Watch a new site climb Google & AI search.
Every experiment, every number, weekly - one 5-minute read. Tested tactics and original data, not recycled advice.
One issue. Four things. Every week.
~70% original, 0% recycled. Here's the recurring structure.
This Week in the Lab
One experiment update with a real number - what I tested and what it did.
The Scoreboard
The site's raw metrics: impressions, AI-bot crawls, citations found, subscribers.
One Tactic
A single, do-it-today takeaway from the week - failures included.
3 Links Worth Your Time
The AI-search reading that mattered, each with a two-line opinionated take.
What a recent issue looked like
This Week in the Lab - On day 34, Perplexity cited the site for the first time, for the query "how to get cited in AI search." The page that earned it wasn't the longest - it was the most structured: answer-first, one data table, three cited sources. Here's the exact page and my theory on why…
The Scoreboard - Impressions 4,120 (+38%) · AI-bot crawls 312 · Citations found 3 · Subscribers 1,406 (+52)…
- full issue continues -
The issues are the research programme, in instalments
The newsletter isn't a separate product. It's how the work on this site gets sent out as it lands:
- The AI Citation Index — the quarterly measurement of what seven AI engines actually cite. Subscribers get the raw files and the query set, not just the write-up.
- The pre-registered studies — the designs are already public. Each one reports here when its collection window closes.
- The null-results registry — including the predictions that didn't hold. Those go out the same way the positive results do.
If you'd rather assess the standard before handing over an email, two pages are the fairest test of it: the provenance audit, which traces twelve widely-quoted numbers back to whoever measured them first, and the state of AI search, which is roughly an issue's worth of thinking at full length. Who writes it, and why the method gets published first, is on the about page.
And if you never subscribe, nothing here gets withheld — the four tools run without a signup and every study is published in full on the site.
A note from me
I write The Lab because I got tired of SEO advice that was all opinion and no receipts. Every issue is something I actually tested this week, with the raw numbers attached. If a tactic flops, you'll read about that too - that's the whole point. If that's your kind of thing, I'd love to have you in.
Questions before you subscribe
How often will you email me?
Is it free?
Who is it for?
What makes it different from other SEO newsletters?
Get this week's experiment.
One 5-minute read, every week. Free forever.