SEO Life This Week

Across BellyUp Atlanta, GPTBot filter requests fell from 63,649 to zero after a query-string rule was added to robots.txt. OAI-SearchBot also fell to zero, Amazonbot dropped 92 percent, and Meta's crawler rose from 937 to 10,566.

The comparison uses August 28 to September 11 before the rule and September 12 to October 2 after it. The dates isolate one crawl-control change, but they do not remove every outside influence.

The rule survived three weekly backups and held GPTBot at zero for twenty-one days. On October 2 the sitemap generator rebuilt robots.txt from a fixed string and erased the rule from all thirty BellyUp category subdomains without warning.

That turns the real correction from another hand edit into a build change. The open test will watch whether filter requests return now that the rule is gone.

Clean URL requests on Atlanta roughly doubled, but portfolio GPTBot activity rose about twentyfold over the same period. Two candidate controls also had no before window, so we cannot credit the robots rule with moving crawl activity to real pages.

A server request only proves that a request reached a URL. It does not prove that the page was indexed, cited, used for training or read by a person.

The first complete seven-day window after publication brought 22 exact-query impressions and 10 clicks sitewide. The opening baseline had 139 impressions and 6 clicks, so clicks rose while impressions fell 84 percent and weighted position worsened from 17.07 to 21.55.

The Articles hub itself had 5 impressions, no clicks, and a weighted position of 16.40. It reached none of the four registered opening thresholds, and the campaign cannot be credited for movement that started before publication.