SEO killed the creative web. AI might bring it back. For thirty years, websites have been shaped around what machines could understand. That's why everything became pages. The irony is that smarter machines may finally free us from that constraint. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/t...

Ok, the new @aptshadow.bsky.social sounds great! Meet Skotch, freelance raccoon investigator, in Green City Wars: artificially enhanced animals serve humans, but their own world is filled with conflict, crime & power battles... Out 26.6, signed #preorder: www.waterstones.com/book/green-c... 💙📚🪐

The best new science-fiction books of June 2026: There's plenty of intriguing sci-fi on offer this month, whether it’s solar-powered cities from @aptshadow.bsky.social or a strange future from M. John Harrison www.newscientist.com/article/2528...

Running multiple CMSs is almost always a death sentence for a website. Shopify + WordPress. React + Webflow. AEM + whatever marketing bolted on afterwards. This pattern is everywhere, and it cripples businesses. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/o...

Your website was built around a moment AI is starting to remove. The web spent decades obsessing over conversion rates, checkout UX and lead-gen funnels. Now, brands need to rethink what websites are actually for. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/t...

Scaled “comparison / alternative” pages are the new scaled “listicle” pages

Model collapse was supposed to be a training problem. Something slow. Something that unfolds across generations of models. Something researchers could warn about in papers while everyone kept shipping. That's not what's happening. New on The Inference: theinference.io/p/the-ourobo...

Wanna measure Core Web Vitals for SPAs? It's been a long-standing gap, but one that we've been working hard to fill. We're approaching the final stages and have launched one last origin trial (🤞) as the "last call" before we ship it! More details: developer.chrome.com/blog/final-s...

You can (but probably shouldn’t) use your traffic to slow your competitors’ sites. No bots. Just a browser feature. Real requests. From real users. At scale. If you’re not protecting against it, it can quietly hit your servers and your costs. www.jonoalderson.com/performance/...

I am 100% in favour of this. Introducing a new spam policy for "back button hijacking" developers.google.com/search/blog/...

🤔 Google has rebranded Looker Studio to ... Data Studio (again)! Read: cloud.google.com/blog/product...

Headless websites are usually a mistake. Sold as flexible and fast. Delivered as complex and slow. Most teams end up rebuilding what the web already does, just worse. This isn’t progress. It’s engineering vanity. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/h...

For years, the performance ceiling in the browser has been clear: the CPU. WebGPU changes that. 🧵 It’s not a library or a framework. It’s a browser API that gives direct access to the device’s GPU, enabling a level of parallelism the CPU cannot match. #WebPerf #WebGPU

PSA Googlebot tries to render pages to understand what they look like, to better understand the value & context of your site's content. This requires that your JS & CSS files be crawlable. Don't block these files for Googlebot in robots.txt, if you want Google to understand your site optimally.

Most websites are built on the wrong stack. Not because the tools are bad. Because teams pick based on identity, not reality. There are only four sane choices: React → products Shopify → selling Static → simple WP/Drupal/TYPO3 → publishing www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/f...

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...