Articles
The tactical archive
New posts on AI search visibility, schema strategy, and indie-SaaS SEO. Some are free; some are part of the course archive.
Case study: 239 clicks from 61,500 impressions — anatomy of a page-2 CTR collapse
A real 28-day Search Console panel — 0.4% CTR at average position 11.5. Setup, data, diagnosis, and the action plan. Plus the generalizable lesson: most 'ranking problems' indie devs bring me are click-through problems in disguise.
RankPropel ·
Cloudflare's 'Manage robots.txt' will silently block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and Perplexity if you let it
I audited 25 of my own Cloudflare-hosted indie sites in May 2026 and found 6 of them invisibly blocking every major AI crawler. Here's what's happening, how to detect it in 30 seconds, and how to fix it.
RankPropel ·
IndexNow on Cloudflare: the 5-minute free win indie devs skip
IndexNow is a single POST that tells Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, and a growing list of engines that your URLs changed. Cloudflare has a one-click integration. Almost nobody enables it. Here's the setup and what it's worth.
RankPropel ·
Welcome to RankPropel
What this site is, what's free, what's paid, and why we're publishing this in 2026.
RankPropel ·
When /robots.txt returns your homepage — the Cloudflare Pages SPA-fallback trap
If you deployed a static site to Cloudflare Pages without an explicit robots.txt or sitemap.xml file, you're serving your homepage HTML at those URLs. Bots see junk. Here's the trap and the one-minute fix.
RankPropel ·
Why Perplexity and ChatGPT rarely cite the same sites
Only 11% of domains cited by both engines overlap. Here's what each one actually selects for, and how to optimize for both without duplicating work.
RankPropel ·