THE SIGNAL JOURNAL / FIELD NOTES FOR THE ANSWER ERA
AI search and SEO, measured
Most writing about AI visibility is written by people who never made the API call. These posts show the request, the response, and what it cost. When we do not know something, the post says so.
LATEST FIELD NOTES
- AI VISIBILITY / 02We asked 7 AI engines what dev tools to use. Reddit won.Sentry, Supabase, Railway and Linear were cited zero times across 2,586 citations from 7 AI engines. Reddit and agency blogs won instead.4 MIN · READ →
- AI CRAWLERS / 03Meta hit us 3,606 times. Seven other crawlers were not real.Seven days of crawler logs from one small site, and the correction that followed: 7 percent of the requests came from IPs claiming to be more than one company.7 MIN · READ →
- STRUCTURED DATA / 04Google stopped fixing double-escaped JSON-LDGoogle now applies one pass of HTML unescaping to JSON-LD instead of correcting double-escaped text. We checked 36 sites that publish it and found it on one.4 MIN · READ →
- AI VISIBILITY / 05We asked seven answer engines which SEO tool to buySeven buying questions, seven engines, 49 answers. 139 domains got cited and not one of them was cited by more than five engines. The full measurement.5 MIN · READ →
- STRATEGY / 06AI search glossary: the terms that matter, with sourcesTwenty-five AI search terms, each with a plain one-line definition and a link to the primary source. Built so you can check every entry rather than trust it.7 MIN · READ →
- ECONOMICS / 07Build or buy AI visibility tracking, with real numbersThe actual API call, what it returns, what a question costs, and the five maintenance problems you inherit. Then the honest case for building it yourself.7 MIN · READ →
- STRUCTURED DATA / 08Does HowTo Schema Still Do Anything in 2026?Google deprecated the HowTo rich result in September 2023 and deleted the doc. The type is still alive in two places you can check today. Here is where.7 MIN · READ →
- AGENT-READABLE SITES / 09llms.txt vs robots.txt vs sitemap.xml: what each one doesThree root files, three jobs, three levels of authority. One is an IETF standard, one a vendor agreement, one a proposal no vendor has confirmed reading.7 MIN · READ →
- AI CRAWLERS / 10Should you block AI crawlers? It depends on who you areThere is no universal answer. What blocking protects, what it costs you, and why a publisher and a SaaS reach opposite conclusions from the same facts.7 MIN · READ →
- AI VISIBILITY / 1144 real AI Overview citations, and what they have in commonWe pulled every source URL from 8 Google AI Overviews. None was a homepage, 49 of 70 titles said best, and 11 came from Reddit, YouTube or Quora.8 MIN · READ →
- AI CRAWLERS / 12Every AI crawler token in robots.txt and what it doesA reference table of the AI crawler tokens worth knowing, what each one governs (training, search, or a user's fetch), and the operator's own documentation.9 MIN · READ →
- STRUCTURED DATA / 13Article Schema Has No Required Properties in 2026Google's Article documentation says it twice: there are no required properties. Here is the recommended list, why people misread it, and what to ship.8 MIN · READ →
- AI VISIBILITY / 14Can you pay to appear in AI answers?Yes on Google, partly on ChatGPT, and what you buy is never the citation. What each vendor documents, checked on 19 August 2026, and the reporting gap.6 MIN · READ →
- AI VISIBILITY / 15Two of our cloaking detector's first three findings were wrongA check that flags sites for serving crawlers different content flagged two sites for defending themselves properly. What we measured, and what we killed.9 MIN · READ →
- STRATEGY / 16GEO: what the paper behind the acronym actually measuredThere is one academic paper behind generative engine optimization. Here is what it tested, on which engine, with what effect sizes, and what it never touched.8 MIN · READ →
- AI VISIBILITY / 17Ranking first does not mean you get cited in AI answersIn 8 AI Overviews we measured, 39 of 70 citation slots went to domains outside that query's organic results. Ranking and citation are different sets.8 MIN · READ →
- AGENT-READABLE SITES / 18What /.well-known/ files AI agents actually look forapi-catalog and security.txt are registered standards. The MCP server card is two competing drafts. Which agent files are real, checked against the IANA registry.7 MIN · READ →
- ECONOMICS / 19What SEO data actually costs, measured call by callThe real per-call provider prices behind rank tracking, site audits, keyword volume and AI visibility, measured against our own balance in August 2026.8 MIN · READ →
- AI VISIBILITY / 20Which index do AI answer engines search? Only one of them saysGoogle documents that AI Overviews retrieve from the Search index. OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic document a crawler and stop. Checked 19 August 2026.6 MIN · READ →
- AI VISIBILITY / 21Why ChatGPT gets your company wrong, and what actually changes itA wrong answer about your company comes from one of two places, and only one of them can be moved. What OpenAI told a regulator it can and cannot fix.7 MIN · READ →
- STRATEGY / 22AEO: what answer engine optimization actually asks of youAnswer engine optimization has no founding paper and no standards body. Here is what its checklist asks, and which items survive contact with primary sources.7 MIN · READ →
- STRUCTURED DATA / 23FAQ Schema Is Deprecated. What to Do With the MarkupGoogle stopped showing FAQ rich results on 7 May 2026 and deleted the doc on 15 June. The markup is still valid schema.org. Here is what to keep.7 MIN · READ →
- COMPARISONS / 2432 free SEO tools with no signup, and what each is forEvery free tool we ship, grouped by job, with an honest note on which ones are commodity, plus the rule that keeps them free with no account required.7 MIN · READ →
- AI CRAWLERS / 25Blocking Google-Extended does not affect AI OverviewsGoogle-Extended governs Gemini training and grounding. AI Overviews are served from the Search index via Googlebot, and Google's own docs say which lever is which.7 MIN · READ →
- AI VISIBILITY / 26What is actually known about how AI Overviews pick sourcesGoogle documents an eligibility floor and a fan-out mechanism, and nothing else. Here is the observable part, separated line by line from the guessing.8 MIN · READ →
- AGENT-READABLE SITES / 27How to make your site readable to AI agentsFour changes that make a page legible to an agent: server-rendered HTML, markdown at the same URL, RFC 8288 Link headers, and clean headings. With real requests.7 MIN · READ →
- COMPARISONS / 28Best AI visibility tools in 2026, compared on published pricesProfound, Peec AI, Otterly, Semrush, Ahrefs and SEOBuilder, compared on each vendor's own published pricing page, including the rows where we lose.9 MIN · READ →
- AI CRAWLERS / 29Does blocking GPTBot remove you from ChatGPT search?No. GPTBot governs OpenAI model training. ChatGPT search runs on OAI-SearchBot, and OpenAI says you can allow one while disallowing the other.7 MIN · READ →
- AI VISIBILITY / 30How to measure whether Google's AI answers cite youThe metric, the question set, the API call and the cost. A method for measuring whether Google AI Overviews cite your site that you can run yourself.13 MIN · READ →
- AGENT-READABLE SITES / 31llms.txt: what the spec says and who actually reads itllms.txt is a proposal, not a standard. What the v2 spec requires, which AI products have confirmed they read yours (none), and why publishing one is a bet.7 MIN · READ →
- STRATEGY / 32SEO vs AEO vs GEO: what actually differs, and what doesn'tGoogle says optimising for AI Overviews is SEO. Here is the precise line between the small part of AEO and GEO that is new and the large part that is relabelled.7 MIN · READ →
- STRUCTURED DATA / 33The Schema Types That Still Earn Something in 2026Google's rich results gallery lists 25 features. FAQ and HowTo are not among them. Here is what still earns a result, and what to keep anyway.8 MIN · READ →
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