The SEO Turtle journal
What we’re working on, what we’re learning, and the questions worth spending a little more time with.
Query fan-out is the buzzword of mid-2026, and for once it points at something real. Google AI Mode breaks one question into ten or more parallel sub-searches and stitches the answers together. We looked at how the same pattern already shows up in ordinary Search Console reporting, and worked out which parts of the new advice are useful and which are just tools selling you a problem.
Search Console is showing the same pattern everywhere: impressions rising, clicks flat or falling. The industry calls it the great decoupling and blames AI Overviews. We did the part most takes skip and worked out how much of it is actually AI and how much is just SEO doing what it always did.
AI agents are starting to browse, compare and check out on behalf of real customers. We break down what is genuinely happening, what is still demo-ware, and the handful of things that decide whether an agent ever puts you in the basket.
The GEO vs SEO debate has turned into a turf war on LinkedIn. We run both for clients every day, so here is the version without the ego. What genuinely differs, where it is the same job with a new label, and a simple way to split your effort that holds up under real data.
A new AEO tool launches every week and the acronym is in every agency deck. We strip the term back to what actually moves the needle, where it is just SEO with a new label, and the few habits that genuinely earn you citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
Eighteen Perplexity rank trackers compared across pricing, accuracy and reporting. Every entry price re-checked against the vendor's own page on September 1, 2026, and a surprising number had moved. Includes which tools gate Perplexity behind a higher tier.
Perplexity rank tracking has gone from three tools and some hand-waving to a crowded SERP in eighteen months. We tested the tools, ran our own prompts, and dug into Perplexity's actual ranking signals. Here is what is real and what is dashboard theatre.
llms.txt has become the most adopted file in SEO that nobody can prove is being read. We have been running it across client sites for six months. Here is what we are seeing, what the search data says, and whether you should bother.
Google says AI Mode has passed a billion monthly users, and the signals behind its citations are not the ones classic SEO trained you on. Here is the GEO playbook we are using with clients right now.
Most SEO advice assumes you can publish 2,000 word guides. What about sites that genuinely don't have much to say? Here is how we got a single-page game ranking.
Most sites that block AI crawlers block the wrong ones. Here is every major AI bot user agent, checked against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, Apple, Meta and Amazon's own documentation, sorted into training crawlers, search crawlers and user fetchers, with three robots.txt policies you can paste in.
Screaming Frog has let you run your own JavaScript on every rendered page since version 20. Most people still use it as a link checker. Here is how the seoSpider API actually works, the snippets we run on real crawls, and when the built-in AI tab is the better tool.
Google renders your JavaScript. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity do not. That one fact changes what a JavaScript SEO audit has to check in 2026. Here is how Google's pipeline works, how to see exactly what it rendered, and the fixes we keep making on React, Next.js, Vue and Angular sites.
Nearly half of US adults have used ChatGPT and a billion people a month use Google's AI Mode, yet trust in AI answers sits at 20 percent and most users go back to Google to check. Here is what the survey research says about why people use AI search, what they use it for, and what a business should change.
In one week of July 2026, four companies guided to roughly $720 to $745 billion of capital spending this year, most of it on the machines that answer search queries. Here is the money in one table, what it buys, why it means subsidised answers, ads inside them and agents that book for you, and how much of the bubble talk is worth your attention.
Google still takes more than 91% of search referrals, ChatGPT has 900 million weekly users, and Gemini just passed a billion. All three are true and none of them measure the same thing. Here are the 2026 figures with dates and sources, what market share means when the AI answer lives inside Google, and the number a business should actually be watching.
Legal is the most expensive category in Google Ads again this year, and most law firm accounts waste the budget on structure, not bids. Here is how we would build a law firm PPC account in 2026: which campaign types earn a place, what AI Max and ads in AI Mode change, and how to keep intake and compliance under control.
A dental practice competes in a three-mile radius, and most of that competition now happens inside Google Business Profile, the local pack and AI answers rather than on the website. Here is the working checklist we use for practices: categories, services, reviews that stay inside Google's and the GDC's rules, treatment and location pages, schema and tracking.