Editorial
Who writes GEOhandbook
Who produces this site, how claims get sourced, and what happens when something here turns out to be wrong.
Peter Adams, Editor
Peter Adams writes and maintains GEOhandbook. Every claim on the site links to primary documentation or published research rather than to commentary repeating it, and the site is audited against its own checklist — including the items it currently fails, which are listed openly rather than quietly dropped.
Verify this byline elsewhere:
These are the same URLs given as Person.sameAs in this page's
structured data. rel="me" states the same claim in the markup:
that the profile and this byline are one person. The claim is only worth
something if it holds in both directions, so each profile should link back
here.
How claims get sourced
Every non-obvious factual claim on this site links inline to a primary source — the organisation that published the data, not an aggregator repeating it. In practice that means:
- Vendor documentation over commentary. When the question is how OAI-SearchBot treats
robots.txt, the source is OpenAI’s own crawler documentation, not a blog post summarising it. - Named studies with their numbers intact. Where a figure appears, the figure and its source are both given, so a claim can be checked rather than taken on trust.
- Primary research for mechanism claims. Assertions about how retrieval actually behaves cite the papers that measured it. The paragraph-structure rules in the checklist, for instance, cite the retrieval benchmarks they come from rather than repeating a number in circulation.
- Dated sources. GEO moves quickly enough that an undated claim is close to worthless. Where a source has a date, it is stated.
If a page makes a claim with no link, it is either self-evident, an opinion clearly framed as one, or a mistake worth reporting.
What this site will not do
- No affiliate links, paid placements, or sponsored posts. Tool mentions are editorial judgements. The full position is in the disclosure.
- No invented statistics, and no round numbers presented as research findings.
- No claims about rankings or citation rates that cannot be traced to something measurable.
Corrections
Errors get fixed on the page, not quietly deleted. If a correction changes the substance of a claim rather than its phrasing, the page says so.
To report one, email hello@geohandbook.io with the URL and what is wrong. Specific corrections with a source attached get handled fastest.
How pages stay current
Every page shows an Updated date whenever its source has actually changed since publication, and that date is derived from the site’s version history rather than typed in by hand — so it cannot be inflated to fake freshness. Pages that have never been edited show only their publication date, deliberately.
The same dates feed the sitemap, which means the date a reader sees and the date a crawler is told are always the same value from the same source.
Practising what the checklist preaches
This site is audited against its own checklist, and the failures are treated as a work queue rather than quietly dropped. Some items are still open — off-site authority signals in particular, and this named-author gap. Where the site does not yet meet its own standard, the honest position is to say so on the page rather than to soften the standard.