One of the worst things you can do for AI search visibility? Destroying your SEO performance with shiny new AI search tactics that are ultimately dangerous for SEO - and by extension - AI search. (1/2) open.substack.com/pub/lilyrayn...

Clicks don’t count. They never did. SEO spent 20 years pretending the search interface was the market. Now people are doing it again with prompt tracking. Measure competitiveness, not clicks (or prompts). www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/c...

Your website is slow because your organisation doesn’t understand the web. Not because performance is hard. Not because browsers are limited. But because you've lost control of your systems, culture, and vision. www.jonoalderson.com/performance/...

We’ve normalised building around constraints we don’t question. But CMSs, browsers, standards and platforms aren’t weather. They’re shaped by people. If you depend on them (you do), you can shape them too. That’s where the real leverage is. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/r...

“I want to rank for X” is how almost everyone gets SEO wrong. You don’t choose what you rank for. You’re inferred. Keywords describe demand. They’re not a strategy. If you’re not building unique, experience-backed utility, you'll be invisible. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/s...

Genius tech bro move: Inventing the paragraph, Calling it a chunk. #showerthoughts

Been saying this for a while but the really exciting stuff on the web right now is all about how things we used to need JS for can now be done with pure CSS. There are a lot of opportunities to cut out client side bloat.

If you run a large-scale/complex site, this is important. Make sure you know where Googlebot could go crazy crawling. E.g. As Gary said, "once Googlebot discovers a set of URLs, it cannot make a decision about whether that URL space is good or not unless it crawled a large chunk of that URL space"

Stop turning your website into markdown. Meaning lives in structure, hierarchy and context. Flatten it and you don’t make it machine-friendly, you make it meaningless. Yes, AI might fetch your .md file. That’s convenience, not trust, and it won't scale. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/m...

The middle of the market is quietly dying. Breadth and “good enough” used to work because humans couldn’t see everything. Agents can. If you’re not the safest default or clearly the best, you’re just noise. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/t...

Fit width text in 1 line of CSS `text-grow: per-line scale;` nerdy.dev/css-text-grow (prototype in Canary 165+)

Don't forget all the GEO-Detox work that will be paid for next year. The cycle of ""SEO"" life.

I’ve been getting pitched by companies who create markdown/“LLM-friendly” variants of webpages. Curious to hear others’ perspectives on this (especially the longterm feasibility)…

The web you’re optimising for doesn’t exist anymore. Most of what you publish will never make it to the surface - it’ll be scraped, compressed, and digested by machines that don’t see pages, only patterns. I wrote about what this means for marketing. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/o...

A plumber drove past me with a Hotmail address on the side of his van. For years, that would’ve been a red flag. Now, in an age of AI-generated everything, it might be the most trustworthy thing I’ve seen all month. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/t...

Find someone who doesn't know your business. Show them your homepage for exactly 5 seconds. Then ask: "What does this company do?" "Who do they do it for?" If they hesitate, get it wrong, or give vague answers, you've found your problem. And it's costing you rankings, traffic, and customers.

With View Transitions now being Baseline Newly available, and the View Transition API consisting of various features, it can be confusing to know what is supported in which browser versions. To help with that, I created this VT Feature Explorer (powered by View Transitions) web.dev/blog/same-do...

The web might change overnight. Are you ready? On PodRocket, @jono.id makes the case for hedging our bets... not by chasing trends, but by doubling down on the fundamentals. YT: buff.ly/xE4udjk Apple: buff.ly/azaJQ9g Spotify: buff.ly/YgpSFz4

I’ve been investigating dead websites for years. Same symptoms every time - bloated code, missing structure, too many dependencies and not enough care. It’s not murder. It’s neglect. And it’s everywhere. www.jonoalderson.com/misc/the-dea...

Introducing the React Foundation

I mentioned before that we’re switching Lighthouse Performance audits to the new and improved Insights. The same Insights that you can see in DevTools Performance panel traces. That’s happening in Lighthouse 13 due to be released very soon. Maybe even this week!

For some reason when people say 'potential audience' or 'ideal customer' I'm fine, but as soon as they say 'persona' I think they are being too cowardly to admit they enjoy astrology. 1. I am being unfair. but also 2. I have never seen personas applied in a way that didn't leave me more confused.

Your brand isn’t what people say about you. It’s what machines remember about you. And they don’t forget. Every slow page, broken checkout, and bad datapoint leaves a scar. Scars spread, harden, and make you invisible. That’s the machine immune system at work. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/m...

🚨 New tool: Impolighthouse Not just “how fast is my site?”, but “why is it slow, and what does that say about our org?” A deliberately impolite wrapper on top of Lighthouse, that calls out your organizational cruft, blockers & bad decisions. www.jonoalderson.com/impolighthou...

The browser is striking back. Bloated stacks, fragile abstractions, bad defaults - it’s all catching up with us. I’ll dig into all of this at Web Directions Dev Summit, Nov 19–20 (Sydney + online). 💸 Codes: jonodevsummit25 / jonodevsummit25streaming webdirections.org/dev-summit

1999 - Notepad 2001 - Frontpage 2003 - Notepad++ 2005 - Dreamweaver 2008 - Sublime Text 2016 - VS Code 2025 - Cursor What does your Web Development journey look like?

How many HTML tags can you remember? No cheating! By Paul Foster codepen.io/plfstr/full/...

Great post from @erwinhofman.bsky.social on webperf Interop proposals: www.rumvision.com/blog/interop... Upvote your favourite ones to let us know which are important to you!

If I ever say "Playbook" non-ironically, you have permission to delete my social media.

The Times appears to have interviewed an 'ex Buckingham Palace cleaner' who supposedly divulges royal stain removal secrets but doesn't seem to exist, is possibly AI, and probably placed by a PR agency to boost SEO for a tiling brand. pressgazette.co.uk/news/royal-c...

WebFlow has built in support for LLMs.txt lol

“The name is misleading. no-cache actually means “store this, but revalidate before reusing it.” Finally finished @jono.id guide to caching, took me about a week 🤣 www.jonoalderson.com/performance/...

You’re loading fonts wrong (and it’s crippling your performance) - via @jono.id‬ #seo

It's sad that we've normalised SEO conferences - that claim to educate on best practices - being openly sponsored by parasitical link vendors. That’s not just tone deaf; it’s disengenuous, hypocritical, and sells our classrooms those least interested in education and evolution.

Most brand blogs are a waste of time. Not because content doesn’t work - but because you’re doing it wrong. Keyword sausage machines, “Admin” bylines, cautious filler… It’s industrialised mediocrity, and it serves no purpose. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/s...

How much do you know about JavaScript in the age of AI search? Do you know which LLM bots can render JS? Test your knowledge and be the first to get the 2025 JavaScript & Search Report: bit.ly/4m5jKj7

all the best windows software in history is called something like "joe's thing doer". it does the thing and nothing else and is available on a html website in plain text and takes up under a megabyte of space and uses default windows ui elements and will work until the heat death of the universe

Great post and it's been a pleasure helping @krzksz.bsky.social and @yoav.ws get this working on Shopify. performance.shopify.com/blogs/blog/s...

Most devs don’t understand caching. And it shows. Slower sites. Fragile infra. Bigger bills. All because a few headers are misused or ignored. I wrote the complete guide to HTTP caching - every directive, pitfall & trick, from Cache-Control to Cloudflare quirks to the AI-mediated web.

95%?!? If it was any other organisational investment that failed to yield ROI on this scale, it would be toxic to even suggest implementing it in your business. Instead AI gets cheered on everywhere. We have collectively lost our fucking minds. www.axios.com/2025/08/21/a...

Most websites are loading fonts wrong. ❌ Google Fonts isn’t “free” (privacy + speed cost) ❌ Icon fonts were a mistake ❌ WOFF2 only - stop shipping TTF/WOFF ❌ Subset or bleed megabytes ❌ Fallbacks matter (and can be tuned!) www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/y...

Two pro webperf tips! Are you using Annotations in your performance traces? developer.chrome.com/docs/devtool... And even when not needing to annotate, Gemini AI auto-annotations can quickly give you an idea what a bit of the flame chart is doing without you needing to dig in yourself. Try it out!

AI search doesn’t just find facts - it rewrites history. If you’re not actively shaping that history, you’re already losing. How to protect your story. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/o...

There’s no such thing as a backlink. A link only has value in the relationship between its source and destination. “Backlink,” “DoFollow,” “niche edit” - all made-up terms to flatten complexity into something easy to sell. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/n...

This is so sad. Not because AOL is shutting down it's dial-up internet service, but because it didn't shut down a decade ago. It's 2025. Everyone in America should have access to affordable broadband. Even rural towns.

“Our traffic’s down… but nothing’s changed on our website.” That’s exactly the problem. The internet moves. Competitors launch. Markets shift. Culture tilts. Attention flows elsewhere. Standing still isn’t safe. It’s a countdown clock. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/s...

Markets you’ll never sell to are shaping your success in the ones you care about. Search and LLMs learn from the whole messy, multilingual web. If you’re not influencing the right places, you’re leaving your visibility to chance. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/l...

Why publishers should worry about growing reliance on Google Discover. Great stuff from David Buttle, he nails all the problematics around Discover as a traffic source. pressgazette.co.uk/comment-anal...

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” - George Orwell, 1984 blog.google/products/sea...

You wrote a great piece, quoted some great minds in the SEO industry and then slapped GEO on it and ruined everything 🤡 dejan.ai/blog/journal...