Blog

Analysis from a production codebase audit. Each post leads with a number or an original finding rather than a summary of somebody else's post.

• Methodology2026-07-31 · 3 min

  Do solo founders need Ahrefs? What $129 a month buys, job by job

  Ahrefs Lite is $129 a month and Semrush Pro is $139.95. An honest accounting of which SEO jobs need a subscription index, which are covered by free tools, and which are implementation work no tool does for you.

• Frameworks2026-07-31 · 4 min

  Next.js SEO: the complete App Router setup, file by file

  Metadata API, robots.ts, sitemap.ts, JSON-LD, canonical URLs and self-hosted fonts: the six file conventions that carry Next.js App Router SEO, from a site that runs all of them in production.

• Structured data2026-07-27 · 3 min

  Does schema markup work? What 42 types on one site actually did

  An honest accounting from a production audit. Four types produced a visible result. Thirty-eight did not, and are still worth shipping for reasons that do not show up in a SERP screenshot.

• Crawling2026-07-27 · 3 min

  Sitemap lastmod: why one build timestamp on 2,100 URLs is worse than none

  A sitemap claiming every page changed at 03:14 this morning is not a freshness signal. It is noise, and the trust you lose is not recoverable by fixing it later.

• Methodology2026-07-27 · 4 min

  Everything our own SEO still gets wrong

  Six specific failures on the site selling an SEO playbook, each with what it costs and how it would be fixed. Published because a claim of completeness is not checkable and a list of gaps is.

• AI search2026-07-27 · 3 min

  llms.txt and llms-full.txt: what to actually put in them

  The format, a complete example, the four blocks that do real work, and an honest account of what is measurable about any of it.

• Programmatic2026-07-27 · 4 min

  Programmatic SEO vs doorway pages: the one test that separates them

  Strip the entity name from the page. If nothing unique remains, do not publish the tier. Worked through three real page types, including one that fails.

• Crawling2026-07-27 · 3 min

  Should you block AI crawlers? The robots.txt decision, crawler by crawler

  Most sites ship whatever robots.txt their framework generated. Here is the crawler-by-crawler analysis, and why the AI-versus-search framing produces the wrong policy.