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Google Search

Nobody Is Leaving Google — and Traditional Search Queries Are Down 17%. Both Are True.

One headline says 95% of ChatGPT users still use Google (Similarweb). Another says households with ChatGPT Search access cut traditional search queries by 9.4%, deepening to 17% after 20 weeks (Bocconi University). Both are right — because they're counting different things. People, queries, and clicks are three separate ledgers that can move in opposite directions at the same time. This post unpacks Similarweb, Bocconi's causal study, a preregistered AI Mode field experiment, and Google's own numbers, and translates them into a practical playbook for independent site owners navigating AI-era traffic decline.

AI Search

When AI Has Nothing on Your Company, It Quietly Describes Someone Else: The Information Vacuum That Lets Competitors Hijack Your Brand

Former Bing executive Duane Forrester reveals AI's substitution mechanism: when a model has no data on your company, it won't admit ignorance — it substitutes your competitor, the category average, or a three-year-old version of you. Multiple studies show 93% of businesses have key facts misstated or missing, and small brands are fabricated at more than twice the rate of large ones. Here are the four shapes substitution takes, why your content audit can never catch it, and how independent site sellers can monitor it.

AI Crawlers

Should You Block AI Crawlers? Robots.txt vs. Server, CDN & WAF — Explained Once and for All (With Code and a Decision Checklist)

SEJ's Ask an SEO column breaks down how to block AI crawlers: robots.txt is a polite request, while server/CDN/WAF layers are a physical lock. Combined with Cloudflare's 2026 classification of AI bots into Search, Agent, and Training — and its September 15 default that blocks Training and Agent on ad-supported pages — here's what to block, where to block it, and how to avoid the classic trap of accidentally blocking Googlebot.

Google Recovery

Google's Uncomfortable Truth: Ranking Recovery Is Measured in Months, Not Weeks — and Disavow Isn't the Lifeline You Think It Is

One Reddit site owner found 800+ 'toxic' links, disavowed them all, and watched rankings collapse within two weeks. John Mueller's response cuts both ways: disavowing a handful of links won't drop you out of search, but recovery from algorithmic issues is measured in months — and disavow files themselves take 3–6 months to take effect, if they ever do. A breakdown of how Disavow actually works, the difference between fast-fix mistakes and slow algorithmic recoveries, and the right mindset after the August 2026 spam update.

Entity SEO

GEO Is Just Entity SEO With a New Name: How Google and AI 'Know' Your Brand Decides Whether Your Independent Site Survives (The Own/Describe/Prove/Earn Framework)

The Telegraph's SEO director makes the case that entity SEO is the foundation of modern SEO — and that GEO is essentially entity SEO with a new name. Google purged 3+ billion entities from its Knowledge Graph in June 2025, and brand mentions now correlate with AI visibility three times more strongly than backlinks. Here's the full Own/Describe/Prove/Earn audit framework plus how to build an entity map.