By Abraxi Taxi — St. Augustine, Florida
Long before anybody asked ChatGPT where to find a taxi, I was sitting at a computer filling out directory forms.
Name. Address. Phone number. Website. Description. Category. Submit.
Then another directory.
Then another.
This was before rideshare companies rolled into town and convinced everybody that transportation needed an app, venture capital, and a little car crawling around a map.
Back then, St. Augustine had a couple dozen taxi competitors. Everybody wanted to be found. I wanted backlinks. I wanted directory listings. I wanted Google to know Abraxi Taxi existed.
So I cooked.
The Old SEO Fricassee
For years, I made what I now think of as an enormous internet fricassee.
A directory listing here. A backlink there. Yelp. Yellow Pages. Local directories. Travel sites. Business listings. Blog posts. Social media. Citations. Anything that might convince a search engine that Abraxi Taxi was a real taxi company in St. Augustine.
Sometimes I may have consumed a beer while doing it.
Sometimes possibly eight.
Other nights I was angry at rideshare companies, the City of St. Augustine, taxi regulations, and whichever politicians happened to be annoying me that week.
I have calmed down considerably.
Except for some of the politicians. Apparently, we’ll eat liver now, as beef costs too much. But that is another article.
The Internet Never Throws Anything Away
Here is the funny part.
Many of those taxi companies I competed against are gone.
Some have been gone for years.
But their ghosts still wander around the internet.
You can find old taxi companies on Yelp, Yellow Pages, and forgotten directories as though they are sitting by the phone waiting for your call.
Old addresses. Dead websites. Disconnected numbers. Services nobody offers anymore.
The internet has a long memory and terrible housekeeping skills.
And then I discovered something slightly uncomfortable:
So did Abraxi Taxi.
Cleaning Up 18 Years of Myself
Over the years, businesses change.
Prices change. Services change. Websites change. Phone habits change. Taxi stands disappear. Vehicles come and go. Pages get written and forgotten.
But the internet remembers what you told it in 2012.
And sometimes what I told it in 2012 wasn’t what Abraxi Taxi was doing in 2026.
So lately I have been cleaning house, on the Abraxi Taxi rehabilitation project.
Old directory descriptions. Old fares. Old pages. Duplicate headings. Broken links. Outdated services. Business information scattered across websites I barely remember joining.
Every little mistake became another breadcrumb for Google, Bing, ChatGPT and the growing army of internet robots trying to figure out exactly what Abraxi Taxi is.
And here’s what I have learned:
No mistake goes unnoticed.
Maybe a human doesn’t notice it.
The robots do.
I Used to Write for People
That’s the strange part.
I always thought I was writing for people.
Customers. Tourists. Locals. Somebody trying to get home from a bar at midnight. Somebody wondering what St. Augustine was like before their vacation.
Today I am still writing for people.
But I have acquired another audience.
Robots.
Googlebot comes by. Bing crawls around. AI systems read pages. Search engines compare business listings. One machine notices that another website has an old price. Another wonders why an address is different. Another complains because a heading appears twice.
They are remarkably finicky dinner guests.
So now I feed them.
Clean titles.
Accurate business information.
Useful FAQs.
Working links.
Proper headings.
Schema.
Fresh content.
Apparently, robots enjoy schema. Who knew?
Long Live the Search Bots
I spent years trying to convince the internet that Abraxi Taxi existed.
Now I’m spending time convincing the internet that the Abraxi Taxi it remembers is the Abraxi Taxi that actually exists today.
There is a lesson in that for any small business owner.
Build your website for people.
Tell the truth.
Keep your information current.
Clean up your old messes.
And remember that something you type into a forgotten business directory today may still be floating around cyberspace long after you’ve forgotten the password.
Because if you want your business to succeed online:
Long live the internet search bots.
Feed them well.
Just remember—they never forget what you served them for dinner.
Abraxi Taxiom, Google knows where I’ve been, where I’m going, and apparently where I should have turned left
