In August, a page from a small Danish website turned up on the "recently indexed" admin page of my search engine. That site's robots.txt is two lines long and couldn't be clearer:
I wrote a piece in September about this site's average Google Search Console position falling from the 14-20 range to 7.8-9.4, right as a dozen new articles went live.
This site has had an llms.txt file since 2026-08-29. I've written about it twice already: once about the first version being robots.txt with a different filename, and once about AEO and GEO making the same mistake at industry scale.
The first version of this site's llms.txt got the idea wrong by copying a more familiar, adjacent format — robots.txt syntax, in a file whose whole point was supposed to be prose. That mistake lived for ten minutes before a second commit fixed it.
The daily trend in both Search Console exports covers August 8 through September 4. Average position sits between 14 and 20 for almost the entire window — the single worst day is 23.4, on August 29, of all days. Then September 1 through 4 comes in at 7.8, 7.8, 9.4, and 8.4. The average position roughly halved in four days.
The September 6 Search Console export splits the last 28 days by device. Desktop: 60 clicks, 4,026 impressions, 1.49% CTR, average position 15.34. Mobile: 19 clicks, 487 impressions, 3.9% CTR, average position 11.14. Mobile beats desktop on both position and CTR, on roughly an eighth of the impression volume. I spent a chunk of one session two weeks ago chasing mobile performance specifically.
On August 29 I pulled a Search Console export and found 30 pages on this site indexed twice. Every one of them had a working clean URL and a second copy at /index.php/ plus the same path, splitting impressions between the two as if they were different pages. I wrote a fix the same morning. This is what a week of real data since then shows, not what I assumed it would show.
This site has two separate mechanisms for loading Google Tag Manager. One of them has never fired a single tag. The other was added by a tool that had no way of knowing the first one existed.
The same line of markup — a Google Fonts reference for Open Sans — went through four distinct states in one evening: deleted by accident, restored plainly, rewritten for performance, and finally replaced outright. Each stage is a real commit with a real, stated reason.
Two unrelated John Mueller answers went out this week, three days apart, both covered by Search Engine Journal. One was about a sitemap trick. The other was about a link disavow.