SEO & GEO Research Index
Brass-SEO maintains this index of primary literature for SEO practitioners and generative-engine optimization researchers. Every entry is a peer-reviewed paper, official specification, or independent benchmark — no vendor white papers, no tool-vendor studies. Capsules are written in the practitioner register: what Brass-SEO draws on each source to tell users, not a neutral literature summary.
22 topics · 118 entries · last verified August 2026
About this index
Inclusion bar: a source must be a primary document (peer-reviewed paper, official specification, or independent benchmark from a non-vendor organization) with a URL that resolves, and it must carry an applied implication for SEO practitioners. Excluded: vendor white papers, tool-vendor benchmarks, paywalled papers without accessible preprints, and abandoned tools. Brass-SEO has no financial relationship with any listed source. Sources are fetch-verified; retraction status is checked against the publisher at each review cycle.
Research topics
AI Citation & Generative Engine Optimization
What does the research say about how AI search engines choose which sources to cite?
Crawling & Indexing
What do official specifications say about how search engines crawl and index pages?
Core Web Vitals
What are the official Core Web Vitals thresholds and how do they affect Google rankings?
Structured Data & Schema Markup
What do independent benchmarks and specifications say about structured data adoption and AI retrieval?
Ranking Signals & Google's Algorithms
What do primary sources — Google's own disclosures and foundational research — reveal about ranking signals?
E-E-A-T & Content Quality
What do primary sources — including Google's own documentation and credibility research — say about E-E-A-T and content quality signals?
Knowledge Graph & Entity SEO
What do primary sources say about how Google's Knowledge Graph works and how entity optimization affects search and AI visibility?
Helpful Content System
What do Google's primary sources say about the Helpful Content System, AI-generated content, and how content quality is assessed at the site level?
Local Search Ranking
What do primary sources — Google's own local guidance and the leading local-search studies — say about how the map pack ranks businesses?
Query Understanding & Semantic Search
What do primary sources — the foundational NLP papers and Google's own disclosures — reveal about how Google understands the meaning behind a search query?
JavaScript SEO & Rendering
How does Google crawl, render, and index JavaScript-generated content?
Canonicalization & Duplicate Content
How do search engines choose a canonical URL and handle duplicate content?
Mobile-First Indexing & Mobile SEO
What is mobile-first indexing and what does it require of a site?
Do Clicks Affect Ranking? Navboost & User Signals
Does Google use clicks and user-interaction data to rank search results?
AI Crawler Access & Control
How do you control whether AI crawlers train on your site or cite it in answers?
Links, Authority & Link Spam
What do primary sources say about link authority and what Google treats as link spam?
Search Spam Policies & Manipulation
What do Google's spam policies actually forbid, and how are they enforced?
AI Overviews & Zero-Click Search
How do Google AI Overviews and the shift to zero-click search change organic traffic?
AI Training Data & LLM Memorization
How do large language models learn and remember facts about brands from their training data, and how is that different from live lookup?
Redirects & Site Migration
What do the HTTP spec, Google's own guidance, and independent web-scale data say about how redirects behave and what site migrations actually cost?
Hreflang & Multilingual SEO
What do the official specifications and independent benchmarks say about implementing hreflang and targeting multilingual audiences correctly?
Image SEO & Visual Search
What do Google's official documentation and independent web benchmarks say about how images get discovered, ranked, and optimized?