3 chapters · 13 min read
The long wait for the bears
Every autumn a small bay town fills with visitors waiting for the water to freeze and the bears to walk out onto it.
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Field-tested SEO for B2B software teams: how pages rank, how AI answer engines pick their sources, and what to fix first. New posts every Tuesday and Thursday.
( 01 )
Fresh posts
Pick a desk. Every desk has its own colour, so you always know which part of search you are in.
Measurement How to Verify Rank Tracker Data After Reports of Google Poisoning SERP Results Ahrefs says 5 to 20 percent of results served to SERP data tools are affected. Here is how a B2B SaaS team can check its rankings before reporting a drop or a win. Molly Ashcroft 6 min 
AI Search How to Track Gemini Referral Traffic in GA4 After Google Added UTM Tags Gemini links now carry undocumented UTM tags, and GA4 sorts them by rules you can read. Here is how to test where your Gemini visits really land before you report them. Owen Mercer 7 min 
Technical SEO Which Image Formats Should a SaaS Site Use? What Google Says About JPEG XL Google Images and Discover do not support JPEG XL yet. Here is a practical format plan for product screenshots, icons and blog photos on a B2B software site. Grant Whitaker 7 min 
Technical SEO How to Serve a 503 During an Emergency PHP Patch Without Losing Rankings PHP2Shell patches are pushing sites offline. Here is how to return a 503, how long it is safe, what happens to robots.txt and how to check recovery. Grant Whitaker 7 min 
AI Search Gemini 4 Argon in Google AI Mode: How to Test Whether Your SaaS Brand Appears in Both Answers Argon reached AI Mode for paid subscribers on October 13. Here is what is known, what is a guess and how to run a clean side-by-side test. Owen Mercer 7 min 
Measurement Is AI Visibility Tracking Worth It? What Three New Traffic Studies Say for SaaS New studies find AI assistants send a sliver of Google's traffic, and AI ranking reports swing from run to run. Here is how a SaaS team should measure and budget. Molly Ashcroft 7 min 
Technical SEO Google's Search Console AI Opt-Out: What It Controls and Whether a SaaS Site Should Use It Google now lists a site-wide generative AI control among seven ways to keep content out of Search. Here is exactly what it does, what it skips and how to decide. Grant Whitaker 7 min 
Content Strategy How to Diagnose a SaaS Organic Traffic Drop: Five Causes and a Checklist Nearly half of 118 B2B SaaS companies in one agency study lost organic traffic. Before you rewrite anything, work out which of five causes hit you. Molly Ashcroft 7 min 
Measurement How to Read Bing's AI Performance Report: Citations, Grounding Queries and Citation Share Bing Webmaster Tools is the only major search platform that shows you where AI answers cite your pages. Here is how a SaaS team should read it. Owen Mercer 7 min 
Measurement Does Schema Markup Increase AI Citations? What Ahrefs' 1,885-Page Test Means for SaaS Teams Pages that carry JSON-LD get cited more often by AI. A 2026 controlled test asked whether the markup is the reason. The answer should change how you test your own site. Molly Ashcroft 7 min 
Backlinks How to Earn SaaS Backlinks With Public Data: A Digital PR Guide for the 2026 ACS Release The Census Bureau releases the 2025 American Community Survey 1-year estimates on October 29, 2026. Here is a step-by-step way to turn public data into links worth having. Grant Whitaker 7 min 
Technical SEO How to Reduce Google's Crawl Rate Safely on a SaaS Site in 2026 Google's October 2026 documentation update spells out how Retry-After works with 503 and 429 responses. Here is the safe way to slow Googlebot without losing pages. Grant Whitaker 8 min ( 02 ) — Start here Read bold.
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New here? Pick a reading track: a short, hand-picked path through one part of search, from first audit to AI citations.
42 min #AI Overviews Google's Search Console AI Opt-Out: What It Controls and Whether a SaaS Site Should Use It 6 stories 38 min #cities The great bagel détente 5 stories 28 min #AI citations Gemini 4 Argon in Google AI Mode: How to Test Whether Your SaaS Brand Appears in Both Answers 4 stories 46 min #small towns The ice road that appears every winter 4 stories
( 03 )
Long reads worth bingeing
3 chapters · 12 min read
The ice road that appears every winter
Each January a highway forms on a frozen river. By April it is gone again, and the towns along it plan their whole year around those few months.
Read it → 3 chapters · 11 min read
The quiet return of the co-op
Grain elevators, grocery stores, even broadband: in rural towns, owning things together is back.
Read it → ( 04 )
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- 01/ SEO How B2B software pages earn rankings: intent, on-page work, internal links and the basics that still decide it. 1 posts
- 02/ AI Search How AI answer engines choose, quote and cite sources, and what makes a page worth citing. 4 posts
- 03/ Content Strategy Choosing topics, building clusters and writing for buyers who search before they ever book a demo. 4 posts
- 04/ Backlinks Earning links that matter for SaaS: digital PR, partner pages, data studies and what to ignore. 2 posts
- 05/ Technical SEO Crawling, rendering, indexing, site speed and the JavaScript problems that hide SaaS pages from search. 6 posts
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Reading lists for every mood
For a coffee break
4 stories · 18mFor the commute
25 stories · 21mFor a slow Sunday
5 stories · 36m“The river was here first. We are just borrowing it for a few months.”
“Honey water, wood fire, no arguments before noon.”
“It is a game first. Whoever laughs loses, and I usually lose.”
“You don't come here to see a bear. You come to wait for one.”
“Nobody out here was waiting for a saviour. We were waiting for a meeting.”
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