B2B SaaS SEO, measured on 69 sites
We checked 69 SaaS sites against the advice Google shows for "b2b saas seo". Most blog in a subfolder and build rival pages; 27 serve Markdown to AI agents.
Field notes
Insights
Notes on technical SEO and Generative Engine Optimization — what we have measured, what we are still unsure about, and what we would do differently. Most of it is tested on this site before it is recommended to anyone else.
01 — latest
02 — the archive
More notes
D2C SEO, measured on 43 brands
We checked 43 D2C brands against Google's own docs. The platform writes the product markup; stores skip shipping and returns, and FAQ rich results are gone.
GEO for ecommerce, measured
Shopify already sends store catalogs to ChatGPT and Google AI Mode by default. What we found on 60 D2C stores, and what a study says about product copy.
Entity SEO, measured on 248 sites
Entity SEO is saying who you are in a form a machine can resolve. We read 248 sites: 76% declare an entity, 32% do it completely, 6% link Wikidata.
Off-page SEO for ecommerce, measured
Every guide tells stores to get links from creators; Google calls paid or gifted links spam unless marked. And what 31 ecommerce AI Overviews cite.
GEO vs SEO: the overlap, measured
Google says optimising for AI search is still SEO. On 65 AI Overviews we captured, first place was cited 38% of the time; the two lists overlap by a quarter.
llms.txt: who publishes it and who reads it
Google Search ignores llms.txt and Chrome Lighthouse checks for it. We counted the file on 276 domains and read the three 2026 documents both claims come from.
Structured data for AI answers, measured
Google says no schema is needed for AI answers and Bing says it helps. We read 485 ranking pages and 248 domains across 75 searches to see what carries what.
AI Overviews cite what Google does not rank
We captured 75 US commercial SEO searches. Across 348 AI Overview citations, 54% named a site that was not in the organic top ten of the same page.
What answer engine optimization actually is
AEO is being cited inside AI answers, not just ranked below them. What Google says it requires, what the research found, and what our 75-search study shows.
Almost nobody has decided about AI crawlers
We read the robots.txt of 161 D2C brands, SaaS companies and publishers. Commerce has no position on AI crawlers. Publishing has one, and it is blocking.
What zero JavaScript did to Core Web Vitals
Elivate SEO ships no client-side JavaScript on content pages. Here are the Lighthouse numbers, and the two fixes that had nothing to do with JavaScript.
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