Insights, Tutorials & Best Practices

SEO Strategies

State of AI crawler blocking 2026: we checked 123 sites' robots.txt

We ran 123 well-known sites' robots.txt through our own matcher. The headline isn't a single number — it's the split: news publishers block AI crawlers at 90%, developer sites at 0%.

Andrei

May 31, 2026 • 5 min

Technical SEO

Redirect chains explained: what they are, why they hurt SEO, and how to fix them

Redirect chains rarely break anything loudly — they waste crawl budget, slow every load, and stall indexing. What 301/302/307/308 mean, the real harm, and how to collapse a chain to one hop.

Andrei

May 29, 2026 • 12 min

Link Building

Dofollow vs nofollow links: what they are and when each matters

A nofollow link won't pass ranking credit like a regular link does, but calling it worthless is wrong. What dofollow, nofollow, sponsored, and ugc do, and how to check any link in seconds.

Andrei

May 29, 2026 • 10 min

Checklists

Quarterly backlink audit checklist for agencies: 40 items for 2026

Browser-saved 40-item quarterly backlink audit checklist for agencies — lost-link recovery (18-26% conversion vs 8.5% cold outreach), donor-health degradation tracking, anchor portfolio drift detection, disavow review (sparingly per Mueller / Illyes / Gabe), and reporting that survives a CFO review.

Andrei

May 27, 2026 • 40 min

Checklists

On-page SEO optimization checklist: 35 items for the 2026 audit

Browser-saved 35-item on-page SEO audit for 2026 — title-H1 coherence (the lever that drops Google's title-rewrite rate from 76% to 20%), self-canonical + noindex checks, post-HCU content quality, AI-extraction structure, internal-link anchor variety.

Andrei

May 27, 2026 • 39 min

Checklists

Site migration SEO checklist: 37 items for surviving a 2026 domain move

Browser-saved 37-item checklist for surviving a domain change or replatform in 2026 — pre-migration content cull, 1:1 redirect mapping, indexability on the new domain, day-zero launch verification, AI-surface continuity, and anti-patterns that still tank migrations.

Andrei

May 27, 2026 • 45 min

Checklists

Technical SEO checklist before site launch: 36 items for a clean 2026 go-live

Browser-saved 36-item checklist for going live in 2026 — indexability staging-leaks, canonicals, Core Web Vitals field-data targets, entity-signal schema, and four anti-patterns being sold as pre-launch SEO that don't survive scrutiny against 2025-2026 data.

Andrei

May 27, 2026 • 42 min

Checklists

AI Overviews + GEO readiness checklist: what 2026 data shows

Browser-saved 22-item checklist for getting cited by AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Built on Ahrefs' 75K-brand correlation study, Princeton's GEO paper, BrightEdge AIO data, and Profound's citation audits.

Andrei

May 26, 2026 • 21 min

Checklists

Indexation troubleshooting checklist: when to fix, when to accept

Browser-saved 22-item checklist for diagnosing Google indexation problems in 2026. Distinguishes the two GSC "not indexed" statuses, separates technical from quality blockers, and tells you when to stop fighting and fix the page.

Andrei

May 26, 2026 • 19 min