| 12 August 2026 | Started the Reddit interception experiment, the first claim from a saved video tested on a live site. It has its own page. |
| 7 September 2026 | 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. |
| 14 September 2026 | Added the expired-domain tactic and the “Google confirmed 40%” claim. |
| 19 September 2026 | Started this page. Picked three new tests to run alongside the Reddit one: IndexNow, three-question FAQs and llms.txt. |
| 19 September 2026 | 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. |
| 19 September 2026 | 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. |
| 19 September 2026 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. |
| 19 September 2026 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. |
| 19 September 2026 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. |
| 19 September 2026 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. |
| 20 September 2026 | 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. |
| 20 September 2026 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. |
