My SEO system: get found, get understood, get chosen

The six pillars of my SEO system

Get found, get understood and get chosen are what a page has to achieve. These six pillars are how I get there. They came from sorting thousands of my own messages to the people and tools I work with, not from a whiteboard. Under each one are two of those messages, word for word.

1. AGet understoodGet chosen

   Start from the person

   “But every idea needs a real person with a real search behavior behind it.”

   • in the areas where people are tryign to understand what i even do, we need to think about simplifying it so everyone can understand, whether...haydenschuster.com, Oct 11, 2026
   • who's going to be on this page? on a blog, could be someone from linkedin or in the industry reading, [...] I also want to make sure my...haydenschuster.com, Oct 11, 2026

   My full-time job. At work, every request gets the same first question: who is searching, what did they type, and what do they need to do next? Every other choice on the account answers to that. How I work

   How it works in practice4 parts

   Name the reader and their moment

   A named human per page or template, never "the user"; journey stage and entry channel (chatgpt, ai overviews, google, reddit, a shared link) decide what the page does; funnel stage decides page shape, so a diagnostic page never carries a buy button.

   Answer the question actually asked

   Harvest real queries, people also ask and fan-out queries, never invent faqs to fill schema; read social, reddit, youtube, press conferences and rival sources for what the audience is asking this week; model what people are planning (group costumes, pet costumes).

   The psychology of action

   Sell the why before the what; give a personal reason to act ("people are selfish"); shrink the ask (one tap beats a form).

   Put the next step where the decision resolves

   Every page ends in one deliberate next action (an affiliate link, a sign-up, the next book, a sibling page); affiliate links sit beside a resolved decision, never before it; tools go at the research stage, never interrupting the buying moment.

   Read more: Why informational content stalls

   Where it shows up

   • The Crawler's Cookbook
   • GageRef
   • The Quack Report
   • CheckMyTap
   • UpOrbit

2. BGet understoodGet chosen

   Tell it as a story

   “Being right is the floor. Being genuinely helpful is the product.”

   • could you do a copywriting and voice audit, like you were a veteran who's studied copywriting and brand voice for 60 years in the industry,...The Crawler's Cookbook, Oct 8, 2026
   • id like you to follow the patterns of this duck team early in the season and start thinking critically about what this season's theme and...The Quack Report, Sep 22, 2026

   The Quack Report. The case study opens where the site did, with "I was going to Autzen Stadium before I could walk." The reason comes first; the numbers back it up after. The Quack Report story

   How it works in practice5 parts

   Story order and the first screen

   Answer first, then the why, then the next step; a table with a takeaway sentence above it; current before historical, resolved before speculative.

   Mobile first, designed on its own

   Design at 390 pixels first and check 390, 768, 1440; build mobile separately, not shrunk; mobile menus are his named recurring weak spot.

   A human voice, opinion labeled as opinion

   Nothing may read as ai-generated; no "if this then that" hedging, no uniform sentence rhythm; no internal language, tool names or seo talk on reader pages.

   Tone that matches the reader's moment

   Read sentiment before writing; gameday energy, honesty after a loss, kindness about injuries; credit the opponent.

   Design with intent, never AI slop

   No generic boxes, arrows or reused ai content blocks; themed and branded to the site; color carries meaning, never decoration.

   Read more: Content structure for answer-first search

3. CGet foundGet understood

   Be the source worth citing

   “Rankings are one distribution channel. The durable position is being the source that AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini cite when they answer the query [...]”

   • and on the about page, really think through what questions people will be curious about, what they search for, how we can dominate my name...haydenschuster.com, Oct 11, 2026
   • another north star i'd like to say is that SEO is GEO, and any sort of AEO or other abbreviation, at it's core, is still seo [...] AI is...haydenschuster.com, Oct 11, 2026

   WireRef. WireRef answers electrical code questions in plain tables. Microsoft Copilot cited it about 320K times in three months, by Bing Webmaster Tools. The WireRef story

   How it works in practice5 parts

   Win the question nobody answered

   Concede branded and official searches; win the long tail, the conversational query and the unanswered question; position a site around a question with no good answer, not a topic with traffic.

   Architecture is intent made structural

   Every page has a parent, two siblings and one downstream action, zero orphans; hubs with real depth; natural bridges written as the reader's next step, not widgets.

   Readable by machines

   Anything behind a tab, toggle or accordion still in the html; interactive results baked as static text at build time; schema mirrors visible text exactly and gets the same verification as prose.

   Moats are commitments

   The moat test: would this still matter if a competitor copied the template tomorrow; moats ranked from template (weakest) to proprietary data assembly to creative reframing (strongest); complete registries.

   Bing and AI answers are first-class channels

   Bing and the ai surfaces first, google is upside; any google-only read is wrong on its face; track citations by engine (chatgpt, copilot, perplexity, gemini).

   Read more: How AI search understands your content, Why AI Overviews appear in Google

   Where it shows up

   • CheckMyTap
   • Technical: structure, templates and checks
   • How this site is built
   • Enterprise SEO work
   • The Quack Report

4. DGet understoodGet chosen

   Never ship a wrong fact

   “A plausible estimate presented as fact is a failure condition. Never verify one AI-generated claim against another AI-generated claim.”

   • only use industry research from the last like 3 months max, this industry moves so fasthaydenschuster.com, Oct 12, 2026
   • if you find pre-existing defects, and triple verifgy and confirm tghey are wrong on our site, and do not just lbvindly change , in the past...WireRef, Sep 6, 2026

   The Crawler's Cookbook. A later source check found an overclaim on the Book 9 page. I corrected it on August 2, 2026, said so, and tightened the check around the page. The correction

   How it works in practice6 parts

   Primary source, matched claim, current date

   Three checks per fact (find the primary source, confirm it says the claim, check its date); every number traces to a file and row or a source actually read; classify a claim before verifying it (absence, universal, comparative, temporal, derived).

   Prove it, never trust it

   Ai output, subagents, plugins, codex, chatgpt and vendor support ai are leads, not facts; ask "agree or disagree" and break each finding; audit the audit.

   State the denominator, sweep the class

   Check every page, not a sample; say "checked 12 of 47" or "sampled"; name the method, never a bare "verified".

   Freshness is part of correctness

   Staleness covers every fact type (scores, names, times, tv channels, records) and the narrative, not just numbers; homepage, menu, footer and hubs included; an event cascades to every page it touches.

   Honest uncertainty

   Label every claim fact, inference or unknown; null beats wrong; a blank cell with a note beats a plausible estimate.

   The bar rises with the stakes

   On electrical, water, gauge and medical sites the bar is "would a professional making a real decision be right to trust this"; safety errors are fixed before anything else; unverifiable safety claims are held however differentiated.

   Read more: Personal audit: where AI output fails

   Where it shows up

   • The Crawler's Cookbook
   • CheckMyTap
   • Content: answers, data and voice
   • Systems: the checks behind every site
   • Decision log

5. EGet foundGet understoodGet chosen

   Measure, then double down

   “Data is evidence for patterns, not a fence around ideas. Use it to understand why things work mechanically, then reason from those mechanics.”

   • i'm using peec.ai for ai visibility reports, ahrefs brand radar for citationa nd share of voice, GSC to pull csvs and analyze large...haydenschuster.com, Oct 12, 2026
   • when it comes to anything on the site from the past, i want you to pull the best elements out yes, but on a granular level, like data level,...haydenschuster.com, Oct 11, 2026

   My full-time job. At work, I finish small before going wide. Depth earns trust from people and from search systems, so priorities get set by what can be done properly first. Rules I work by

   How it works in practice5 parts

   Every channel, cross-checked

   Search console, bing webmaster tools (including first-party ai citations), ga4, clarity, pagespeed and crux, screaming frog crawls, ahrefs brand radar, peec ai; first-party bing data verifies sampled third-party ai tools; name which source is authoritative for which question.

   Honest comparisons

   Complete periods only; equal windows anchored on a real event; volume floors so tiny samples can't make news.

   Follow the data to the winners

   Double down on what works instead of cutting; top pages first for both accuracy and growth; improve existing pages before adding new ones.

   Measure what actually earns

   Revenue per site with its own tracking id; explain every spike down to product and url; instrument before deciding when two explanations fit.

   A dashboard that says where to look

   Simple and visual, not an internal spreadsheet; headline metric near the top with a baseline; insight text generated from fresh data, never hand-written.

   Read more: Search Console as a visibility dashboard, Why impressions rise and clicks stay flat

   Where it shows up

   • Enterprise SEO work
   • WireRef
   • GageRef
   • Systems: the checks behind every site
   • Decision log

6. FGet foundGet understoodGet chosen

   Turn every lesson into a system

   “Audits find a problem once. Gates prevent recurrence.”

   • never trust agents and plugins naturally, everything needs to be checked with a fresh pair of eyes. [...] any handover documents or...haydenschuster.com, Oct 11, 2026
   • write a handoff to codex, where it isn't demands, but a thought document, to let codex explore, come up with new or better ideas, break the...The Crawler's Cookbook, Oct 8, 2026

   This site. Moving this site off WordPress, every one of 148 old addresses got a new home chosen by hand, so nothing anyone had linked to breaks. The decision log

   How it works in practice6 parts

   Gates over audits

   A build gate that blocks the deploy beats an audit that writes a report; every gate fails on a known-bad fixture first (ideally the real shipped bug); zero inspected fails, never passes.

   Every mistake becomes a fix to the system

   Fix the generator or template, never the generated page; every change is a template change or it is debt; the unit of repair is the field, so enumerate every reader of it.

   Automation that runs without him

   The terminal state for a seasonal site is that it updates itself accurately; a self-healing loop beats an alert to someone on vacation; failures alert loudly and never report green on a no-op.

   Plan, break the plan, ship what survives

   Check what already exists (live site, repo, decision notes, recent work) before proposing; plan mode means no edits; steelman, then attack with evidence.

   Change safely where it earns

   Earning sites get small, reversible diffs and a stated blast radius and revert path; read-only audits on top pages first; design-only changes proven to leave search-visible content identical.

   Two AIs, checked against each other and against me

   I set the plan and the standard; one ai speeds up the build, the other reviews it with an open, creative eye, then they swap; every handoff opens with a read-critically note, so the next one questions instead of rubber-stamps; a shared log of what changed, how it was verified and what the other should check.

   Read more: SEO strategy vs SEO systems, How I structured my old site for search

   Where it shows up

   • Technical: structure, templates and checks
   • How this site is built