What Counts As A Citation, According To Bradley Benner
Most people use citation and mention interchangeably. Bradley Benner draws a line, and it changes what you should be counting.
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The interview is the information gain
Every model can write your blog post already. It cannot have been in the room. Here is why we run a podcast instead of a content calendar.
SEO, SEO SOPs
SEO SOP: Audit Referral Quality by Source, Then Rebuild the Page
Gisele Navarro of HouseFresh measured her own visitors by source instead of trusting vendor claims: ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini referrals stay about two minutes, Reddit and YouTube stay six to eight across multiple pages. Here is the eight-step audit and the page rebuild it drove.
What AI referral traffic actually does on your site
HouseFresh measured it. AI referrals leave in two minutes. Reddit and YouTube referrals stay six to eight, across multiple pages. Gisele Navarro rebuilt the site around that gap.
Exact-match anchor text didn’t move rankings. Topical overlap did.
I pulled 46 complete search results and scored 303 ranking pages against their own backlink anchors. Exact-phrase anchors showed nothing. Anchors matching the query’s tokens, word order ignored, showed a real effect. Here is the method, the numbers and the 12.87 USD it cost.
SEO Podcast Summaries
How to Get Recommended by an LLM Before You Are in the Training Data
Patrick Stox, Ben Wills and Ben Senescu split AI visibility into two surfaces on two clocks – the retrieved pages you can work on this week, and the training data you cannot. Here is the practitioner version.
Is Google Search Console Accurate? I Checked It Against Clarity on 4 Sites
Search Console under-reported clicks on all four sites I measured, by 2% to 16%. Not dark clicks – a second gap on top of them. Here is the method and seven prompts to test your own site.
SEO, SEO SOPs
SEO SOP: Audit Blog Topics Against the Product Catalog
Most blog programs carry topics nobody can defend against the product catalog, protected by an email click. Laura Hoot of GPO gives the eight-step audit: name the destination page and CTA for every topic, kill or re-aim the ones that cannot, and re-seed the calendar from the catalog outward.
SEO, SEO SOPs
SEO SOP: Control Which Pages Google Sends Your Paid Clicks To
Google’s AI Max now picks which page on your own site a paid click lands on. Lisa Raehsler of Big Click Co lays out the eight-step audit and exclusion pass to run before the February rollout makes it mandatory.
Hey Search Console! Where Are My F*3Kin’ Clicks, Bro?
The median Search Console property attaches a query to just 34.9% of its clicks. I measured the dark-click gap across 35 properties and confirmed the one export that does not lose them.
Your Actual CTR: Three Prompts To Pull It From Search Console
Published CTR curves describe somebody else’s site. Three copy-paste prompts that pull your real click-through rate out of Search Console, plus the one thing you should never ask any tool to build.
Read the SERP Before You Promise the Keyword
Alex Radetic of Nuvo Agency still does keyword research by opening the search and looking at it. His SERP-reading method, why Search Console impressions are inflated by AI Overviews, and the sixty-seven ChatGPT leads that reframed his AEO pitch.
SEO SOP: Validate the Not-Indexed Bucket Before You Fix It
AJ Kohn checked how many pages in the “Crawled – currently not indexed” bucket were actually indexed. Across 24 clients it ran from 99.8% down to 0.5%. Seven steps to score your own bucket before you spend a penny fixing it.
SEO SOP: Build a Claude Skill That Does Your Pre-Work
Erika Braeger of Ten Speed builds Claude skills that absorb the hour of data-gathering before an analysis starts, and stop there. Eight steps to scope, build, QA and measure one for your own team.
SEO SOP: Mine Your 404 Report for AI-Hallucinated URLs
ChatGPT invents URLs on your domain and sends real people to them. Your 404 report is the list. The step-by-step for turning invented pages into real ones, from Stephanie Long’s Unscripted SEO interview.
“Vetted by AI” Is a Real Disclaimer. Here Is How to Hire SEO Help That Isn’t.
Fiverr and Upwork’s “vetted” section says vetted by AI in the fine print. Stephanie Long of Junction Jack on how to actually hire SEO help, plus the verification habit that catches what the tools invent.
The Naperville Test: What ChatGPT Actually Cites When It Recommends a Local Business
A viral thread says prompt ChatGPT ten times, screenshot the sources, and go get profiles wherever they repeat. I ran it across 13 runs with SERP controls. No source appeared in a majority of runs, 56 percent of citations pointed at the firms own websites, and on long-tail queries ChatGPT matched Google top 4 exactly.
SEO SOP: Validate Keywords With Three Weeks of Google Ads
Before you commit six months of SEO to a keyword set, buy three weeks of ads on it. The three-keyword validation test Gert Mellak runs when a client’s keyword choice is wrong.
8 Reporting Changes After Gert Mellak Called Impressions “All Crap”
Gert Mellak has already pulled impressions out of his client reports, because bots create them and Google does not filter them. Eight practitioner changes from the episode: kill the impressions column, stop pricing off search volume, settle keyword arguments with three weeks of Google Ads, and track high intent instead of traffic.
GSC Regex Checker: Will Your Pattern Actually Run?
Paste a regex and find out whether Search Console, GA4 and Microsoft Clarity will actually run it. Catches lookaheads, backreferences and the other PCRE constructs Google’s RE2 engine silently refuses.