Build Helpful Hobby Websites Using AI and Real Human Experience
“First-hand experiments examining how Google AI Mode answers questions, uses citations, handles follow-up prompts and combines information from multiple sources.
These articles record the queries, results and evidence before exploring what they reveal for website owners, content creators and everyday search users.”
One of the hardest parts of building a hobby website is finding topics that genuinely deserve another article. It is easy to ask an AI tool for 50 content ideas. It is equally easy to turn those ideas into 50 competent-looking posts. The harder question is: What would those articles add that readers cannot already … Read more
When Google AI Mode produces a detailed answer followed by 10, 15 or even 20 source links, the response can appear extremely well researched. The natural assumption is that the citations prove the claims placed beside them. But do they? We conducted a simple experiment to find out. Rather than merely counting the number of … Read more
Google AI Mode can produce a polished answer supported by an impressive-looking list of citations. But how stable is that answer? Does asking the same question repeatedly produce the same recommendation? Do the cited pages support the precise claims being made? And what happens when the question is reworded to emphasise a different part of … Read more
AI Mode can produce an impressively complete answer within seconds. It can search across numerous sources, identify the broad agreement and turn it into a clear set of instructions. That creates an obvious problem for website owners. If AI Mode can already summarise what the internet says, what reason does anyone have to visit another … Read more
Google AI Mode is new, powerful and slightly confusing. That makes it a perfect subject for a small experiment. If someone wants to build a useful online resource explaining Google AI Mode, could they simply ask Google AI Mode what that resource should include? That sounds circular. But it is also very interesting. So I … Read more
Key points: Google’s guidance on AI Mode does not suggest that website owners need a completely new SEO formula. Pages still need to be crawlable, indexable, clear and useful, but there is no special AI Mode file, markup or magic technical switch. The bigger lesson is that guidance should not become a mechanical checklist. Keywords, … Read more
AI search is starting to look complicated. We now hear about AI Mode, AI Overviews, query fan-out, AI citations, prompt tracking, regex filters, visibility reports, and specialist SEO tools that monitor whether your website appears in AI-generated answers. For a hobby website owner, that can feel overwhelming. It can also feel worrying. Whenever search changes, … Read more
Query fan-out research makes sense. If AI search engines break a main query into several smaller sub-queries, then it is useful for website owners to understand what those sub-queries are. It helps you see the fuller picture. Instead of only asking: What keyword is the user searching for? You start asking: What is the user … Read more
I recently had a discussion with AI Mode about a fear that many small website owners are probably feeling right now. The fear is simple: If Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews can answer questions directly in search, what chance does a small hobby website have? This is especially worrying for people who are not … Read more
AI Mode changes the way we need to think about websites. In traditional search, the pathway was fairly simple. A user typed a query into Google. Google showed a list of websites. The user clicked one or more of those websites. The website then helped the user find the answer, make a decision, solve a … Read more