Stage 01 · 2005 →
Crawl & Match
URL discovery, token corpus, exact-match. Visibility is a function of presence.
TF-IDF · BM25 · n-grams
An ongoing study · since 1999
Search did not end. It was rewritten.
Twenty-seven years of work on Google's ranking systems — and now on how language models read, score, and surface the web. Algoholic is the working archive of that transition: from keywords to claims, from URLs to statements.
0
Published essays
0
Case studies
0
In the archive
since 1999
Practising
Gilad Sasson · Tel Aviv · since 1999
Cited in · referenced · quoted
Search Engine Land Featured on Barry Schwartz vlog #67: cannabis SEO and the future of search. 2020 Search Engine Land Quoted recalling AdWords certification, 2004 — among the first in Israel. 2012 Search Engine Roundtable Moderator of the first Hebrew SEO panel at SMX Israel. 2012 Search Engine Roundtable Listed in the 2015 year-in-review · the SEO posse. 2015 Search Engine Land Cited as Algoholic · the canonical alias-bridge. 2013 10SEOs Directory Independent profile of nekuda Web Solutions, est. 1999. Standing
§ 01
The framework
From keywords to claims: a working model of generative retrieval.
Four stages, twenty-seven years. We trace the substrate of search as it shifted — first from text matching to graphs, then from graphs to intent, and now from intent to statement-level visibility. Each stage subsumed the last; none replaced it.
Stage 02 · 2010 →
Index & Rank
Link graph, PageRank, authority. Visibility shifts from presence to connectedness.
PageRank · HITS · graph centrality
Stage 03 · 2018 →
Intent & Quality
BERT, MUM, helpful-content. Visibility becomes a function of semantic fit.
Transformer · classifier · entity model
Stage 04 · 2024 →
Retrieve & Generate
RAG, AI Overviews, LLM answers. Visibility is no longer page-level — it is statement-level.
Generative retrieval · LLM citation · GEO
§ 02
Featured figure
Statement-level visibility, measured.
90 days of LLM-citation tracking across 14 frontier models, six verticals, and a controlled set of 3,200 documents.
Citation persistence by document type across 14 LLMs (Q1 2026, n = 3,200).
Figure 2.1
Research and long-form editorial content retains 52–67% of its initial LLM-citation rate after 30 days. Commercial pages drop below 12% within 14 days. The decay tracks the shifting weight an LLM places on statement durability over page recency.
Research (52% @ d30)
Editorial (18%)
Commercial (2%)
§ 03
Chronology
Twenty-seven years, scroll-through.
Nine moments that anchor the work: from the founding of nekuda in 1999 to the launch of Algoholic in 2024. Conferences, certifications, panels, press features. Scroll down to walk through them.
Chronology · 1999 → 2026
Algoholic / Sasson, G.
Stop 01 · the founding 1999
nekuda Web Solutions · Tel Aviv
The practice begins, before Google was dominant.
Founded nekuda Web Solutions to optimise for the engines of the late 1990s — Excite, HotBot, AltaVista, Yahoo. PageRank had not yet swallowed the index.
nekuda.co.il · founding year
01 / 09
nekuda office · Tel Aviv · the practice has personality
Stop 02 · the Yellow Pages 2002
Zap Group · Israeli Yellow Pages
Four years running search for the largest directory in Israel.
Joined Zap Group as Head of Internet sphere and Search. Built the search-strategy operation through the first decade of Google's index expansion in Hebrew. The foundational training in RTL retrieval.
2002 → 2006 · operational role
02 / 09
Search partner briefing · Tel Aviv
Stop 03 · the certification 2004
Google AdWords Certified Professional
Sat for the exam in spring 2004. Still certified, twenty-two years on.
Among the first Israeli practitioners to hold Google AdWords certification. The credential, public-verified via Search Engine Land in 2012, remains continuously in good standing.
Verified · Search Engine Land · 2012
03 / 09
Continuously certified · Google · Meta Blueprint
04 / 09
CMO years · Interlogic · 2006 → 2009
Stop 04 · the CMO chair 2006
Three years as Chief Marketing Officer at Interlogic.
Led marketing across enterprise and startup SEM portfolios. Oversaw the transition from manual-link era to algorithmic quality — Panda and Penguin loomed.
Interlogic · CMO · 2006 → 2009
Stop 05 · the panel 2012
SMX Israel · Jerusalem
Moderated the first Hebrew SEO panel at a major industry conference.
Inbal Hotel, January 15, 2012. The only Hebrew-language session on the SMX agenda, navigating Panda, Penguin, and the link-spam era with Ori Golan, Oren Shatz and Uri Breitman.
Listed: Search Engine Roundtable · 2011
05 / 09
SMX Israel · Inbal Hotel, Jerusalem · January 15, 2012
Stop 06 · the European tour 2012
TNW Amsterdam · TNW Europe · Web Summit Dublin
Three years across Amsterdam, Dublin, Westerunie.
TNW Conference Amsterdam (2012) where startup culture met SEM. Web Summit Dublin (2014) in Main Hall. TNW Europe Westerunie (2015). The era when the Israeli search ecosystem mattered abroad.
2012 → 2015 · European circuit
06 / 09
TNW Amsterdam · 2012 · with B.A. Baracus
Stop 07 · the YMYL talk 2019
DMIEXPO Spring · Tel Aviv
"Big Deal!" — cannabis & digital marketing at scale.
Spring edition of DMIEXPO, sponsored by Outbrain. A talk on the structural problems of YMYL SEO in regulated verticals. The work that led to the Search Engine Land feature one year later.
DMIEXPO Speakers · 2019 · 2022 · 2023
07 / 09
DMIEXPO · June 2, 2019 · Cannabis & digital marketing
Stop 08 · the SEL feature 2020
Barry Schwartz · Search Engine Land vlog #67
Featured by Barry Schwartz on the past and future of search.
May 18, 2020. A dedicated video interview at Search Engine Land — the entity-graph endorsement that bridges Algoholic the alias to Sasson the person across the global SEO knowledge graph.
searchengineland.com · vlog · May 2020
08 / 09
On the record · the European circuit
09 / 09
Industry veterans · Tel Aviv tech scene
Stop 09 · the substrate shift 2024
Algoholic flagship launches into generative retrieval.
The substrate shifted entirely. Ranking became retrieval, retrieval became generation. Twenty-five years of practice meets the first measurement framework that models the new layer. Vol. III opens.
Algoholic · Vol. III · 04 · 2024 → present
§ 04
Recent essays
A working archive, updated weekly.
40 essays at launch; two per week thereafter. The archive is the work.
Essay 04 · this week
Statement-level visibility, or: why ranking a page no longer matters.
The unit of competition has shifted. LLM-driven retrieval doesn't surface URLs — it surfaces claims. We propose a measurement framework.
Essay 03
A taxonomy of LLM citation behavior across 14 frontier models.
What gets cited, what gets paraphrased, what disappears. A controlled audit across GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini, and 11 others.
Essay 02
GEO is not SEO with prompts. A position paper.
The framing of GEO as 'prompt-optimized SEO' mistakes the surface for the substrate. Generative engine optimization is a distinct discipline.
Essay 01
Ranking ≠ retrieval ≠ generation. A decomposition.
Three operations, often conflated. We separate them with notation, examples, and applied measurement.
§ 05
Tools
Measurement, not advice.
A small set of working tools — each one answers a question that classical SEO tooling does not.
Built here
LLM Visibility Audit
Run a controlled prompt set against 14 frontier models. Citation share, statement match, 30-day persistence. Output is raw CSV.
Built here
GEO Scorer
Statement-level scoring of a URL or paste-in text. Predicts citation probability across model classes, surfaces likely-reproduced claims.
Partner
Claim-tracker
Continuous monitoring of how your branded claims appear across AI Overviews, Perplexity, You.com, ChatGPT. Partner attribution disclosed.
Two essays · every week
The work, before it's a framework.
The Algoholic newsletter delivers the working notes — drafts, in-progress measurements, and the figures that didn't make the final essay.
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