So you think all the worry about rank tracking data is new? It’s not, it’s old - like as old as “SEO is Dead”, and other SEO horror stories you keep the kids awake at night with. 🧵 1/4

This article is essential reading. Great work, JesScholz 👏 If you’re not preparing your website for agents yet, there’s a lot of good food for thought here. I’ve cribbed some key points from it, but you should also check it out if you get the chance. 🧵 1/3

Yass, a business-justifiable reason to visit Zurich! Coffee & hills, I'm coming for you (too!)

Where “traditional” search and AI search differ is important. Many people have, however, pointed to this difference as an inflexion point in SEO and, therefore, heralding the death of the “old way” of doing things. A more productive way to look at this difference is how Duane puts it here. 🧵 1/4

I really wouldn’t want to be a publisher right about now, but I’ve been thinking that for the last few years LLMs have been the cherry on top But reading how the Economist plans to define itself against AI/LLMs in the next three years IS super interesting: 🧵 1/4

Working with search data can be unforgiving. About two weeks after I started work on repositioning impressions as important metrics in an age of AI search, Google swoops in and does a proverbial table flip. 🧵 1/8

How to use the Streamlit Regex Tool: - Paste URLs directly into the "Enter URLs" text field (one URL per line) - Configure Regex Options: 1. Enter Domain: Provide the domain you want to strip (e.g., example.com) 2. Wildcard Options: Enable partial matching at the start or end 🧵 1/2

Since digging into Web.Search in ChatGPT 5 (SonicBerry), I’ve been testing how to explain this function and work with it. Others, such as Mark Williams-Cook, Britney Muller, Mihir Naik, Dan Petrovic etc., have all dug into this and shared their thoughts, which contributed to my thinking too. 🧵 1/7

“If you’re reading this, you’ve likely wrestled with time-series forecasting” Yes! “Perhaps you’ve implemented Facebook Prophet” … guilty. “Prophet excels at business time-series with strong seasonal patterns but requires manual tuning for each new dataset”. Ain’t that the truth! 🧵 1/3

Why chaining prompts can help you work with AI/LLMs. If you work with LLMs or have a specific focus to add value with the AI processes, one thing you may have hit against is what happens when you start using longer and longer prompts. 🧵 1/7

Where’s the best place to keep up with SEO news? And here’s another way to shortcut you to some of that least! I was thinking about the question I'm asked the most in podcasts and when I give talks/workshops, and one of them is how to stay informed about SEO and related news. 🧵 1/4

SEO’s intent state system is kind of broken. This was before AI Search, in my opinion. For IR/Data Science, the question of intent types has been long-discussed, but what usually bubbles up (across, diagonally?) into SEO is often over-simplified and more flawed than we’d expect. 🧵 1/8

After sharing a load of my SEO tools a few weeks back, one of the requests I got was for a more detailed guide on how to use Prophet… Here it is -

If you see me at @brightonseo.com, make sure you ask me for a sticker. We need to get this standard official 🐈

Essential reading for e-commerce in the age of AI There’s a lot of panic and general anxiety on how it impacts e-commerce - but the details are slowly emerging! In this blog, Chris (that one again), looks at Agentic commerce and how Google (and others) are preparing. 🧵 1/4

If you knew, with certainty, that organic clicks (through Google) would drop by xx% by the end of 2026, what would you do now? Quite an intimidating prospect (assuming you’re not expecting that already), but as a thought experiment, I think it is one we need to be training ourselves on. 🧵 1/2

Footers are back? I’m not sure they ever left, but I can agree that I’m glad I don’t see many sites with 50+ links in the footer anymore. That was once valuable for SEO, but now - thankfully - not so much. 🧵 1/3

Web Guide, AI Mode and AI Overviews - what next? Gianluca has created a super-detailed explainer into Google’s Web Guide AND set it against the already-familiar AI Overview and AI Mode “surfaces”. 🧵 1/4

I had some great feedback on the Google Trends Stitcher APP previously, but one of the biggest requests was to include DataForSEO as well. So I did - trends-stitcher.streamlit.app 🧵 1/2

Chris (another one) questions the reliability of X-robots headers in the world of LLMs/AI search. "If you’re serious about protecting your data, you need stronger measures: Explicit robots.txt blocks for AI crawlers that claim to respect them. Server-level blocks against suspicious IPs. 🧵 1/2

You’re fed up with chunking, right? Wait a sec! There are enough well-respected SEOs who've given sensible accounts for why obsessing over “chunking” your content could be a waste of time from an LLM visibility standpoint. Beyond just readable, “well chunked” content, I'm inclined to agree. 🧵 1/4

Do you have some time to provide some advice? One of the tools I started creating a while back was my People Also Asked (PAA) moments App - www.chris-green.net/post/user-mo... 🧵 1/4

“Agents” are all over your site. Well…maybe. But are you even sure how to track them? If you’re fortunate enough to be able to check your server access logs, you’ll see it happening. 🧵 1/5

AI Search is more volatile plays on my mind. What if you spend months achieving visibility for key events in a user’s journey, only for it to be lost again a few days/weeks later? www.tryprofound.com/blog/ai-sear... suggests this is more of a feature in AI search, which may be unavoidable. 🧵 1/5

Do you dare to treat bots differently? Chances are, if you’re in SEO - or speak to your SEO team - the answer is “no”! There is a significant level of fear in some circles that serving different content to different users (i.e. search bots, Google, OpenAI, etc) is a complete “no-go”. 🧵 1/7

“The web isn’t human-first anymore” Gulp. Jono’s hit a purple patch on this blog lately, but this one stuck out at me as a “moment” with how your mental model of “the web” needs to change. 🧵 1/5

This is one of the MOST interesting AI Search frameworks I’ve seen. In an “eat your greens” type blog post (I.e. it is good for you, but not a quick-hit or easy to digest in one sitting), Gianluca provides a really detailed and compelling view of what a robust AI Search framework looks like. 🧵 1/2

“What are the best prompt libraries for LLMs?” This was one of the first questions I was ever asked about after presenting on the impact of AI chatbots on marketing. It’s a perfectly understandable question, but one I pushed back on. Here’s why: 🧵 1/10

“The SEO industry is teaching the wrong skills.” This one may bring about some strong feelings. I think some of this is Duane trying to be provocative - and it worked on me! - but I think there is a kernel of truth here. 🧵 1/5

How hard is it to change everyone’s current search habits? OpenAI’s chances to “beat” Google really depend on how they can effectively change people’s given “search instincts”. For early adopters and young users, this may be easy, but are some users just so entrenched in using Google? 🧵 1/5

A balancing act for the AI-search generation is that of Understanding vs Steering This short piece by Dan is one which overlapped some of my own thinking recently, but I wanted to call attention to it because it presents a relationship which many may only spend time understanding one side of 🧵 1/5

Turns out I’ve been building a few tools recently, it’s a bit of a random collection, but if you work in SEO and find yourself having to report on performance, chances are one of these may be useful to you: 🧵 1/3

OpenAI, Google, and the search data question. Rumours have been circling in SEO for weeks that OpenAI may be tapping into Google data to power its own search (and possibly SonicBerry). 🧵 1/5

I’ve been rebuilding my Metric Chain in the AI Search era. Not out of vanity, but because it's been requested by a few and I am growing increasingly aware that this measurement piece is something that presents a greater issue for SEO as a channel than the scary unknowns of AI search itself. 🧵 1/5

How should you chunk your content for AI? Here’s my take on it…

Ever wanted to try and build a search engine? Maybe, maybe not. But if you want to learn more about how search engines work and don’t have the time to try it all for yourself, Wilson has you covered. It’s hard to really summarise the level of detail in this one, so I’d suggest you read it. 🧵 1/2

If you want to delve deeper into the foundational knowledge of AI Search, Duane is still one of the best to follow in this space. This particularly interesting read, Duane looks at semantic density and semantic overlap with regards to optimising for AI Search. 🧵 1/4

LinkedIn is often plagued by bad data-viz. My biggest (recent) pet peeve? Using a secondary axis and cherry-picking a scale to make a correlation where there isn’t one. Not all of that is intentional; sometimes it is accidental, or just a knowledge gap. 🧵 1/3

How are AI Bots shaping the web? Here’s another data source that is really interesting. Paul has done a deep dive into HTTP Archive’s data - something that I’m super-close to right now as we’re preparing the 2026 Chapter of the Web Almanac! 🧵 1/3

We should use Google Trends data more, as the rest of our click/attribution data will degrade because of AI search. - Google Trends scales each query independently to 0–100. Compare up to 5 terms together, but anything more breaks down - Introducing a workaround - Trend-Stitching (see link) 🧵 1/2

Time to dust off trends data *again* Google Trends isn’t just for curiosity any more, it’s a reality check when our other metrics start to look shaky. This is the biggest challenge AI search brings us. 🧵 1/4

Take to the Skies 09/17/25 www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0GP... Join the adventure! 🔗https://bit.ly/LostSkies #LostSkies #IndieDevs

Does it matter that AI search is fundamentally different to “traditional search?” Yes & no First off, the more you understand about the underlying mechanism and methods, the better. I'm NOT putting people off learning more, and I’m not saying that those who have taken the time have wasted it 🧵 1/5

Does content substance impact rankings? In short, no. Watch the video to find out why.

“SEO is dead/dying/killed by AI” is fast becoming a new meme headline in the tech press. Not for the first time, and certainly not the last! One of the latest in this “series” - buff.ly/QLHzviH 🧵 1/8

In a world of LLMs and infinitely scalable content, companies like Google and OpenAI must develop robust methods to surface the most relevant content Google’s history is deep - PageRank was the first major breakthrough, followed by signals like quality, authority, relevance, and freshness 🧵 1/7

How “substantial” is ranking content? I recently tested Dejan’s Content Substance Classifier - an AI model designed to spot “fluff” (empty writing) vs. “substance” (meaningful content) - on over 500 keywords across multiple niches. The findings were… telling: 🧵 1/4

Will GEO replace SEO? Yes, I’m back with my “it depends” videos, and this is a timely one.

Who’s going to be first to crack “query fan-out”? My money's on Dan and the Dejan team. While the SEO industry gets its head around what this process is and what it means in practice, one of the key “actionable” pieces of info is how we can predict/anticipate this fan-out specifically. 🧵 1/6

As discussed with @panvictor.bsky.social and @chris-green.net before, while you can see the "RAG probability" in ChatGPT network data, it seems the threshold is wildly different on free vs paid (maybe a cost saving thing). Even things like that are interesting outside of model v model.