I have made many many notes this year as I work through my ideas about the state of independent content creation. Here's my summary. www.hiblue.com/five-pillars...

12YO girl signed up to do “stand up comedy” at the talent show. 13YO boy decided to heckle her. Teacher started to tell the boy to leave her alone, but the 12YO comedian said “no, no, let him go, this is the closest he’s ever going to get to having a conversation with a girl.”

One more speaker spot left and a few sponsors spots still available.

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:

Bad week for the MAGA 'alpha' males. Woke is back 😅

Jaw broken in two places ✅

If you're not involved in scraping, you won't know about some massive changes Google made a couple of weeks ago to make it harder to scrape some parts of their SERP. This latest legal action in another brick in the wall Google is building to make life hard to competitor LLMs using their index.

Shame the murder isn't on until 3:30am 😴

On 15th January, I'll be talking to @yagmursimsek.bsky.social and @bngsrc.bsky.social about one of the most tricky areas of SEO: "Content quality". It's a free webinar you can join, and we'll try and field your questions too! You can register here: www.duda.co/webinars/win...

Every year, instead of sending Christmas gifts to clients, @withcandour.co.uk make a £2,000 donation to Future Projects who provide for the thousands of local households that are struggling to afford food and daily essentials over Christmas. 🎄

Cheers to my very first article on @sejournal.bsky.social 🥂Posting this with a very proud smile 🥳

“While the AI industry claims its models can “think,” “reason,” and “learn,” their supposed achievements rest on marketing hype and stolen intellectual labor. In reality, AI erodes academic freedom, weakens critical reading, and subordinates the pursuit of knowledge to corporate interests.”

... But does it run Doom? Yes, yes it does.

"Apparently, I was spot on!" loops.video/v/cq6L8PhpC0

Google’s December 2025 Core Update has started rolling out, and may take 3 weeks to complete. May the odds ever be in your favour! 🪄

Very happy to say @withcandour.co.uk is a Scholarship Sponsor for @womenintechseo.bsky.social Fest in London next year. This helps cover the cost of tickets for those that otherwise might not be able to attend 🫶

📖 Date for your diary: 24th September 2026: We found a venue for SearchNorwichXL. 250 people ✨

The @majestic.com SEOin2026 is out today. There is a launch livestream at 14:00CET at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WOM... 117 leading SEOs and Digital Marketers to help you stay one step ahead of your competitors. Grab your copy on Amazon👇 UK: maj.to/48FVO0S US: maj.to/44TaVCM

AIOs starting to trend down? Very interesting data from @alsoasked.com: An analysis of 24 million PAA questions shows a significant drop in AI-generated answers by Google in the last 4 weeks. Was this an experiment? Do users prefer real website answers over AIOs?

Halifax trying to do a “Wrapped” in their banking app got me cringing so hard it hurts

🚨 YouTube drop alert! Our brilliant hosts Simon Cox (@simoncox.com) and Mike Chidzey were joined by two SEO legends - Bengü Sarıca Dinçer (@bngsrc.bsky.social) and Geoff Meakin - for #SeoOfficeHours. 📺 Catch the full episode now on our website, and 📅 add SEO Office Hours invites to your calendar!

When you go to Down Detector to see if LinkedIn is down and then find out that the site itself is down because of Cloudflare.

With no malice, I will say the common denominator between the vast majority of "SEO is dead, let me tell you how to GEO" people I have noticed is: they have zero professional SEO experience 🙃

Why have any experiences when you can boil the ocean mentally cosplaying what it would be like to live your fucking life.

Quality people 💅

Aleyda does helpful surveys, fill this in ☺️

is Keyword still a thing? RAG to Riches: Keyword Research for the AI Era 2025-12-03 | 10:00 PT Live @markwilliamscook.com @shelleywalsh.bsky.social @ulrikaviberg.bsky.social @duda.co www.duda.co/webinars/rag...

"All of this falls apart if humans don't adopt the tech. This is why you've seen Meta cram its lame chatbots into WhatsApp and Instagram. This is why Notepad and Paint now have useless Copilot buttons on Windows. This is why Google Gemini wants to "help you" read and reply to your emails."

Still reeling from the Stanford report on Brexit. Reduced GDP by up to 8% and investment by as much as 18%. The UK Treasury would have £40 billion more each year if Britain had remained in the EU. Devastating self-immolation.

POV: SEOs explaining to clients how AI/AIOs are going to impact traffic/revenue over the next 24 months.

Google implemented some very tricky anti-scraping measures yesterday, specifically around their AI answers. V interesting.

I’ve got 6 days to sell at least 14 framed pieces to have what I need for rent. Any order tonight over $100 will receive one of these *original* continuous line drawings w/ metallic sumi ink (see the lil’ @darthbluesky.bsky.social?!) www.sol-exposure.com/shop/

True story, though.

🔎 Think keyword research is old news? Think again. Our latest #DudaWebinar will show you how clever content + smart AI workflows can give your builds a whole new win. 💪 @markwilliamscook.com @withcandour.co.uk @sejournal.bsky.social @shelleywalsh.bsky.social

I introduced someone to the artist Meatloaf today for their first ever time. What did you do? 😂

Google changed a thing, so @alsoasked.com is currently returning fewer results. We're working on it. To be clear it was 40% off annual subscriptions, not 40% fewer results 😅

Oof

Very much enjoyed attending #SEOFOMO as @andy-chadwick.com to tell people about @keywordinsights.bsky.social and my extremist views. 🥚 🥚

Autocorrect has become our worst enema.

In 2025, we call this a "Cloudflare hangover"

Semrush being purchased by Adobe 🫠

This was the metric I have been looking for, but didn't realize it's here, sitting in Profound all along: The number of "open-ended" LLM searches that rely on Web Search For this banking company, it's 96%... sheesh.

YouTube is really enshittifying itself. I got sent a link today on WhatsApp to look at a video, and I honestly don't even know if it's working. I'm watching I think ads, with no bar to show how long they are, no way to skip, the second one has frozen? Will I see a video? Who knows.

Happy "Cloudflare is fucked again so I need to talk to clients that will no doubt blame me personally" day

Happy Monday! Have a great week! 😹 #iykyk #geo #catstxt #llmstxt

This was an incredible conference in 2024, and 2025. Looking forward to 2026 🔥

SEO updates you ✨NEED✨ to know [17 November]: www.linkedin.com/posts/markse...

So you successfully manipulated Reddit. Now what? I saw a LinkedIn “growth hack” inserting product recommendations into Reddit to gain AI citations. It wasn’t the post that annoyed me. It was the response. Thousands applauding the “amazing insights”. Without questioning the consequences.