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Practical guides on AI Discovery Files, llms.txt implementation, and making your website readable by AI systems.

29 articles published

Nine AI Bots Read Our Files in 30 Days. Here's the Free WordPress Plugin That Logged Them.
Guide 21 min read

Nine AI Bots Read Our Files in 30 Days. Here's the Free WordPress Plugin That Logged Them.

Most WordPress sites cannot tell you whether a single AI system has ever read them. Ours can. Over the 30 days to 4 August 2026 our own site logged 55 reads of its AI Discovery Files by 9 named bots, with PerplexityBot top and nothing blocked. Three weeks earlier the same site logged 43 reads from 11 bots and a different leader. Here is the full log, the free plugin that captured it, and an honest account of what a fetch does and does not prove.

MM Mark McNeece Read article
Your Next Customer Is an AI Agent: The 10 Things Your Website Must Publish
Guide 22 min read

Your Next Customer Is an AI Agent: The 10 Things Your Website Must Publish

Someone asks an assistant to find the best locksmith in Birmingham. Before a human sees anything, an agent has to answer seven questions about your business, and it can only answer them from what you published. Yext found 42.7% of people already use AI for local search and 28% have tried a new business on its say-so. Here are the ten things a website has to publish to survive that shortlist, each one shown working on a real UK trade site.

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Claude Opus 5 Checks Its Own Work. Here's When to Use It Over Sonnet.
Explainer 14 min read

Claude Opus 5 Checks Its Own Work. Here's When to Use It Over Sonnet.

Ask most AI models to fix something and they will tell you it is fixed. Whether it actually is remains your problem. Claude Opus 5, released 24 July 2026, is the first one that reliably goes and looks before it answers, and that asks before it does something it thinks is a bad idea. What changed, the benchmark numbers translated into plain English, and the honest line between using Opus 5 and the cheaper, faster Sonnet 5.

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Your Next Website Visitor Might Be an AI Agent, Not a Person
Explainer 26 min read

Your Next Website Visitor Might Be an AI Agent, Not a Person

AI stopped chatting and started doing. Agents now research, compare, book and buy on a customer's behalf, and they never see your design: Google's own guidance says they work from a machine-readable representation of your site. One study measured agent-ready sites completing tasks at 89.3% against 49.3% for conventional ones. Here is what those visitors need, why "I'll wait until it becomes a standard" is the wrong test, and the three free steps to prepare your website for AI agents.

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Blocking Every Crawler in robots.txt? AI Can Never Recommend You
Explainer 11 min read

Blocking Every Crawler in robots.txt? AI Can Never Recommend You

A client with domains dating back to the early 1990s blocks every crawler in robots.txt, submits sitemaps to Google Search Console, and wants to appear in Google's AI results. That combination cannot work. Here's what Disallow: / actually does, why AI assistants can never recommend a site their crawlers can't read, the server-overload myth behind the policy, and the free two-minute check that shows what your own robots.txt is really blocking.

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AI Visibility Trackers Are a Waste of Money. Here's the Free Test.
Explainer 10 min read

AI Visibility Trackers Are a Waste of Money. Here's the Free Test.

A whole category of software now charges £25 to £400 a month to count how often AI mentions your brand. That number barely repeats between runs, can't be acted on, and isn't what you think you're buying. Here's why mention-tracking is a vanity metric, the free five-minute test that answers the same question, and the deterministic check that's actually worth your attention.

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What AI Visibility Actually Is (And Why the Tracker Tools Get It Wrong)
Explainer 12 min read

What AI Visibility Actually Is (And Why the Tracker Tools Get It Wrong)

Almost every tool defines AI visibility as how often an AI assistant mentions your brand. Share of voice, citation counts, mention tracking. That is tracking, and it measures an output that changes every time you ask. AI visibility is the input side: whether a website can be discovered, interpreted, trusted, and safely used by AI systems at all. Here is the case for the inputs, made fairly against the strongest objections.

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Google I/O's Agentic Search Demos Have a Visibility Problem. The Answer Is Already a Standard.
News 10 min read

Google I/O's Agentic Search Demos Have a Visibility Problem. The Answer Is Already a Standard.

Google I/O 2026 showed Universal Cart, agentic booking, and information agents picking which businesses to recommend on the customer's behalf. Search Engine Journal called it the new business visibility problem on 30 May. Six named industry experts agree there is a problem. Nobody is connecting the answer. The fix is already a published standard, and it is deployable today.

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