The Lab · 5 tests, 2 running

I test the advice before I sell it.

Short videos say what works. I check each claim against its source, and where it can be tested, I run it on a real site with the success criteria written down before the data exists. Verdicts post whichever way they land.

Running now

Updated 20 September 2026 · criteria fixed before data

Where 24 claims landed

  • False 8
  • Overstated 4
  • Testing 4
  • Partly true 3
  • Unproven 3
  • Holds up 1
  • Won’t test 1

The loudest claims fall apart at the source. The useful advice is quieter.

All 24 claims →

Grading a claim is not grading a person. Every row links to who said it. If I got something wrong, tell me and I’ll fix it and log the change.

The log

nothing rewritten, only appended

The log
Date What changed Page
20 Sep a number moving against me Updated the zero-click row rather than leaving it flattering. I graded "over 80% of searches end with zero clicks" false on the strength of SparkToro’s 2024 figure of about 58.5%. Their 2026 figure is about 68%. The claim is still false, and it is a lot less false than it was. Leaving the old evidence in place would have made my correction look stronger than it is. SEO claims
20 Sep Checked the last nine claims sitting in the clip library’s backlog, and two of them changed what I think about a test on this page. The first: a creator promising that publishing posts as markdown brings hundreds of AI crawler hits within hours. Measured studies find close to the opposite, including one test logging zero visits to .md files against 137 to the HTML, and an analysis across 300,000 domains finding no link between these files and AI citations. That is the same family of claim as the llms.txt test below, and it means that test now has a likely answer before it starts. I am running it anyway, because a likely answer is not a measured one and my own site is cheap to experiment on, but the expectation has moved. SEO claims
19 Sep a fifth test Added the Google Business Profile Offer to the list, because I am now running it rather than just reading about it. My website audit is $50, an Offer post on the business profile carries a coupon that makes it $10, and the redeem link is tagged so I can tell what came from the post. The claim that a free post on a profile brings in paying local customers is exactly the sort of thing this page exists to settle. SEO claims
19 Sep first readings on the Reddit experiment Five weeks late, and they are interesting. The tactic page ranks 4th on its reddit query, so the first success criterion is met. The control page, which has no reddit anywhere in it, ranks 8th on that same query and 1st on its own. A grounded AI retrieves the tactic page for the Reddit question and the control page for the pros-and-cons question, so both pages are inside the machine, and neither gets named out loud. The tactic works and has not yet been shown to beat an ordinary good page. Full numbers and the mistake I made scoring them are on the experiment page. SEO claims
19 Sep narrowing the FAQ test Changed the success criterion for the FAQ test before any data existed, which is the only honest time to change one. It used to say the FAQ pages should gain more impressions than the untouched ones, or get cited where they do not. The impressions half cannot work here: this site takes about four clicks a quarter from search, and the busiest page in the test sees eighty impressions in ninety days. Any eight-week move in that is weather, not signal. I checked whether living-wired.com was a better host and it is quieter still. So the criterion is now citations only, and impressions are recorded as context. The test got narrower and more honest at the same time. SEO claims
19 Sep evening Both pages merged and live. That started the FAQ test, so I took its day-zero AI reading five minutes after the deploy landed, while no engine had recrawled: six questions, three runs each, on a grounded AI surface. Not one answer cited any wiredbuilder.com page, treatment or comparison. Even asking who I am by name returns nothing. A floor of zero is a clean place to measure from, if a slightly bleak one. SEO claims
19 Sep where that leaves the claim The first success criterion is met and the second is not. The tactic page did reach the top 10 for its reddit query inside six weeks, comfortably, at 4th. But it has not beaten the control page’s trajectory on the control’s own target, because the control page went to 1st. The uncomfortable part for the tactic, and the most useful thing on this page so far: the control page has no reddit in its slug, title, H1 or body, and it still ranks 8th on both reddit queries. A page that ignored the tactic entirely cracked the same SERP the tactic was supposed to unlock. That does not kill the idea, because 4th in a Reddit-dominated SERP is harder won than 1st on a quiet long-tail, and the two queries are not equally competitive. It does mean the tactic has not yet shown it does anything the ordinary page did not. Reddit experiment
19 Sep One verdict changed, and it is mine that was wrong, not his. I had Matt Diamante’s agentic-calling clip down as “Holds up”. Google’s feature is real and I had checked that properly. The part I waved through is the half that actually sells the clip: that the shop which answered the phone beat better-ranked shops. That rests on a single search filmed on a phone, with the business never named. Feature confirmed, ranking claim not, so the row is “Partly true” now. My own note from 7 September already graded it that way and I did not read my own note carefully enough. SEO claims
19 Sep the reading that changed my mind The half that matters went differently than the rank numbers suggest, and I got it wrong the first time, so here is both the mistake and the finding. I asked a grounded AI surface five Shaklee questions, three runs each, and my first pass scored the pages as absent because neither URL appears in the answer text. That was the wrong test. The pages were in the retrieval set the whole time; the model just never names them out loud. Resolving the source links properly: asked what people on Reddit say about Shaklee, the model retrieves the tactic page. Asked for the pros and cons of Shaklee products, it retrieves the control page twice over, plus the older /shaklee-reviews page. So each page wins its own question. Being retrieved and being named are two different measurements and I had been conflating them; from here this log records both, separately. Reddit experiment
19 Sep Went back through every row against the saved clip and the notes I wrote when I checked it. Swapped each creator link from their profile to the exact post, for the clips I saved by link. Twenty-three of the twenty-eight now point at the post itself. Three I had screen-recorded off my phone instead, so there is no post URL to point at: those keep a profile link, marked as such. Two lost their handle in the recording and stay unlinked rather than guessed at. No platform was wrong. Edward Sturm’s clips are on Instagram and the rest are on TikTok, which is what the rows already said. SEO claims
19 Sep later the same evening Gap closed. I took the readings rather than leaving the entry above as the last word, so this page now has five-week data instead of an apology. Ranks first, organic positions with the SERP features stripped out. On "shaklee reviews reddit" the tactic page is 4th and the control page is 8th. On "shaklee reddit" the tactic page is 5th and the control page is 8th. On the control page’s own target, "pros and cons of shaklee products", the control page is 1st and the tactic page does not appear at all. Both reddit queries still show an AI Overview, and Reddit threads now hold 7 of the top 10 organic slots on each, down from 8 at day zero, with the two slots they lost going to these two pages. Reddit experiment
19 Sep Started this page. Picked three new tests to run alongside the Reddit one: IndexNow, three-question FAQs and llms.txt. SEO claims
19 Sep Nothing to report, which is itself the report. The weekly rank and AI-answer checks I promised on 13 August have not been run since the pages went up. The test site has had no commits since 14 August either, so the pages are untouched and the experiment is still valid; it is the reading that is missing, not the setup. Five weeks with no data is longer than the six-week window I set myself for the first success criterion, so the next entry has to be a real set of readings or this stops being an experiment. Logged here rather than quietly backfilled, because a gap in the log is data about how the experiment was run. Reddit experiment
14 Sep Added the expired-domain tactic and the “Google confirmed 40%” claim. SEO claims
7 Sep Went through 61 saved clips in one evening. Each was transcribed, and every claim in it was checked against its source: Google’s documentation, the study being quoted, or the tool itself. Most of the rows above come from that pass. SEO claims
14 Aug Protocol change, one day in, logged rather than hidden: the site owner wants the tactic page to work as a real reviews destination, so it now also displays all 15 Google reviews of the distributorship and the 46 customer reviews from Shaklee store listings for the catalogued products alongside the critical Reddit threads. Both experiment pages went into the sitewide footer at the same time, deliberately as a pair, so neither gets an internal-link advantage over the other. A third page also shipped, a research-studies hub, which links to neither experiment page. Net effect on the experiment: both pages gained equal internal linking, and the tactic page gained content depth the control did not. From here, a tactic-page win is evidence for reddit-optimization plus richer content, not reddit-optimization alone. The control page stays frozen. Reddit experiment
13 Aug Picked the test niche and matched keyword pair from Canadian keyword data (both targets near-zero difficulty, comparable volume, same skeptic intent). Captured day-zero SERPs for both target queries: the tactic query returns 8 Reddit threads in the top 10, and both queries already show a Google AI Overview. Published the tactic page and the control page on virginiamitchell.ca within the same hour, same format, same internal linking. Started rank tracking on five keywords. Reddit experiment
12 Aug Started the Reddit interception experiment, the first claim from a saved video tested on a live site. It has its own page. SEO claims
12 Aug Transcribed the source video (46 seconds, credits SEO David Quaid). Extracted the five claims above and researched each. Ran baseline searches on four unrelated "X reddit" queries to see the tactic in the wild: found one live specimen ranking #8 in a competitive niche, and wide-open local SERPs. Reddit experiment

Seen an SEO claim you want tested?

Send it here. I check it against the source first. If it is worth testing, it goes on the tracker with a dated verdict, and you get the result by email.

I use your email only to send you the verdict. If the claim goes on the tracker, the claim and who said it are published; your name and email are not. See the Privacy Policy.

Have your own site checked this way

The same habit, pointed at one site: what is actually wrong, what the evidence says, and what I would do about it in what order.

Get the Foundation Audit

Or skip ahead and talk

If you already know what you need built, a call is faster than a report. Thirty minutes, no pitch deck.

Book a call

Want the Lab's results in your own searches? Add Wired Builder as a preferred source and Google shows it to you more often.

Add as a preferred source on Google (opens in a new tab) Add as a preferred source on Google (opens in a new tab)