Stephen Sumner
Getting cited by AI Overviews: what actually moves the needle
The handful of changes that reliably shift a page from indexed-but-ignored to quoted: top-loading, schema honesty, and the snippet directives nobody remembers setting.
In progress· 8 min
Long-form writing on AI search, local SEO and the legal sector: the frameworks I build, the things I test, and the notes I write to think problems through.
Ranking audits answer one question: can Google rank this page? It is no longer enough. This is the full rubric I run on every client site: what each category measures, why it is weighted the way it is, and what I deliberately refuse to score.
No WordPress, no build step, no JavaScript framework. The whole recipe behind a clean 100 for SEO, accessibility and best practices: hand-written static HTML, self-hosted fonts and images, and one file of edge config, deployed free on Cloudflare — plus an honest word on the one score that isn't 100.
The handful of changes that reliably shift a page from indexed-but-ignored to quoted: top-loading, schema honesty, and the snippet directives nobody remembers setting.
Why NAP consistency still decides local rankings, and a boring, repeatable process for fixing years of drift across directories.
Practice-area pages, review strategy and the trust signals that matter when the searcher has a problem and very little patience.