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Composite walkthrough, Media, 3 weeks

A trade publication starts getting cited in AI Overviews

Independent trade pub with strong reporting but Article schema was missing dateModified. Added schema discipline + bylines.

Composite
Before71After93

Readiness, out of 100: up 22 points in 3 weeks.

Composite walkthrough: patterns aggregated from real implementations. No specific named brand. Numbers are typical, not promised.

The site

Independent B2B trade publication, ~3000 articles indexed, well-known in vertical but not appearing in AI Overviews for vertical-specific queries.

What moved, signal by signal

In priority order. Signals in the 47-signal rubric link to their documentation.

  1. date-markup

    Fail to Pass

    Date markup

    Added dateModified to every Article JSON-LD. Bumped on real edits, not on the WordPress 'save' button.

  2. author-credentials

    Weak to Pass

    Author credentials

    Every author bio page now lists prior outlets, years covering the vertical, and external profile links.

  3. outbound-authority-links

    Pass to Pass

    Outbound authority links

    Already strong: trade pubs naturally cite primary sources.

  4. freshness

    Weak to Pass

    Freshness

    Re-published 8 evergreen pillar pages with updated 2026 stats. Reset article:modified_time on each.

  5. structural-depth

    Weak to Pass

    Structural depth (GEO-SFE)

    Articles longer than 1500 words got an explicit H2 outline for skim-readers. AI engines extract H2-anchored chunks.

  6. open-graph

    Weak to Pass

    Open Graph metadata

    Added og:image to all articles via a programmatic OG image route (similar to /vs and /grade).

How it went

Diagnosis showed this site as a B+ that should have been an A. Authority was already strong (the pub cites primary sources well) but Structure was missing date markup hygiene and OG images on legacy posts. The team automated dateModified updates via the CMS hook and shipped a programmatic OG-image route in week 1. Week 2 was author-credentials sweep. Week 3 was the 8-pillar refresh.

Takeaways

  1. If you publish daily, dateModified discipline matters more than dateCreated. Engines weight 'updated' over 'first published' for freshness scoring.
  2. Programmatic OG images per article (via next/og or equivalent) move the open-graph signal from warn to pass for thousands of pages at once.
  3. Pillar-page refreshes can substitute for new content. A 2024 pillar republished with 2026 stats often outperforms a brand new 2026 article because of accumulated authority.

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