RankMerlin blog
Get found. By both.
Plain-English guides on classic SEO and AI visibility: what the checks mean, why sites fail them, and exactly how to fix each one.
Redesigned your site? Check for orphaned staging pages first
A redesign that goes sideways rarely looks like a ranking drop. It looks like a forgotten staging subdomain or missing redirects, quietly costing you the traffic you had before.
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Google Search Console won't show you this: the AI traffic blind spot
Search Console reports clicks on a ranked URL. It has no way to show an AI Overview citation with no click, or a mention inside ChatGPT. Why that gap is growing fast.
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Running Yoast and Rank Math at the same time? Here's what it breaks
A redesign or agency handoff often leaves two SEO plugins active on one site without anyone deciding that on purpose. What breaks, and how to check your own site in two minutes.
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How many pages does an SEO audit actually need to check?
Crawl-budget advice is written for sites with a million URLs. Here's what an audit actually needs to cover on a typical small business site, and why 25 pages is usually plenty.
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Do AI assistants mention your business? A 15-minute self-check
A 15-minute, no-tool first pass: ask the assistants directly, check whether their crawlers can even reach you, then read your own pages the way a model would.
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Local businesses in AI answers: Google Business Profile, NAP consistency, and reviews
AI answers for local queries lean on your Business Profile, NAP consistency, and reviews, not your homepage copy. What Google's own ranking factors are, and a practical checklist.
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Internal linking: the cheapest ranking boost you are not using
Internal links cost nothing and are fully within your control. What Google's own documentation says they do, why orphan pages go unindexed, and a 30-minute fix.
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Markdown versions of your pages for AI: llms-full.txt and .md mirrors explained
llms.txt is a short index. llms-full.txt and plain .md mirrors are where the actual content lives for a model to read. What each one does, and realistic expectations for adoption.
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Google AI Overviews: what a small business site can actually do
AI Overviews already cut click-through to the top result by over half on some queries. What they are built from, and the levers a small business site still has.
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How ChatGPT and Perplexity decide which sites to cite
The sources listed under a ChatGPT or Perplexity answer are chosen by separate crawlers and a quotability filter, not a ranking page. What determines whether your site gets lifted in.
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SEO vs GEO: what carries over and what changes
Generative engine optimization is not a replacement for SEO. It is a second scoreboard on the same foundation. What transfers directly, what is genuinely new, and what to ignore.
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robots.txt and sitemap.xml in plain English
Two small text files decide how machines walk your site. What each one does, what a healthy version looks like, and the copy-pasted rules that quietly hide sites.
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Thin content: how 200-word pages drag down your whole site
Search engines judge sites, not just pages. A tail of empty service stubs and auto-generated archives tells them most of your site is not worth indexing. Find and fix the tail.
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Entity clarity: does anyone know who you actually are?
Machines cannot infer from your hero image that you are a Warsaw tattoo studio. Name, place, and offer need to be stated in text. The NAP test and where sites fail it.
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FAQ blocks: one section, two search engines
A good FAQ section feeds classic search and AI assistants with the same few paragraphs. What to ask, how to answer, and the schema that makes it machine-readable.
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Titles and meta descriptions: the 60-character sales pitch
The title tag is the most-read sentence you will ever write about each page, and the description is its ad copy. Formulas, length rules, and the duplicate trap.
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Answer-shaped content: write so AI assistants can quote you
Assistants do not summarize your brand story. They lift direct statements. The question-heading plus direct-answer pattern, and how to retrofit it onto existing pages.
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JSON-LD for small business: the four schema types that matter
Structured data sounds enterprise. It is actually a paragraph of JSON that tells machines what your business is. The four types that cover a typical site, with examples.
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Are you blocking GPTBot without knowing it?
We audited our own site and found Cloudflare quietly serving 403s to every AI crawler. The two settings responsible, how we found them, and the score before and after.
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How to create an llms.txt markdown file for AI visibility (in 10 minutes)
One markdown file at your domain root tells AI systems what your site is, what you sell, and where to look. The format, a template, and where to put it.
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An SEO plugin is installed. Nothing is configured.
Half the WordPress sites we scan have RankMath or Yoast active and almost nothing filled in. The plugin is an editor, not an author. Here is what actually needs doing.
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What is AI visibility, and why your site probably scores low
People increasingly ask AI assistants instead of searching. AI visibility is whether those assistants can find, read, and cite your site. Most sites fail it without knowing.
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