Footnotes Desk

Articles

1. What first-party data shows about AI search: Search Console, Bing AI Performance and their limits^{, 4 sources}

   Google folds AI Overviews and AI Mode into Search Console totals, while Bing reports citations directly. Here is what each report measures and where each stops.

   Footnotes DeskLLM visibilityOct 29, 20265 min read

2. llms.txt: what the spec says, what Common Crawl found, and what Google's AI guidance covers^{, 3 sources}

   The llms.txt proposal is a small markdown file with a defined format. Adoption is real, but none of the sources shows it affects AI search visibility.

   Footnotes DeskAEOOct 29, 20265 min read

3. Google adds inline links, official-site sections and creator profiles to AI Mode and AI Overviews^{, 3 sources}

   Google's Oct 15 update moves inline links higher, tests a section for official sites and adds creator profiles. Here is what it means for publishers.

   Footnotes DeskAI searchOct 29, 20265 min read

4. Cloudflare AI Crawl Control and pay per crawl: what they show and what the ratios miss^{, 3 sources}

   What a site owner can see and do with Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control, where pay per crawl stands, and how to read crawl-to-refer ratios.

   Footnotes DeskAI discoveryOct 29, 20264 min read

5. How often AI search engines cite the wrong source: what two audits measured^{, 3 sources}

   The Tow Center's excerpt-tracing test and the Stanford verifiability audit measure different things, but both find that AI search citations are frequently wrong.

   Footnotes DeskLLM visibilityOct 29, 20265 min read

6. AI crawlers by purpose: what each fetches and the robots.txt lines that control it^{, 7 sources}

   OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic, Apple, Google and Common Crawl crawlers sorted by training, search and user-requested fetches, with the robots.txt rules for each.

   Footnotes DeskAI discoveryOct 29, 20264 min read