Field notes on the web
Research and strategy from Atomic Glue on web development, SEO, and digital growth.
The Group Leak
robots.txt groups do not inherit. Name GPTBot or ClaudeBot and it stops reading the rest of your file. Here is a real site where that one rule inverted every tier the operator set, in both directions.
What Is a Baited Page? A Definition for the AI Search Era
A baited page is fully citable by AI for the problem, partially citable for the method, and non-citable for the result. Here are the three tests, how to build one, and why the category needs a name.
The Bait-and-Switch Bot Strategy
We built a three-tier bot-access framework on our own site — open, gated, and baited content — and saw a 3x jump in citation-readability and a 35x better crawl-to-referral ratio on the baited tier. Here’s exactly how it works.
Your Website Is Their Training Data
Senior marketing leaders built their content strategy around Google's referral traffic model. That model is breaking. Here's what you do about it.