Search Central states plainly that AI Overviews need no special markup, no AI text files, no schema. The one independent study of what users actually do is 18 months old and says a citation is worth a 1% click. Everything fresher is measured by the people selling the service.
It's Q4 planning season, which means a lot of small teams are about to write GEO on a budget line. Before you do, I'd spend twenty minutes on two documents, because they disagree with the pitch in a specific way.
The first is Google's own page on AI features and your website, in Search Central. It says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimisations necessary. Further down it's blunter: you don't need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files, or markup, and there's no special schema.org structured data to add. The whole page is a restatement of ordinary SEO fundamentals - be crawlable, be indexable, be useful, have your important content in text.
That's the platform saying, in its own documentation, that the product being sold to you does not exist as a distinct technical practice. You can decide Google is being coy. I'd just note that this is the one party in the conversation with nothing to sell you, and that it's the version I'd have to defend if I were wrong.
Most people are using AI wrong and I was one of them.
For the first year, I used AI like a fancy Google. "Write me a product description." "Summarize this." "Give me 10 ideas for X." Useful? Sure. Transformative? Not really.
For the first year, we marketed Murror as an "AI-powered emotional companion." It was technically accurate. It was also the worst positioning decision we made.
Here's what happened: people who downloaded expecting an AI chatbot were confused. Murror doesn't chat with you -- it helps you journal, reflect, and understand patterns in your relationships. They'd open the app, look for the chat bubble, and leave within 30 seconds.
For the first year of building Murror, we optimized for the same metrics every other app optimizes for: daily active users, session length, screens per visit. The dashboard looked healthy. Usage was growing. We felt good about it.
But something was off. Our most engaged users were not our happiest users. People who spent the most time in the app were often the ones who left the harshest feedback. Meanwhile, users who opened the app twice a week for five minutes were writing us emails about how it changed how they handle difficult conversations.
At the beginning, my reason was very simple: I needed a job and I genuinely liked the product.
I graduated with a Marketing degree, but I never felt like I belonged in agencies or similar environments. It just wasn t for me. At the same time, I didn t have much experience in tech either. So I took a leap of faith and applied for a Customer Support role, almost blindly.
The early days were tough. I had no technical background, no real understanding of how apps were built, and everything felt overwhelming. But the product itself became my motivation. I started from the most basic things: learning simple technical terms, understanding how an app is structured, and slowly exploring how everything works behind the scenes.
Play's Age Signals terms limit the signal to age-appropriate experiences and name advertising, marketing, profiling and analytics as prohibited uses, with app takedown as the stated penalty. Apple's version hands you the age plus how it was proven. Both are live now in a widening list of regions, and the default engineering reflex is wrong for both.
There's a new field arriving in mobile apps this year and almost nobody is treating it as a product decision. It's the user's age, handed to you by the store instead of asked for in your onboarding.
There is a moment that separates products people use once from products people come back to every day. It is not a feature. It is not a notification. It is the feeling that the product remembers who you are.
I have been thinking about this a lot while building Murror. We spent so much time on acquisition, onboarding funnels, and activation metrics. But the thing that actually moved our retention numbers was something much simpler: continuity.
What are three things you re grateful for every day? Are they the same, or do they change over time?
For me, the three things I m grateful for most days are:
Having the health to keep working
Having work that I can pursue and grow with
Having a family that cares about me and supports me from behind the scenes
Of course, each day brings different moments, small wins, or reasons to feel grateful. But at the core, it often comes back to the same things: health, work, and family.
Article 14 reporting went live on 11 September. It applies to apps you shipped years ago, the only filing channel is a web form with no API, and the login you need to use it is not something you can obtain at hour 23.
Almost every summary of the EU Cyber Resilience Act you've read ends with the same reassurance: it applies from December 2027, you have time. That sentence is true about the part of the Act that will cost you the most work, and it is wrong about the part that is live right now.
