Hey, it's Jeane 👋

Back in June I opened this newsletter with a confession: I'd gone quiet for eight months. The cobbler's kids had no shoes, and I was done with that. Twelve issues later, I want to show you what showing up every week actually looked like, because the same lesson applies to your website.

On a personal note first: our little boy cat, Buddy, was diagnosed with heart disease this summer. So on top of everything else, it's been a crash course in how to get medicine into a cat. He's doing well, and we have another recheck at the vet soon. If you've ever mastered the art of pilling a cat, hit reply with your tips. I will read every one.

12 emails later, here's what actually matters

While I was busy keeping this promise, Google reinvented search about five times. The quick rewind. Half of Google searches now end without a click, but pages that get cited inside the answer still win visits. Your Google Business Profile views dropped by half while customer actions held steady, because the profile became a data feed, not a brochure. Search Console started grading your Instagram and TikTok, then this month started showing your AI impressions. The llms.txt craze mostly fizzled (Google ignores it; we tested it ourselves for five months). Reviews flipped from a trophy count to a freshness game. And two weeks ago, ads showed up inside the AI answer, which made the free citations worth more, not less.

Different headlines, same lesson every time. The businesses that win aren't chasing each change. They're maintaining a small set of fundamentals that every change keeps rewarding.

And that's the comeback-arc part. Nothing I did these twelve weeks was clever. I just stopped going quiet. Consistency did what cleverness never could, for this newsletter and for every client site we touch: show up weekly, keep the fundamentals fresh, and the algorithm changes start working for you instead of against you.

The three things that still work

1. Be the answer. Pages built around real customer questions, with clean structure and schema, get cited by Google's AI, ChatGPT, all of them. Every algorithm shift this year rewarded this harder.

2. Keep it fresh where trust lives. Recent reviews, an updated profile, current photos. Recency is the signal both humans and AI now read first.

3. Measure instead of guessing. UTM tags on everything you share, the new Search Console AI report, the branded versus non-branded split. Ten minutes a week, and you're making decisions on data your competitors don't have.

That's it. Not thirty tactics. Three habits.

Your one move this week

Grade yourself honestly, 1 to 10, on each of the three. Whichever scores lowest is your Q4 project. Just one. A single fundamental done consistently for a quarter beats dabbling in all three, and October is the last calm-ish window before the holidays.

And a small heads-up: I've spent the summer turning these three habits into a system I'm calling Findability OS. It's taking me longer than I hoped (building in public is humbling), but it's coming, and readers of this email will hear about it first.

See you next Tuesday,
Jeane (sounds like Genie) Sumner
Website HQ + Findability OS

P.S. Want a head start on all three fundamentals? Our free Findable MiniGuide walks you through seven practical moves, one at a time, starting with the highest-leverage one: grab the MiniGuide here.

P.P.S. Know someone who spent the summer panicking about AI instead of doing the three things? Forward this. They can subscribe here: websitehq.kit.com/findable-email