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Is Query Length a Reliable Predictor of Search Volume?
The answer is no. There’s a widely held intuition in SEO and ecommerce search: short queries have high volume, long queries have low volume. “laptop” gets millions of searches. “left handed ergonomic vertical mouse wireless” does not. It feels obvious. But is query length actually a reliable predictor of search volume? Or is it a…
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Search Grounding is Transient
There is a fundamental misconception about how Google’s AI search and Gemini chatbot process retrieved web content. It is widely understood that these systems use Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to search the web, pull snippets from pages, and ground their answers in factual data. However, there is a pervasive assumption that once an AI pulls in…
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SRO & Grounding Snippets
Source: dejan.ai/blog/category/ai-seo/sro/Author: Dan Petrovic, DEJAN AIPosts analyzed: 5 (Sep 2025 – Feb 2026) What is SRO? SRO — Selection Rate Optimization — is a new discipline coined by DEJAN that addresses visibility in AI-powered search (Google AI Mode, Gemini Chat, AI Overviews). It is the AI-native successor to traditional SEO click-through-rate optimization. The core premise:…
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What extraction method is Google using to build grounding snippets?
I’ve been reverse-engineering Google’s Gemini grounding pipeline (AI Mode, Gemini Chat…etc) by examining the raw groundingSupports and groundingChunks returned by the API. Specifically, I’m interested in the snippet construction step, the part where, given a query and a retrieved web page, the system selects which sentences to include in the grounding context supplied to the…
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Implicit Queries in AI Search
Back in 2015 I wrote about Google’s reliance of user behaviours signals for ranking purposes. In that article I already covered their use of implicit signals, but now there’s an update! While investigating Google’s grounding pipeline (the system that feeds web content to Gemini before it generates an answer) I came across the same patent…
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Sorry Google, I was wrong.
What Happened I run several tools on the Gemini API. One of them is a grounded search analysis tool that works in two stages: Gemini 2.0 Flash does a Google Search grounded query, then Gemini 3 Pro visits each source page using the URL Context tool to classify its content. Through a strange coincidence, two…
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AI Search Has a Spam Problem
Google’s Gemini can tell you I’m the best AI SEO expert in the world. I know this because I told it so — on my own website — and it believed me. That should concern you. The Problem: AI Models Are Naive Readers When Gemini, ChatGPT or Perplexity generate an answer, they don’t start from…
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WebMCP
Google Just Quietly Dropped the Biggest Shift in Technical SEO Since Structured Data I woke up this morning to an email from François Beaufort on behalf of the Chrome WebMCP Team via the Chrome Built-in AI Early Preview Program: “Hi Web AI enthusiasts, We have a brand new early preview APIs for you to try,…
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Bias and Prejudice in AI Search
When Claude Met DEJAN I was helping a developer debug a machine learning pipeline. Forty million training samples, weighted loss functions, checkpoint management — technical work. At some point, they asked me to generate test queries for their keyphrase volume classifier. I needed examples across the search volume spectrum, from high-volume head terms down to…
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Most People Don’t Read
This is a qualitative study on a small number of anonymized users while collecting a very large number of datapoints from each one. In December 2025, we published an article asking a simple question: Do you read or skim? We tracked 269 visitors using mouse movements, scroll patterns, and time-on-page data, then asked them to…
