Articles that explain website work
Read about website design, technical quality, search, content and the systems behind an online business. Each article is written to help you understand a choice and what the work behind it means for your business.
-
What to check before changing your website’s hosting and care
Moving a website to new hosting fixes the hosting. It does not fix a plugin that breaks the checkout, a form that stopped delivering last month or a connection to your accounting software that nobody has tested since it was set up. Before you agree to a care arrangement with anyone, work out what the…
-
Edge of Search 2026 and the dog harness that explained modern search
I went to Edge of Search 2026 expecting to learn how SEO changes when people use AI. I came home with a bigger question about where search now happens. Notes on entities, AI crawlers, share of search, and the dog harness that tied it all together.
-
Some AI Bots Train on You. Others Bring You Customers.
Last week we checked our website’s robots.txt file properly for the first time in a couple of weeks. To our surprise, it was telling the major AI crawlers not to read our site. We never wrote this rule. Investigating further, we found a setting in Cloudflare rewrites your robots.txt for you, and we had switched…
-
Your Rankings Are Fine. Your Traffic Is Not.
Open Google Search Console and look at your last six months of data. For many businesses, the pattern will be the same. Rankings holding steady, impressions mostly climbing, clicks dropping dramatically. Your SEO is not broken. The scoreboard of how we measure is. Analysts tracking over 300,000 keywords call this the Great Decoupling, and it…
-
Your Website Is Now a Knowledge Site
Ask ChatGPT who does what your business does in your area, without mentioning the business name. Read the answer carefully. If your business is named and described accurately, you are ahead of most of your competitors. If the answer is vague, wrong, or names someone else, that is the problem this article is about. For…
-
The answer arrives already chosen
AI hasn’t just added a new place to be found. It’s becoming the layer your customers decide through — and it gives them a sense of freedom while quietly taking the judgment. For about twenty-five years, the thing standing between a customer and your business was a list. You typed something into Google, it returned…
-
Is Google’s Engine Being Dismantled?
Over the past few months, something has turned up in our clients’ website analytics that wasn’t there a year ago: a steady, growing stream of enquiries and online conversions arriving from ChatGPT and the other AI frontier models. Not a trickle of curious clicks — actual customers, who did their looking inside a chat window…
-
SEO vs AEO: A Small Business Guide for 2026
SEO vs AEO explained for Australian small business owners — what’s changed, how AI decides who to cite, and the practical steps to stay found in 2026.
-
Google’s I/O Was Not About AI. It Was About Replacing the Open Web.
Google I/O 2026 looked like incremental product updates: a faster model, a redesigned search box, a shopping cart, and agents that book things for you. Underneath was a single strategic move — Google replacing the open web with a layer it owns — and the consequences for small businesses are already showing.
-
Australian Privacy Laws for Small Business – A 2026 Guide
After million-dollar penalties against Australian Clinical Labs and Latitude Finance — and with major reforms landing through 2026 — Australian privacy law has stopped being a big-company problem. A plain-English guide for small business owners on what the law now requires, and what to fix before the next deadline lands.
-
What agentic shopping means for your WooCommerce store
A shopper asks their AI assistant: “Find a dark roast coffee subscription under $40 a month with free shipping to Sydney.” Your WooCommerce store has exactly the right product. The price is competitive. The stock is available. Your shipping rules match the request. Yet the AI recommends a competitor instead. You lost the sale not…