The Weekly Growth Checklist: SEO, AI Search, Content, Competitors and Distribution

What is a weekly growth checklist?

This is the full version of the five-point checklist from Kanso's Instagram Reel. The goal is not to do everything. It is to find the biggest gap, fix it and measure what changes.

Most teams do not lack tools. They lack a fixed moment each week when search data, content, competitor moves and distribution are read together, because a gap in one area usually shows up in another.

check five areas → find the biggest gap → fix one thing → measure → repeat next week

What are the five checks, at a glance?

The five checks are SEO, AI search, content, competitors and distribution, and each one answers a single question. The table gives the question, where to look, what a pass looks like and the usual fix.

The rest of this page takes each check in turn, with the facts behind it. Where a claim comes from Google, the sentence links to Google's own documentation.

Check 1: Can people discover your business through search?

Yes, if your key pages are indexed, they rank for queries your customers use, and Google can reach them without wasting effort on junk URLs. Open Search Console's Page indexing report and the Performance report once a week and record three numbers.

1. Indexed pages. The Pages report graphs indexed against not-indexed URLs and lists up to 1,000 indexed examples.
2. Non-branded clicks and impressions. This is the clearest read on whether new people are finding you.
3. Queries at positions 11 to 20. These are your quickest wins and are covered below.

Separate branded from non-branded queries. Google's branded queries filter, announced on 20 November 2025 and available to all eligible sites from 11 March 2026, splits them automatically. Google says branded queries typically rank higher and earn higher click-through rates, while non-branded queries show how new people find you.

Then check speed. Google's Core Web Vitals guidance sets the good thresholds at a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less and a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads.

The table lists the statuses you will see when pages are not indexed and what each usually calls for. Read the status before you act, because several are working as intended.

Which six SEO terms should you check every week?

Six terms turn the SEO check into specific actions: information gain, keyword cannibalization, crawl budget, index bloat, striking distance and entity salience. Some are Google's own language and some are industry shorthand, and each section below says which.

Information gain: add one thing the top 10 results do not have

Information gain is how much new information your page adds beyond what already ranks for the same query. If your page repeats a definition, five generic tips and a basic FAQ that three other results already carry, it adds nothing a searcher has not already read.

The idea has a documented origin. A Google patent, US 11,354,342, granted on 7 June 2022 and naming Victor Carbune and Pedro Gonnet Anders, describes scoring a document by the additional information it contains beyond documents a user has already viewed.

A patent does not prove how Search ranks pages today. Google's helpful content guidance asks the question directly instead: whether the content provides original information, reporting, research or analysis, and substantial value compared with other pages in the results.

Weekly action: before you publish, list what the top results already say, then add one element they lack. Good candidates are your own survey or usage data, a real test with results, a named expert's quote, or a first-hand screenshot.

Keyword cannibalization: one keyword, one page

Keyword cannibalization is two or more of your own pages competing for the same search query, so rankings and signals split between them. The pattern in Search Console is a query where two of your URLs swap places from week to week and neither settles on page one.

It is industry shorthand, not a Google term. Two pages ranking for one query is not always a problem, because it can occupy two results, so act when the pages do the same job and neither performs.

To find it, filter the Performance report by one query and open the Pages tab. To fix it, merge the useful content into the page that should win and redirect the other. Google calls a redirect a strong signal that the target should become canonical, rel=canonical a strong signal too, and a sitemap entry a weak one.

Crawl budget: usually a large-site problem

Crawl budget is the number of your URLs Googlebot will crawl in a given time, and it matters mainly for large sites. Google's crawl budget guide is for sites with more than 1 million unique pages that change weekly, sites with more than 10,000 unique pages that change daily, and sites with many URLs showing Discovered - currently not indexed.

If you are smaller than that, quality and indexing are the better use of your hour. If you are in that range, Google's fixes are to consolidate duplicate content, block unimportant URLs in robots.txt, return 404 or 410 for removed pages, remove soft 404s, keep sitemaps current, avoid long redirect chains and keep server responses fast.

Filter and sort URLs are the classic drain. Google's faceted navigation guidance says crawlers will typically fetch a very large number of these URLs before concluding they are useless, which slows discovery of new, useful pages.

Index bloat: low-value URLs in Google's index

Index bloat is a large number of low-value URLs, such as filter, tag, print, parameter and paginated pages, sitting in Google's index beside the pages you want ranked. The signal is a gap between the pages worth ranking and the pages Google has indexed.

The check is in Search Console: Pages, then the indexed count. Compare it with the number of pages you would be glad to see ranked. If you have 120 worth ranking and 4,800 indexed, the other 4,680 deserve a decision.

The fixes depend on the URL. Use noindex for thin pages, canonical tags for near-duplicates, and merge or delete pages with no purpose. For pagination, Google advises giving each page its own URL and its own canonical instead of pointing every page to page one.

One trap: robots.txt is not a way to keep a page out of Google. Google says a disallowed page can still be indexed if other sites link to it, and that noindex is the method to use. Blocking a URL in robots.txt also stops Google from reading a noindex tag on it.

Striking distance: keywords ranking 11 to 20

Striking distance keywords are queries where your page ranks between positions 11 and 20, one push from page one. They are usually the cheapest traffic gain on a site because the page already has relevance.

The upside is large. SISTRIX's analysis of more than 80 million keywords on mobile found 28.5% of users click the first organic result and significantly less than 1% click through for each position on the second page. Click-through varies by search layout, so treat the figures as a guide, not a forecast.

Weekly action: open the Performance report, filter position to 11 to 20, sort by impressions, and pick the top query. Note that Google defines average position as the topmost position your link held, averaged across the queries it appeared for, so open the individual query before you trust a page-level number.

Then refresh the page with new facts, answer the query in the first paragraph and add internal links from your strongest related pages.

Entity salience: how central your main entity is to the page

Entity salience is how central a person, brand or thing is to a document. In Google's Cloud Natural Language API, the salience score runs from 0 to 1.0, where scores closer to 0 are less salient and scores closer to 1.0 are highly salient.

Treat it as a clarity check on your own writing, not as a ranking factor Google has confirmed. If a page about your product spends its first screen on a competitor or a category term, a reader and a machine will both be unsure what the page is about.

Weekly action: for the page you are working on, name the main entity in the title, the H1, the first paragraph and the headings, and keep competitors and category terms in supporting roles.

Check 2: Is your business easy for AI tools to understand?

For Google's AI features, yes if your pages are indexed, snippet-eligible and useful, because Google says generative AI features are rooted in its core Search ranking and quality systems. Its AI features documentation adds that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.

Google's guide explains the mechanism. AI responses use retrieval-augmented generation, which pulls pages from the Search index to ground an answer, and query fan-out, where the model runs several related searches at once. Google's own example is the query “how to fix a lawn that's full of weeds”, which can fan out into “best herbicides for lawns” and “how to prevent weeds in lawn”.

The same guide calls out what you can skip. The table lists five popular tactics and what Google says about each for Google Search.

Google also says that optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO. It advises caution with third-party tools that claim to use internal Google metrics, since no third-party tool has access to Google's ranking or AI systems.

Measure it directly. Google launched Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console on 3 June 2026 and, as of 31 August 2026, rolled them out to all websites worldwide. They show impressions, pages, countries, devices and dates for URLs appearing in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's generative AI features.

Weekly action: record AI feature impressions and the top pages, and ask whether they are the pages you want an AI answer to cite. Mind the click side too: Pew Research Center found users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits with an AI summary and 15% without, in a March 2025 sample of 900 US adults and 68,879 Google searches. An Ahrefs study of 300,000 informational keywords found top-position click-through fell 58% with an AI Overview present, comparing December 2023 with December 2025.

Which AI crawlers should you allow or block?

Allow the search crawlers if you want to be cited in AI answers, and decide separately whether to allow the training crawlers. Each company publishes separate bots for training, search and user-requested visits, so a single blanket rule is the wrong tool.

Weekly action: open your robots.txt and confirm no rule blocks a search bot you want. A broad Disallow: / added during a staging launch is a common way to disappear from AI answers without noticing, and the documentation sources are OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity.

Check 3: Are you answering the questions your customers actually ask?

You are if each page answers a real question in its first sentence and adds something a reader cannot get from the average result. Google separates commodity content such as “7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers”, which rests on common knowledge, from non-commodity content that gives unique expert or experienced takes.

Find the questions in four places: the queries in Search Console, the questions in sales calls, the tickets your support team closes, and the threads in communities where your buyers talk. Google's Query groups card in Search Console Insights, launched on 27 October 2025, clusters similar queries into one intent, which shortens this step. Google notes it is available only to properties with a large volume of queries.

Weekly action: pick one question, answer it in the first sentence of the page, then add the one original element from the information gain section. Ship or upgrade one page. A page you finish beats three you outline.

Do not turn this into volume. Google says writing separate pages for every query variation primarily to manipulate rankings violates its scaled content abuse policy. On AI drafting, its guidance is that it is critical to manually fact-check and review all AI-generated content before publishing.

Check 4: What are your competitors doing that you are missing?

Find out by watching a short list of three to five competitors for the same five signals every week and logging what changed. This check is the one that depends most on judgment, so the method below is Kanso's suggestion rather than a published standard.

• New pages: open each competitor's sitemap and blog and note what was added since last week.
• Pricing and positioning: check the homepage headline, pricing page and plan names for changes.
• Queries where they outrank you: search your non-branded target queries and record who holds positions one to five.
• Where they are discussed: note the forum threads, reviews and lists that mention them and not you.
• Launches and proof: record new features, case studies, integrations and customer names.

Then choose one response: close the gap, match the move, or take a deliberately different angle. Copying a competitor's page is the weakest option, because it fails the information gain test from the SEO section.

Competitor data tells you what is possible, not what is right for you. Use it to pick the question to answer, then answer it with your own evidence.

Check 5: Are you getting your content in front of the right people?

Only if every piece is sent to places where your customers already are, because publishing alone does not create readers. With AI summaries cutting clicks from search, as the Pew and Ahrefs figures above show, relying on search as the only channel is a risk you can reduce.

Weekly action: for each piece you publish, send it to at least three places. A reasonable spread is one owned channel (your email list), one professional network (LinkedIn or X) and one community where the question is already being asked.

Communities have rules, and breaking them costs more than skipping the post. Hacker News's guidelines say “Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans,” ask people not to use the site primarily for promotion, and prohibit soliciting upvotes, comments or submissions.

Google makes a similar point from the search side: seeking inauthentic mentions across the web is not as helpful as it might seem. Earn mentions by being useful in the conversation, and keep a log of what each channel returned so next week's plan reflects it.

How do you run the weekly review in 60 minutes?

Run it in six blocks that add up to 60 minutes, and end with one decision. The time boxes are a suggestion and keep the review from expanding into a day of dashboards.

The last block matters most. Write down the single biggest gap, the one fix you will make this week, and the number that will show whether it worked.

Judge the fix by the number you chose, not by mood. Rankings can take longer than a week to move, so use leading signals such as indexed pages, impressions and AI feature impressions for the first check, and clicks later.

What should the weekly scorecard track?

The scorecard should track seven numbers, most of which you can read in minutes from Search Console and a simple log. Keep them in one sheet so the trend is visible.

A short copy-and-paste version of the whole checklist follows.

• SEO: record indexed pages, non-branded impressions and the count of queries at positions 11 to 20. Pick one page-two query to refresh.
• SEO: check for two of your pages swapping places on one query, and merge them if they do the same job.
• AI search: confirm robots.txt allows the search bots you want, and record AI feature impressions.
• Content: choose one customer question, answer it in the first sentence, add one original element.
• Competitors: log new pages, pricing changes and the queries where they outrank you. Choose one response.
• Distribution: send this week's piece to three places and log what came back.
• Decide: name the biggest gap, the fix and the number to check next week.

Where does Kanso fit into the weekly checklist?

Kanso's agents cover parts of each check, and each one still leaves the decision and the approval with you. Here is what each does, as described on its own page.

• The SEO Agent combines a public site analysis with Search Console and Lighthouse data into evidence-backed recommendations, then tracks the work and verifies the live page afterwards.
• The GEO Agent checks the signals AI systems can read on a site (AI crawler access, llms.txt and structured data) and estimates citation potential with a model. It does not query AI engines, and, as the table above shows, Google does not use llms.txt.
• The Writer Agent reads a connected Search Console property, picks a query where the site is not yet on page one and drafts one long-form article in your brand voice for you to review.
• The Reddit Agent and Hacker News Agent find relevant conversations. Reddit replies are drafted for you and published only after approval, while Kanso never posts, comments or votes on Hacker News.
• The LinkedIn Agent and X Agent draft posts from your company context and publish the ones you approve.

You can see all of them on the Agent Hub, or compare the plans.

Weekly growth checklist: frequently asked questions

Sources

• Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search, Google Search Central
• AI features and your website, Google Search Central
• Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console, Google Search Central Blog
• Introducing the branded queries filter in Search Console, Google Search Central Blog
• Introducing Query groups in Search Console Insights, Google Search Central Blog
• What are impressions, position, and clicks?, Search Console Help
• Page indexing report, Search Console Help
• Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, Google Search Central
• Google Search's guidance on using generative AI content on your website, Google Search Central
• Crawl budget management for large sites, Google Search Central
• Managing crawling of faceted navigation URLs, Google Search Central
• Pagination, incremental page loading, and their impact on Google Search, Google Search Central
• What is URL canonicalization, Google Search Central
• Introduction to robots.txt, Google Search Central
• US11354342B2: Contextual estimation of link information gain, Google Patents
• Entity: the salience field, Google Cloud Natural Language API reference
• Why almost everything you knew about Google CTR is no longer valid, SISTRIX
• Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results, Pew Research Center
• AI Overviews reduce clicks by 58%, Ahrefs
• Overview of OpenAI crawlers, OpenAI
• Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler?, Anthropic
• Perplexity crawlers, Perplexity
• Web Vitals, web.dev
• Hacker News Guidelines, Hacker News