IndexWire — the signal in the noise.

the signal in the noise.

SEOFeb 11, 2026

Search Console's Hidden Half: Anonymized Queries

An Ahrefs study of 9 billion clicks found 46% come from queries Google won't show you. Here's what that means for keyword strategy and what BigQuery can (and can't) do about it.

How to Audit Your Brand's AI Search Visibility

A practical framework for auditing what AI search platforms say about your brand. SparkToro research shows AI responses produce nearly unique brand lists each time, making traditional rank tracking useless. Manual audits of 20-30 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini reveal outdated pricing, hallucinated features, and positioning gaps. Platform divergence is significant — only 11% domain overlap between ChatGPT and Perplexity citations. Brand search volume correlates more strongly with AI citations than backlinks do, and comparative listicles account for 32.5% of all citations.

Google Search Console Metrics Most SEOs Misread

Google Search Console's core metrics — impressions, average position, and CTR — are widely misinterpreted because the aggregation logic and benchmarks were designed for a simpler SERP. Property-level and URL-level aggregation produce fundamentally different numbers from the same data. Average position paradoxically declines when pages perform better by ranking for more queries. AI Overviews have inflated impression counts by 27–49% while cratering organic CTR by up to 61%, rendering historical benchmarks obsolete. The fix: stop reading metrics in isolation and start tracking them as ratios segmented by query type and SERP feature presence.

Programmatic SEO: When Scale Works and When It's Spam

Google's enforcement against scaled content abuse has intensified with three spam updates in 2025 and 750K monthly manual penalties. Programmatic SEO still works when each template-generated page delivers genuine user utility — as Zapier's $140M integration pages demonstrate — but commodity pages like ZoomInfo's are seeing 80%+ traffic declines. The 2026 playbook: fewer pages with real differentiation, conversion rate as the quality signal, and internal linking that earns crawl budget.

E-E-A-T: What Google Measures vs. What SEOs Assume

E-E-A-T describes what Google wants its algorithms to reward, not a signal engineers directly implement. Quality raters provide calibration feedback, not ranking inputs. The algorithm measures behavioral proxies — click patterns via Navboost, topical consistency, content originality, and link relationships — not credentials or trust badges. Most E-E-A-T optimization advice targets the wrong layer.

Schema Markup ROI: Which Types Drive Rich Results

Google deprecated seven schema types in 12 months, exposing the critical gap between markup Google validates and markup it actually renders. Only six schema types consistently produce rich results in 2026: Product (180% CTR increases), LocalBusiness (45% more calls), JobPosting (up to 1194% CTR lift), Review, Event, and Video. The ROI formula is straightforward — incremental clicks from rich results multiplied by average CPC — but most organizations skip proper baselining and measurement. The article provides a prioritization framework by business model and argues the era of maximal markup is over.

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AI SearchUpdated Feb 11, 2026

How to Audit Your Brand's AI Search Visibility

Traditional SEO metrics don't work here. A practical framework for finding out what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini actually say about your brand.

AI SearchUpdated Feb 11, 2026

AI Visibility Tracking: What to Measure and How

Individual AI query rankings are noise. Aggregate visibility across thousands of prompts is the signal. Here's a measurement framework that works on a small-team budget.

SEOUpdated Feb 11, 2026

Schema Markup ROI: Which Types Drive Rich Results

Google deprecated seven schema types in 12 months. Here's where to focus your structured data effort based on actual CTR and conversion data.

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