AI Overviews now appear on a meaningfully large and growing share of Google searches, and getting cited inside one requires a different playbook than climbing the traditional ten blue links. AI overviews optimization is close cousin to classic SEO, sharing much of its...
You cannot improve what you cannot measure, and knowing how to track brand mentions in ChatGPT reliably is genuinely harder than checking a classic ranking position. Here is how to track brand mentions in ChatGPT with the methods currently available, and an honest...
Classic SEO has Search Console and two decades of rank tracking infrastructure behind it. Measuring visibility inside AI-generated answers has none of that maturity yet, which is exactly why the current crop of llm rank tracking tools matters and why none of them...
Google stopped matching keywords a long time ago. It matches entities, people, places, organizations, concepts, and the relationships between them, and that shift is exactly what knowledge graph optimization is built around: being recognized as a clear, consistent...
In May 2024, over 2,500 pages of internal Google API documentation, detailing more than 14,000 potential ranking attributes, became public through what appears to have been an accidental exposure rather than a hack or whistleblower disclosure. This google api leak...
Scaled content abuse gets misread constantly as "Google penalizes AI content," and that misreading causes a lot of unnecessary panic and equally unnecessary confidence. Google's actual policy, introduced in the March 2024 spam update, is more specific than that, and...
A manual action is when a member of Google's Search Quality team, a real person, has personally reviewed a site and applied a penalty for violating Google's guidelines. Unlike an algorithmic penalty, this is not automatic, and it always comes with a paper trail: a...
For over a decade, Google publicly denied that clicks directly influenced search rankings. Then, during the 2023 US v. Google antitrust trial, Google's own VP of Search testified under oath that a system called navboost is "one of the most important ranking signals"...
Every few months, someone in an SEO forum claims that a search quality rater personally downgraded their site, and someone else corrects them: raters cannot touch your rankings directly. Both halves of that exchange miss the more useful point. A search quality rater...
Delete the weak pages and watch the whole site's rankings improve. It is one of the most repeated pieces of SEO advice out there, and it is also one of the most frequently applied without any actual measurement of whether it worked. Content pruning can be genuinely...
SEO split testing means dividing comparable pages into an untouched control group and a variant group that receives one isolated change, then measuring the gap between the two once it clears a statistical significance threshold. It borrows its logic directly from the...
Open any SEO forum and you will find the same argument running in circles: does keyword density still matter, does publishing frequency move rankings, does adding a year to your title tag actually help. Everyone has an opinion. Almost nobody has run a controlled test....
Most SEO advice on indexing is cargo cult behaviour. Someone observed that requesting indexing seemed to speed things up, published it as a tip, and it became received wisdom. The problem is nobody isolated the variable. Nobody compared requested vs non-requested...
Schema markup is one of the most underused tools in both SEO and AEO strategies. Despite being around since 2011 and supported by every major search engine, the majority of websites still do not implement it correctly — or at all. In 2026, that gap has become a...
For most of its existence, Google's E-E-A-T framework was treated as a concern for health and finance sites. If you were writing about medical symptoms or investment advice, you needed credentials, named authors, and verifiable expertise. If you were writing about...
KatvTech runs controlled experiments on Google ranking factors. Here’s the exact methodology we use. Check out how we set up tests, control for variables, measure outcomes, and publish results.