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A first-month SEO log for a small site in English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. Google started showing it in search; Bing had read the sitemap and still hadn't crawled the homepage. What we set up on day one, what the early data showed, why Google shows a globe instead of our favicon, where the first links came from, and what we chose not to do.
In July, Cloudflare split its single AI-bot switch into three separately managed categories: Search, Agent, and Training. From September 15, domains newly onboarding get a default that blocks Training and Agent bots on pages that display ads while Search stays allowed. Here is what each category covers, who the new default actually touches, and the dashboard audit that takes half an hour.
Content API for Shopping was sunset on August 18, 2026, and requests began experiencing progressive errors on September 1. Merchant API takes over product uploads, inventory, account management, and the Google Ads inventory link. Here is how to confirm in half an hour which API your stack calls, what goes dark when the feed stops, and how the extension request form works as an emergency lever.
Cloudflare split AI traffic into Search, Agent and Training in July 2026. Akamai sorts the same traffic into training crawlers, search crawlers and fetchers. Vercel's AI bots managed ruleset covers training, search and user-generated fetches. Three vendors, nearly identical splits, different names and different defaults. A selection guide with a comparison table, an honest read on robots.txt, and a recommended setup for three kinds of store.
You don't need to pay for a technical SEO audit. Google Search Console and Ahrefs Webmaster Tools are free, and Screaming Frog is free up to 500 URLs. This builds the crawl-index-analytics stack from free and low-cost tools, then shows the scale where Sitebulb's reporting earns its price and when Plausible beats GA4.
Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers by default now and added Pay Per Crawl billing. Many stores never noticed GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot got shut out, which quietly erases them from AI answers. Here's how to audit, which bots to allow, and the difference between training and retrieval crawlers.