How we research, write, review and correct what we publish

Who writes here, and why it matters

Everything on this site is written by the practitioners who do the work: the consultants, engineers and strategists described on our team page. Nothing is outsourced to a content mill, and nothing is published under a byline that did not write it.

That is a practical constraint rather than a boast. A guide to faceted navigation written by someone who has never had to decide which facet combinations to block will describe the theory and miss the decision. We would rather publish fewer pages that survive contact with a real site.

What we will publish

A page gets published only if it does at least one of these:

• Answers a question we are actually asked on scoping calls, in the way we answer it on the call.
• Documents a decision framework we use — not "what is X", but "how to choose between A, B and C, and what each costs you".
• Reports something we measured, with the method attached so you can check it.

If a draft does none of those, it gets cut rather than padded to a word count. We do not publish to a cadence.

What we will not publish

• Content assembled from other search results. If a page could have been written without access to anything except the current top ten, it has nothing of its own to add and we do not publish it.
• Invented statistics. No "studies show" without a link to the study. No made-up percentages to make a point land harder.
• Client results we cannot evidence. seothumb.com is a young brand. Where we illustrate an engagement, it is labelled as an illustrative scoping example, in conditional tense, and never presented as a reported client outcome. Our full position is in the disclaimer.
• Competitor characterisations we cannot support. We will describe tactics we disagree with and why. We will not assert what other agencies are secretly doing.
• Predictions dressed as fact. Where something is our judgement rather than documented behaviour, the copy says so.

Sourcing standards

Claims about how search engines behave are sourced to primary documentation — Google Search Central, web.dev, or schema.org — rather than to another agency's blog post summarising it. Every external link on this site was fetched and verified before publication, and we re-check them when a page is updated.

Where we cite a threshold or a requirement, we link the page that states it, so you can confirm we read it correctly. Where documentation is ambiguous, we say it is ambiguous rather than picking the reading that suits us.

External links are references, not endorsements, and we take no payment for any link we publish. We have no affiliate relationships with any tool named on this site.

How we use AI, stated plainly

We use language models for research, clustering large query sets, summarising documentation we then verify, and structuring a first outline. That is a productivity tool and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

We do not publish model-generated prose as finished copy. Every published page is written or substantially rewritten by the named practitioner responsible for it, checked against primary sources, and edited by a second person before it goes live.

The reason is not ideological. Generated text carries no experience and has nothing of its own to cite, which is exactly the failure mode Google's people-first content guidance describes. We hold client content to the same standard, which is why briefs are written for subject-matter experts rather than generalist writers.

Review before publication

Every page passes three checks:

1. Technical accuracy — reviewed by the engineer or consultant who owns that subject area. A content strategist does not sign off a crawl-budget claim.
2. Sourcing — every external claim traced to a primary source and every link fetch-verified.
3. Honesty — a specific pass for invented specifics, implied track record, and claims we cannot evidence. This check has killed more sentences on this site than the other two combined.

Updates and corrections

Search changes, and a guide written today can be wrong in eighteen months. Pages carry a published date, and a visible updated date once they have been materially revised.

If we get something wrong, we correct the page rather than quietly deleting it, and where the error was material the correction is noted on the page itself. We do not silently rewrite history to look more accurate than we were.

If you find an error, email hello@seothumbs.com and tell us what is wrong. A correction that is right gets made whether or not it is convenient, and we will credit you on the page if you want the credit.

Advertising, sponsorship and independence

Nothing on this site is sponsored. We do not accept paid guest posts, paid links, or payment for a mention. We have no affiliate arrangements with any tool, platform or vendor named anywhere on this site, including the tools we say we use.

If that ever changes, the relationship will be disclosed on the page it affects, before the content, not in a footer nobody reads.