Pull any large site's crawl logs and you will find a meaningful slice of bot activity spent on URLs that died months ago. Googlebot, Bingbot, and a growing crowd of AI crawlers keep returning to pages you deleted, rechecking whether they are still gone. The lever that controls how often they bother is the HTTP status code you return when they ask, and the choice between 404 and 410 matters far less for how fast a page leaves the index than for how much crawl it keeps costing you afterward. We pull this thread on almost every technical audit, because recovered crawl budget is some of the cheapest performance in SEO.

Read the comple post here https://search.agency/blog/http-410-vs-404-deindexation.

A buyer asks ChatGPT whether your product is any good, and the answer comes back wrong. Maybe it invents a founding date, credits you with a service you have never sold, or repeats a complaint a competitor seeded six months ago. You never see the query, the buyer never reads your rebuttal, and the deal disappears before anyone on your team hears about it. With more than 40% of B2B software discovery now starting as a conversational query to an answer engine, according to Steakhouse, a confident wrong answer often becomes the first and only impression a buyer forms of you.

Here's how you can defend your brand in AI search results. Full blogpost available here https://search.agency/blog/negative-defensive-geo.

IndexNow gets dismissed for one reason. Google does not support it. That is true, and it is the wrong place to stop reading, because Google is not the only index that matters anymore. IndexNow is a simple protocol that lets you tell a search engine the moment a URL is created, updated, or deleted, instead of waiting for a crawler to rediscover it.

It is supported by Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, and Yep. And Bing's index is the one that feeds Microsoft Copilot, DuckDuckGo, and the web search behind ChatGPT. So the question is not whether IndexNow helps you in Google. It is whether you want your freshest content reaching AI answer engines in minutes instead of days.