so he doesn't have a fractured hand. the clinic's AI hallucinated it. literally thousands in lost flight, a painful trip to the ER, a cast-like bandaid forrrrrrrrrr nothing. the fractured hand had healed normally.

Stop using "Explain Like I'm 5." It insults your audience. Instead, treat them like a smart peer on their first day: capable of understanding, but lacking context. Your goal is to orient, not dumb down.

Emotion is the new moat. Features are easy to copy. Feelings aren't. Andrew Hogan argues that "resonance" is the only sustainable competitive advantage left. If your product doesn't make users feel something, it is vulnerable to the next clone.

Musing of the day: connecting dots across domains is now more valuable than deep expertise in just one.

Digital PR is not just "SEO with better storytelling." It focuses on audience, narrative, and brand authority. 1. The "Why": Are you fixing a reputation or building one? 2. The Audience: Who are we talking to? 3. The Timeline: 3-month pilots rarely work. You need 6-12 months for impact.

Hey @johnmu.com weird question. I see the "catch-22" for sites when it comes to stuff like the Stanley toolkit: being penalized for something that we can't technically fix on our servers. This has ome "security as UX vibes". Curious to know what you think. www.darkreading.com/remote-workf...

Forget 4K, for AI search optimization, visual anchors are priority #1. Don't block UIs with your head in Loom demos, rotate products slowly for 3D modeling, and keep labels camera-facing. Consistent brand codes help models identify you across different videos. Get more good advice here:

The "semantic gap" between image and text is gone. Google’s Gemini 3 Flash uses reasoning to zoom, inspect, and perform visual math. Read my article on image AI search optimization best practices: searchengineland.com/image-seo-mu...

I'm a #UKContentAwards judge this year! My judging lens for quality content this year: 1. Does the content actually support a clear business goal? 2. No fluff: is the content noise or something that can be scanned by humans and machines? 3. Does it deliver zero-click value and high-intent utility?

"Brand Drift" happens when AI doesn't have enough facts about you, so it assumes you're like your competitors. High-quality video provides the "ground truth" proof to stop AI hallucinations. There are many reasons for that, check out why here and get tips on how to optimize videos in 2026.

Jump cuts are killing your AI search efforts. AI models sample video at ~1 frame per second. If your info flashes too fast, the AI misses it and "hallucinates" your brand details based on competitors. Slow down your roll, quite literally. Want video optimization tips that work in 2026? Read this

I have a world war II question: too many old undetonated things from the war end up in men's rectums and they go to the ER in France. Is this just a French thing. Also why does it keep happening?

Your voice is a highlighter for AI. Use audio bolding: 1. Enunciate: Speak key terms and brand names clearly. 2. A short pause before and after a main point acts like a "comma" or a "period" for the AI. The cadence of speech influences the tokenization. Check out this article on the topic:

Most SEOs chase volume. The good ones chase value.

"Magical Thinking" (the belief that thoughts = reality) is a strategy killer. It breeds confirmation bias: you ignore red flags because they ruin the "vision." I know we are dealing with a lot more CEO "manifesting" AI...so the more you know.

For the French, the press didn't just report on the Republic; it created the Republic. Normalizing behavior in the press is propaganda. Calling it out matters for a proper democracy. And no you can't sue and call it fake news. The 1881 law there makes it hard to censor the press.

Locksmith stickers are annoying but great marketing: 1. They remove the "Search Tax". No need to Google or ask an AI. The sticker provides it with zero friction. 2. The locksmith sticker is where the user is. 3. They capitalize on "Low-Cognition" moments. No thinking, just dial.

x.com/grok/status/... I have been avoiding Twitter and the Grok bits. Ugh.

Stop sending your boss spreadsheets full of SEO stuff. Most of them don't care. Build your SEO roadmap like a product manager: Kill the audit dump. Prioritize by revenue impact Align with business goals, not just algo updates. A roadmap is a strategic argument for resources, not a to-do list.

Hot take: if your Total Addressable Market is 1,000 companies, stop looking for statistical significance. Start looking for patterns in customer interviews. Good judgment beats bad data every time.

We should obsess over the constraints. Dave Kiss wanted to win a WD-40 brand contest. His odds looked terrible. He found a loophole: "Video Format" was weighted 2.5x higher. He didn't need to be good. He just needed to be a video. Find the path of least resistance.

There's a rolling fog in my area. Time for me to go walk in the cemetery and practice Duolingo, thus terrifying people walking their dogs there. They can't see me but they can hear my French accent. French people are buried in that place so they assume I'm a ghost asking unhinged questions.

The Pinterest 2026 Trends Report is interesting: 1.Cabbage Crush Food Searches for "cabbage dumplings" are up 110%, the economy impacts palates. 2. Pen Pals Gen Z is actively rejecting "instant" for "intentional." 3. Darecations : Adventure tourism is up 75%. Watch what people buy & why

Checked and my dog is the same length as the burger receipt.

Your April Fool’s joke might damage your brand. Brands are finding their April Fool's pranks surfacing in AI answers as historical facts. You are feeding the machine that narrates your brand. Audit your "Shadow Brand": the old content, jokes, and lawsuits that treated as gospel by LLMs.

Don't ask WHY, ask HOW futurism.com/artificial-i...

Nope. Not working today.

Ah yes. AI art and the good old piss filter. www.reddit.com/r/isthisAI/c...

I wish some folks would lose everything they lied so hard to get. I'm petty like that.

Image SEO in 2026 is about machine readability. FDA font sizes (0.9mm) fail AI OCR. Glossy packaging causes data hallucinations. Weird facial expressions = unreliable sentiment scores. I have some thoughts and advice here:

Voice to text typing on my phone is wild. It seems that as a baseline, I sound like I'm asking a question so everything ends up with a? at the end. Happens in French, English and Hungarian attempts.

No branded mug. No hoodie. No gift card. Search Engine Land sent nothing to their contributors. Instead of shipping swag, a donation was made to the American Marketing Association Foundation (AMAF) on behalf of us contributors.

Most marketing playbooks on LinkedIn and in my inbox feel like survivor bias in PDF format. You download them and feel like a failure when you can't apply half of it with success. It doesn't work...just like a map of Paris métro won't help you navigate the London underground. I talk about this here:

Treat your reputation like a data engineering challenge. 1. AI search answers usually present a "consideration set" of 3-5 options. If your brand falls outside this cluster, bye! 2. AI assigns qualitative labels ("budget-friendly," "legacy," "complex"). 3. Your brand narrative is co-created

One of the things i hear less and less: "They have a bigger marketing budget and marketing department, that's why we can't compete". Vibe marketing is emerging alongside vibe coding. If it sounds like a buzzword for you, read Marc's article.

@johnmu.com youtube.com/shorts/BoySC... Christmas catering option for you.

I'm watching a video by French photographer. Her voice... Sounds like someone replaced her vocal cords with a cheese grater that has a wind chime inside of it.

Did we ever need AI recipes for Thanksgiving to be headed for tragedy? futurism.com/artificial-i...

the greatest tragedy of my life is that only men think i am a lesbian. it's a tragedy because i wish women thought that.

I think about Maxwell's demon at least once a year. If Google allows valuable content and doesn't index low quality pages, it aims to reduce the disorder and randomness present in its system. EXCEPT that it now introduces disorder in AI answers. It's both a filter and a source of noise.

haven't slept. need to do a client proposal and prepare for a meeting and then go to a conference. what is my brain doing? reminding me that this one time @not-a-robot.com managed to get a marriage proposal while attending a silent disco.

I made it onto @adweek.bsky.social! Well not really. It was my Unsplash image. But hey, made me smile. Thanks @alertmouse.bsky.social for that. I genuinely enjoy the service.

Recap of IMPORTXML bits SEOs should love: Fetch the title: =IMPORTXML(A2, "//title") Get the meta description: =IMPORTXML(A2, "//meta[@name='description']/@content") Get the H1 : text =IMPORTXML(A2, "//h1") Get the Open Graph Title: =IMPORTXML(A2, "//meta[@property='og:title']/@content")

I'm exhausted from putting effort into messages when people just reply with an emoji. I wish I could “emoji their emoji” to signal that I'm done taking initiative, now it’s up to them to continue the conversation. Has genZ found a solution to this?

Throwback. She hasn't changed anything. She's doing great. I haven't changed anything. Doing great. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

If you're using a cloud provider to host images / videos / other content, you can and should verify the host in Search Console, so that you're aware of potential issues that affect Google's crawling & indexing, & Safe Browsing. Use a DNS CNAME to the bucket, then verify with DNS. More: (1/n)

Met a lot of new people at a conference. One of them in the speaker WhatsApp group is super polite and kind. They wish folks good night, sweet dreams, etc. ME: sends a link to a medical study on the impact of micro plastics in tea bags at midnight cause we both like tea. Sigh. Goodnight I guess

I saved this post because it always reminds me that I made a difference. If you have ADHD or work with someone who's neurodivergent, check this out: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Flan it. When you're French and type on mobile and get autocorrected. Flan it indeed.

why are empty social displays so popular on LinkedIn? I'd like to share the cool shit I'm working on but what's the point when it gets drowned out? It's sad.