Is your website ready for AI agents?
A practical test for AI agent readiness, based on an audit of 50 UK agency websites and the latest shopping technology.
Notes on · Search & AI
Notes from the table.
Things I'm learning, testing and thinking about in SEO, AI visibility and automation. Some come from project work, others from research or a question I haven't quite finished answering.
The ideas and views are mine. I use AI to help with research, drafting and editing, and I'm responsible for what I publish.
50 UK agencies, none met the Strong bar
50 agencies, one result: the mean was 40.2/100. Best in Show tests UK marketing and SEO agency sites against my published Modern SEO + AI Optimisation Standard.
AI chatbot market share: usage is not citation
Chatbot usage and website referrals tell different stories. Here is the market share that matters for AI visibility.
Google's AI Mode cites Dog on the Table. Until I ask a second question.
AI Mode cited Dog on the Table on 13 of 25 questions. One follow-up later, 12 citations had disappeared. This changes how I measure AI visibility.
AI-disclosure rules are now live in the EU: what marketers actually have to do
Article 50 of the EU AI Act applies from 2 August 2026. What marketing teams must disclose, what's myth and why the key exemption is also a GEO strategy.
The 14% problem: why a single AI visibility score is a category error
Google's AI Mode shares just 14% of its URLs with Google's own top ten. Cross-engine citation overlap runs as low as 16%. A blended AI visibility score can't tell you where you stand.
The file nobody reads just got added to the test everybody runs
llms.txt barely gets fetched by AI, and Google says it doesn't use it. So why did Google's own Lighthouse start grading it? An honest, data-led take.
Answer engine optimisation is just SEO that admits the answer moved
AEO isn't a new discipline. The answer moved to AI summaries; the fundamentals of good SEO didn't. Here's what actually changed and what didn't.
Google didn't say it. Its AI did. A German court says that's the same thing.
A German court just ruled that Google owns the words its AI Overviews generate. Why the ruling is right, why it's a mess, and why the big G will switch the answers off before it stands behind them.
The clicks aren't dying. They're emigrating.
Google clicks are falling and the panic industry is booming. Strip out everyone's incentives, mine included, and the data says traffic is moving, not ending.
Who AI tells UK founders to raise from
I ran 40 founder fundraising questions through ChatGPT, twice each. Over half named investors and cited no source. The data, and what it means.
LLM SEO is a contradiction in terms
You cannot optimise a model's frozen training data, and optimising what it retrieves live is just SEO. So LLM SEO is a contradiction, and this is what to do instead.
GEO is a bad name for it. It won anyway.
The industry settled on GEO for the work of getting cited in AI answers. It's an ambiguous, slightly inaccurate name almost nobody loves. This is how it won anyway.