lawfully, and measure content by what each click is worth.
IndexNow lets your site tell Bing and other engines the moment a page changes, and Google does not listen. How to set it up to the documented API, what to send, and how to make Googlebot's visits count by reading your own logs.
ChatGPT has no ranking list, just two routes into an answer and one documented gate. What OpenAI, Microsoft and the research actually say, what is unknown, and how to measure your place.
What LCP, INP and CLS measure, why Google grades them at the 75th percentile of real visits, how much they weigh in Search, and how to diagnose a slow page from the top, worked through on an invented Manchester furniture shop.
ChatGPT search and Google's AI features fetch and cite pages by different routes, opened by different switches. Here are both routes, what the UK usage figures really say, and a plain monthly way to measure whether either tool cites you.
Search engines now answer before they link, and the page quoted in the answer is the one that is seen. How a question becomes an AI answer with citations, the three things that decide whether you are in it, and what I do on the sites I build.
Google does not punish AI written pages, it punishes pages made to game the rankings. What its guidance and spam policies really say, why AI detectors fail, and how I use the tools myself.
