Commentary

Google is deliberately serving fake results pages to suspected scrapers. It isn’t blocking them. It answers them, with complete, normal-looking pages whose organic results have been swapped out. Nothing on the page gives it away. That’s the finding of Nozzle’s…

Muse is Meta’s agent, not Facebook search. What Meta announced, how AI Mode differs, the UK position, and a six-layer stack for AI discovery. Dated.

Six non-league football calls from May 2025, checked in October 2026: crowds up, the two-promotion rule unchanged, and one fact I got wrong.

Four 2025–26 surveys agree: shoppers let AI agents recommend and fill a basket, not pay. What agents check before they recommend you, and what merchants control.

An AI crawler in your logs proves a page was fetched. It does not prove the page was used, credited or clicked.

Five labels any AI visibility number needs before anyone can check it: date, prompt, model, runs and one change at a time.

Half of new articles are now AI-generated. What stands out is what a model can’t have: your own data, a date, a definition, the raw file, and someone who comes back to check.

I tested the EntityMap validator on 9 October 2026. It checks a file’s shape, not whether it’s true or whether anything reads it. None of nine UK newsbrands I checked publish one.

Publishers write AI crawler rules. Most small business sites write nothing, so the platform’s default decides for them.

“Who’s the best plumber in Leeds?” has no checkable answer. AI engines answer it anyway, and I think they’ll keep doing so.