Operator: Claude Code (Cowork, scheduled)

Window: Sunday 17 May 2026, Day -1 before the formal Day 1 (Mon May 18)

Mode: Production verification, fresh research, AI citation panel re-run, ICP refresh, ready-to-ship page drafts for the high-priority pull-forward pages. No production writes (push to remote still blocked from Run 1 — local commit 499bbae remains the source of truth).

TL;DR

Run 1 foundation is still live 48 hours later: robots.txt (24 user-agent blocks), llms.txt (200 OK, served as text/markdown), sitemap.xml (9 URLs, all lastmod=2026-05-15). Zero regression since Run 3. The push-access blocker remains the single biggest constraint on the plan.

Fresh research surfaced three updates that sharpen the May 6 picture from Run 3:

  1. AI Overviews now appear on 48 percent of all Google queries (up from 31 percent year-over-year, per WordStream / Heroic Rankings April 2026 data). Run 3's "AEO matters more" thesis is now data-confirmed — AI Overviews are a near-majority surface, not a fringe one.
  2. Google's May 6 update added five distinct citation surfaces, not three (Tocanan / Search Engine Land confirmed): Further Exploration links, subscription-labeled links, Community Advice panels (Reddit + forums), expanded inline links, and website hover previews. Run 3 caught three of the five. The two missed — Further Exploration links and hover previews — both reward sites with deep, well-titled, modified-recently sub-pages. Direct implication for Shilika's plan: the Week 3 information-architecture rebuild (8 service pages + 6 case-study pages) is materially higher-yield than the original plan assumed because Further Exploration links are sub-page bait.
  3. Princeton GEO study now has a formal citation: Aggarwal et al., arXiv:2311.09735, ACM SIGKDD 2024. The 40 percent citation-boost finding from citations + statistics + quotations is now confidently citable in the brand's own content. Additional finding: pages not updated within 90 days are 3x more likely to lose AI citations — confirms the Week 12 "refresh top 5 winning pages" task is non-optional.

AI citation baseline re-run across 5 new buyer-intent queries: Shilika still cited zero times in any of them. The competitive landscape narrowed and sharpened — High Vibe PR, Outset PR, and Eak Digital are now openly positioning around "LLM visibility" and "AI search citation," which is the same lane Shilika is trying to enter. The 90-day plan window is competitive, not vacant.

Fresh ICP intel added 10 new recently funded prospects from May 2026 — Auctor ($20M Series A, Sequoia), Greenboard ($20M Series A), Enzo Health ($20M Series A), Scout AI ($100M Series A), Liquid ($18M, Paradigm/Left Lane), Fun ($72M Series A, Multicoin), Graphon AI ($8.3M stealth exit), Frame ($50M Series A, ex-Wiz team, cybersecurity), Exaforce ($125M Series B, AI security), Filigran ($58M Series C, cyber AI). Each maps cleanly to one of Shilika's three service lines. Frame and Exaforce specifically reset the Run 3 read on cybersecurity — there is now a clear category lane ("human risk security," "AI-driven SOC") that Shilika could enter as the named voice if she ships the Week 6 cybersecurity AEO content early.

Today's biggest deliverables: two ready-to-ship page drafts (/services/ai-startup-pr, /services/content-writing) — both pulled forward from Week 3 per Run 3's recommendation. Both are now drafted in full, with copy, H2 stack, FAQ schema content, internal links, and CTA — Shilika can paste them straight into the site template once the push blocker clears.

Production verification — Run 1 still live (Day +2)

Asset HTTP Last-Modified Note
/robots.txt 200 2026-05-15 12:05 UTC 24 user-agent blocks; 19 AI crawlers explicitly allowed; cached 86,400s
/llms.txt 200 2026-05-15 Served as text/markdown; charset=utf-8; H1 + blockquote pitch + curated links
/sitemap.xml 200 2026-05-15 9 URLs (homepage, blog, testimonials, articles 1–6); priority 0.9 on articles 4–6
Homepage / 200 2026-05-15 Schema graph + meta + OG all intact; 307 → www.shilikajain.com (clean redirect)
Vercel edge HIT — gzip, HSTS max-age=63072000, cache-control correct

No regression since Run 3. The new title and meta rewrites identified in Run 2 are still pending (blocker: push access). Article-5 still ships with the 78-character title; homepage meta description is still 187 chars.

What changed in search this week (May 12 → 17, 2026)

Three confirmations and one new data point material to the plan:

1. AI Overviews now at 48 percent of all queries (April 2026, WordStream / Heroic Rankings)

AI Overviews share has climbed from 31 percent (April 2025) to 48 percent (April 2026). At the current trajectory it crosses majority within 12 months. The plan's "optimize for citation, not click" thesis is no longer optional. Confirmed by Bain (60 percent zero-click) and Semrush (83 percent of AI Overview queries end without a click).

2. Five citation surfaces in the May 6 update, not three