There's very little content about AI in search that I can 100% agree with. This article is pretty much a perfect way of thinking about how search had evolved and in what direction should it go next.

It’s bloody huge.

Google’s AI says there’s no performance in the Verona arena tonight. I am in Verona and I can guarantee you, there is definitely a performance. Zucchero is lighting the place up. Note how the AI Overview contradicts itself immediately.

The beauty of a wine tasting is that you can sit down with a group of total strangers and end up making new friends that you’re never going to see ever again.

I’ve had worse hotel room views.

ChatGPT referrals are down for the second month in a row -- but Google's growth trend remains intact. If ChatGPT traffic doesn’t soon show meaningful month-over-month growth, the idea it could overtake Google in the near future is officially moot.

Italian lunch in Bologna.

It will never not be amazing to me that journalists and other people in positions of public influence willingly stay on a site that is being openly manipulated on every level by one of the worst human beings on Earth.

Adams family weekend gathering.

"when real-life users become more familiar with the tech — realizing that, at their core, products like ChatGPT are word prediction algorithms rather than human-like sentient entities — it can be a major turnoff"

“[Discover] allows Google to funnel more traffic to publishers as traffic from search declines" Buttle says. “Publishers have no choice but to agree or lose their organic search. [It] pulls in the opposite direction to the kind of relationship publishers want.” www.theguardian.com/media/2025/s...

Spotted in the wild: AI Overview above a Top Stories box. Hard news apparently isn’t as safe from AI slop as Google wants us to believe… Image courtesy of @olegko.bsky.social.

It's coming: "We have to get ready for a Google traffic apocalypse where that traffic number is just going to drastically reduce because users will see less need to click through to search results." - @polemicdigital.com . Listen in at 28 minutes edgeofthewebradio.com/seo-podcast/...

Great start to the Digital Olympus event with the ever-amazing Ross Simmonds. #DOevent

This is potentially earthshaking for the advertising-funded publishing business model. In a good way.

Why Informational Content Still Matters in the AI Search Era Great stuff from @gfiorelli1.bsky.social: www.advancedwebranking.com/blog/informa...

Nick Clegg's new book is absolutely atrocious and I cannot in good conscience recommend you read it. Instead, read my review for @newscientist.com about how bad it is www.newscientist.com/article/mg26...

AI bots bombard publisher websites with ‘no meaningful value exchange’ pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/d...

Alan taught me a lot about how to do proper SEO auditing. Such a great guy. Met him only a few times in person but I had a profound respect for him. Such a great loss.

Who needs a car wash when a Northern Irish summer will powerhose your car several times a day with torrential blasts of rain interspersed with rainbow-birthing glares of sunshine?

Unfortunately true. Discover rewards the lowest form of click-chasing bullshit, and there are no repercussions for sites chasing after cheap clicks on Discover. It's deeply frustrating, especially when I recommend my clients focus on producing real journalism and not churnalist clickbait.

Stop Trying To Make GEO Happen Generative Engine Optimization makes sense as a concept, but GEO as an acronym is doomed – linguistically, historically, and strategically. www.searchenginejournal.com/stop-trying-...

It’s ‘SEO’ even for the AI companies.

"Anthropic remains the most crawl-heavy platform. Even after an 87% decline this year, it still crawled 38K pages for every referred page visit in July 2025, the highest imbalance among major AI players. OpenAI crawled 1,091 pages for every referred page visit." blog.cloudflare.com/crawlers-cli...

Check out the 'Crawl to refer' ratios below of the various AI platforms -> The crawl-to-click gap: Cloudflare data on AI bots, training, and referrals blog.cloudflare.com/crawlers-cli...

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.

Post a movie from the year you were born.

Do you know an "AI Booster"? There are plenty of them on LinkedIn and @edzitron.com has once again written an absolute storm: www.wheresyoured.at/how-to-argue...

A close friend of my sister developed a mild cough and headaches four weeks ago. Today she got a stage 4 terminal lung & brain cancer diagnosis. Life is short. Enjoy every moment. And fuck cancer.

What is this? Google deliberately misconstruing and strawmanning an argument so they can ‘debunk’ it? No way! We definitely haven’t seen them do this several times very recently! They’re always so honest and transparent!

Superb piece from @clarasoteras.com on the state of SEO for news publishers: clarasoteras.com/en/blog/futu...

Quite ironic that OpenAI is building its success on the output of the company it ostensibly aims to replace… www.theinformation.com/articles/ope...

Fortunately at least one business leader seems to think about AI a bit more sensibly. www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/a...

Google publisher entity follow pages from Google Discover www.seroundtable.com/google-disco... via @AndellDam @gaganghotra.bsky.social @vijaychauhanseo.bsky.social #google #googlediscover #publishers

Great new article by Despina Gavoyannis at @ahrefs.bsky.social that separates fact from fiction about “chunking” as an AI/SEO tactic ahrefs.com/blog/seo-chu...

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...

Interesting experiment in Google for Top Stories boxes on desktop, showing vertical images as thumbnails. Confirmed on incognito searches for sport and politics news stories in the UK and US. Can lead to some weird crops, as images obviously haven't been tailored for this. H/T Shelby Blackley.

The ‘AI agentic web’…

This very effectively shows the huge gap in traffic volumes coming from Google vs the hype-machine that is ChatGPT.

I’m thoroughly enjoying this. #RSAvAUS #RugbyChampionship

Leading US online publishers reported an average fall in referral traffic from Google search of 10% in May and June compared to a year earlier UK publishers at PPA also report impact on clickthroughs pressgazette.co.uk/media-audien...

I really dislike how science has started calling almost any fancy computational technique AI. 🧪 The framing of this entire article makes it sound like a benevolent AI independently made these drugs. That is *pure fantasy*. Instead: a team of scientists made a machine learning model for a study.

ChatGPT referral traffic was down 3.8% in July. Is the bubble about to pop? After a wave of graphs (including ours) predicting growth that would intersect Google’s in '27-28, metrics went negative. On the other side of the coin, Google traffic was up 15.9% across 193 sites.

The same day this is published, one of the people quoted in this article publishes an 'AI Search manual' purporting to show how to rank in AI search. Let me quote someone else from the same article, the indomitable @lilyray.nyc: “Anybody that’s pretending to be an expert in GEO, they’re lying.”

"The hype around GEO suggests urgency, but most media operators know better." digiday.com/media/despit...

Found a burst of inspiration and finished a newsletter I had in drafts for months. It's about semantic HTML, and why SEOs and devs alike should care about this - now more than ever: www.seoforgooglenews.com/p/why-semant...

The new 'Preferred Sources' option in Google's Top Stories box can drastically transform the news you're exposed to. First screenshot is a Google search showing a Top Stories box without any preferred sources. The second is the same search, with the BBC and The Guardian set as preferred sources.

Slightly diminish a band: Dukes of Leon.

Google users in the US and India can now select their "preferred sources" which will mean they can see their articles prominently more frequently in Top Stories blog.google/products/sea...