Blocking an AI crawler is a decision you cannot measure afterwards
The bandwidth you save by blocking an AI crawler shows up in a log. The citations you lose do not show up anywhere, because nothing reports an answer that did not mention you.
Shipping notes, in public
How we build the thing that publishes your changelog, your blog and your release notes.
Being the source an AI answer names, when you are a small site
No setting anywhere grants a citation. What a small site controls is the shape of its passages and its own server logs. What makes a paragraph cheap to quote, how to tell whether assistants are fetching your pages, and why a cited page can still show zero referrals.
Consent mode, and what your GA4 numbers mean without it
A consent banner changes what GA4 can measure, and the reports carry no marker saying so. What the seven consent types cover, what basic and advanced consent mode each do when someone declines, and how to read numbers collected under either.
Measuring whether the agent's writing earned anything
An agent that publishes without a feedback loop is writing post forty the same way it wrote post one. Closing the loop takes a stored measurement window and a reader that groups by decisions.
Cross-domain measurement between your app and your marketing site
A signup that starts on your marketing site and finishes in your app is two users in GA4 unless the domains are configured together. Here is what the setting does and what it cannot fix.
Brand mentions without links: what you can and cannot measure
A mention with no hyperlink cannot appear in a referral report, because attribution needs a click that carries a referrer. The measurement that does work is a branded-query baseline in Search Console, taken before the mention runs.
Server-side GA4: when it is worth the infrastructure
A server container is a service you now operate: a host, a domain, a deployment and someone to notice when it stops. Here is what that buys, and when it does not buy enough.
Tracking clicks to your own documentation in GA4
Whether GA4 records a click to your docs depends on where the docs live. The built-in outbound click event fires only for links that lead away from the current domain, and configuring cross-domain measurement switches it off again.
Can an AI answer cite a page that does not rank?
A page can be named in an AI answer without ranking for the question, but the case is narrow: the assistant answered from its own weights instead of running a search. Retrieval produces a link. Memory produces a name with nothing behind it.
Engagement rate replaced bounce rate, and it is not the old one inverted
GA4's bounce rate really is one minus engagement rate. The mistake is comparing either of them to the bounce rate you remember, which was defined on a different event.
Progress that is allowed to be negative
A progress bar that cannot go below zero hides the one thing you needed to know. Here is what measuring from a baseline gives you, and what it costs.
Perplexity, Claude and Google read different things about you
Each assistant arrives under its own name, obeys the rules written for that name, and takes away whatever the page contained at fetch time. Your own log is the only place all three can be compared.
GA4 realtime and the standard reports disagree. Both are right.
Realtime covers the last 30 minutes and never settles. Standard reports cover a date range in the property's time zone and keep changing until processing finishes. Neither is the corrected version of the other.
Goals that do not close themselves when you hit the number
Reaching the target marks a goal as reached and leaves it open. Closing is a separate decision with three possible endings, because a number passed through in week two is not a result.