Blog — Cittago
Worth your coffee break.
Practical guides on search, AI and advertising — written for the people who run businesses, not for other marketers.
ChatGPT has outdated facts about you. What corrects them
71 impressions, zero clicks: the prompts asking who corrects an outdated AI description, measured in our own Search Console over 28 days.
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Google stopped unrolling double-escaped JSON-LD
441 pages audited: Google now applies one pass of HTML unescaping instead of two, and the obvious test for it is the wrong one.
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One article, three languages, ten points apart
82, 87 and 77 for the same article measured in one session. A speed score is a range, not a grade — here is how wide, with dates.
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Nine AI crawlers banned in a file we thought we wrote
Nine Disallow lines none of us wrote, in one of five robots.txt files we audited. Cloudflare changes the defaults on 15 September 2026.
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Customer Match: 60 days instead of 540, for one tick
60 days instead of 540. Google Ads enhanced matching widens your Customer Match lists and cuts their memory ninefold, in the same sentence.
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Google has started building the tool, not linking to it
271 impressions and zero clicks on our own speed tool. On 19 August 2026 Google started rolling generated interfaces into AI Overviews.
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Two vendors ship an "AI Max". One can switch on the other
1 September 2026: Google Ads auto-upgrades campaigns to AI Max. Microsoft shipped its own on 19 August. And the importer carries the settings across.
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ChatGPT Ads Europe: 31 countries, 9 can buy
On 24 August the OpenAI table carries 40 rows: all 31 European ones read «Coming Soon». Ads reach Europe; the buying tool does not.
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Google spam update August 2026: how long it runs
Ten finished spam updates on Google's own dashboard ran from 19 hours to 29 days. The August 2026 one started on 18 August with no end time posted.
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Cloudflare adds analytics to your site by default
Since 15 October 2025 Cloudflare injects its Web Analytics by default on free domains. How to really check, and three ways to turn it off.
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Does ChatGPT respect robots.txt? Not the bot that matters
OpenAI documents 4 bots. ChatGPT-User — the one reading pages for users — may ignore robots.txt. What actually decides access is the firewall: our data.
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Google Ads removes language targeting in September 2026
Announced 13 August for late September 2026: the setting leaves Search and AI Max. Google announced the identical removal 360 days earlier.
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Merchant Center, 24 August: organic traffic drops
From 24 August 2026 YouTube affiliate leaves «Organic» and history is rewritten from 1 July. Two of three changes lower numbers by definition.
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Google Ads local customer optimization: what it does
Documented on 2 of the 12 Google Ads help pages we checked on 13 August: the setting that bids for people standing near your shop.
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What happens to my Google Ads Travel campaign in Q3 2026?
Starting Q3 2026 Google migrates Travel campaigns on its own. We checked 25 Google pages: the notice is on four, none of them in Romanian.
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Google Analytics benchmarks: why you may see none
Google Analytics has compared you with your industry since 30 May 2024. Three conditions decide whether you see it, and the first one is a checkbox.
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WordPress 7.1 admin tables: what actually breaks
We ran WordPress 7.1-RC2 against 12 popular plugins on one install: 7 admin screens changed, 3 plugins name the moved cells, 1 actually breaks.
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ChatGPT Ads advanced matching turns on 17 August
17 August 2026: ChatGPT Ads turns automatic advanced matching on for pixels you already have. What it sends to OpenAI, and the four clicks that stop it.
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Google Ads AI Max auto-upgrade: 1–30 September 2026
1 September 2026: Google Ads starts auto-upgrading broad match and ACA campaigns to AI Max, progressively through the month. Defaults differ by case.
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Does llms.txt work? 4 requests in 23 hours, zero AI
4 requests to our llms.txt in 23 hours, none from an AI crawler. Google says it ignores the file. What the server logs show, and what to do instead.
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Why PageSpeed says 68 on mobile and 96 on desktop
Same page, same minute: 96 on desktop, 68 on mobile, 90 from our own server. What the score actually measures, and which number to watch.
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CVE-2026-8457: anyone logs in as WooCommerce admin
CVE-2026-8457, severity 9.8: up to 2.8.7 anyone logs in as admin with an email. Fixed in 2.8.8 — but a marketplace plugin will not fetch it.
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Why ChatGPT can't read your site: 79% of AI bots blocked
79% of AI crawler requests to our own site were refused while Googlebot got through 99% of the time. What was in the firewall, and what the fix moved.
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Google Ads passkey requirement: what 19 August blocks
19 August 2026: Google Ads needs a passkey for four operations. A new key carries a seven-day security wait, so starting now no longer buys you margin.
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Does Google penalize AI content? What 150,000 pages show
5.3% of Google’s top-three results are fully AI-written. The real gap is 8.9 points, and it is at indexing, not ranking.
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Google Ads costs by industry: Cluj vs Florence, 2026
Florence searches for hotels 11× more than Cluj — and bids less. Real auction ranges for 5 industries, plus two managed accounts.
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Strange queries in Search Console? An AI wrote them
35 of the 148 queries in our account were not written by a person. Four tells that let you spot yours.
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Four days old, and second in five countries
Position 2.0 in Hungary, Denmark and Portugal four days after publishing. What we did, what it proves, and how “seo cluj” went from 43.3 to 23.0 in a week.
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Search Console's AI Report Shows Impressions, Not Clicks
Only 6.8% of ChatGPT answers linked out in May 2026. Google's AI report gives impressions — the metric that moves first when SEO work starts.
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Journey-aware bidding: Google Ads bids on the sale
25% of small EU firms use a CRM against 65% of large ones (Eurostat 2025). Google's new Search bidding learns from the sale, not the form.
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Why ChatGPT won't recommend your company (2026)
96% of brands are described accurately by AI, but only 11% appear in answers. July 2026 study, 8 platforms — and what actually moves the needle.
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ChatGPT ads in Europe: what's live in July 2026
Zero EU countries can buy ChatGPT ads in July 2026. Where the pilot runs, why the EU is last, and what our own Search Console data says to do instead.
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ChatGPT recommends hotels. It rarely cites their sites
22.6% of ChatGPT travel answers contain a link (Similarweb, 2026). We tested 14 Italian properties: not one was citable. Here is what was missing.
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Google Ads target CPA change, 17 August 2026: what to do
17 August 2026: Google Ads delivers toward your target CPA, not below it. Which campaigns are hit, which are not, and the 30-minute check to run this week.
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AI in WordPress 7.0: what to turn on, what to leave
WordPress 7.0 ships its AI foundations: the Connectors screen, your choice of provider, tools in the editor. What to turn on now, and what it costs.
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Zero-click: customers choose you without opening your site
93% of searches in Google AI Mode end without a single click (Semrush). What that means for your business — and how to become the answer the AI cites.
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The wp2shell alert and how safe your site actually is
A critical WordPress flaw (wp2shell) put site owners on alert worldwide. What it means, what to do now, and why no site is truly immune.
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Cloudflare explained simply: CDN, firewall and free hosting
Cloudflare for a small business: what a CDN is, what the firewall protects you from, and how to host a static site free. Real data: 62% cached.
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SEO vs GEO in 2026: how to get recommended by AI assistants
SEO vs GEO in 2026: why organic traffic drops even when you rank first on Google, how AI assistants choose who to cite, and what a small business can do.
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Core Web Vitals 2026: a fast, AI-readable website
How fast your site must load in 2026, what slowness really costs you, and why speed and AI-readability are the same job. Real data: PageSpeed 100.
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Meta Ads E-commerce Europe 2026: Benchmarks, CPA & ROAS
Meta's own 2025 lifts for EU e-commerce: 9% lower CPA on Advantage+ sales, +29% ROAS on Shop Ads, +11% CTR from AI backgrounds, and the structure.
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Google Ads Performance Max 2026: A Practical Guide for SMEs
A 2026 guide to Google Ads Performance Max for SMEs: what changed this year, the numbers that matter, and an 8-step framework to launch and scale PMax.
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How to Get Your Business Cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity
How to get your business named inside ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI answers — what these engines cite, and how to become one of their sources.
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SEO in the AI Search Era 2026: A Guide for European SMEs
SEO hasn't died — it's transformed. How European SMEs can stay visible in Google's AI search era in 2026. A practical framework and checklist, by Cittago.
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