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Every matter and rule on this site

Every entry on this site in one place: the disputes that turn on search evidence, and the rules and methods that decide whether that evidence survives. Every card carries the question the entry turns on, so you can scan the whole reference before opening anything.

Matters and Disputes

17 entries

Standard of care

Commercial and Contract Disputes

SEO Malpractice and Negligence

How a standard of care gets established in a field with no licensure, and why the date of the guidance decides the opinion.

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Standard of care

Commercial and Contract Disputes

SEO Agency Contract Disputes

Deliverable ambiguity, guaranteed-ranking clauses, and who owns the accounts when the engagement ends.

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Commercial and Contract Disputes

Website Traffic Loss Claims

The shape of a traffic loss claim, the evidence it needs, and the ways it comes apart before damages are ever reached.

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Commercial and Contract Disputes

E-commerce Search Visibility Disputes

Migrations, faceted navigation, indexation, structured data, and marketplace conflict — the retail-specific failure modes.

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Trademark, Advertising and Competition

Trademark Infringement in Organic Search

Where a mark can sit in a page's HTML, how each location is captured, and why this is a reconstruction problem

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Trademark, Advertising and Competition

Keyword Advertising Disputes

What Google Ads reporting proves about diversion in a keyword case, and the several things it cannot prove at all

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Trademark, Advertising and Competition

Competitor False Advertising Online

How Lanham Act false advertising claims appear on search surfaces, and the sharp line between exposure and deception

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Trademark, Advertising and Competition

Domain Name Value and SEO Equity

What the search value of a domain is made of, what survives a transfer or a redirect, and how prior bad use suppresses it

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Technical and Platform Failures

Site Migration Failures

What a failed migration looks like in the data, and how a report shows the failure was foreseeable before the launch date

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Technical and Platform Failures

Technical SEO Defects in Litigation

How crawl, index and rendering defects are established, which ones point at which defendant, and where the causal claim breaks

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Technical and Platform Failures

Negative SEO and Link Attacks

What a link attack claim can and cannot establish, and why the disavow file is often the most probative document in the matter

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Technical and Platform Failures

AI Overviews and Traffic Loss Claims

What Google's AI reporting does and does not contain, which public statistics survive scrutiny, and where the causal claim breaks

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Technical and Platform Failures

Local Search and Map Visibility Disputes

Why local visibility has to be measured across a geographic surface, and what a Business Profile account holds before it disappears

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Reputation and Content Disputes

Defamation in Search Results

What appeared, for which queries, on which dates, and to whom - and why a single screenshot proves none of it.

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Reputation and Content Disputes

Online Reputation and De-indexing

What de-indexing actually does, why a removal can expire, and how an expert verifies whether it happened at all.

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Reputation and Content Disputes

Fake Reviews and Review Manipulation

The FTC rule, what it actually prohibits, and why proving a set of reviews is inauthentic is easier than proving who wrote them.

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Reputation and Content Disputes

AI-Generated Defamation

Model output varies by session, account, retrieval, and sampling. Establishing what was said is a Rule 702(c) methodology problem.

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Evidence and Procedure

16 entries

Admissibility and Qualification

Federal Rule of Evidence 702

What the 2023 amendment changed, and why opinions built on third-party estimates and aligned timelines fail 702(b) and 702(d).

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Admissibility and Qualification

Kumho Tire and Technical Expertise

Gatekeeping reaches technical and other specialized knowledge, and the Daubert factors are neither mandatory nor exhaustive.

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Admissibility and Qualification

Daubert Challenges in Search Cases

The grounds actually raised against a search expert, what the damages exclusions teach, and the one reported SEO ruling.

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Admissibility and Qualification

Machine-Generated Evidence

What a court asks of an AI-derived score today, and the correct status of proposed Rule 707 — which is not pending adoption.

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Disclosure and Discovery

Rule 26 Expert Report Requirements

What the report must contain, why “considered” is wider than “relied upon,” and how a ten-year publication list gets an expert impeached.

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Disclosure and Discovery

Expert Drafts and Attorney Communications

What Rule 26(b)(4) protects, the three exceptions that are not protected, and why a spreadsheet from counsel becomes a discoverable item.

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Disclosure and Discovery

Consulting Versus Testifying Experts

Why the early technical work in a search matter is consulting work, and why designating a testifying expert too early cannot be undone.

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Disclosure and Discovery

Spoliation of Search Data

Search evidence deletes itself on a timer. What Rule 37(e) requires, what partially replaces the lost data, and what a demand letter sets off.

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Evidence and Exhibits

Authenticating Web Evidence

What Rule 901 actually requires of a web exhibit, the three routes that matter, and where search evidence loses its foundation.

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Evidence and Exhibits

Self-Authenticating Electronic Records

How FRE 902(13) and 902(14) let machine records and forensic copies come in by certification, and what the certification has to say.

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Evidence and Exhibits

Wayback Machine Evidence

The foundation routes for Internet Archive material, the three failure modes, and why a forensic capture beats an archive print.

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Evidence and Exhibits

Summaries Versus Illustrative Aids

Rule 1006 summaries are substantive evidence. Rule 107 illustrative aids are not evidence and stay out of deliberations.

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Causation and Damages

Before-and-After Damages Analysis

Why a pre-event baseline in organic search is usually confounded, what a clean one requires, and when the model still holds

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Causation and Damages

Yardstick and Benchmark Analysis

How other channels, unaffected page cohorts, competitor visibility, and query demand become controls in a testable design

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Causation and Damages

Algorithm Updates as a Confound

How update dates are established, what volatility trackers can and cannot show, and how each side argues the confound

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Causation and Damages

Dividing Work With the Damages Expert

Where the search opinion ends and the accounting opinion begins, and why crossing that line puts both opinions at risk

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