CBC News spoke to Hamzah Khadim, co-founder of the Toronto-based AI-SEO agency Logik Digital, about how AI summaries and chatbots are changing the way people find information online. The feature ran on CBC News as a written analysis by technology reporter Nora Young and as a segment on The National. It examined a change that is already measurable rather than speculative: human traffic to websites is falling, and machines now do a large share of the reading. What the CBC Feature Examined The piece set out to answer a question that most business owners have not yet asked. If an AI tool answers the question directly, what happens to the website that used to supply the answer? The data behind that question is not ambiguous. Cloudflare, which provides internet infrastructure for a large share of the web, measured traffic between June 2025 and April 2026 and found human visits declining […]
Ask ten SEO professionals whether schema markup helps you rank in AI search, and you will get two confident, opposite answers. One camp treats it as essential. The other calls it a waste of time that Google itself has downplayed. Both are partly right, which is exactly why the question causes so much confusion. The short answer is this: schema markup does not directly make an AI engine cite you. But it makes almost everything else that earns citations work better. It is a part of the complete AI SEO framework in 2026. It is trust infrastructure, not a citation lever, and understanding that distinction is the difference between using it well and either overselling it or dismissing it entirely. What Schema Markup Actually Is? Schema markup is a standardised vocabulary of code you add to a page to describe what its content means. Not what it says, what it […]
Query fan-out is the technique AI search engines use to break one prompt into 8 to 12 parallel sub-queries behind the scenes, retrieve passages for each, and merge the results into a single cited answer. Google AI Mode averages 10.7 sub-queries per prompt, ChatGPT generates 2 to 4, and Perplexity uses a single query 70% of the time. This guide explains what fan-out is, how it works across platforms, the latest research on its impact on citations, and what it means for businesses trying to earn AI visibility. What Is Query Fan-Out and Why Does AI Search Use It? AI search engines do not run one search per prompt. They decompose the prompt into several sub-queries, run them in parallel, retrieve passages for each, and fuse them into a single synthesized answer. Google patent language calls this query variant generation. Traditional search matches your words against an index and returns […]
What the May 4, 2026 Account Restrictions Mean for Local Businesses On the night of Sunday, May 3, 2026, Google began restricting entire Google Accounts rather than individual Business Profiles. Every profile under each affected account is suspended simultaneously, account holders cannot create or claim new listings, and the action disproportionately targets accounts running active Local Services Ads or Google Ads. This is the most consequential local search enforcement event since the 2024 verification overhaul, and the pattern signals a permanent shift in how Google moderates local visibility in 2026. Wave 2 follows an April 27, 2026 enforcement sweep that targeted individual Business Profiles in California home service categories. The May 3 to 4 wave is materially different in scope, severity, and recovery difficulty. Below is what changed, what triggered it, who is exposed, and the steps we are advising our clients to take this week. What Exactly Happened on […]
Why Garage Door Companies Running LSA and Google Ads Are Suddenly Losing Their Google Visibility Over the past several weeks, we have seen a sharp increase in Google Business Profile suspensions affecting garage door dealers and local garage door service companies across North America. The pattern is becoming impossible to ignore. We are seeing this increasingly with garage door dealers who are actively running Local Services Ads, Google Ads, or both. In many cases, these are not low-quality operators or spam listings. They are real garage door businesses with real crews, real service areas, real trucks, and years of local visibility. But when Google flags the account structure, the impact can be immediate. Map rankings disappear Local Services Ads stop running Google Ads performance is disrupted Calls and form leads drop overnight Reviews and trust signals become harder for customers to find AI search visibility on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google […]
BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT Google’s 2026 policy update explicitly bans asking customers to mention staff names in reviews, conducting reviews on shared or on-premises devices, and any form of review gating or incentivization. Enforcement is now automated and aggressive. We know this not from reading the policy update, but because we watched it happen in real time with our own clients. We have been doing this for 15 years. In that time, we have helped hundreds of businesses build their Google presence from the ground up, and we have watched the review landscape shift from something businesses barely thought about to one of the most consequential signals in both local search and AI recommendations. So when Google updated its review policies in early 2026, we did not just read the announcement. We lived it. Reviews that had been sitting on client profiles for months disappeared without warning, which is why […]
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