@crawled

Troll Farms, AI, and the Engineering of Public Opinion

Feb 27 · 3 min read · A few months ago, I wrote about the “Manufactured Web,” focusing mainly on bought reviews. Fake five-star ratings. Reputation padding. Synthetic trust signals. But a recent MSSP podcast episode pushed

Why the February 2026 Google Update Feels Like a Ranking Drop (Even When It Isn’t)

Feb 12 · 4 min read · Over the past few weeks, I’ve received a steady stream of emails from business owners asking the same question: “Why did our website drop after the most recent Google update?” The timing makes sense. On February 5, 2026, Google officially released th...

How AI Visibility Really Works (and What’s Worth Paying Attention To)

Feb 3 · 4 min read · If you’ve invested money in third-party tools promising AI visibility tracking, rankings in ChatGPT, or guaranteed placement in generative answer engines, it’s time for a reality check. The way AI systems serve answers today makes those “AI rank repo...

Why SEO Matters More in 2026 Than Ever Before

Jan 18 · 4 min read · For years, people have predicted the death of SEO. Each major technological shift, from social media to voice assistants to artificial intelligence, has sparked the same conclusion: search is changing, so SEO must be becoming obsolete. In 2026, this ...

From SEO to GEO: How to Rank (or Get Cited) in the Age of AI Answer Engines

Jan 4 · 5 min read · Search is no longer just about finding information. It is about summarizing it, synthesizing it, and deciding which sources deserve to be referenced at all. For most of the past two decades, SEO had a clear objective: rank higher, earn clicks, grow t...