Field notes on search, AI, and growth.
Long form thinking from our founder and team. New writing on SEO, AI search, content strategy, digital measurement, and the work we do for brands across Indonesia and the region.
Your Rendering Strategy Sets Your INP Score and Your AI Visibility
Headless stacks built on Next.js, Nuxt, or Astro promise clean content APIs and fast deploys. Many of them ship a hidden tax. The browser receives a thin HTML shell, downloads a large JavaScript bundle, and rebuilds the page on the user's device. While that bundle parses and executes, the main thread is busy, taps and clicks queue up, and Interaction to Next Paint (INP) climbs into failing territory.
Information Architecture for Ecommerce Category Pages
Take any ecommerce store and rank its pages by the revenue they touch. Product pages convert, but they rank for narrow branded and model queries. The home page pulls navigational traffic that was already coming. The category page is the one asset that ranks for the high-intent commercial head term, the query a buyer types when they know what they want but not which one to buy. "Running shoes." "Air conditioner 1 PK." "Office chair ergonomic." That is where the money enters, and on most stores it is also the page nobody owns. It inherits whatever structure the platform shipped with, and that structure quietly decides whether the page ranks at all.
What Google AI Mode Cites When Indonesians Plan a Trip
We wanted to see exactly which sites those are. So we built a structured set of Bahasa Indonesia travel prompts, ran each through Google AI Mode, and parsed every domain it cited. What came back was a clear picture of who Google has decided is authoritative on Indonesian travel, and an equally clear picture of who is being read around.
How I got rpsg.co.id to 100/100/100/100 on Lighthouse, and which fixes actually moved the score
Most Lighthouse advice tells you to chase 100 across the board. Half of it does not move the score and most of it does not move the user experience. Here is what actually got rpsg.co.id from 88/95/85/100 to 100/100/100/100, and what I would skip if I were doing this again.
Anchor Text Patterns That Read as Natural to Google
Across healthy enterprise backlink profiles, exact-match commercial anchor text rarely accounts for more than five percent of inbound links. Across profiles that trigger Google's filters, it routinely crosses ten. The distance between those two numbers is one budget cycle of well-meaning vendor work, and the system reading the difference is more sophisticated than most teams plan for.
What Makes an SEO Dashboard Worth Opening
The dashboard most enterprise SEO teams use was built by the person who left two roles ago. Nobody has opened it in three weeks. Nobody trusts the numbers on it. Nobody can name what would change in the work tomorrow if a green line went red. This is the SEO dashboard problem, and it is endemic enough that solving it is a competitive advantage that costs almost nothing to ship.
WebMCP: How to Make Your Website Executable by AI Agents
Google and Microsoft, working through the W3C Web Machine Learning Community Group, released WebMCP: a browser native JavaScript API that lets a site expose callable tools directly to AI agents. Chrome 149 moved it into a public origin trial on May 19. Edge 147 has it. The testing flag lives at chrome://flags/#enable-webmcp-testing.
Schema Markup That Still Moves the Needle in 2026
A schema audit in 2026 should start by deleting code, not adding it. Most enterprise sites still ship structured data that no surface renders, no engine rewards, and no team has reviewed since the JSON-LD was pasted in. The interesting question is not which schema to add this quarter. It is which schema is actually earning a result somewhere, and which is sitting in your `<head>` for no reason at all.
Rand Fishkin Is Half Right About the End of Great Content
The 25-year-old loop where great content drove organic traffic and organic traffic drove growth is breaking, and his framing of why is accurate. The conclusion that companies should pivot to inimitable products instead of content does not survive contact with the enterprise SaaS market, where the inimitable product is already the company. What changes for those buyers is not whether to publish, but what publishing is for.
When to Merge Pages and When to Keep Them Separate
Two URLs start trading places for the same query, one of them quietly losing a position it used to hold, and the team reaches the same verdict almost every time. Cannibalization. Merge them. A week later one page is redirected into the other, the report shows a problem closed, and nobody asks whether it was the right page, or even the right problem.
We Ran Our Own Page Through an E-E-A-T Auditor and Scored 61
We ran the page we use to sell AI search work, search.agency/ai-search, through StoryMint's E-E-A-T Auditor, and it came back with a 61 out of 100. Fair, not good. E-E-A-T is Google's shorthand for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust.
How to Build SEO Into Your Go-to-Market Strategy (Not Bolt It On Later)
Build SEO into your go-to-market plan the way you build in sales or paid: as a demand channel with a job to do, sequenced to your company stage, anchored to a real buyer and a real pain, and now optimized for AI answer engines as well as the ten blue links. The startups that treat search as a launch-day input win compounding pipeline. The ones that treat it as something to switch on later spend year two paying for the months they skipped.
The Startup Founder's Guide to Realistic SEO ROI in Indonesia
SEO can be one of the highest-return channels an Indonesian startup ever builds, and it can also quietly burn six months of budget before it returns a single qualified lead. Which one you get depends almost entirely on whether you understood the shape of the return before you committed to it.
How to Run a Persona-First Content Gap Analysis With StoryMint
A persona-first content gap analysis finds the questions your audience is asking that the current search results fail to answer. That is a different exercise from the gap analysis most teams run, which finds the keywords competitors rank for and you do not. Both go by the same name. Only one of them tells you what to actually say.
What Screaming Frog Can Really Do Once You Connect It to Claude
Most Screaming Frog tutorials stop at broken links and missing meta descriptions. That is the warm-up. The tool earns its license fee on the layer underneath, the canonical logic, the rendering gaps, the international signals, and above all the moment you stop treating the crawl as the answer and start treating it as one input among several. On enterprise sites, the real wins live where crawl data meets Semrush and Search Console.
GEO vs SEO: Is SEO Dead in the Age of AI Search?
SEO is not dead. It is being absorbed into something larger. The honest answer to "GEO vs SEO" is that they are not rivals, they are two layers of the same job: SEO gets your content found by the engines, and GEO gets it quoted inside the AI answers those engines now write. The brands that treat this as a fight will pick the wrong side. The brands that treat it as one program will win both.
AI Does Not Need a Markdown Copy of Your Website
You do not need a Markdown version of your website for AI to read it. The advice telling you to build one has the diagnosis backwards, and acting on it burns enterprise engineering time on a problem you do not actually have.
Why Squarespace Quietly Stops Indexing Your Blog Posts (And How to Fix It)
Open Google Search Console for almost any Squarespace site that has been publishing for a few years, go to the Pages report, and scroll down to the Not indexed section. There is a good chance you will see what we saw on our own site: a quiet stack of perfectly good blog posts sitting under "Crawled - currently not indexed" and "Discovered - currently not indexed," missing from search and slowly bleeding away the authority you spent years building.
Google's AI Already Answers 88% of Indonesia's Child Nutrition Searches
We took 50 of the highest-intent questions parents ask about feeding and raising young children, then checked what Google actually shows. Nine in ten now return an AI Overview, and the category's most visible brand is cited in only half of them. Here is what that means for anyone selling to parents.
Samsung Owns 64% of What Google's AI Says About Phones in Indonesia
We put 266 real buying questions to Google AI Mode in Indonesia and counted every brand it named. Samsung took almost two thirds of the mentions and Apple barely a sixth. Here is how Google's AI already picked a winner, and what the rest of the market can do about it.