Hello Riddlers!

📌 If you find value in my newsletter and want to support the work that goes into it consider —> [☕Buy Me a Coffee☕]💡 Want more from me? [SEO Strategy Course] | [Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)] | [Premium SEO Mastermind]

Alternatively you can become a paid subscriber

SEO has changed/is changing…. ya ya ya

You’ve probably heard it a thousand times by now: “SEO is changing”, “SEO is evolving”, and every other variation of the same message. And we’ve all been bombarded with GEO advice on how to optimize for the new world of LLMs.

Here’s the thing: LLMs still aren’t sending much traffic, so for now, we’re still focused on figuring out how to get the most out of Google.

But Google is now eating up most of the clicks… we’re in the zero click ERA 🤷‍♀️

“In the first four months of 2026, a whopping 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click,” according to a new study by Similarweb and SparkToro.

So where do the clicks go, what happens after the user searches?

There are 3 possible scenarios:

• 32% of the time people click to an organic result, to another Google property (Youtube, AI Mode, Maps, Images, etc…)

• 39% they do nothing after the search.

• 29% they do another search.

The study found that for every 1000 us Google searches, only 232 convert to clicks to a non-Google property.

That’s not good…

And so far every solution I see proposed to this dilemma misses the biggest opportunity out there…

We forgot that Google has different surfaces

I was listening to a webinar recently about “Google Discover” and it was during this webinar that I got my Aha moment.

Google Discover is a Google surface that shows users content based on their interests. Google also said they’re rolling the feature out on desktop last year—not sure where that went, but they said it’s coming.

Google discover is a huge traffic source, for a lot of website owners, it makes the biggest source of traffic, even more than traditional search. and that’s why we should consider optimizing for discover.

But here’s the thing…

the content that works in Google discover is slightly different than the content that works in traditional SERPs, although there’s an overlap of course.

So what type of content works well in Google Discover?

Content for Google Discover

Your best ideas are going to come from browsing your discover feed and seeing what made it there, however here are some pointers:

• Sensational titles. But you need to avoid click bait, lean more on people’s natural curiosity vs been purely click-baity. An example is “New Zealand reaction to Mo Salah’s goal”.

• Quoting people in titles. This is something that would not work in traditional SERPs, but for Google discover, having a title like “Mbappe on PSG’s season: “for me, a team that wins will always be an example of football”.

• Questions in titles. Some have reported that this type of titles perform really well in discover. Worth testing out. An example is “why men keep dropping out of the workforce: it starts in childhood”

• Timely fresh content. Yes you can still get visibility in discover with your evergreen content, but timely content has an edge. One thing you can do is to keep an eye on Google trends for keywords related to your niche, and once there’s something relevant to your audience, you can blog about it.

• Images are very important for Google discover. Having the right featured image can improve your CTR there, this is something that is not relevant for traditional search results since you rarely see the featured image in search.

• Localized content. Google discover surfaces content that is very relevant to the user and one of the factors that determine relevancy is location. If your customers are in a specific geographical area e.g Ontario, content like “Spring in Ontario. Uncover colors, rhythms and flavors that make this province a true cultural canvas” may work well.

Cheesy: understand your audience

Yes I know saying “understand your audience” is as lame as the Google advice “create helpful content” but it’s a step we rarely do in SEO.

Sometimes when I meet with business owners, I’m pleasantly surprised when they share things like:

“Our target audience are SEO agencies managing multiple clients who need to standardise workflows, speed up repetitive tasks, and maintain consistency without increasing headcount.”

Because then you can tailor interest-based content that would perform well in discover and on socials for your audience.

Topics you may write about for example:

• Sensational: What actually breaks first when an SEO agency starts scaling

• Quotes: “SEO manager at a 30-client agency: ‘Reporting is where we lose most of our time”

• “Why do SEO agencies still do so much work manually in 2026?”

• “Inside Canada’s SEO agencies: why reporting is still the biggest time drain”

You are not a ship anchored to the past

Our main focus has always been the 10 blue links, only today there’s rarely 10 blue links anymore… they’re usually less, with a SERPs designed to send less clicks to your website with Google’s AI experiences.

I’m not suggesting you abandon the 10 blue links, I just think you should widen your horizons a bit, and explore other surfaces available to you.

Creating content for Google Discover, can be the answer to your traffic challenges. And you probably have everything already in place:

• Google technical foundations for discover highly are practically almost the same as the requirements for traditional serps.

• User experience and bounce rate matters a lot for how your content would perform in discover, but these are things we should’ve always taken into account when creating content for SEO, right?

• You probably have a social team in place, they can work with SEO to brainstorm content ideas that can work better for both social and discover!

The name of the game for SEO in 2026 is testing every thing, and this is one thing I think you should experiment with.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

It’s time we tackle the zero-click reality with a different mindset and play the hand we’ve been dealt. The landscape has changed but there are still real opportunities for those who adapt to how distribution actually works today.

At the same time, we should keep an honest conversation going about the relationship between platforms and publishers.

Google continues to say “create helpful content,” and publishers have done exactly that, investing significant time, money, and effort. Yet the return in the form of clicks and owned audience is becoming harder to measure and less predictable.

As the web shifts toward more zero-click experiences, the question of fairness, attribution, and sustainability for publishers becomes harder to ignore.

We should continue pushing for a web where value flows both ways, not just one where content is consumed but not always returned to its source.

That’s that for today folks and see you in the next newsletter!

Sources Worth Checking

Google Discover Webinar with Barry Adams

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

📌 📌 Set me as a preferred source on Google! Click here.

Warm Up

Around this same time last year I talked about diagnosing SEO traffic drops, I had a simple framework:

Since then, my SEO learning has continued — and today I want to share a technique that can diagnose any SEO issue.

It’s called the Ishikawa diagram (aka the Fishbone diagram): a visual root-cause analysis tool that connects cause and effect to uncover why an SEO problem is happening, and what you can actually test to fix it.

What I love about this technique is that it structures your thinking into a diagram you can share with your team and stakeholders.

So buckle up!

1# Start with the effect

Just draw a simple box (or whatever shape really) and write the problem or the symptom you’re seeing that you wish to address.

2# Buckets of causes

The next step would be to draw a diagonal line, and list all category of potential causes. We’re not listing exact causes yet, just categories of potential causes.

In SEO we have a handful of established categories, so our work is pretty clear:

• Technical

• Content

• Authority

• User experience

You may want to add more categories like market changes or Google updates and SERPs changes… totally up to you how you tackle this.

It’s fascinating how we can all work from similar-ish checklists yet arrive at completely different SEO results and performance in search.

I really think this is very helpful in breaking down a complex problem, and help to focus on it from various perspectives.

Reminds me of the 6 thinking hats technique, where you wear a different hat for a different mode of thinking all in an attempt to solve a problem.

This is pretty much similar, only here, instead of hats, you’re switching between a technical lens, a content lens, and so on.

3# Potential Causes

Now it’s time to fill in potential causes under each of the above buckets (and yes I changed the diagram color 😄)

A quick disclaimer: this is not meant to be an SEO checklist. It's simply an example of how one person might approach the problem. Your own experience, knowledge of the website, and understanding of the industry may lead you to a completely different diagram.

Here’s how I thought about this from each lens:

• Technical lens: from my experience, sometimes things happen on the website itself that can cause a decline in traffic. Did your tech team remove the sitemap and not tell you, is there a UX change that included a lot of JS, is server returning 5XX errors or your internal links for one reason or the other have changed?

• Content lens: if your content is low quality (AI and spammy for example) it will stop working at some point, that if it worked at all. So that maybe the issue, or is your content old and have not been updated in a long while? your competitors are working btw, they don’t stop, and so shouldn’t you, SEO is not a one and done thing so it maybe your content is up for a refresh. Finally, is your content a “commodity” type of content that is just lame, expected, and has no unique angle?

• Authority lens: for so long in SEO pure brand mentions meant nothing, but that has changed, did your strategy for building authority adapt? Also let’s say you did a domain migration, and all your backlinks are pointing to your old domain (ya ya I know you created redirects and all), but wouldn’t it be nice to get a fresh pack of backlinks pointing to your new domain?

• User Experience: a lot of SEOs would not bucket this alone, but I would 😄 mainly because it requires extensive type of work and analysis on it’s own. How’s the bounce rate on your page? while this specific metric is NOT a ranking factor, it can also indicate that there’s a problem with your content. How is your CTR? well I know that CTR is dead in search according to some ppl 😄 but it’s always worth a look to understand if there’s anything you can do to improve this (test different title formats perhaps?)

So basically keep asking why, and filling in the diagram until you’ve reached a useful level of detail. That is when the cause is specific enough to be able to test a change and measure it’s effect.

and you’re done! You now have a clear view of potential causes, that you can prioritize and start testing out.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

It’s not uncommon for the most powerful ideas to be surprisingly simple.

There’s a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Whether or not he actually said it, the principle holds true.

What I appreciate most about the Ishikawa diagram is its simplicity. It helps organize messy problems into something visual, collaborative, and actionable.

And if you struggle to populate the diagram at all, that can be useful information too, it may simply highlight areas where you need to deepen your SEO knowledge and experience.

That’s that for today folks and see you in the next newsletter!

Sources Worth Checking

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

📌 📌 Set me as a preferred source on Google! Click here.

Warm Up

So we’ve heard…

“Google search is AI search”, search is changing, and then cloudflare comes in and drops this data “Bot web traffic has overtaken human web traffic, data shows, for the first time” [1]

Google also added “agentic browsing audit” documentation to its lighthouse docs [2] that include reference to things like LLMs.txt after - also Google - repetitively telling us that LLMs.txt is not useful/important on various occasions 😂😂😂

It seems like we are trying to establish certainty in an environment where things are very dynamic and even the people building these systems don’t have all the answers yet.

Few topics capture this confusion better than LLMs.txt!

Over the course of several months, we heard:

• Jun 18, 2025: “FWIW no AI system currently uses llms.txt”

• Jul 22, 2025: noindex your LLMs.txt file

• Jul 24, 2025: Google doesn’t support LLMs.txt and isn’t planning to

• Aug 1, 2025: Why should AI systems trust a file that website owners can fill with whatever they want?

• Dec 3, 2025: Google itself uploaded an LLMs.txt file for the Google Search Central portal (which is now gone btw 404-ing https://developers.google.com/search/docs/llms.txt but it still remains on many of Google’s other sites)

• Jan 6, 2026: Google explains, they added LLMs.txt to their websites for other purposes

• Jan 20, 2026: Google Search Team Does Not Endorse LLMs.txt Files

And on the other hand, we have reports that "Log file analysis shows that OpenAI crawls LLMs.txt file”

At this point, I think the entire industry deserves a group therapy session 😂

But all jokes aside, there are a few things we need to keep in mind:

• When Google representatives speak publicly, they’re often speaking about specific products and teams. What applies to Google Search may not apply to other Google initiatives or to other companies entirely.

• It was widely believed that Google doesn’t use metrics like CTR or bounce rate for rankings. But it turns out they do use other user behavior signals that are in the same general category🤷‍♀️. It just shows that there usually isn’t a simple yes or no answer, there are often a lot of details, and those details really matter.

• We should stay open-minded about everything. A lot of things are still new to everyone. It helps to pause, think things through, test ideas, and then form your own conclusions. Also this isn’t something you do once and forget, it’s an ongoing process as more information keeps unfolding and technology continues to evolve..

In this new light💡here’s everything I know about getting your website ready for AI agents!

What agents do?

AI agents are software that performs specific tasks on your behalf autonomously. Unlike chatbots and LLMs, AI agents don’t just provide “answers”; they perform actual tasks, they can plan a trip for you, and make bookings for example.

“At its core, an agent is a system that receives input, interprets it, then plans and executes actions on behalf of the user” [3]

To do this, they need to browse the web, and be able to use your website.

In the AI-powered search era, we have three barriers we need to cross:

1. Discoverability: we need to be findable by different AI systems.

2. Citation and/or selection: being cited and selected as a source. And while AI agents may not provide outputs like AI mode and AI overviews for example, there has to be some type of mechanism where they narrow down the choices to start making decisions and taking actions.

3. Actions: can AI agents use your website? and that’s what we will focus on today!

Is your website screen reader friendly?

AI agents and screen readers use the accessibility tree as their primary roadmap to navigate websites and applications. This means that you can use chrome plugins like Text Mode to see how both screen readers and AI agents would see your website. Here’s a screenshot from my LinkedIn feed using this plugin:

What to tell your developers?

• Use real HTML elements like <button>, <nav>, <main>, <header>, and <footer>, and avoid replacing them with generic <div> containers just for styling. Make sure elements clearly describe what they do.

• Use <button> for clickable actions, and avoid clickable <div> or <span> elements.

• Every input must have a <label> that clearly explains what the field is for. For example, use “Email address” instead of relying only on placeholder text.

• Add appropriate autocomplete values to forms, such as name, email, tel, street-address, and organization. This helps browsers and AI agents complete forms correctly.

• Use headings in order (<h1> → <h2> → <h3>) and avoid skipping levels (for example, jumping from <h1> to <h4>). This helps agents understand the structure of the page and its sections.

• When building complex, custom, or dynamic user interfaces where native HTML elements do not provide the required functionality, use ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) attributes to fill those gaps.

• Make sure important content is already present in the HTML when the page loads rather than being added later through JavaScript. Use Server-Side Rendering (SSR) so pages are fully built before they reach the browser. Avoid depending on JavaScript to display critical content, because AI agents may not run or fully process scripts. Anything important should not rely on user actions or client-side scripts to become available.

• Use clear, descriptive link text that explains where a link goes. Avoid vague phrases such as “click here” or “read more.” Both users and AI agents rely on link text to understand the purpose of each link.

Google Lighthouse Agentic Browsing audit

If you download chrome canary (Chrome Canary is Google’s most experimental, cutting-edge version of the Chrome browser, designed primarily for developers, testers, and browser enthusiasts.), open your webpage, right click inspect, go to the lighthouse report, you’ll see that Google now has an Agentic browsing audit… ta-da!

You can use this audit to help you assess your webpage for agentic browsing (clear from the name daah 😂)

If you don’t want to do all of this, and want just to know what to tell your developer, here you go:

What to tell your developers?

• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) just got another importance boost outside of the core web vitals score. Your CLS score is a measure of UI stability for interaction precision.

• LLMs.txt, (please don’t laugh, mute giggles are ok though) but Google’s own documentation recommends “Create an llms.txt file and place it in the root directory of your website (for example, https://example.com/llms.txt). The file should follow the llms.txt specification and provide a concise Markdown summary of your site’s purpose and key links.” [4]

• Use WebMCP [5]. WebMCP is a proposed protocol that lets websites explicitly define and surface their “tools” (like forms, actions, and workflows) to AI agents in a structured way, instead of relying on agents to infer behavior from HTML, JavaScript, or UI interactions. In practice, it lets a site declare “this is a search tool,” “this is a checkout action,” or “this is a booking flow,” along with the required inputs and expected outputs, so agents can interact with it reliably and consistently.

Markdowns

Another highly controversial topic is adding markdowns to your webpages. Markdown is a lightweight markup language used to format plain text. It is widely used online for platforms like Reddit for example to format text in posts, comments, and community sidebars.

Google has added markdown files, .md.txt files, to the Google Search help documents [6]. Here’s an example.

While John Muller explicitly said that “There were discussions around this on Linkedin a few weeks back. This is not being done for Search or generative AI responses in Search.” This does not mean that Markdowns are useless, they maybe used by AI agents.

One tip though, do not create a markdown version of each webpage, because this may cause duplication. At the moment I’m testing adding markdown in the html of the page. You can use markdown between html tags as long as you add to the tags the markdown attribute with value 1. markdown=”1”

Here’s how this looks like on my website right now:

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

While a lot of the above recommendations are classics and have existed long before AI agents, some are very new and come with a lot of skepticism.

Keep an open mind, test things out, and keep learning.

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Sources:

[1] Bot web traffic has overtaken human web traffic, data shows

[2] Lighthouse agentic browsing scoring

[3] Introduction to agents

[4] llms.txt

[5] WebMCP

[6] Google Adds Markdown Files To Help Docs But Not Used For Search

Hello Riddlers!

📌 📌 Your support keeps this newsletter FREE —> [☕Buy Me a Coffee☕]💡 Want more from me? [SEO Strategy Course] | [Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)] | [Premium SEO Mastermind]

Warm Up

Since the Google I/O event a few weeks ago, my feed has been full of hot takes declaring “SEO is dead.”

Here’s one from TechCrunch:

It opens with:

“The era of the “ten blue links” is officially over.”

But if you read past that line (and most people don’t), the same article clarifies later:

“The links, to clarify, have not entirely disappeared; they are just no longer the priority for many types of searches.”

There’s plenty of speculation about what Google’s I/O announcements mean for search and with even more AI being woven in, the obvious question is: are we headed for another traffic drop?

AI search has become the synonymous to “less traffic to publishers”, so when Google’s VP of search, Liz Reid declares that ‘Google search is AI search, through and through,’ it’s not exactly great news 😆

So what are we going to do?

As of now, everything is still in the air, a lot of the AI features Google announced will be pushed to search later this summer, and as I will discuss below, they may not cause the apocalypse everyone is expecting. This much I know. Of course I can be wrong, but hear me out.

I also know that the web echosystem relies on publishers creating good content, if publishers cannot properly measure, let alone see the ROI of their work, the system will collapse, so whatever is happening in search, Google will have no option but to find ways to support publishers and compensate them.

Enter features like Preferred Sources, which just rolled out to all publishers after being limited to news outlets only. It's the shortcut no one expected! A way to get more visibility in search and across Google's AI surfaces.

If you're not familiar with it, it's a feature that lets people "follow" specific websites, so those sites appear more in their search results. [learn more here]

So what’s happening to search?

The Search Box

Google just launched their biggest upgrade to their search box ever. It anticipates your intent and helps you formulate your questions better that go beyond autocomplete.

What this means for SEO?

We will be seeing more and more long tail queries in GSC. Our traditional keyword research processes and optimizations will need to adapt accordingly.

It’s not going to be just simple keywords like “best SEO newsletters”, there will be more details attached like “best SEO newsletters for someone starting in SEO with no technical background” for example.

With more specific searches like this, your content will need to be more specific as well. But in a way, this has always been the case, over 70% of traffic on the web already comes from long tail keywords [source]. The queries are just going to get even more specific.

Additionally being more detailed and specific in your content has always been a thing, after all 94.74% of keywords have monthly search volumes of 10 or less [source]

Search Agents 🧐

Did you ever use Google alerts?

Well one of the features Google announced was search agents that keeps you up-to-date on whatever you need.

For example, if you’re apartment hunting, the new search agents feature can keep scanning the web for you and notifies you once there’s a new listing that fits your specific needs.

Ya… google alerts with more fine tuning features… one you might actually use 😆

What this means for SEO?

Agents will be searching on behalf of humans, LLMs do that at the moment in a way. Is your website agents ready?

Turns out adding an LLM.txt, markdown and schema may come in handy now right?

If your website has tools that agents maybe using, things like WebMCP protocol that Google quietly announced that didn't get nearly the attention it deserved maybe core to your web strategy. It now all makes perfect sense. It’s another piece of the agentic web puzzle.

The question is are we ready AI agents using your website on behalf of users?

Agentic coding in Search

You know when you want to teach a child something and you start by drawing it for them?

Search is about to do that.

Google announced that search results will be able to generate interactive, visual experiences on the fly. Not static diagrams, but actual tools you can play with.

For example,

ask how mixing red and yellow works, and instead of a text explanation of how they create the color orange, you get sliders to adjust the composition yourself and watch the color change in real time.

What this means for SEO?

I really don’t know. But I can make some guesses:

• People will have higher expectations from educational content. A lame block of text may not cut it anymore. If you're teaching something, you'll need to go deeper, or offer something the demo can't.

• A lot of learning will happen in search. I don’t think this is great news given we know the limitations of LLMs and how they hallucinate, a side of effect of their design.

• Another drop in traffic to educational websites. Sorry, but not great news.

The Mini Apps & New Content Mindset

One thing the I/O blog mentioned that I find super interesting, is “But often, you aren’t asking one-off questions — you have an ongoing task you find yourself searching for over and over”

With the agentic capabilities coming to search, you will be able to create dashboards to track your progress on specific tasks. Like building a fitness tracker for your daily workout plans and meals.

“You can think of these like mini apps for your own specific tasks.”

But this feature will be only available at first to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the U.S.

What this means for SEO?

I know this may come off surprising, but this is the part I liked the most about the I/O announcements. It just gave us a major hint how we should be creating content.

Think of the task the user is trying to achieve that this one search is one part of, look for the bigger picture not just the exact searches and their intent.

Old thinking:

You sell evening dresses, you optimize your content as follows:

• evening dresses product category page

• individual evening dresses page

• blogs about evening dresses (e.g what dresses are most slimming, and how much should you spend on an evening dress, etc..)

New thinking:

You sell evening dresses, you optimize your content as follows:

• You ask “why is a customer looking to buy an evening dress”

  • They have a date

  • They are attending a wedding

  • They just got invited to a black tie event and have no idea what to wear

• From there, you build content around those bigger goals, the date, the wedding, the event, not just the dress. Some of the information will naturally overlap with what you’re already creating, but the structure shifts from “what are people searching for” to “what are people trying to accomplish.” Think of it as zooming out from the search to the task behind it.

Psst… his overlaps nicely with the commodity vs. non-commodity content framework from the Google search central live event. The content that survives is the content that serves a purpose no widget or AI snippet can replicate.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

I’ll be honest, I’m excited about what’s coming, even if it’s a challenge. SEO has survived every major evolution so far, and I don’t think this one will be any different.

And did you notice how everything connects? Preferred Sources, search agents, WebMCP, agentic coding, mini apps, etc.. it’s all pointing in the same direction. The web is getting more agentic, and the SEOs who adapt their thinking early will be just fine.

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter 👋

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

📌 Your support keeps this newsletter FREE —> [☕Buy Me a Coffee☕]💡 Want more from me? [SEO Strategy Course] | [Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)] | [Premium SEO Mastermind]

Reddit is Organic

I was planning on sharing today how I got my Python course cited in ChatGPT without listicles or spamming, but I found a more interesting idea to write about!

Yesterday, I was running my monthly SEO town-hall-style meetup and Reddit came up, and I found myself discussing a cool idea, that I decided to share today instead!

Well, we all know how important Reddit is for visibility in LLMs. Reddit is a leading source across all AI search tools. It’s the top-cited domain on Perplexity, and among the top three on both SearchGPT and Google AI Mode [source].

And in case you didn’t know that, OpenAI officially uses Reddit as part of its training data [source].

Then, of course, we know that Google loves citing Reddit way more than we SEOs would like to see. It constantly raises eyebrows, really. Did you know that a Reddit thread can rank on Google within minutes 🤷? [source]

It’s the stuff fairy tales are made of for SEO people…

But the problem with Reddit is that it’s organic. If you try to hijack a thread to insert your brand, you will be easily spotted by Redditors and moderators. It’s not going to work. It can actually backfire for your brand.

The best engagements on Reddit about your brand are the ones that come naturally and organically, without you paying someone to promote your product or service around there. The strongest Reddit mentions are the ones you don’t manufacture.

That’s probably why Google and LLMs love Reddit…

But what can we as SEOs do then? How can we leverage that platform?

Let me tell you how!

Your New Customer Service Q&A Database

I wrote recently how Starbucks is now hiring more baristas as relying on automations backfired [source]. People want to engage with other people, it’s also more efficient sometimes (contrary to the popular belief that automation is always better)

There are moments when people would rather speak and engage with other people.

What if you use reddit as your customer Q&A forum? what if you direct users to your own brand subreddit where they can post questions about your brand and products, and get human-written informative answers.

What if your social media team uses reddit to engage with your customers on your brand subreddit.

I did this analysis over a year ago [source] and found many people are searching for brand subreddits.

Most of the time, these subreddits are not official. What if there’s an official one, where people can still post freely and ask questions, the only difference is that you are directing your customers to post their questions there.

You know how many brands have an FAQ page, that’s a great practice, but now your subreddit can supplement this page, and be a resource for every possible question your customers have.

If you’ve ever been on Facebook groups recently, you’ll see how many people are still engaging and asking questions there and some of those posts are also getting visibility in search, because that’s what people want.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

SEO tactics are no longer limited to changes you make on the website in my opinion.

I personally audit Youtube, I audit socials, and I try to understand what factors and platforms impact a brand’s visibility in search and LLMS, then build my strategy accordingly.

And as simple as this reddit tactic is, I really think it would be useful for brands that have multiple lines of products or complex products that users can come back with questions about.

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter.

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

📌 Your support keeps this newsletter FREE —> [☕Buy Me a Coffee☕]💡 Want more from me? [SEO Strategy Course] | [Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)] | [Premium SEO Mastermind]

The Mindset

As a LinkedIn’er myself 😂, I see tons of SEO tests and experiments shared. Some are really good and some are… just broken, and I’m sure you’ve seen your fair share too.

The problem I realized exists is, we need a better mindset to create SEO experiments and to read and assess their results.

Unless we want to build our strategies on broken assumptions, or even worse, do the right SEO tactics, but assume they don’t work because… we’re approaching the tests with a mindset that’s lacking!

Let me explain what I mean… buckle up, this is super FUN!

Google Search Console is a broken tool

There… I said it… again…

The first time I said GSC was buggy, it raised a lot of eyebrows… to my surprise.

Well, a few quick examples to establish an agreement on that, include the URL Inspection Tool showing a page as “not indexed” while that same page is literally appearing in the Performance Report collecting impressions… or impressions being inflated for almost a year 😂😂😂

There’s this unwritten rule, that if your SEO strategy is working, the first early signs would be an increase in impressions. I still believe that’s true. But as of today… I don’t think this is enough.

You maybe thinking rankings is a better measurement…. well yes and no (I’ll explain in the next section), but my conclusion is:

if you rely solely on GSC to see if your test/experiment is working, you may not be able to spot that accurately. There’s data lag, there’s seasonality, there’s inflated metrics, and more…

The best approach is imo:

• Combine data from multiple sources (e.g: GA4)

• Check user behavior on the page because that’s all that matters (use MS clarity for example)

• Have a baseline of your website performance, and understand potential impact of seasonality (decide on % lift or decline)

Google plays games

I mentioned above using rankings to measure the success of an SEO strategy, right?

Well, imagine this…

You try an SEO tactic, and the next day your ranking jumps from position 50 to position 3.

Then you repeat the same tactic 2–3 more times… and the same thing happens again.

Wouldn’t that reveal a LOT about how Google works?

And wouldn’t that open the door to even more search manipulation? (As if backlinks spam, listicles, and everything else weren’t enough already 😂)

Google has two patents (Ranking documents & Changing a rank of a document by applying a rank transition function) describing how it intentionally slow down ranking changes instead of updating rankings instantly 😂

Google is using social engineering to fight spam.

For example, if you build backlinks to your website, you may notice:

• nothing happens at all

• a decline in rankings

• rankings fluctuations

for a period of time (a transition period), before you get rewarded, that is if Google sees you deserve to be rewarded.

This on it’s own is enough

to mess up with a lot of SEO tests.

You can be doing the right thing, but seeing no rewards at all. I experienced that in my own Python for SEO page. I did everything right imo, and it was not until recently that it finally made it to the top of the SERPs.

The core goal of Google is spam detection and dampening manipulative SEO, such as aggressive link schemes or constant micro‑tuning based on daily SERP feedback.

By introducing some type of a ranking transition period with seemingly random or counter‑intuitive ranking changes, Google makes it harder for spammers to map “I did X yesterday, rankings went up today, so X works.”

The patent discusses observing how site owners react to these fluctuations; if someone rapidly reverses or overreacts to every movement, that behavior can itself be a spam signal

For link building specifically, the patent says:

“it might take approximately 70 days for a change in a document’s link-based information to change the rank of the document to its steady state”

The problem when you have such a transition period, a lot of other changes have already occurred on your website, so it can become a challenge to isolate the exact tactic that brought the positive impact.

Also, anyone saying SEO does not need a minimum of three months to work, I hope they read this…. things can be fast, but also can be slow, by design.

Best approach for analysis imo

Well if data from GSC is… inflated sometimes, and rankings are tricking you, what can we do?

The best analysis imo would be existing SERPs and citations, and finding patterns. That is if you’re looking for a quick analysis. Otherwise, long term SEO studies expanding over at least 3 months (I’d say 6 months is even better since we saw how mount AI takes some time before it goes down) are your second best alternative.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

My goals in this edition was to shed the light on why so many SEO tests are broken.

GSC inflated impressions and Google’s social engineering tricks are not the only reason though.

More often than not, the experiment itself has design flows. But that’s probably a topic for another day.

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter.

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

📌 Your support keeps this newsletter FREE —> [☕Buy Me a Coffee☕]💡 Want more from me? [SEO Strategy Course] | [Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)] | [Premium SEO Mastermind]

Truth Be Told

I’m about to once again step into the debate of GEO vs SEO 😄

Google has said on multiple occasions that they’re essentially the same thing. That there’s nothing particularly special or different you need to do for “GEO”.

But Google has also said a lot of things before…

…and ahem, we all know how some of those turned out 😄

So it was honestly refreshing to see Microsoft Bing publish a new blog discussing the difference between traditional search systems and grounding systems.

While much of the industry has been busy arguing whether GEO is “real” or not, Bing has quietly been one of the more transparent players during this AI-powered search wave.

They introduced AI Answers reporting inside Bing Webmaster Tools, publicly discussed the role of schema and structured data for LLM understanding, and now they’re sharing more details about how indexing systems and grounding systems actually work behind the scenes.

So buckle up, because I’m about to dissect what all of this actually means for SEO 🙏

Two Systems, Two Questions

I really think it’s important to start from the top and acknowledge that traditional search, and LLMs grounding are two separate systems.

As the new Microsoft Bing blog explains:

“Traditional search and grounding systems share the same foundation – crawling, understanding, and ranking the web – but they are optimized for fundamentally different outcomes. “

Here’s a simple analogy to explain the difference.

You walk into a restaurant and the waiter hands you the menu. That’s traditional search: a curated list of options they think may satisfy what you’re looking for.

But then you ask the waiter, “What’s the best dish here?”

Now the waiter shifts from simply presenting options to giving you a direct recommendation based on context, interpretation, and experience.

And that’s essentially the difference between traditional search and grounding.

Traditional search presents you with possible sources and options.

Grounding attempts to synthesize those sources into a direct answer.

It also fits well with the classic “librarian” analogy we’ve used for years in SEO.

A librarian can point you toward the books or sections where the information exists.

But if the librarian directly answers your question based on their own reading and interpretation of those books… that’s a very different role.

One system retrieves information sources and serves you the most relevant.

The other synthesizes and delivers answers.

Traditional search asks: which pages should a user visit? (the menu)

Grounding asks: what information can an AI system responsibly use to construct a response? (the dish)

How They Work Differently

The two systems clearly have two different goals/outcomes. And therefore it’s reasonable to assume they work differently, but the good news we don’t have to assume anymore!

Traditional search is about serving the user a list of options, they believe are the best to answer the user query. When you look at SERPs, you don’t expect every single URL to be great for you but, you expect the results to be “right enough” so you find what you need.

If you’re searching for a black shirt, you’ll get a lot of options in SERPs, not every option necessarily fits your taste, but overall the results are relevant to your search and you can eventually find what you need.

AI answers has an additional constraint, the goal is not to point the user to information sources, it’s goal is to use those information sources to answer the user query (well that explains why the clicks are less, the system by design is about providing the answer directly to the user, citations or not).

AI answers use the index. Let’s make that clear, however, it’s not looking for entire pages, it’s looking for “groundable information – discrete, supportable facts with clear provenance”

This means the grounding system needs to decide:

• Can I answer this question/user query

• Do I have enough information to do so while preserving the meaning, making sure users can verify that if needed, and detecting and representing conflicting views when relevant?

This is where the two systems clearly are optimizing for different things.

Zooming In

To be more clear, here are processes and things Grounding needs to account for, that traditional search does not:

• AI systems often break content into smaller chunks (yes they chunk content) before retrieving it. The challenge is making sure the original meaning and context are still preserved after that process.

• Source quality matters differently in AI answers. A grounding system cannot treat every indexed page as equally trustworthy if it’s going to generate a direct response from it.

• Freshness becomes far more critical. In traditional search, outdated content may simply rank lower. In grounding systems, outdated information can directly become part of the answer itself.

• Contradicting sources also become a bigger issue. A search engine can simply rank one page above another and let the user decide. But a grounding system has to recognize when sources disagree, otherwise the AI may confidently present the wrong information as fact.

• Another important difference is that errors in grounding systems can snowball very quickly. In traditional search, if a result is irrelevant or inaccurate, users can usually recognize it, skip it, and adjust their search accordingly. But grounding systems don’t really have that safety net. If an AI retrieves slightly wrong, incomplete, or misleading information early in the process, that error can carry through the entire reasoning chain and influence the final answer without the user even realizing it. That means grounding systems need to optimize not just for retrieving information once, but for consistently retrieving accurate, reliable information across repeated reasoning steps and interactions.

So What?

At this point you’re looking for actionable steps, here’s some thoughts, learnings and future research ideas that I gathered at this stage:

• Understanding and optimizing for chunking seems to be valuable based on the information in Bing’s blog. I highly recommend you read “Moving from a Google-shaped Web to an Agent-shaped Web: A Refutation of Misinformation about Chunking” to learn more (I will 😄).

• We’ve seen over and over AI answers citing some URLs NOT in the SERPs. This requires an in-depth research to understand what did AI answers find in this source to cite, while this URL did not qualify for the top 10 results in SERPs (different systems, right?)

• Freshness matters more than we think. That takes updating your content to a whole new level of importance (strategy update alert: if AI answers matter to you, prioritize updating content)

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

I think the confusion of the debate of SEO vs GEO all comes down to the fact that both search indexing and grounding indexing processes start at the same foundations.

That’s true, but that does not mean they’re identical systems. They have different goals and outcomes, so that cannot be.

As the blog perfectly puts it:

“Search indexing was built to help humans decide what to read.” while “Grounding indexing is being built to help AI systems decide what to say”

I wanna end today’s newsletter by saying that, every time there’s something new in SEO, there’s always those SEO naysayers ready to dismiss it immediately… that’s the actual root cause of the SEO vs GEO debate imo. Some people are just not open to new ideas and innovation🤷

You don’t have to follow this pattern, you can do your own thinking!

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter.

Bing’s post: Evolving role of the index: From ranking pages to supporting answers

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

📌 Your support keeps this newsletter FREE —> [☕Buy Me a Coffee☕]💡 Want more from me? [SEO Strategy Course] | [Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)] | [Premium SEO Mastermind]

“Here’s how AI replaced”

I get it, everyone is excited about using AI to automate their tasks, I am too. But we also need to understand what AI cannot fully replace. One thing we can agree on, is it cannot replace SEOs!

I saw this post recently on LinkedIn and I just cannot stop laughing 😂

I also didn’t believe AI should be heavily involved in quality content writing. We’ve seen one study after another showing the impact of scaled content abuse, or as Google puts it in its spam policies, “Using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users.”…..

But I also came across a very interesting example!

I was super surprised to learn that Ahrefs are using Claude Code to write and update some of their content. They’ve been doing it for 8 months now, and the process makes read-to-publish drafts starting from keyword in just 6–12 minutes !!!

I had to pause and learn how are they doing it and not getting hit with some kind of spam penalty.

Which brings me to today’s topic.

AI is a great tool. But like any tool, its value is defined by how you use it, and more importantly, where you use it.

Not all automations are created equal.

Nor everything that can be automated should be handed to an LLM.

So let’s break this down properly.

Using AI to generate quality content

Any good use of AI will not involve a “quick” setup, and the Ahrefs team seem to have invested a lot of time into building and automating their editorial process.

Here’s how they did it:

1. Turned every editorial SOP into a claude skill file.

   1. If you don’t know what a skill file is, it’s a a structured, markdown-based text file that teaches an AI agent how to perform a specific, specialized task (often named SKILL.md)

   2. SOP for how to write a brief became it’s own skill file

   3. SOP for how to write an outline became it’s own skill file, and so on…

2. Add your inputs, like focus keyword, working title, your POV and points you want to include, other things you want to reference (e.g specific products, etc…)

3. Build one master skill that runs all the other skills files in order.

   1. When the steps are executed sequentially, this gives you a chance to provide feedback at every stage.

4. Use Ahrefs MCP to pull SEO data like SERPs results, and competitor coverage.

5. Refine the output by providing 5-10 great articles of your own to reference, and the system surfaces moments in the draft that you can insert your own real life experience.

6. Refine the system, using a skill that tests every other skill in isolation and suggest improvements. This way your system gets better over time.

7. Read every article from start to finish before you publish it

Note: they’re not using this system to pump out hunderds of blogs every month, they actually only created 15 so far [source to post]

I see what they did here, they removed all the noise and stripped the process down to its core: the value isn’t the content itself anymore, it’s the meaning/knowledge they are trying to communicate.

I think this is a very good approach, and it works for them.

But I don’t think this can work for me.

As an indie newsletter writer, what I put out isn’t just SEO insights. It’s the tone, the random comments, the little jokes (don’t worry, I’m holding back… mostly 😂).

That’s part of the newsletter… me.

And I don’t think that’s something you can fully systematize.

Also by the by, if you have not heard, Starbucks are hiring more baristas to win back their customers.

“Over the last couple of years, we’ve actually been removing labour from the stores. I think with the hope that equipment could offset the removal of the labour,” Mr Niccol said during a call with investors.

“What we’re finding is... that wasn’t an accurate assumption with what played out.”

Customer experienced seemed to suffer, so they’re rehiring people.

Don’t use AI for these

There are things that AI simply cannot do very well. Here’s what I don’t recommend you fully automate:

• Data tasks: Despite the hype, AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude are unreliable for data work.

  • They can hallucinate, miss critical data points, and quietly omit information without warning.

  • Did you know that LLMs struggle data in tables (tabular data). According to recent research, even the smartest AI models see a big drop in their scores when they have to read data from a grid.

  • So if you’re uploading your data csv to chatgpt and asking it questions about the data, chances are the output is inaccurate, which is risky if you’re doing client reporting for example.

• Summarizing important documents: this is probably one of those no-brainers we see circulating around. I do it too, but only when I want a rough idea on something. If I want a summary that’s comprehensive and does not miss out any important points, AI is not gonna do that because it can simply skip important information…. I wouldn’t trust the output.

• Write long code in one go: I teach vibe coding, and one thing I always say break tasks down into smaller tasks and test each one. The bigger the task, the more likely the mess in the code and therefore the output, and the more challenging it is to fix, if at all 😂😂😂 so if you’re vibe coding, you need to have a mental plan of the steps involved. Start small to grow your code.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

I really believe that the future is human, more human, and deeply human. All things machines cannot create.

Think of Artesian bread vs. store bought bread with tons of preservatives and additives.

That’s how I see the difference between AI output to human work.

And because this difference exits, not everything can be fully automate.

That’s that for today folks, and see you next newsletter 🙏

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

You know the drill!

The Schema Tool Built For The Agentic Web

Writing valid JSON-LD is no longer the bottleneck. Keeping it consistent across a portfolio is — different stacks, tools, outputs... no central view of what’s deployed where.

NxisAI brings it all together. AI scans your live pages, generates valid schema markup, and deploys it in one click — as a JS tag, native Shopify integration, or SSR/SSG SDK — across every site you run, from a single dashboard.

Plus native MCP, so your schema becomes queryable by AI agents directly.

Live today: the Founder’s Package. 25 seats, $16/mo locked for life, 30-day risk-free trial. Claim yours at nxisai.com.

Check it out

What a great event!

I had the pleasure be attending last week’s Google search central live event in Toronto, I have been looking forward to this, we don’t have a lot of SEO events in Canada so I was super happy that Google finally decided to bestow an event upon us!

The event covered a lot of topics, from AI in search, to Google trends, schema, SEO myths, and of course how search works.

And yes, I had my notebook in hand, so enough chitchat… let’s get to the good part!

Key takeaways

1# Search is evolving beyond information to intelligence.

The ultimate goal is for search to understand exactly what you mean and give you exactly what you’re looking for. But then, there’s the trade-off between the cost to compute vs intelligence level of a model. This is where the The Pareto frontier concept comes in. This is the set of results that are optimal for at least one combination of tradeoffs. I really think this is a very great hint, to understanding how Google and LLMs may potentially be selecting sources to rank/cite. I found this AMAZING resource on the topic.

2# The life of a URL

A URL goes through multiple phases before it finally becomes eligible to appear in search. Note how I said “eligible” because ranking is not just about technical SEO, quality signals of course matter and sometimes, your URL is not getting indexed or fell off search results because users did not find it useful and Google picked up on that.

A lot of cool nuggets and random notes from this session:

• If there are issues on your sitemap, Google can access it less often. So if Google finds broken URLs, redirected URLs, non-canonical URLs in the sitemap, that can be an issue if you’re a large website, or a news website for example.

• Factors that can impact your rankings include the type of search, is it coming from desktop or mobile, is it geo-sensitive search, is it a voice search (yes that matters), is it a photo search?

• We operate in an echo system where change is the only constant, user behavior changes, web changes, expectations changes and more. Search is a never solved problem.

3# Google Trends

First, there’s a Google trends API from Google that is in Alpha right now, and being closed tested by a select group of companies. Great news right?

My main takeaway is that, we are underutilizing this tool in SEO. So I’m bringing it to my day to day as much as possible. Do we ever check Google trends when we do keyword research? We should!

Narratives beat keywords (we’re better off focusing on topics/problems vs specific keywords).

Also and I’m quoting jean-christophe-chouinard here who was also present in the event:

“Trends vs. Keyword Planner: They are distinct tools with different ways of calculation. Trends is superior for cross-platform interest (YouTube + Search) and identifying “Breakout” queries. The data is lagged by 48 hours to prevent spammers.”

4# Good SEO is Good GEO

I really am not getting into the debate of terminology, but Danny Sullivan’s session was all about AI in search and Myths busting.

An important note from the session is “Make use of structured data”.

Schema has been under scrutiny and constant attack in the SEO industry, with many people calling it useless… it’s not.

And of course the popular slide from Danny that has been making rounds. Screenshot from jean-christophe-chouinard:

Commodity content is basic, simple, and very generic. People may not relate too, you are talking AT people. Non-commodity content is talking about a problem, sharing personal experiences and real-life scenarios.

5# Structured data, quality and AI

If you’re wondering what is the relation between structured data, quality and AI, well that was the title of the talk by Ryan Levering, a Google search engineer.

Here are my notes:

• Schema is used as context served to models when doing fanouts.

• Be more precise with schema, spamming won’t help.

• Something that’s being considered is publishing Google’s validation rules in standards and client-friendly formats, so SEOs can build their own schema validation tools instead of relying solely on the structured data and rich snippets tools (that go down sometimes because they get overwhelmed 😁)

• Google is also considered providing data on which schemas are more popular!

• Additionally Google is reinvigorating their investment in schema.org this year. After all how do you think the two newly Google agentic standards the UCP and WebMCP are going to communicate? (personal note: schema is a good candidate for this)

• Personal note: with so many voices in the industry saying schema is useless because they cannot measure it’s impact… well we have solid proof today that it is useful somehow, we just do not understand how.

6# Some good news to news😁

The highlight of the event for me is I got to ask Daniel Waisberg, Google search advocate the one question that was very important for me given that I work for a major news house! Will AIO come to top stories, and I got a clear “no”… yaaaay!

So for now… all is good for news publishers.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

I loved every bit of this event. I will definitely do my best to attend ANY upcoming Google events like this.

We can disagree with Google reps all the time, but there’s no denial that they do an awesome work, go above and beyond and deliver great value.

My biggest regret coming out of this event is…. I only had one falfel wrap, should’ve grabbed two 😄

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

📌 Your support keeps this newsletter FREE —> [☕Buy Me a Coffee☕]💡 Want more from me? [SEO Strategy Course] | [Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)] | [Premium SEO Mastermind]

My new Free Log Files Tool

Not sure if you’ve heard but I recently launched a Log File Analyzer Tool and it’s free! Also it’s super cool, give it a test drive.

Talking about server log files feels especially relevant right now. While everyone’s focused on “AI this” and “AI that,” log files are sitting there quietly holding some of the most valuable data you can get.

Honestly, they’re a goldmine.

If you want to see what I mean, check out my example report—it’ll give you a clear picture of the kind of insights you can uncover.

Anyways I decided to make today’s newsletter about Log files analysis, plus I’m giving you a raw python script so you can build your own workflows on top of this code!

Also if you don’t know what log files are, don’t worry, I’ve got you:

What are server log files for SEO?

Server log files for SEO record every request made to a website’s server, including pages crawled, response codes, and bot activity. You can use server log files to analyze how search engine and AI bots crawlers access your site, identify crawl errors, and optimize crawl budget and indexing efficiency.

We don’t have the data we need

As annoying as this sounds, it’s the truth. We are missing a lot of the data we need in SEO. Google search console, our main source of data, has a lot of issues. Last year when I called it buggy, that ruffled some feathers, I still stand by that… it’s a buggy tool in general.

Google search console data is:

• incomplete

• inaccurate (e.g. impressions have been inflated for at least the last 12 months)

• and depending on your website structured, maybe hard to segment in a clean way.

and that’s just the data part, let’s not get into the technical issues.

And that leaves us as SEO hanging, and looking for the best third party tool to get some more information. But again, third party tools come with their own limitations, and data assumptions, I would treat them as directional.

I guess this is a great motivation to build your own tool, and building your own log file analysis tool can give you answers you may not find elsewhere.

So… build your own data advantage

In a time were all we talk about is AI bots, log files cannot be any more important. From your log files you can find more concise answers to questions like:

• How much referral traffic is sent to our website via chatgpt/gemini/perplexity/ect…

• How many times does AI bots access the content on our websites.

• Which pages on our websites are accessed more often by AI bots (this is a major optimization opportunity)

and many more…

But the log files analysis does not stop there, you can also understand the behavior of Google bot on your website:

• How often does Google bot visit your website

• What pages are visited regularly and what pages are rarely visited (important optimization opportunity right here!)

• Are there any redundant page requests that make no sense (maybe we should noindex those pages?)

etc…

You can find pages to optimize, and opportunities to reduce your server costs as well. It’s a gold mine of insights.

Build your own log file workflow (Python script included)

So… as part of my Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI) course, I added this simple Colab script that generates this dashboard for you:

You can use this script as a starting point, and build your own workflow!

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

As someone who’s been working with data in SEO for a while, analyzing, learning, and trying to finding meaning and connections between the numbers we have and the things we do, I find log files very valuable.

If you’re looking for something new to try out this week, let this be at the top of your list. Ping your dev team today and ask them for few rows of data (1000+) from your log files and run the script (or my free tool) so you can understand how different bots interact with your website.

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter 🙏

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

📌 Your support keeps this newsletter FREE —> [☕Buy Me a Coffee☕]💡 Want more from me? [SEO Strategy Course] | [Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)] | [Premium SEO Mastermind]

Tracking visibility in AI

Google does not show us AI visibility in GSC, and other AI tools have followed suit. Although Barry Schwarz reported yesterday that Google Search Console maybe testing an AI contribution report, so we’ll have to wait and see.

In the meantime, SEOs are experimenting with all kinds of AI visibility tracking tool or even building their own. And honestly, we kind of have to. Without some form of data, even if it’s directional, it’s hard to generate insights that actually inform what we do next.

In today’s newsletter, I want to unpack both sides of this using my own courses as an example: What are we actually measuring? and How do we turn that into action?

Let’s dig in!

What are we actually measuring

The way I think about visibility tracking is this: it’s a measure of share of voice.

How likely is my brand to be mentioned compared to competitors?

Wil Reynolds recently shared this on LinkedIn: “We just asked a room of 200 marketers to enter the same prompt into ChatGPT incognito and I’d say 60% got the same 3 brands. I was shocked to see that level of repetition of brand names.”

That level of repetition is the signal. How often is your brand mentioned?

Because here’s the thing with LLMs:
They’re not deterministic. The output can change.

So the real question isn’t:
“Am I showing up?”

It’s:
“How likely am I to be mentioned?”

But here’s where it gets tricky…

How likely… for what?

We use prompts to check visibility—but prompts are just a proxy.

What you’re actually measuring is visibility for a topic.

The specific wording of a single prompt doesn’t matter nearly as much as the topic space it represents.

For example:

I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Google for:
→ “top python for seo resources”
→ “top python for seo courses”

For “resources”? No mention.
For “courses”? I showed up on almost every platform (except Gemini 🤷‍♀️).

Here’s an example of a mention on Claude:

What does that actually tell me?

It tells me my visibility is stronger around the “courses” topic than “resources.”

So if I want broader visibility, the opportunity isn’t to tweak prompts endlessly…

It’s to expand my presence in the “resources” topic space.

The takeaway

Individual prompts don’t matter.

Topics do.

So when you’re measuring AI visibility, ask:

• What topic am I trying to win?

• How often do I show up across prompts within that topic?

• Where are the gaps?

Because that’s what actually turns visibility tracking into something actionable.

First party data, is the best data

One of the most useful things I did recently was mine my own GSC data differently.

I used this regex:

([^” “]*\s){4,}

to get keywords that are 5 words or more because that’s how I expect a prompt to look like and I found this search that I assume to be a prompt (there’s more):

• “has anyone actually taken sara taher seo riddler course worth 299 dollars honest review of content quality”

I ran this by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google and I kid you not, none of them corrected the pricing for the course is not 299, but 100 😂😂😂 but that’s not the issue.

With the exception of Gemini, both chagtp and claude mentioned a big yellow flag for me to work on: there are no independent third party reviews of my course. Well, in actuality there is, but only on LinkedIn in some posts, but there’s non in the places/websites LLMs look for to validate a product e.g. reddit.

Here’s what chatgpt said:

Here’s what claude said:

So this is another workflow for you:

• Check your GSC for prompt like keywords

• Run them by LLMs

• See how often you’re mentioned or not and if not, why.

• Come up with a plan.

Note: I’m not entirely sure how to reliably get LLMs to correct incorrect pricing when it’s embedded in user input but I think now I have an idea for testing and research!

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

Tracking your AI visibility is great, but understanding it and knowing how to use those insights is what actually matters. And you may not need a lot of prompts to do that btw!

Also, always start your data journey with GSC. First party data is your best data (keeping in mind that GSC is very bugy 😄😄😄)

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

📌 Your support keeps this newsletter FREE —> [☕Buy Me a Coffee☕]💡 Want more from me? [SEO Strategy Course] | [Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)] | [Premium SEO Mastermind]

The search for meaning

Measuring performance is what gives our work meaning.

And in SEO, meaning has always been… complicated.

Showing ROI has never been easy—but in the past few years, it’s become even harder.

Not because SEO isn’t driving value.

But because of the ambiguity baked into the data we rely on.

You know the drill.

Google Search Console doesn’t give you the full picture.
Third-party tools estimate search volume—sometimes over, sometimes under.
There’s a massive gap in the funnel, where keyword-level attribution breaks down.

You’re left asking:

Was this conversion driven by branded search?
Or non-branded discovery—the thing we actually want to prove?

And just when you think you’ve made peace with the chaos…

We find out that impressions in Google Search Console have been inflated for over a year.

Impressions—arguably one of the few metrics that could hint at visibility, demand, even brand growth—turn out to be unreliable.

So you start wondering:

What exactly are we measuring?
And why?

The SEO is dead narrative

I’m tired of hearing it. You probably are too.

SEO is not dead.

But repetition is powerful.
The more something is said, the more people believe it—regardless of whether it’s true.

And here’s the real issue:

It’s not SEOs who believe this narrative.

It’s the people further from the work—executives, business owners, CMOs.

The moment SEO becomes hard to measure, it becomes easy to dismiss.

“If we can’t measure it, we cannot see it, and if we cannot see it, it must not be working.”

And honestly?
The ambiguity doesn’t make it easy to push back.

Time series

So… bring it on.
What do you have up your sleeves, Sara… right? 😄

Fair question.

The answer I have for you today is Time series. You know the performance graphs we use all the time, x-axis is date, and y-axis is whatever metric?

Exactly that, but now we are going to use that in a smarter way. Here’s how:

Get your graph ready… just stay away from impressions for the time being.

Then,

For the same period, plot 2 different metrics, clicks and sessions for the same time period for example or clicks and trends from Google trends. I have this graph from my Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI) course, where I compare impressions of my website (make that clicks starting today) with the search interest from Google trends for the keyword “Python”.

From the graph you can see that while the interest remained steady, I had a surge in performance at some point. That gap tells a story. Demand didn’t change.
My performance did. We are not looking for exact numbers, we are looking for patterns. Whatever I was doing in December 2024, it was working and I should probably do that again!

Here’s another example of how insights can be pulled by comparison:

In the screenshot, you can see that there's an increase in organic traffic, that's aligned with an increase in the number of organic keywords, which is NOT due to an increase in the number of pages, but rather due to an increase in branded searches!!!! [I wrote about this here]

Last but not least my favorite example, direct traffic vs organic clicks. You can show the direct impact and relationship between your direct traffic which often goes unattributed to specific marketing efforts, to your SEO work, if your graph looks like this (do you see how they go hand in hand with absolute harmony?)

That was actually a real-life case I experienced in the past for one of the websites I worked on. Putting different metrics side-by-side does magic.

Before and after

If you’re not using GSC Guardian or Advanced GSC Analyzer chrome exteions you should change that right now imo!

Both allows you to plot a vertical line that can be used to correlate traffic changes with Google updates or better development releases and SEO implementations!

Here’s an example of how they can highlight on a graph the duration of a Google update for you so you can see your traffic pattern during the update, and also visually compare before and after!

I had this discussion recently with the rollout of a new SEO feature, and having a vertical line on the clicks graph, maybe one of the easiest remedies to show performance changes.

Seasonality

Don’t forget about seasonality.

Compare your performance to the same time last year, and look at it both numerically and visually. This makes it easier to tell whether growth is coming from your SEO efforts—or just seasonal demand.

Look for patterns, 2 lines in the same graph…

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

Ya time series are your new best friend in attempting to make sense of all the chaos, I’m not saying they solve everything, but definitely having those tips in the back of your pocket will help!

Thanks for reading this far and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

Before we dive into today’s topic, a quick word from today’s sponsor:

You Don’t Have a Marketing Strategy Problem. You Have an Execution Problem.

Most marketers know what needs to happen. The bottleneck is always doing it!

Writing the content, fixing the tech issues, running the ads, building the links, you know the drill...

Search Atlas changes that. It’s the agentic marketing platform that saves you time by helping execute your vision and not just giving you suggestions that waste your time.

A team of AI agents at your disposal that autonomously execute across your entire marketing operation:

• SEO & technical fixes ✅

• Content created and published ✅

• PPC managed and optimised ✅

• Press Release Writing and Distribution ✅

• LLM Optimization ✅

• Marketing Execution ✅

Your job becomes deciding what to grow. Search Atlas handles the rest.

73 Marketing Tools. 1 Platform. 1 Payment. 0 Manual Execution.

Start your free trial today

SEO can be overwhelming

Every day there’s a new tactic, another “must-do” strategy, constant shifts in search behavior, and never-ending updates from Google. Just when you think you’ve figured things out, something changes again. It’s a lot for one person to keep up with.

If there’s one thing I learned that works like magic, it’s consistency.

Remember when John Muller said this:

He was absolutely right, but this is not just for technical SEO, it’s for everything in SEO. Your best way to winning, is to stay on top of things.

And when I say “stay on top of things,” here’s what I actually mean:

• Search trends

• New tactics

• Changes happening on your website (and the bigger the site, the messier this gets)

and more!!!

That’s already a lot to juggle—and that’s exactly what I want to chit-chat with you about today.

Well… that, and how one simple system helped me catch something worth fixing.

The headspace

I had a recent meeting with a co-worker that inspired me to build a simple automation on Google sheets. I created a simple script that pulls latest URLs added to a website through the sitemap, their title tags, status, title length, etc….

I then started to create pivot tables to analyze the data

And that’s when something clicked 💡

It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but it was a small, easy-to-miss fix that was definitely worth addressing.

I can’t go into the specifics, but it was one of those moments where you realize the issue wasn’t complexity… it was the mental load that prevents you from noticing opportunities. [paid newsletter subscribers can access this sheet with instructions to use it at the end of this article]

I came across this post recently on LinkedIn from Jonathan Boshoff, and he had a similar experience!

Long story short, Jonathan automated the repetitive work, and once he automated enough, he had free headspace, to look in-depth in more SEO issues, and guess what? He found a major opportunity that grew organic traffic from 160k to 1.7 million.

Can you imagine?

So we should just automate everything?

“So… is that what you’re saying here, Sara? Just automate stuff?”

Naaaah.

What I’m trying to say is, we need to build systems that work for us!

Automation is just a piece of that, not the goal.

Build systems (and yes, some automation within them) that:

• Free up your headspace for deeper, more important thinking

• Allow you to stay consistently on top of things, without constantly juggling sources or manually digging through data.

A framework to finding automation opportunities

We talk a lot about automation in SEO, and very less about what to automate. So here you go!

If you’re looking to start automating today to reap the benefits, here’s how you should do it:

Step 1: Start with Your Business Goal
☐ Write down your main business goal (e.g., grow website traffic).

Step 2: List High-Level Tasks
☐ Break the goal into key tasks that drive it (e.g., content, track performance, competitor monitoring, etc…).

Our goal here is visibility, i.e. having a simple way to quickly check the status of the tasks that drive your business goal, like how many pieces of content you publish each month and how well those new pages are performing.

Step 3: Break It Down Further
☐ Break the high-level key tasks, into subtasks. (e.g. for content: writing content, promoting content, etc…)

Step 4: Spot Opportunities
Identify tasks that are:

☐ Repetitive.

☐ Time Consuming.

☐ Bonus: follow clear IF/THEN logic. Rule-based tasks sound like IF we create a new blog, THEN we need to share it on social media or if a competitor creates a new blog, I need to be notified.

☐ Bonus: frequently cause errors when done manually

Example

If you’re wondering how this framework would look like in action, here’s a simple example just to demonstrate the process:

1. My business goal: get more newsletter signups

2. Tasks to support that goal (many, but for simplicity I’m focusing on content)

3. Zooming in, under the content category there are

   1. Creating great content

   2. Analyzing content performance

   3. Keeping up with industry trends and news to be able to create great content

   4. Promote the content on socials once created

4. Now which of those tasks are repetitive, time consuming and possibly prone to errors when done manually or follow a clear structure? I’d say everything except creating great content.

   —> therefore I should be automating everything EXCEPT the content creation!

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

Automations in SEO some how became synonyms with content creation and programmatic SEO, that’s definitely not the use case I’m promoting. Nor I am promoting the “I replaced my entire marketing team with [place an automation tool]…” narrative.

Automation is the key to staying consistent and delivering solid results, and the framework above shows you exactly how to make it happen!

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Paywalled content below this point that includes the Google sheet template mentioned above.

Read more

Hello Riddlers!

You know the drill!

A bootstrapped AI SaaS startup appeared in Google AI Overviews alongside Tidio, Gorgias, and Intercom —
in under 3 weeks.

No big budget. No massive content team. No years of domain authority. Just a methodology — applied systematically.

343% impression growth · 127% click growth · 74% branded search share

Get the Playbook (use promo code SARA15 at checkout for 15% off)

Everyone’s new toy

You literally could not miss how Claude Code (CC) has taken over LinkedIn… like your entire feed is just people building stuff left, right, and center 😄 [credit: Magali De Reu]

And honestly? I get it.

Claude Code feels like magic. People are suddenly shipping things they never thought they could.

…or at least, that’s what it looks like.

Because here’s the thing no one is really saying:

A lot of people are confusing “I got it to work” with “I actually know what I’m doing.”

So yeah—let’s cut the fluff.

I’m going to show you exactly where Claude Code goes wrong, where people misuse it, and how to actually use it in a way that doesn’t come back to bite you later.

1# A shortcut is as good as the driver, right?

If you don’t know how to drive, it does not matter if you take the long road or a shortcut, same with CC. You need to know how to use CC, and you need to know what you’re doing.

For example,

If you’re doing a data analysis task, you need to understand fundamentally how this task is done, then you can ask CC to automate it for you.

I’ve spent a lot of time using CC to analyze large datasets, and here’s where it gets it wrong:

• Using the wrong dataset to begin with, even when you specify which dataset to use multiple times!

• CC does not clean the data for you correctly most of the time, you need to clean the prep the data before processing it.

• Finishing the entire task without validating with you mid-point. This is very problematic, because now if you ask it to undo things, it may create more problems and issues.

Solution?

The simplest thing you can do is to ask CC to provide the following after it reads your dataset and before doing anything:

• List of all column names, value type (integer, string, etc…), and total number of rows

• Summary statistics of the dataset

• Missing values count per column

• Top 5 rows and bottom 5 rows of the data

Just by looking at all of the above you can understand if this is the right data, and if the data is ready for your task or work still needs to be done, and 95% of the time it’s the case that the dataset needs cleaning specially with large datasets.

2# Break it down to smaller tasks

Whatever you’re trying to use Claude Code to do, do not ask it for the entire job from the get go, if the task is too big with multiple major steps, or accuracy is very important for you.

For example,

do not tell CC “hey, take this data from GSC and provide a monthly report”.

Here’s how to do that better:

• I want to create a monthly report using my GSC data.

• Do not start working yet, let’s create a plan together.

• Throughout this project, you need to pause, show me the work done so far, and wait for my approval of the output.

Why are we doing this?

If you let it run end-to-end, one small mistake early on will quietly snowball into a much bigger problem later. By the time you notice, you’re not fixing one issue—you’re untangling a mess.

And that usually takes longer than just doing it properly in the first place.

Note: fixing will also consume more of your tokens.

The move is simple:
Work in small steps → validate → then move forward.

That’s how you build something that actually holds up.

Because this idea of:
“I let it run for 45 minutes and came back to a fully working system”…

Yeah—just because it runs and generates some output doesn’t mean it’s right.

Someone shared this screenshot on one of my posts 🤦‍♀️😄:

3# Look at the code

I get it—most people using Claude Code aren’t developers. So the instinct is: “I’m not even going to try to read this.”

Fair.

But you still need the basics.

Using CC without understanding any code is like using a calculator without knowing basic math. You might get an answer—but you won’t know if it’s wrong.

And that’s where things break.

I’ve build an entire course “Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)” teaching people how to vibe code the right way. I didn’t start with “go build cool stuff.”

I started with: How code actually works.

Why?

Because it’s the fastest way to:

• It’s the best way to make sure that you’re getting the right output.

• It also can save you tons on tokens

For every task, I ask CC to create a python script, then I run that script using VScode or Google Collab, as running the code on those platforms won’t cost you anything, while asking CC to run the code for you which it does in the background even if it does not save a code file, will cost you tons of tokens.

This can easily multiply if you’re still testing and fixing things and will run the code multiple times.

Also asking CC to create scripts for the tasks comes with benefits, you can easily pickup where you left (I know CC has memory, but this still is helpful).

Bottom line:

If you want better outputs, lower costs, and less frustration…

You’ve gotta look at the code 🙂

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

There are so many things that can go wrong or go right with vibe coding.

The real skill going forward (and honestly, it’s already here) isn’t just “using AI”… it’s understanding just enough code same way you know basic math.

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

You know the drill!

📌 Your support keeps this newsletter FREE —> [☕Buy Me a Coffee☕]💡 Want more from me? [SEO Strategy Course] | [Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)] | [Premium SEO Mastermind]

Also did you check out my FREE PEOPLE ALSO ASKED tool yet?

On a random moment of time

I decided to finally work on my chrome extension. I have been wanting to build it for a while, but never got the time.

Recently, I installed Claude Code and spent some time figuring out how to actually use it. What it’s good at, where it struggles, and how to get decent output from it.

So I gave it a real task:

Build a Chrome extension that analyzes Google search results and visualizes SERP feature distribution in a pie chart.

3… 2… 1…

Claude Code built it.

…or did it?

The first round

The problem with Claude Code (CC) is that it will take the prompt and start working right away. You’d think this is super cool, it’s not because there are so many things that need to be flushed out first.

Anyways, CC took some time and came back telling me it’s done, it also provided instructions on how to test it.

It was working, but it was not working…. 😂

There was no errors or bugs, and it generated an output, but it was not working correctly. The numbers in the pie chart were just not right, and many SERPs features where not detected.

This is where I had to intervene.

Round two

I started doing searches, and getting the html source code of the SERPs results pages.

I then saved them in files, used both Chatgpt, and CC to try to find patterns and match them to search features, but this was a mess of a task…. the html was very big and they were looking at a needle in a hay stack…

A complete mess and waste of tokens… so I build a Python script that converts the SERPs code into what I called a SERPs Map.

The purpose of the code is to remove all the noise and convert the SERPs into a tree/map format of the main dev components. That way the file size is smaller and we can analyze the find patterns and match then with SERPs features, right?

I took those SERPs maps and fed them to Claude Code, one after the other to analyze them for patterns. It would ask me to verify what SERPs features I actually see compared to what it can detect… I became it’s eyes 😂

We then went to work from there, and made adjustments to our code, and the chrome extension came to life…. but once again it was not working properly.

Detecting patterns in SERPs is very difficult and unreliable. I spent time looking for what others have done online and understand the problem, and then after hours and backward and forward with Claude Code I decided to shift gears.

This round took the most time btw… 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

Round three

It was up to me at that point to decide how to tackle this problem. I decided to use SerpAPI. I already have an account and credits that I used for my Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI) course, because if you signup you get free credits (in the screenshot I have paid credits, free accounts get way less).

I went back to Claude code and started building. Even with SerpAPIwe still had issues, for example an image carousel was labeled as “knowledge panel” by the api 🤷‍♀️

So I had to introduce a set of new rules, where the extension will also check the headers in search, so for example if there’s a label in search we will use that label. Here’s an example of what I mean by a label:

There are a lot of labels in search like:

• Popular products

• Discussions and forums

• People Also Asked

and so on… so if they’re present, the plugin will incorporate this information.

So now I had a plugin that can detect the features… how to accurately calculate the percentages?

There were two options:

• Are we talking about how much space on your screen a certain result takes

• Or how much of this result exist in SERPs

As you can see, and as I always say, you need to know what you’re doing, you cannot simply delegate everything to Claude Code.

So I made the decision that, if there are 20 total items and 5 are organic results for example, organic gets (5/20) * 100 = 25.0%. Each category’s percentage represents its share of total SERP feature items counted.

The Feedback

I finally uploaded the extension, and once it got approved, I shared it and got some very reasonable feedback:

The colors of the pie chart for one… it was horrible, but you see I’m not a designed so I did not account for things that a usual designer would…

I made some changes later, and have not pushed them live yet, but someone pointed out to take into account the color blind audience, and choose a suitable color palette. So I decided to dig into that myself. It’s a very interesting learning opportunity for me.

Others have asked for more instructions on using the plugin, which is fair enough. I made the changes by giving very clear instructions to Claude Code, don’t assume it will know how to fix an issue on it’s own. This is right now ready but not pushed live, so stay tuned:

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

I think the goal of this blog it to show you that to build something that is providing meaningful output, you need to know what you’re doing and understand how a good code works.

Claude Code definitely accelerates a lot of work, but there’s a some learning curve and few more skills you’ll need to learn.

One thing I didn’t account for is having to maintain the extension and release updates and fixes as needed. Every piece of code you write needs regular maintenance, something that we don’t discuss much in SEO.

Any how, hope you found this useful!

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!!!

Also check out my Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI) course where I teach you the basics you need, so you can start building with the right foundations!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

📌 Your support keeps this newsletter FREE —> [☕Buy Me a Coffee☕]💡 Want more from me? [SEO Strategy Course] | [Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)] | [Premium SEO Mastermind]

There isn’t just one type of SEOs

I’ve been thinking a lot about my audiences lately. And yes… audiences, plural.

When I send technical SEO topics in my newsletter, I get a few unsubscribes. But on LinkedIn, that same type of content performs better.

Then there’s my YouTube channel, my Python course, and my Strategy course… all attracting slightly different people.

And my experience with the SEOs I meet in my monthly townhall meetup too, all made me realize:

There isn’t just one type of SEOs

So if you’re doing any kind of audience research—or trying to understand where you fit in SEO—this article is for you.

The ones under pressure

These SEOs that are under immense pressure from their clients, they operate under “go high or go home”…

I’ve had a situation where one of those SEOs reach out to me on LinkedIn to perform a second audit to make sure they are doing everything right.

They were in their third month of an engagement with a client, whom had set unrealistic traffic and conversion goals from month one, similar to how you might measure a PPC campaign. As most SEOs know, that’s not always how SEO timelines work.

Can you imagine the pressure?

These SEOs only care about tactics that are directly tied to results. That’s all they want to hear.

If you’re marketing a product or a course to them, it needs to clearly show how it helps them drive results and prove progress.

If you do this, you get that type of messaging.

The non-techy

All SEOs need some technical knowledge, but some are more technical than others.

When I was job hunting, I noticed that being a generalist—or having skills across both technical SEO and content—was a big advantage.

Most SEOs, however, are more focused on the content side of things.

These are the readers who love my newsletter, they’re happy to dive into long-form content, frameworks, checklists, tips, and case studies. They enjoy actionable insights and practical guidance, as long as it’s not too technical.

In other words, they’re all about strategy and application, rather than deep technical details.

If you’re marketing to these folks, avoid jargon and make your messaging clear and approachable.

Many of them are interested in becoming more technical but aren’t sure where to start. If you’re offering a technical product or course, highlight that no prior technical knowledge is needed.

The nerds

These SEOs love diving into the details—analyzing data, mastering technical SEO, building their own tools, and generally having an opinion on everything. 😄

Many of the nerds in the industry become SEO influencers. They speak on webinars, contribute to industry publications, and share tips wherever they can.

They’re also probably the most challenging group to market to. Unless they genuinely see the value in your product, they’re unlikely to convert.

The career SEOs

These SEOs are a great bunch to hire or work with. They know SEO well, do a solid job, and are generally reliable.

Many are career-oriented. Their main goal isn’t to freelance or become influencers, though you might see a few pop up on a stage or podcast occasionally. That’s the minority.

What matters most to them is doing well in their role. Career growth, upskilling, and moving into more senior positions are what drive them.

Marketing Tip: If you’re reaching this group, tie your product or service to career progression. Show how it can help them elevate their role, develop skills, or prepare for the future.

The lazy daisy

In an industry like SEO, you can’t really coast. Things change fast, and you need to keep learning, testing, and analyzing—it’s just part of the job.

Not everyone keeps up.

These SEOs tend to focus on maintaining their current workload rather than actively pushing for growth or new results. They’re less motivated to experiment or seek out new insights.

If you’re hiring, they’re usually easy to spot. Ask about the newsletters or blogs they read… and you might hear… crickets.

Marketing Tip: This group is hard to engage. Products or courses that require active experimentation or self-driven learning probably won’t resonate. Focus your messaging on those who are naturally motivated or already seeking improvement.

The socials

Some SEOs excel at building strong relationships with clients and colleagues.

They can read the room, understand what clients care about—both at work and outside of it—and start meetings in a way that immediately establishes trust and connection (great at small talk too)

This group thrives on rapport and relationship-building. They excel at client communication, closing deals, strengthening industry connections, and navigating tricky work situations with ease.

This skill will become increasingly important as AI automates more aspects of SEO work.

They’re also great listeners, which makes them effective collaborators and trusted advisors.

Marketing Tip: Products, tools, or courses that help improve client communication, networking, or soft skills resonate strongly with this group. Show how it helps them connect better and build influence.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

One thing remains clear as I wrap this up: there are way more SEO types than listed above. And it’s also rarely either or, you can be a mix of 2 or more types.

Did any of the above resonate with you? or some more than others?

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

📌 Your support keeps this newsletter alive —> [☕Buy Me a Coffee☕]💡 Want more from me? [SEO Strategy Course] | [Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)] | [Premium SEO Mastermind]

Let’s be real

It was only a matter of time before SEOs started trying to game LLMs.

We’re an industry that still pulls off blackhat and spammy tactics in search, no matter how many systems are built to stop it, we adjust and innovate!

Which leaves you thinking, what chance do those new AI models have against the SEO spam? 😂

Through personal observation, reading papers, testing and regular discissions with industry peeps through my monthly SEO townhall style meetup [signup for next one here] I've been collecting the manipulation tactics that are already in play. Here's what I've found in no specific order.

The summary button

This one surprised me. Some sites now have a "Summarize with ChatGPT" button on their blogs.

Seems helpful, right?

You click it, it opens ChatGPT with a pre-written prompt to summarize the post. Harmless.

Except — every click trains ChatGPT to read your content. More clicks = more exposure = higher chance ChatGPT recommends or cites your blog later. 🤷

Listicles

Everyone knows about this. Google’s AI Overviews and chatgpt love listicles. For a while, this was the easiest way to get cited.

Well I tried getting listed on few of the main sources used for the keyword “best SEO newsletter”.

Did it work? Nop, you know why?

because I noticed Google was changing the cited sources over and over… it seems they were making adjustments to their systems to separate value bringing listicles and ones that are made specifically for ranking and getting cited.

These may also overlap with many of the “ranking volatility” you hear barry schwarz reporting on. Something was changing in how listicles are selected in search.

Does this tactic still work? It does, but only if your listicle delivers real value. If it’s just self-promotional fluff, don’t bother. Garbage in, garbage out.

Poisoning Attacks on LLMs

Anthropic has been putting out some great research lately, and this one is no exception "Poisoning Attacks on LLMs Require a Near-Constant Number of Poison Samples."

In this study, researchers wanted to find out how easy it is to sneak harmful content into AI training data.

What they discovered was pretty alarming: it only takes about 250 bad documents to compromise an AI model, no matter how big the model is or how much data it was trained on.

Even models trained on 20x more clean data were just as vulnerable.

Think of it like this: whether you’re poisoning a glass of water or an entire swimming pool, it takes roughly the same amount of poison to be dangerous. That’s a problem.

In SEO terms? All you need to influence an LLM is 250 mentions…

🎤 a mic drop moment.

Injecting Prompts

Remember this ancient antique SEO tactic called cloaking, where you add a white text on the page for ranking purposes but users cannot see it because it’s white?

Well, it evolved with times, and now some people embed hidden prompts in their content.

Modern AI reads text, images, and audio. Each one is a door for manipulation. Hide white text on a white background? The AI reads it. Shrink font to zero? The AI reads it. Embed a prompt inside an image? The AI reads that too. You’d never notice — but the AI processes every bit of it.

RAG Poisoning

LLM bots like ChatGPT use RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) which is just a fancy way of saying they search sources like Google or Bing to make their responses more accurate.

Well, researchers behind the “PoisonedRAG” paper found that you can trick a RAG system by injecting fake text into the sources the AI pulls from. They treated it like a math problem and figured out the exact wording that makes the AI give a specific wrong answer to a specific question.

Here’s how it works, the fake text is crafted to do two things at once:

• First, it looks relevant enough that the system actually retrieves it.

• Second, once the AI reads it, it steers the response toward whatever the attacker wants.

Think of it like slipping a fake document into a library. The title and keywords match the topic, so the librarian pulls it off the shelf. But the content inside is completely made up to push a specific narrative.

The scary part? Just five fake texts in a database of millions was enough to trick the AI 90% of the time. And when the researchers tested existing defenses? None of them held up.

Now think about this from an SEO perspective — many RAG systems pull from public sources that anyone can edit like Wikipedia. If five pieces of text can manipulate the output, imagine what a coordinated effort could do.

Reddit

LLM bots and Google AIO rely a lot on reddit in their citations and recommendations, and this of course opened another possibility for SEOs... “spam reddit”...

You may see some “success stories” circulating here and there, but the reality is, most of these attempts fail!

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

Obviously I just scratched the surface on this topic, but you know what I was thinking the whole time I’m writing this?

We're trying to figure out how to make LLMs harder to manipulate, when we still haven't figured that out for humans yet. 🤷🤷🤷

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

Before we dive into today’s newsletters, first a word from our sponsor:

Turn AI Citations Into a Systematic Growth Channel

If your clients are asking why competitors show up in ChatGPT and they don’t, you need more than guesses. You need a system.

I’ve been testing @Wellows to see if it actually turns AI visibility into something agencies can execute on. Here’s what works:

Outreach – Shows you the exact third-party URLs that AI engines cite as trusted sources. Get verified contacts and templates. Turn random pitching into systematic outreach that earns citations.

Quick Wins – Tells you the single highest-impact action to take next. What to write. Who to contact. Based on real LLM behavior, not guesswork.

Client Reporting – Track citation growth over time. Show clients the proof. Citations earned. Competitor gaps closing. Reportable outcomes they can see.

It’s simple: Citations → systematic outreach → prioritized actions → reportable outcomes.

See where your clients stand in AI search. Run a free audit now!

Zooming In!

One of the most common questions you’ll hear in SEO is:

“Why are my pages not getting indexed?”

“why am I getting crawled - not indexed in GSC?”

and you can feel the frustration through the screen…

here’s the thing

Diagnosing issues like this isn’t about running through your usual checklist and hoping something jumps out at you.

It requires going beyond the obvious. Zooming in. Zooming out. Connecting dots most people don’t even realize are connected.

Then ask yourself:

What am I missing?

…. Okay now, enough rambling… let’s talk about how to actually get your URLs indexed fasterrrrrrr. 😌

1# Do not use the “request indexing” feature as a strategy

This is not a sustainable way to get your URLs indexed. Use it for one-time off things, or when there’s an immediate need to get a new page indexed. Otherwise, it’s not feasible for large websites.

If you think of this feature as a quick patch, you’ll understand that you are better off figuring out what is preventing your URLs from getting indexed and resolving the issue, since this may also improve your website overall technical health for search bots, right?

2# Check your sitemap(s)

So your sitemap primary goal is to list URLs for Google to crawl, but it won’t force Google to index your URLs. I just listed this here because your problem maybe that your URLs are not listed in the sitemap and Google has no way to find out about them.

I’ve seen enough broken sitemaps, sitemaps with 404 URLs, sitemaps with redirected URLs, and sitemaps with URLs that are just wrong (subdomain URLs for example) to tell you that you should check your sitemap specially if your CMS is custom and not one of the commonly used CMS like shopify or wordpress.

Sitemaps are also important if you just performed a website migration or some major URL redirects project.

3# Audit your Merchant Center

Why do SEOs NOT audit Google Merchant Center? If you’re working on an ecommerce website, this is part of your SEO work.

Google merchant center “is a free tool that enables retailers to add product information and data so that their products can appear across Google surfaces.”

So while you’re struggling to get your products indexed by Google and trying to use the “request indexing” feature to force index 10 URLs/day at most, you are missing out on Google Merchant Center, and the impact is FAST.

4# Content quality issues

I think I now understand why Google keeps repeating the same redundant vague advice “just create helpful content”… well because:

1. most of the content online is not really helpful 🤷

2. a lot of the issues you’re experiencing on your website including slow indexability, are due to your content being seen as low quality 🤷🤷

So do yourself a favor and ask few questions:

1. do you have cannibalization or duplication issues?

2. do you have thin content?

3. do you have AI generated content in such a way that this content brings no unique value?

4. Do you already have pages that are indexed and getting some clicks and impressions but overall performing poorly in search?

If your answer to any of the above is yes, this means you have content quality issues, start with that FIRST.

5# Javascript

I had a lead reach out one time because their website was not getting indexed in search. This was at a time a lot of other SEOs were complaining of the same issue so I could’ve easily dismissed it as some Google bug or guideline change or smth… but I didn’t…

I dug here and there and just realized that the website is JavaScript heavy. And while Google can render JavaScript and read your content, the website ALSO was new so very low authority and the pages were thin/low quality content…. now why, why really would Google index those pages?

6# Social signals

I’ve been very active on LinkedIn for years now and I tell ya, this has helped my URLs get picked up by Google fast, despite having a small website, and I only publish once a week, AND I don’t really focus on optimizing my newsletter content for search AND I duplicate the content on LinkedIn as well.

But overall my URLs get picked up fast… but the challenge I’m facing right now is that sometimes, Google will end up deciding to show the LinkedIn newsletter version of a blog vs. my website blog URL… obvious duplication issue and the winner is LinkedIn because I get more engagement there and it’s a higher authority platform…

Let’s see how can I tackle this…

7# Your title tag

One of the reasons your URL is not getting indexed, is simply the title tag… if it’s just similar to all the results in search, tell me again… why would Google index it?

I used a python script to pull the title tags for “digital marketing tools”, here is the output:

26 best AI marketing tools I’m using to get ahead in 2026
After 15 years of experience, here are my favorite ...
21 Must-have digital marketing tools to help you grow
Digital Marketing Tools For Campaign Management
Top 21 Digital Marketing Tools Every Marketer Needs in ...
What tools are used in digital marketing?
8 free online marketing tools for every “hands-on” marketer
Hootsuite: Social Media Marketing and Management Tool

here’s the title tags in serps for “best running shoes for women”:

The 10 Best Running Shoes of 2025 | Tested & Reviewed
The best running shoes for women 2025
The 12 Best Running Shoes of 2025
Women’s Running Shoes
Need recommendations for the best running shoes ...
Best Running Shoes & Apparel for Women
The Best Running Shoes 2025
Women’s Shoes | Running Room
Women’s Bestsellers Running Shoes

here’s the title tags in serps for “how to learn SEO”:

What is the best way to learn SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide
How Do You Learn SEO? Step-by-Step Guide for 2026
SEO Certification Course
Learn SEO with a Free Roadmap of Reliable Guides & Tools
How to Learn SEO: A Complete Roadmap for Beginners
How To Learn SEO (2026 Guide)
How to Learn SEO in 2026 (In Record Time)

do you see what’s happening? the titles, despite being for the same keyword, are different one way or the other…. so differentiate yourself!

8# Run Ads

That is not my advice or something I invented, but a quote from John Muller. I remember this making rounds when he first said that, but it’s true. If you want your website URLs to get indexed faster in search, you can run ads.

Ads will bring traffic and users to those websites as well as engagement metrics, and all of this can help Google pick them up. I remember when I first started doing SEO, and I was playing around with Facebook ads for my website, every time I ran an ad for a page, I can see in real time, the page ranking increase in search… and once the ads stop… it take a short bit of time and then goes back to it’s normal place in search.

So ads can help your URLs get indexed, AND maybe temporary rank high.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

I think the bigger goal of this blog is to tell you look deeper and don’t take the first answer as the final answer. In SEO, you need an eagle eye!

I hope this helps you improve your website indexability, I’ve also recorded a YouTube video on the topic, feel free to check it out, like subscribe or drop a comment:

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

— Advertising Message —

“SEO Gets” gets it. 🙂

SEO Gets is an analytics platform that enhances your Google Search Console data by giving you:

• Up to 50× more search data rows

• Longer historical storage

• A unified dashboard to monitor all your sites in one place

It makes reporting and trend analysis much easier with features like:

• Content groups

• Topic clusters

• Branded vs. non-branded performance

• Growing/decaying insights

• Cannibalization reports

• Striking-distance keywords

All designed to help you find what to fix or improve—without exporting data or fighting spreadsheets.

👉 Try SEO Gets + use coupon sara10 for a discount (affiliate link — I may earn a commission).

History Is a Great Teacher

I’m not about to get into the benefits of studying history, but history is a very good teacher!

I came across a very interesting paper called “Robots at Work”. It’s a 2018 study, so not some ancient research, and it looks into the economical impact of using robots at work and how it impact employment. I

If history repeats itself (and it often does), AI adoption may follow a similar path to industrial robot adoption in manufacturing.

It’s funny that once I started working on this blog, I saw this post on LinkedIn 😂

If you’re wondering how AI will change hiring and the job market in SEO and beyond, read on!

Robots at Work vs AI at Work

The “Robots at work” study blew my mind. It looked at “industrial robots” - which does not look like pop culture, movie-style robot btw 😂 - and how they impacted employment and productivity of firms across 17 developing countries and 14 industries between 1993 and 2007. ​

Here’s what they found:

1. Massive Productivity Gains

Firms that adopted industrial robots saw substantial productivity improvements.

To put this into perspective, the productivity boost was comparable to the steam engine’s contribution in the 19th century.

That’s huge.

2. Diminishing Returns

BUT… the authors of the study also found diminishing marginal gains.

Translation:
More robots did not always mean proportionally more productivity.

At some point, the productivity curve plateaued. Adding more robots stopped producing dramatic results.

More is not always more.

3. No overall job loss

Read that again.

No overall job loss.

Total employment levels stayed stable.

BUT…

The share of low-skilled workers decreased. So while jobs weren’t eliminated overall, the composition of the workforce shifted.

4. What Happened to Wages?

Not much.

There may have been small wage increases, but most of the financial benefits went to the firms themselves.

No big surprise… the big players won again 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

5. Lower Prices for Consumers

Here’s the twist:

Robot adoption lowered production costs, which reduced prices for consumers.

Lower prices increased demand.

Higher demand meant more revenue for firms - again 😂

Translation to AI and SEO

So what does this mean for AI adoption in SEO and other industries?

If history repeats itself:

1. SEO firms adopting AI correctly will be able to increase their productivity massively. If you have not heard yet, but shopify released an internal mandate making AI adoption mandatory to all it’s employees! And that’s not just for developers or data analysts.

If you’re wondering how is that going so far? I couldn’t find solid numbers published yet, but came across this post:

2. Using AI just for the sake of using it, won’t help. Also more is not more. Trying to use AI for everything won’t make you more productive on the contrary. I’m seeing people complaining how AI made them actually slower. This maybe why… you need to make sure that your use case will actually benefit from automation.

3. Your skillset and experience are your main protection against layoffs because of AI. And of course you need to know how to use the tools efficiently.

4. Do not expect a bigger salary on the long run, maybe now many companies are offering high salaries for SEOs with some AI skills, but that’s mainly because of rarity… the more people learn to use AI, the more the market will bounce back to similar-ish wage levels…

5. Good news for firm owners! I recently talked about this with Fery Kaszoni on my podcast. He is investing even more in AI, so I asked him if that meant he was laying people off. He said the opposite — he’s actually hiring more. He explained that if before AI for example, one employee could produce about 5 reports per month. With AI, that same employee can now produce 15 reports. Because his team can do more work, he can lower his prices. Lower prices mean more customers. And more customers mean he needs to hire even more people. It was refreshing to hear from someone who’s using AI correctly.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

So how will AI adoption change hiring in SEO? More advanced skillset will be expected, and knowledge on how to use AI will be a requirment.

The big question is, are you ready the shift?

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

“SEO Gets” it…. 🙂 SEO Gets is a powerful analytics platform that enhances your Google Search Console data by giving you up to 50× more rows of search data, longer historical storage, and a unified dashboard where you can monitor all your sites in one place. It makes SEO reporting and trend spotting easier with features like content groups, topic clusters, branded vs. non-branded performance, growing/decaying insights, cannibalization reports, and striking-distance keywords—all designed to help you find what to fix or improve faster without exporting data or wrestling with spreadsheets!

👉 Try SEO Gets here + use coupon sara10 to get a discount (affiliate link — I may earn a commission if you sign up)

So you may have heard, I migrated my websites from ghost.io to Substack and decided to tell you all about it. After all, it’s always interesting to see how SEOs actually migrate their own websites because as the Arabic saying goes “The carpenter’s door is (always) off its hinges” 🙂 Not this time!

Here’s what I did, but first Why?

Why I decided to move from Ghost to SubStack?

I was running my newsletter on ghost since ever since I launched back in 2022. But seriously, there was no point in paying for a service that I can get totally for free on substack. I was paying 55USD every month for what?

Of course this was not an easy decision because SubStack does have some limitations when it comes to SEO compared to ghost:

• The platform is JavaScript heavy

• If you ever offer paid subscriptions, substack will take a share

• Less functionality like redirects for example which is a pretty big deal when you’re doing a migration, eh? (Canadian for don’t you think 😂)

Now let’s talk about the steps

1# Moving the subscribers

This was the easiest most straightforward task in this messy process. Exported the subscribers list from ghost and imported them to substack.

But I made a mistake, I think this should’ve been the LAST STEP, since I was intending to use both substack and ghost in parallel for a bit till I make some decisions. Because what happened is, my subscribers started getting double emails in their inboxes and complaints started to flood in, while others just hit that unsubscribe button… it was a mess… but hey we live and we learn!

2# Moving the content

Next came moving the actual content: the blogs, the navigation menu, and the About page.

Not glamorous work. At all.

• Navigation menu — easy ✅

• About page — easy ✅

• Blogs? That’s where it got tedious.

I used Ghost’s export feature and imported the content into Substack. I also tried Substack’s “import from URL” option, but that only pulls the first 15 posts, which doesn’t help much when you’re sitting on ~100 articles.

And then there were the images.

For reasons I still don’t fully understand, images and screenshots didn’t carry over with the import. So yes, I manually copied and pasted every single one. Painful, time-consuming, and absolutely overkill… but sometimes that’s just what migrations demand if you want things done properly.

You do what you gotta do 🤷‍♀️

3# Domain name

Then came the zero hour, where I have to adjust my domain settings to point to point to substack. Easy, login in to your domain name provider, make the changes as per substack guidelines.

I must warn you though, that your website maybe unreachable/down for a few hours

4# The Redirects

Being not familiar with the substack CMS, I did not see this coming, but you cannot create redirects inside the substack CMS. The problem is:

• on ghost, blog urls were: domain/blog-title

• on substack they are: domain/p/blog-title

so redirects where not something I can skip, unless I want to start from scratch in search.

So:

• I just created a spreadsheet and mapped URLs.

  

• manually created a redirect to each and every page on my domain name provider:

But things are not always smooth sailing, migrations always come with some complications. The domain name provide does not allow adding long URLs, So for some URLs like “/do-companies-need-to-hire-seos-anymore-short-answer-yes-they-do” I’m unable to create a redirect, and it is what it is.

5# GSC

Last but not least, GSC… I already had a verification via html tag but that’s on ghost, so I verified via Domain name provider. This interestingly helped me see no interruption in data collected!

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

Nothing fancy but a migration is never a simple task, you always need to plan ahead, and then plan how to respond to random things that may come your way.

My biggest mistake is accidentally double sending my newsletter, definitely didn’t make many subscribers happy.

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.