Nati Elimelech's Blog
Here I write about what I've learned in 20+ years at scale: how to build TECH SEO and GEO systems that work on millions of pages, how to solve problems no one else has solved, and how to translate SEO into language that product and engineering teams understand.
6 articles
web-bot-auth: The Bot Authentication Protocol Explained
The definitive guide to web-bot-auth, the IETF protocol for cryptographic bot identity. How it works, who built it (Cloudflare + Google), who's using it (OpenAI, AWS WAF, Akamai), and what it means for your site.
Googlebot IP Addresses: 2,000+ IPs Updated Daily (All 5 IP Files)
Every Googlebot IP address and CIDR range, pulled directly from Google's official JSON endpoints. Updated daily. Covers all five IP files across Google's three crawler categories: Common Crawlers, Special-Case Crawlers, and User-Triggered Fetchers. Copy-paste ready for firewall rules.
What is server response time, and how it affects Google's crawl rate
Server response time sets how much Googlebot crawls. On one large site, dropping from 500ms to 120ms took crawling from 15,000 to 100,000 URLs a day.
query fan-out: what it is and how it shapes your AI visibility
query fan-out is how ChatGPT breaks one question into many parallel searches and assembles a single answer. Here's what it means for your visibility, and how to track it.
What is llms.txt, and why you probably don't need it
Open almost any GEO checklist and llms.txt is on it. But Google's own docs, the Lighthouse audit, and the logs of real sites tell a different story. Here's why you don't need this file for AI visibility.
I tested if AI agents can read Lovable, Base44, Bolt, and v0 websites so you don't have to
I built the same page on Lovable, Base44, Bolt, and v0, then tested whether ChatGPT and Claude could retrieve it. All exposed the topic. Only some exposed enough HTML for reliable body retrieval.