Performance & SEO.
How small business sites win on Core Web Vitals and stay visible after each Google core update. Practical, measurement-driven notes (INP, LCP, schema, AI search citations) from sites we actually maintain.
Chrome stops running your site's cleanup code on September 22, and it already stopped for four out of five visitors
The unload event is being switched off by default, and it is not happening on one date. Chrome has been ramping it down all year: 1 percent of page loads in March, 60 percent in July, 80 percent since August 25, and 100 percent when Chrome 154 ships on September 22. Edge follows on its own schedule and reaches 100 percent at Edge 155. If something on your site saved data, released a lock, or fired a last analytics beacon on the way out, it has been failing intermittently for months and nothing logged it. Here is how to find out in ten minutes, what to replace it with, and why beforeunload is not the thing being removed.
Google ran a spam update last week without changing a single rule, and that is the part worth understanding
The August 2026 spam update started on August 18 at 09:27 Pacific and finished on August 21, running two days and sixteen hours, the longest of the three spam updates Google has confirmed this year. It applied globally and to every language, it shipped with no new policies and no blog post, and Google described it as normal. Reporting from the search trade press adds that it did not target link spam and did not target the site reputation abuse policy. That combination means enforcement got better at rules that already existed, which is why an ordinary small business site can lose rankings in a week when nothing on it changed. The four ways that happens, how to tell an algorithmic demotion from a manual action in about ten minutes, and the measurement dates that stop you from misreading noise.
Pew counted how much of the web is written by AI. The number changes what your content has to do.
Pew Research Center analysed roughly 490,000 pages from Common Crawl and published the result on August 20, 2026: about 10 percent of pages now show significant signs of AI authorship, up from around 1 percent in early 2021, and more than a third of pages published since ChatGPT's release. The tells (em dashes at twice the 2023 rate, Oxford commas up 63 percent, 'delve' and 'testament' more than doubled) are also leaking into human writing, which makes detection useless as evidence and turns them into a credibility tax instead. What that means for a small business publishing anything.
Google will now let you leave AI Overviews. It will not tell you what leaving costs you.
A new Search Console setting lets a site exclude itself from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover's AI features without dropping out of normal Google results. It exists because a UK regulator ordered it. The report that came with it shows impressions only, no clicks and no click-through rate, which means Google handed site owners an exit door and not the number they would need to decide whether to use it. What the toggle does, what it does not do, and why a small business should almost certainly leave it alone.
The switch that can hide your website from Google changes on September 15
Cloudflare is replacing its single 'Block AI bots' toggle with three categories (Search, Agent, Training) and setting new defaults on September 15, 2026. The part that matters: Googlebot, Bingbot, and Applebot are classified as multi-purpose crawlers, so any setting that blocks AI training now blocks them too. Reports of Googlebot getting 403s started in early August. Here is what changes, who it actually affects, and the five-minute check.
AI shopping in 2026: discovery happens in the chat, the sale still happens on your site
OpenAI shipped in-chat checkout, then walked it back in March 2026 after Walmart found it converted three times worse than a click through to its own website. Here is what actually changed, what the traffic numbers look like, and the short list of things a small store should do about it.
Your customers are asking AI about you. Is your website ready to be recommended?
Google's AI search has over a billion users, ChatGPT answers buying questions daily, and Apple's new Siri runs on Gemini. People increasingly ask an assistant 'who should I hire for this' and get one synthesized answer. Here's how to make sure your business is in that answer, and why it rewards the same fundamentals as a genuinely good website. Updated August 21 with a correction: Google published official guidance on July 10, 2026 stating that structured data is not required for generative AI search, which walks back the strongest claim in the original version of this post.
The answer-engine optimization checklist: 13 things that decide whether AI recommends your business
A practical, no-fluff checklist for showing up when a customer asks ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, or the new Gemini-powered Siri about your line of work. Thirteen concrete items, why each one matters, and how to check it. A companion to our guide on making your site AI-readable. Updated August 18 with a new item on crawler access, after Cloudflare changed how its AI bot blocking works, August 21 to reflect Google's July 10 guidance that structured data is not required for generative AI search, and August 27 with where to find the Search Console generative AI report now that it has reached every property.
Local SEO for a Toronto small business in 2026: what actually moves the map pack
Most 'local SEO packages' are filler. Here's what actually gets a GTA small business into Google's local results, and how much of it you can do yourself for free.
Google I/O 2026, translated for small business owners
Google's I/O 2026 keynote was three hours of AI. Most of it won't touch a small business this week. But three things will: dramatically cheaper capable models, AI Mode search crossing a billion users, and agentic shopping. Here's the signal, and what to do about it. Updated August 21 with measured AI Mode usage, which turned out to be a third of one percent of US searches.
The March 2026 core update, read honestly
Google's March 2026 core update finished rolling out on April 8. Here's what actually changed, who got hit, and the short list of things worth doing if your rankings moved.
INP is the metric that actually matters now
Interaction to Next Paint has been the Core Web Vitals metric quietly tanking small business sites since 2024. Here's what it is, how to measure it, and the three things that fix it.
Have something that needs shipping?
One call. Thirty minutes. You leave with an honest read on scope, timeline, and price, whether we're the right fit or not.