The lab — Day 4 of 365 —
The page that says no
We ran an audit against the site and it came back with four high-severity findings. All four were things we had shipped ourselves, on purpose, believing they were fine.
An app that existed nowhere else
The Organization markup had no sameAs. No Play Store link, no social profile, nothing. And the footer had no outbound link to a single DayBloq account anywhere on the internet. As far as a machine reading this site could tell, DayBloq was a name that occurred here and only here.
That matters more now than it used to. Ahrefs looked at 75,000 brands and found that mentions of a brand across other domains correlate with visibility in AI answers at 0.664, against 0.218 for backlinks. Roughly three times. The models are not counting links so much as checking whether anything outside your own website agrees that you exist.
One list in the codebase now feeds both the sameAs array and the footer, so they cannot disagree. Blank entries are filtered out rather than shipped — a sameAs pointing at a profile that 404s is worse than an empty one.
An icon pretending to be a screenshot
The SoftwareApplication node listed app-icon.png under screenshot. It is an icon. It has always been an icon. A validator that notices will discard the property, and depending on how strict it is feeling, it can throw out the whole node — which would have taken the price, the platform and the app category with it.
Five real screenshots now, pulled as frames from the product videos, each with alt text that describes what is in the picture rather than repeating the app name five times. A grid of twelve months. A month where every day is a colored bird. The template store. A day someone decorated. The shelf of journals.
Pages that ran out of things to say
The money pages were 620 to 996 words against competitors doing two or three times that. Length is not a ranking factor and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But there is a reason those pages were short, and the reason was that they answered the easy question and stopped.
So: what actually goes wrong when you keep a Year in Pixels — the week you fill in from memory, the eleventh color, the December where you cannot read your own key. What a month of squares looks like when you read it back. When a note is worth writing and when it isn’t. When the tool is simply the wrong tool.
The mood tracker page now includes a comparison with Daylio that says where Daylio is better, because it is, and a comparison that only lists your own wins is an advertisement wearing a table’s clothes.
The page that says no
The fourth finding was the one worth the whole day. People search for a Year in Pixels app for iPhone. There isn’t one from us. There is no iOS build, no TestFlight, no web version you can run on an iPhone. The site’s answer to that question was silence, which a search engine reads as nothing and a person reads as maybe.
There is now an iPhone page that says no. It says no in the first sentence, explains that we are not putting a date on a build we have not made, and then names other developers’ iOS apps — Moodistory, Moodflow, Pixels — because someone who wants to color a square today should go color a square today.
It is registered in the sitemap and in /llms.txt, and deliberately carries no SoftwareApplication markup. There is no iOS app to declare. A page that honestly says no is a page that can be quoted correctly; the alternative is a model inventing an answer about us, and it will not invent this one.
Two smaller things
The hero video, sitting above the fold, was set to preload="auto" with no poster image — the largest thing on the page, downloading itself in full before anything could paint. Poster added, preload dropped to metadata.
And the sitemap had been lying. Every URL carried a lastmod of “right now,” because it was generated at build time — so the terms page, untouched for days, announced itself as freshly edited on every deploy. Google uses lastmod only while it is consistently accurate and ignores the field entirely once it isn’t. Real dates now, per page.
Which matters more than it sounds, because this log became a series of dated pages on the same day. A daily journal about search work, filed under a sitemap that could not be trusted about dates, would have been a decent joke at our own expense.