Search, SEO experiments, growth tactics, and how the web really ranks.
SEO & Growth is where we test how the web really ranks. We cover technical SEO, crawl budget, content strategy, and the new front line of GEO/AEO — getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews. Expect data, working numbers, and a healthy skepticism of vendor claims.
IndexNow covers Bing, Yandex and ChatGPT — but Google ignores it. Here's the evidence-based split: the two fast levers that actually get Google to index a new site, the myths that waste weeks (the Indexing API, sitemap pings, paid indexing bots), and a realistic checklist.
A bogus DMCA notice can knock a rival off Google for days with no court and no evidence — as a 2026 case against Press Gazette showed. Here's how takedowns actually affect rankings, why the '18-month penalty' is a myth, and the counter-notice playbook for victims.
llms.txt — a proposed markdown 'map' for language models — now sits on roughly one in ten sites. But in 90 days of 500M+ AI-bot visits, only a few hundred fetched it, and Google has explicitly said it doesn't use it. Here's the honest split: near-zero value for AI search, real value for developer tooling.
Reddit appears in roughly 93% of AI-search opportunities and is the single most-cited source for Google AI Overviews and Perplexity. Yet most of that influence is invisible to users, and in 2025 the numbers swung wildly — ChatGPT's Reddit citations fell from ~60% to ~10% in six weeks. Here is what site owners should actually take from it.
New vendor analyses spanning tens of thousands of domains suggest page-level SEO strength still correlates with being cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews, yet a large share of AI recommendations never appear in traditional rank trackers. We separate the load-bearing tactics from the GEO hype.
SEO practitioners report large traffic gains from pruning junk indexed pages to free Google's "crawl budget." We break down what crawl budget actually is per Google's own docs, who it genuinely matters for, and a concrete reclamation playbook — while staying skeptical of the headline +67% figure.