My exact 2026 GEO/AI SEO growth strategy: 1) LLMs.txt 2) ? 3) Profit

It's that time of the year again: here's the Mueller Report of SEO memes for 2025. #SEO

Experimenting with removing color from my phone to reduce screen addiction, and it's kinda working?! What do you think?

This is clearly where the industry is heading. Thanks @aleyda.bsky.social for putting this together "SEOFOMO’s Organic Traditional & AI Search Trends for 2026: Top Challenges, Expectations & Actions" hub.seofomo.co/surveys/orga...

Every Christmas we trek up to the Astoria Column to see the lights and look over the city. This year we went inside and sang carols in the base, voices echoing 120 feet up. Happy holidays, ya lovable animals!

2 million views on Reddit earned me $0.15 Only 66 million more until the $10 payment threshold! 🕺

Google's top 3 ranking factors finally revealed: 1. ██████s ██████ 2. █████ of ███████ 3. ███████████████

Want a quick way to (potentially) pay for gifts? Take our survey! We're looking for responses to our 2026 trends report to fully capture the state of the market. Two responders will be selected for a $500 Amazon gift card. Survey only takes ~3 minutes: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Sites that rank for multiple fan-out queries are far more likely to appear in Google AI Overviews Nice research via the @surferseo.bsky.social team "Ranking for Multiple Fan-Out Queries Dramatically Increases Your Chances of Getting Cited in AIOs" surferseo.com/blog/query-f...

Have you turned on "Web Guide" in Google Labs? Many people think it's the future of Google Search @dr-pete.bsky.social does a deep dive: How Web Guide works, how it summarizes your information, and how it's query fan-outs work Read here: moz.com/blog/guide-t...

Technical SEO tidbit spotted by @rustybrick.com If you change a robots "noindex" directive to "index" via JavaScript, good chance Google won't ever render the JavaScript after they see the "noindex" in your HTML 🚫 "noindex" in HTML remains noindex searchengineland.com/google-says-...

Me watching the traffic roll in from Google's December Core Update

My national government has turned evil and dumb. Ask me anything.

If you work in SEO/AI marketing, take the survey!

NEW post: sparktoro.com/blog/the-202... Thanks to the tireless work of @paddymoogan.bsky.social, our survey of 200+ digital agency owners is now live featuring answers to critical questions about the field's health, growth, and threats. 👇

A great SEO convo with one of our favorite peeps, @gfiorelli1.bsky.social where we talk about • What hurts/helps rankings most • Patterns uncovered by testing • The truth about AI visibility tools • How to shape brand signals for SEO • Backward books www.advancedwebranking.com/blog/what-dr...

I saved what remains of my frayed sanity and used AI to generate ALT text for thousands of images. Then I wrote a post about it: www.ianlurie.com/digital-mark...

Tool of the day: Alertmouse For finding new brand/keyword mentions on the web, this is the best tool, hands down, for tracking + daily alerts If you haven't already, try it out. Every day, I've received comprehensive email reports I never would have known about otherwise alertmouse.com

Actually useful > Gave Gemini our company's (human-designed) color palette, and it generated a fully interactive Design System, complete with multiple shades You can see it in action: zyppy.com/colors.html

As it was announced today that Adobe is acquiring Semrush for 1.9B, here are some of the companies that Semrush owns — presumably now owned by Adobe: Backlinko Kompyte Prowly Traffic Think Tank Datos Exploding Topics Ryte Search Engine Land MarTech org Search Marketing Expo (SMX) MarTech Conference

If your small content team uses AI to scale to 500+ "human reviewed" articles/month, how much human reviewing is really taking place?

Off to Brazil for SEO Summit 2025

Google's new deceptive ad layout not only tricks people into clicking more ads It's costing businesses real money 💸

These Google sitelinks are getting out of hand

AGENCY OWNERS! Help yourself & your fellow agencies out: randfish.typeform.com/to/eFoJ3tXz Paddy Moogan is once again running the Digital Agency Owner Survey for 2025. Last year's results were incredibly compelling; this year's will be, too.

True story

More evidence that Google's August 2025 Spam Update was bigger than most SEOs realize "How to tell if you were impacted by the August 2025 spam update" by @mariehaynes.bsky.social Multiple Googlers have said this Google will reward "originality" this year FWIW www.mariehaynes.com/august-2025-...

And we're off! Exciting time speaking today at Ahrefs Evolve in San Diego "What Google Doesn't Tell You About E-E-A-T" Photo credit @lou-lin.bsky.social

Something tells me Google's August 2025 spam update—which lasted 26 days(!)—was more significant than we realize Seeing many *legitimate* sites with significant movement beginning mid-September, reminiscent of the declining slopes we saw with the Helpful Content updates 📉

While there currently is no evidence that using a CYRUS.txt file can help you rank higher in Google + LLMs, @whitespark.ca is testing it so you don't have to 📈

Open AI / Google: Please release a search console for your LLMs. Let us measure our content performance and search behavior to better serve the audience there without having to only rely on 3rd party data! Thanks, SEOs around the world 🙏 ...

One of the coolest small gigs I ever worked in Hollywood was with the Jimmy Kimmel Show. (I got to help Jimmy rehearse for an on-air bit.) Thank you for your service, sir, and may good things come in your future

This week alone (and it's only Wednesday), I've received *three* different sponsored social requests for newly launched AI companies. I've never said yes to any of these, but be slightly wary when you see an influencer talking about the latest AI tool

RankEmbedBERT is a deep-learning model used by Google to rank web pages, relying on two primary sources of data 1) 70 days of search logs (user data/clicks, etc) 2) Scores generated by Quality Raters Information is power. Do with this knowledge what you will

So sorry to hear this. Alan could be a character, but he was there for a lot of people when it mattered. I'll never forget what he did for Dana during her last days.

We have some (unpublished) data showing a positive correlation between <a>branded anchor text</a> and Google rankings 📈 So we changed the links on Zyppy List from a generic "Contact Company" to include your company's brand name Hopefully, it helps your SEO a little!

Court rules Google must share data with competitors. Looks like they'll be forced to share: 1) Basic Search Index: URLs/first seen/last crawled/spam score/etc. 2) "Glue": uses click data to build SERPs 3) RankEmbed: deep learning to understand semantic meaning www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552...

Terrific post by @wilreynolds.bsky.social on the frustrations + successes of AI Optimization "AI Optimization Test: Footers are back like 2003" www.seerinteractive.com/insights/ai-...

Pro Tip for improving AI Search visibility 📈 YouTube often plays an outsized role across many AI platforms as a cited source, due to models reading *transcripts* So if you've been waiting to upload those videos with positive brand mentions, now might be a good time to put it on your roadmap 🗺️

Easily one of the best articles I've seen on AI search Explains how Structured Data influences AI answers, even if the models never sees it "From Retrieval to Reasoning: The Architectural Evolution of Information Systems for Large Language Models" by Andrea Volpini wordlift.io/blog/en/retr...

Migrated 95% of the pages on this site to shorter URLs +closer to the homepage You'll never guess what happened next

Chart of the Day: ChatGPT vs Google Traffic Across 44,421 sites tracked by Ahrefs, traffic from.. • Google = 41.91% • ChatGPT = 0.19% While ChatGPT traffic is growing at a faster rate, Google still sends 220x more traffic. What are you optimizing for today? chatgpt-vs-google.com

Here's a free llms.txt file you can use that has proven to work with ChatGPT, Google Gemini, etc. Edit to fit your site. Easiest way to higher AI rankings: tinyurl.com/3u33tx8e

Current state of the SEO industry

SEO Tool of the Day: Rendering Difference Engine Need to spot the difference between your HTML and JavaScript rendered content? "Identify SEO signals added, removed, or altered during JavaScript rendering — without digging into the code." Very nice! 👏 thegray.company/resources/js...

Agent mode is a wild paradigm shift in online marketing happening now Users never visit your site Your traffic becomes bot traffic *yet it still converts*

🤔

One mile in 8 minutes, 11 seconds Not terrible for a guy my age. Will train and measure again in a few months

"Based on current trends, ChatGPT referral traffic could overtake organic search in 31 months." This study was based on a couple hundred websites, but if the growth curves are directionally accurate, the premise is NOT implausible www.siegemedia.com/strategy/cha...

Spent the weekend merging Zyppy List and Zyppy into one unified website. Why? • Better user experience • Consolidate link equity • Consistent brand signals Strangely, toughest migration I've ever tackled! :) zyppy.com