Stupid mistakes. Measured fixes.
Most SEO advice is recycled. This site checks what actually breaks on real sites, shows the evidence, and ends every piece with the fix.
Start here
- The 2026 Q4 Stupidity Index
Ten SEO mistakes we keep running into, the evidence for each, and the fix.
- Your SEO pixel's fixes are invisible to AI crawlers
We tested what six crawlers receive from sites running an SEO platform's JavaScript pixel. None of the fixes were there.
Latest
- Stop redirecting your 404s to the homepage
Sending missing URLs to the homepage, or answering them with a 200, makes soft 404s. Return 404 or 410, and save 301s for real replacements.
- Google rewrote your title. Here's why.
Google replaces titles that are half-empty, out of date, inaccurate or boilerplate. Its own documentation lists the causes, and most are fixable.
- Your canonical tags are pointing the wrong way
Canonicals to dead URLs, to the homepage from every page, or fighting your redirects. rel=canonical is a hint, and a wrong hint works against you.
- The noindex you forgot to remove
A staging noindex that ships to production, a robots.txt noindex Google ignores, and a Disallow that hides your noindex from Google.
- To an AI crawler, your homepage has zero links
If your site builds its pages in the browser, crawlers that don't run JavaScript get an empty shell. One homepage we tested had no heading and not one link.
How we look at a site
- SEO audit: the checks that still matter for classic search.
- AEO: getting picked as the answer by AI answer engines.
- GEO: getting cited by generative engines.
- ARO: making a site AI agents can read and use.
Want to check your own site first? Start with the free checks.