Post-AI SEO and blog growth · field notes
Practical, sourced guidance on writing blog content that still earns search traffic after AI Overviews — what to keep, what to cut, and how to prove first-hand experience.
Start with the decision
First-hand, sourced, and dated.
the ~20% worth defending
Thin pages an AI summary already covers.
be honest about the thin ones
Overlapping posts into one canonical guide.
kill the duplicates first
Aging facts, with new evidence and a new review date.
re-date and re-check, don't just re-post
Newest at the top. Older work gets re-checked, not deleted.
Automated Reddit posting to show up in AI answers breaks Reddit's authenticity rule and fits Google's definition of spam. What each rule says, how to test a vendor pitch, and what you can do instead.
Last checked Sep 26, 20268 min
Block AI crawlers by name, one operator token at a time, and keep Googlebot and Bingbot out of those groups. Most AI operators split training, search and user fetches into separate tokens, so you can refuse training and stay in AI search. Three rule sets by goal, the operator split table, and the catches that change what each rule does.
Last checked Sep 26, 202611 min
A request that says it is GPTBot, ClaudeBot or Googlebot proves nothing until you check it the way the operator documents: an IP match against the published file, a reverse DNS lookup confirmed by a forward lookup, or a signature check. Here is the procedure, which of 40 crawlers support each method, and what an IP match can and cannot tell you.
Last checked Sep 26, 202611 min
Adding llms.txt is not a required SEO task and should not be treated as a ranking factor, indexing control, robots.txt replacement, or guaranteed path into AI answers. Consider it only as a small documentation experiment: a Markdown file that may help agents understand which pages, docs, or resources matter. If your site already has crawlable, indexable, useful pages and you can publish a simple file without delaying proven SEO work, run a low-risk test. If basic technical SEO or content quality is weak, fix that first.
Last checked Sep 26, 202611 min
A dated AI visibility tool pricing table from public vendor pages checked on 2026-09-24, with unknown prices left blank instead of guessed.
Last checked Sep 24, 20269 min
To get cited in Perplexity AI, make the page easy to retrieve and safe to quote: keep it crawlable, answer the target question in the opening section, use clear headings around each sub-answer, and attach verifiable sources to claims. You cannot buy or guarantee a Perplexity citation; the practical job is to make one page a better source candidate than a vague ranked page.
Last checked Sep 24, 20268 min
A 7-day triage worksheet for confirming a core update caused a traffic drop, measuring the size of the drop in Search Console, and running Google's self-assessment before rewriting anything.
Last checked Sep 16, 20269 min
Method note
Search behaviour changes fast, so every guide is dated and scoped to what we can actually defend.