AISQ Progress Update #2 – Smart SEO in Practice, New Awards Earned, and AI Crawler Protection

Spring 2026 has been a busy season in the AISQ | Squirrly universe, and there’s a lot worth catching up on. From a dramatic SEO rescue story to new G2 awards and fresh ways to scale your growth with AI — this rundown covers it all.

Let’s get into it.

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When DIY SEO Goes Wrong

One of Florin’s clients — an auto service business — had been tinkering with their own SEO, and things went sideways fast. Pages started blending together, keyword signals got muddled, and Google essentially lost track of what each page was supposed to be about. Rankings dropped.

Florin stepped in, had a tough-but-honest conversation with the client’s leadership team, and mapped out exactly what needed to be fixed before any new work could begin.

The takeaway? Good SEO isn’t just about adding keywords; it’s about making sure every page sends a clear, consistent signal.

Read the full story here.

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What Actually Happens When You Sign Up for RankJumps

Some people assume RankJumps is just a managed SEO retainer where someone tweaks your settings once a month. It’s much more involved than that.

The work is tailored to each site depending on what the initial audit uncovers — no cookie-cutter approach — and it follows a structured three-month process with clear reporting at every stage.

Get the full breakdown of what RankJumps does.

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WP Ghost Is Having a Massive Spring — 5 G2 Awards and a Version 9.0 Launch

WP Ghost picked up five new G2 badges for Spring 2026, including High Performer and Easiest To Do Business With — all driven purely by user reviews, no paid placements involved. But the awards aren’t even the biggest news: WP Ghost 9.0 just dropped, and it’s the most significant release since the plugin was rebranded from Hide My WP Ghost.

The update brings a redesigned security dashboard, a real-time Security Optimization Score, and AI crawler blocking baked right in.

See what’s new in WP Ghost 9.0.

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Squirrly SEO Also Brings Home New G2 Awards This Spring

Squirrly SEO earned four new G2 High Performer badges this season, based entirely on customer satisfaction scores from real users. On the product side, the AI assistant’s Next SEO Goals feature has been updated to deliver sharper, more personalized recommendations, so users spend less time wondering what to do next and more time actually moving the needle.

Read more about the Spring 2026 awards.

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How to Stop AI Crawlers From Scraping Your WordPress Site

AI bots have gotten aggressive — they’re not just indexing pages anymore, they’re hoovering up entire article archives, product databases, and media libraries for model training. WP Ghost now lets you block specific AI user agents at the firewall level while simultaneously updating your robots.txt, which means scrapers get stopped before they ever put a load on your server.

The guide also makes an interesting distinction worth knowing: if you rely on visibility in tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity, blocking those crawlers will pull your content out of those ecosystems — so there’s a real trade-off to consider.

One smart workaround suggested is keeping your main marketing site open to AI crawlers while protecting member areas or course content on a subdomain.

Learn how to set up AI crawler blocking in WP Ghost.

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Scale Email, Social, and SEO with One Connected AI System

We’re launching a new suite of growth options that combine Squirrly SEO, Squirrly Social, Email Hero, and Next Level Marketing AI into one interconnected system. Whether you want to run everything yourself, get hands-on guidance while your team learns the ropes, or hand the whole operation over to Squirrly’s team completely, there’s now a model for each stage of business.

The pitch is simple: no more “we didn’t have time to post” as an excuse for stalled growth.

Find out how to scale your reach with AI.

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That’s a wrap on this edition of the AISQ Progress Update. Stay tuned for the next rundown; there’s more to come.