Working notes on search, AI answers, analytics, and site performance. We write when something is worth checking: a change that needs explaining, a common practice that turns out not to hold up, a real business website inspected from the outside. Every post names the free tool or the source behind the finding, so you can check the same thing on your own site.
Some of it runs long enough to have a name. From the Outside takes a real business website, inspects what can be inspected without access or credentials, and says what we found.
A well-built medical spa site with proper structured data, a clear booking path, and no analytics of any kind. Nothing records whether any of it works. What we found and what we'd fix first.
Read moreA long-established HVAC and plumbing firm runs three tag manager containers at once and blocks AI crawlers it never chose to block. What we looked at, what we found, and what we'd fix first.
Read moreAn independent restaurant publishes its full menu in readable text and still tells machines nothing about it, while two analytics properties leave no answer to which one is right. What we found and what we'd fix first.
Read moreTwo unrelated local businesses returned byte-identical AI crawler rules. The cause was a hosting feature that rewrites robots.txt automatically, and it has been applied to millions of sites. Here's how to check yours in about two minutes.
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