The headline for month four needs no interpretation: searching “Cumbria SEO” now returns a Google AI Overview that names 1418 directly, alongside four other local providers, with an accurate one-line description of what the business actually does. After four months of tracking an AEO score in the abstract, this is what it looks like in practice.
| # | Post | Date | Key metric |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Building a Website That Ranks — SEO Diary 1 | 6 May 2026 | Baseline established |
| 2 | Building a Website That Ranks — SEO Diary 2 | 5 June 2026 | 2,260 impressions, AEO 38 → 70 |
| 3 | Building a Website That Ranks — SEO Diary 3 | 4 July 2026 | AEO 70 → 88, SEO page converting clicks |
| 4 | Building a Website That Ranks — SEO Diary 4 | 7 August 2026 | Average position 41.4 → 25.6, AEO 88 → 81 |
| 5 | Building a Website That Ranks — SEO Diary 5 | 5 September 2026 | Cited in AI Overview for “Cumbria SEO,” average position 25.6 → 22.6 |
For reference, the launch post explains the plan in full.
Named in an AI Overview
On 29 August, a search for “Cumbria SEO” returned a Google AI Overview listing five providers under “Popular SEO Providers in Cumbria.” 1418 was one of them, described as offering “comprehensive web design, hosting, and technical SEO fixes for local sole traders and international clients,” an accurate, on-brand line, and not something written for this site. Google generated that description itself, pulled from how the SEO page and its supporting content are structured.
This is worth being precise about, because it is a different achievement to ranking well in the traditional results list. Being named inside a generated answer means being treated as a reliable source Google is comfortable summarising and standing behind, in the same breath as competitors with far more established local presence. Whether it holds, and whether it turns into enquiries, is not yet known. But as a proof point for four months of AEO work, it is hard to ask for a cleaner one.
A new report, and a genuinely useful one
This month, Search Console’s Performance report added a dedicated view for generative AI features on Google Search. It is the first month that data exists to look at, and the early picture is encouraging: it is not just the homepage picking up generative AI impressions. The SEO page, website maintenance, design & build, hosting & email, and two blog posts all show impressions in that report. That spread across the site, rather than a single lucky page, is the more meaningful signal. It suggests the answer-first structure applied site-wide is doing what it was meant to, not just working in one place by chance.
There is no click or conversion data attached to this report yet, and it is genuinely new territory for interpreting what “performance” means when the destination is a generated answer rather than a search results page. This will be watched properly rather than over-read in month five.
Search Console: month four
3 clicks, 1.41K impressions, average position 22.6. Clicks and impressions both eased back slightly from July’s 4 and 1.68K, continuing the pattern of small numbers that move less than the headline metric. Average position improved again regardless: 41.4 in month three’s baseline comparison, 25.6 last month, now 22.6. Four months running, the same story holds. The site is being seen in a better position more consistently, even where the raw click count has not caught up yet.
The SEO page’s own numbers are the clearest example of that gap. It logged 1,015 impressions this month and zero clicks, despite being the exact page named in the AI Overview. That is not a contradiction, it is a plausible explanation. An AI Overview can fully answer someone’s question without a single click ever reaching the site behind it. Visibility and click-through are moving in different directions here, and that is worth stating plainly rather than treating the zero as a failure.
Hosting & Email led the month on clicks with 1 click from 203 impressions. Website Timeline, Design & Build, and What Is AEO all picked up their own single clicks too, spreading conversions slightly wider across the site than in previous months.
Google Analytics: a different kind of noise
GA4 showed 48 active users this month, all but four of them new. Before repeating that number as growth, it is worth applying the same scrutiny that caught last month’s bot traffic. The signature is familiar: near-100% new users, five-second average engagement, and 81% bounce on the homepage. Two of the referral sources this month, sunblog.asia and a domain describing itself as a “white label manual” service, have the hallmarks of referrer spam: fake traffic designed to make a site owner curious enough to visit the referring domain back, rather than genuine visitors.
This is a different mechanism to the Netlify preview-domain issue found and fixed in July. That fix addressed traffic landing on the site’s raw hosting-platform domain, and appears to be working as intended, with no sign of that specific pattern this month. Referrer spam is a separate, older, and more persistent nuisance, generally addressed by excluding known spam referrers as a filter in GA4 rather than anything fixable at the hosting level. That filter has not been set up yet, and doing so is a fair task for month five rather than something to solve inside this post.
Net result: 48 is not treated as the real figure any more than 56 was last month, and no confident replacement number is offered here either. The plain position is that GA4’s active user count remains unreliable until proper filtering is in place, and Search Console’s numbers are the more trustworthy read on real visibility for now.
Site Health and AEO score
| Baseline (May 4) | Month 1 (Jun 3) | Month 2 (Jul 3) | Month 3 (Aug 3) | Month 4 (Sep 3) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Site Health | 86 (B) | 100 (A) | 100 (A) | 100 (A) | 100 (A) |
| AEO Score | 38 (F) | 70 (C) | 88 (B) | 81 (B) | 85 (B) |
The AEO score recovered somewhat from last month’s dip, moving from 81 to 85, though it has not yet returned to July’s peak of 88. Pages crawled increased from 19 to 22, and warnings rose from 8 to 12 alongside that growth, a reasonable trade-off given the site itself is larger than it was, but a warning count moving in the wrong direction is still worth tracking into month five rather than assuming it will resolve on its own.
August’s work, briefly
August was a lighter month by design, three weeks of it spent away from the desk entirely. The work that did happen:
- August 7. Month three diary published, and the Host-based redirect for the site’s raw hosting-platform domain committed and pushed, closing the gap the CONTEXT-based noindex header alone could not cover.
- August 9. Indexing requested for the month three diary post.
- August 15. Website timeline blog post published and submitted via Search Console.
- August 29. What is AEO blog post published and submitted via Search Console. The AI Overview citation was spotted the same day, an entirely coincidental but fitting piece of timing.
A quiet month on paper, and a plain one to report as such. The AI Overview result did not come from anything done in August specifically. It is the visible result of four months of accumulated structural work landing at once.
What month five looks like
Priorities for September: setting up a referrer-spam filter in GA4 so active user figures are trustworthy again, working through the 12 open AEO warnings, and watching whether the AI Overview citation persists or was a one-off. The generative AI report in Search Console will be checked properly for the first time with a full month of data behind it rather than a partial one.
The next update will be at the start of October with September’s data.
1418 provides web design, SEO and AEO, hosting and email, and website maintenance for businesses in Cumbria. This blog documents the process of building search visibility from the ground up.