On what's actually changing
How things actually behave, not how they're documented. Some of it starts on a client project — a directive that contradicts the docs, a log line nobody was reading. The rest starts when a vendor ships a change that quietly breaks what everyone relied on.
Your Hreflang Is Correct. Google Still Ignores It
An invented language code fails silently and one locale stops being an alternate. Valid hreflang still loses when your country pages are identical.
Google Doesn't Want to Send Traffic. It Wants to Finish the Task
AI Mode compares, filters and shortlists before a single link appears. Zero-click took your informational traffic. This takes the part that converted.
Cloudflare Is About to Block Googlebot for Sites That Blocked AI Training
The 'Block AI bots' toggle you flipped last year starts blocking Googlebot too. Cloudflare now judges crawlers on every purpose – and the strictest rule wins.
Siri Removes the Last Reason to Visit a Website
This fall, Siri will answer informational questions right on the phone – no click, no referrer, no data. Most everyday searches will simply stop reaching your website.
Being Found by AI Isn't the Same as Being Known by It
Ask a model about your brand with search off. Silence means you're not in the training data – and no schema or fast server can fix it.
Google Will Never Read Your llms.txt. Build It Anyway
Lighthouse says build an llms.txt. Google says don't bother. Both are right – because it was never meant for Google's search. Here's who actually reads it and why you should ship it.
Your Sitemap Is Doing the Opposite of What You Think
Every URL in your sitemap is a statement to Google about what deserves to be indexed. Most sites are confessing more than they realize.
AI Search exposes every shortcut you took for Google
Thin content, duplicate descriptions, hidden prices, weak entity signals. Google forgave them for years. AI Search just picks the competitor with cleaner data instead.
The technical SEO newsletter engineers and SEOs actually finish
One specific problem, taken apart, with a position on what to do about it — argued against the primary documentation and against what I see in audits. Then three stories from the last two weeks, picked and explained.
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