| Affiliate and sponsored placements | Pay for disclosed placement on review sites, affiliate publishers, and sponsored content - legal when honest, rented when the invoice stops. | Situational |
| AI crawler access policy | Decide deliberately which AI crawlers may fetch your site - training bots, search bots, and user-triggered fetchers are not the same thing. | Situational |
| Answer-first page structure | State the answer at the top and structure every section so it survives being quoted on its own. | Recommended |
| Astroturf review sites | Building or funding 'independent' review sites that exist to endorse you. | Deceptive |
| Author pages and bylines | Put a real, verifiable person behind editorial content - a byline, an author page, and Person markup that links to their profiles. | Recommended |
| Community seeding | Planting promotional threads or comments in forums and Reddit to look like organic peer advice - usually against platform rules and often deceptive when undisclosed. | Discouraged |
| Comparison pages | Publish honest comparisons of your product against alternatives, on your own domain. | Recommended |
| Content readable without JavaScript | Deliver your page's text in the HTML the server sends, so AI crawlers that never run JavaScript can still read and cite it. | Recommended |
| Credible proof on conversion pages | Place specific, attributable social proof next to the decision - named customers, sourced ratings, guarantees you honour - not anonymous praise or logo walls without context. | Recommended |
| Digital PR | Earn genuine third-party coverage - data pitches, expert commentary, journalist outreach - so independent sources talk about you. | Recommended |
| Fake and incentivised reviews | Buying, gating, or fabricating consumer reviews - and why platforms, the FTC, and AI assistants punish it. | Deceptive |
| Guest-post link schemes | Buying or trading thin contributed posts mainly to gain followable links - a link-spam pattern Google documents and often devalues. | Discouraged |
| Internal linking for topical authority | Connect related pages with clear, descriptive links so crawlers and assistants can find, understand, and trust your best content on a topic. | Recommended |
| llms.txt | A curated Markdown index at \/llms.txt for AI tools - cheap to add, useful for some agents, not a Google ranking lever. | Situational |
| Local SEO and Google Business Profile | For businesses with a real location or service area, keep NAP consistent, complete the Google Business Profile, and declare LocalBusiness markup that matches what people see. | Recommended |
| Machine-readable dates | Declare when every substantial page was published and last updated, in metadata that machines can read. | Recommended |
| Organization identity markup | Declare one canonical Organization (and WebSite) entity with logo, URL, and sameAs links so engines can tell who you are. | Recommended |
| Original research and statistics | Publish data only you have - surveys, benchmarks, measurements - so others must cite you, and structure it so assistants can lift the figures accurately. | Recommended |
| Page speed and Core Web Vitals | Make important pages load and respond quickly enough that visitors stay and search engines treat experience as a real signal - measured by Core Web Vitals. | Recommended |
| Parasite SEO | Publishing promotional pages on someone else's high-authority domain to inherit its ranking signals - Google's site reputation abuse. | Deceptive |
| Press kit and newsroom | Maintain a public newsroom with boilerplate, logos, facts, experts, and a media contact so journalists and assistants can verify and cite you. | Recommended |
| Primary CTA clarity | Give each page one unmistakable primary action - clear label, visual priority, present where decisions happen on desktop and mobile. | Recommended |
| Private blog networks | Networks of owned sites that exist to link to a money site - classic link spam Google has targeted for years. | Deceptive |
| Quotable claims and evidence blocks | Write factual claims so they stay true when quoted alone - with numbers, named sources, and framing machines cannot misread as literal fact. | Recommended |
| Review platform presence | Build a disclosed, well-managed presence on the review platforms your buyers and AI assistants already trust. | Recommended |
| Structured data markup | Describe what your pages contain - articles, products, your organization - in the machine-readable vocabulary engines actually parse. | Recommended |
| Wikipedia and Wikidata presence | Earn (do not manufacture) an encyclopaedia article and a Wikidata item when independent sources already establish notability - and disclose any paid involvement. | Situational |