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Six things, and the rest of this site makes sense
Read the six headings and you have got it. Open one if you want more.
About ninety seconds either way.
1 | Google used to hand you a list Ten links. You clicked one. That was the deal for twenty-five years. | + |
You typed a question and got ten websites. One of them could be yours, and everything anyone ever told you about your website was built on top of that arrangement.
2 | Now it just answers Three businesses, named. Nobody visits a website. | + |
Someone asks for the best med spa in their city and gets an answer, not a list.
someone asks: best med spa in Scottsdale
Three good options are Desert Bloom, Camelback Skin and Sonoran Med Spa…
If your name is not in there, you never knew it happened.3 | Something has to read your site first They are called crawlers. There are about thirty now. Two years ago there was one. | + |
AI knows nothing about your business until a small program goes and reads it.
| Retrieval crawlers | Can name you in an answer |
| Training crawlers | Read everything, send you nobody |
One file decides which get in. Most owners have never opened it, and plenty had it changed by a plugin years ago.
4 | There is no alarm when this goes wrong Your phone just rings a little less, and you blame the season. | + |
Every other problem announced itself. Website down, someone calls by lunchtime. Ads stop working, it shows in the numbers on Monday.
This one is silent. Nothing appears in your website statistics, because there was never a visit to lose.
5 | Almost nobody has fixed it yet Not a race you are behind in. A race that has barely started. | + |
If AI is not naming you, it is probably not naming your competitor either. The only thing available right now is timing.
6 | Checking properly means reading your accounts A real ask. So here is who decided what we ask for. | + |
Anyone can read your website. To see whether crawlers actually visited, we need your Google accounts and your server logs.
Paul Sanford spent thirteen years at the Department of Defense investigating cyber crime — finding out how businesses got taken, and by whom. He built our access model and reviews every tool before it ships.
The answer to “why should I trust you with this” is that he spent a decade cleaning up after the alternative.
Six words you will keep hearing
CrawlerA program that reads websites
IndexedGoogle has read you and knows you exist
RankingYour spot in the list of links
CitationNamed and linked. This one rings your phone.
robots.txtThe file that decides who can read you
That is the whole idea. Now go and see yours.
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