Field notes
Practical notes on being accessible, identifiable, and credible to the systems that answer questions about your business. Every post cites its sources and states what the technique does not do.
6 min readFundamentalsAI visibility
Search ranking and AI citation reward different things. Here is where the two overlap, where they diverge, and which parts of your existing SEO work carry over.
8 min readFundamentalsTechnical
No tools required. Twelve checks, in priority order, covering what actually determines whether a machine can reach, identify, and trust your site.
7 min readTechnicalCrawlers
AI crawlers split into two jobs with very different consequences. Blocking the wrong one removes you from answers; blocking neither may not be what you intended either.
7 min readTechnicalRendering
Content assembled by JavaScript after load is invisible to anything that reads the served HTML. How to tell whether that applies to you, and what to do about it.
6 min readStructured dataEntity confidence
When identity is left to inference, the wrong company gets named. Here is the minimum structured data that makes your organisation unambiguous, and the mistakes that undo it.
6 min readEntity confidenceStructured data
Entity confusion is rarely caused by one bad page. It comes from a business describing itself three different ways across places nobody has audited together.
6 min readStructured dataTechnical
Schema.org has hundreds of types. A handful do most of the work for being understood by machines; the remainder are mostly effort with little return.
6 min readTechnicalCrawlers
Two mechanisms nobody enjoys maintaining, both routinely broken in ways that quietly waste crawl attention. What each actually does and how they fail.
7 min readContent trustFundamentals
Trust signals are not a checklist to satisfy. They work because they make a claim accountable, checkable, and current — which is precisely what mass-produced content cannot do.
7 min readContent readinessWriting
Extractable content is not dumbed-down content. It is writing where a specific claim survives being removed from its surroundings — and most business writing does not.
6 min readContent readinessStrategy
Volume strategies were built for a system that ranked documents. When the unit of value is a claim, near-duplicate pages actively work against you.
5 min readFreshnessContent trust
Freshness is not about publishing constantly. It is about making currency assessable — and most sites make that impossible without realising it.
6 min readFundamentalsMethodology
Every proprietary score in this category has the same four limitations. Knowing them is the difference between using a score well and being misled by one.