I enjoyed this one. What happens when we abandon “do-all” processes and instead adopt a series of principles and apply them with our own experience/creativity? Amaka - who I had a blast working with on the 2025 Web Almanac - nails it when she says: “principles, not fixed steps.” 🧵 1/6

Visibility scores have always been a bit hit-or-miss for me. On the face of it, a % score which expresses how visible you are (relative to what's possible), is a useful stat. Whether for “traditional” rank tracking or prompt tracking, it gives us a simple way to show how well we’re doing. 🧵 1/7

What are the forces shaping SEO most profoundly? This is something I spent a lot of time digging into as part of my work on the SEO Chapter of the Web Almanac. buff.ly/fBtlcg7 🧵 1/5

Are AIOs the main reason you’re losing clicks? AI overviews are big and potentially impact clicks - that’s widely known and feared, and some industries are suffering heavily from this already. 🧵 1/7

I’m on a panel on GEO and AI Search at Similarweb on April 28. Expect insights from Ethan Smith @dixonjones.bsky.social @sagibson.co.uk @chris-green.net and Rice Tong. Drinks, networking, and the future of search. 🍻 Free tickets www.tickettailor.com/events/cjeve...

Links in visibility in “traditional” search and “AI search” keep coming thick and fast. Meaning, you can’t safely invest in SEO without impacting GEO/AEO or the other way around. We should be waaaay beyond arguing this by now, but it’s just not going away. 🧵 1/4

Where is the value in AI prompt tracking? Given how costly most AI prompt tracking platforms are, I’m pretty sure most users aren’t seeing a positive ROI from them. Let’s break this down: - Daily/weekly monitoring of overall visibility is so noisy it has the potential to waste time 🧵 1/7

I’ve been talking about spam in AI results a lot recently. Almost certainly because I’m encountering more people offering “GEO services” that are broadly based on ranking well and misinforming AI models. 🧵 1/8

For years, I felt like keyword research often started in the wrong place - an SEO tool. Granted, the tools had the data, and depending on your objective, there is a huge amount of value here. 🧵 1/6

Another HTML vs Markdown showdown for AI consultants to contend with. Do LLMs ever see the full HTML when provided a URL? David has run some tests that provide super-interesting outputs and food for thought for those trying to understand whether their website is “AI-ready.” 🧵 1/4

This won’t be a popular one for all, but it is thought-provoking. Devs and engineers are rightfully resistant to vibe coding, and analysts might not enjoy the thought of being replaced by AI Agents either. But hear me out. Wil’s blog “I have 10 questions a day & only ask you 1. 🧵 1/7

How I keep up to date with SEO news has changed in the last 10+ years The main influence here is how I identify the valuable voices in the industry, and how they choose to circulate is a huge component. The painful metamorphosis of Twitter to X is possibly the biggest single contributor here 🧵 1/4

The world of AI search needs more testing. Okay, perfect testing is hard; causation does not equal correlation; and just because something is happening now doesn’t mean it’ll happen in the future. These are common objections against testing, but they shouldn’t stop. 🧵 1/5

“Is this optimised for AI?” or “Can AI see this?” are two of the most frequent questions I field at the moment. For non-experienced SEOs, this is a tricky question to answer. Even some experienced SEOs aren’t super sure - a lot of information posted is conflicting. 🧵 1/3

A while back, I went down a rabbit hole using the AlsoAsked API I was actually building an AI content workflow, but I had a feeling in the back of my head, “What if answering PAA questions drives better results?” 🧵 1/6

Recently circulated on LI was the regex “^(?:\S+\s+){9,}\S+$”, which can help people identify queries with over 9 words in their Google Search Console data. This is a neat proxy for AI-based queries (AI mode, AI overview, or search grounding). 🧵 1/5

Can an AI Chat Bot “just read an image” when it views a page? No. Just because AI models are “Multi modal” doesn’t mean they’re used in the RAG pipeline process, and I ran a small experiment to test this. 👉 buff.ly/Of7XdVY 🧵 1/2

AI Search (GEO/AEO) has a spam problem. That was inevitable. We’ve seen this pattern before: • A new surface appears • Early tactics exploit it • Scale accelerates • Monetisation pressures build • Algorithm updates recalibrate trust 🧵 1/3

Search in e-commerce is undergoing a huge facelift. Optimising Google product feeds to leverage organic shopping features has been a best practice for a few years. But we’re standing on the precipice of this all changing again: 🧵 1/6

👏 @chris-green.net did an amazing study showing how answering more PAAs can correlate to better rankings, and goes into more depth about what these findings mean on video with @alsoasked.com . Interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9df... Full study: alsoasked.com/insights/paa...

There’s still so much talk of aggressively scaling content 💬 More content equals more success seems to be the simple calculus. And it works… until it really doesn’t. 🧵 1/4

“You Can't Generate What You Can't Retrieve” is a foundational message for AI Search. Retrieval is the bedrock of everything, and Dawn has hit the nail on the head (again). Slides are never a great substitute for being in the room, but this is a slide deck you’ll still learn from. 🧵 1/3

We love tools, and awesome tools are even better 👏 Suganthan has done a great job with this list, with contributions from across the industry. Curating and maintaining this is a huge effort, so I suggest you follow it on GitHub for future reference. Thanks, Suganthan

We’re no longer playing a zero-sum game. In so many ways, this is an opportunity; in others, it’s a massive stress-headache waiting to happen. 🧵 1/7

Just so people get a feeling how much 2MB HTML actually is, I made this (3MB+) monster: experiments.geekonaut.de/3mb-behemoth I know - nobody asked but here we are. You are welcome.

I review more technical audits than I write these days. From the teams I work with, to third-party SEO resources (mainly agencies), there is almost always one observation I make. Where is the prioritisation? OR That prioritisation feels wrong. 🧵 1/9

Whilst this piece is framed as a GEO-myth-spotting safari, I found the most useful part to be the lessons we should take when approaching any particular area. - Challenging biases - Lazy thinking - Being willfully ignorant - Looking for easily-fitting or convenient answers 🧵 1/6

This is pretty big: Pages that fully answer more PAA questions tend to rank higher. This is one of the conclusions of a brilliant independent study completed by @chris-green.net and published on the @alsoasked.com site today. alsoasked.com/insights/paa...

This is great from Harry 👏 We’re starting to see more mature, less BS approaches to SEO/AEO/GEO. Disambiguation is similar to what I’ve been encouraging. Interpretability focuses on how we ensure that we are being understood and represented as we want to be. 🧵 1/2

Will ChatGPT paid ads be a worthwhile investment for brands? Right now, it’s hard to see how we can prove it. Estimated average CPM at $60 (which is super high relative to other paid platforms), and yet there is no clear way to understand conversions generated from those placements. 🧵 1/7

What replaces clicks in a post-click world? If “SEO is dead” and “AEO/GEO is the new SEO”, it’s ironic that Google Impressions are one of the best indicators Don’t expect to hot-swap clicks for impressions without questions. Time to start educating on impressions and why they’re important.

So you’re happy your content works for users, but are you sure it works for AI systems too? Okay, so this is something that I wish we didn’t need to worry about - but we do. It comes worrying close to the “writing for SEO” activity that is responsible for at least some of my grey hairs. 🧵 1/9

AI Search has driven an evolution in your SEO function, not - I’ve argued many times - a replacement of it. But for those who were quicker at launching a new function (net new or an extension of existing SEO), here’s likely what you have seen in the first year: 🧵 1/7

If you want an example of why 2026 is the year of better bot management, this is it! In this specific example, Grok is asked to fetch a URL, and we see 16 requests across 5 different user-agents and 12 IPs. 🧵 1/6

I use AI but… I wouldn’t connect it to my Google Drive I wouldn’t use a browser powered by it I wouldn’t auto-allow Cursor to run any/all commands in terminal I wouldn’t take health advice without question I wouldn’t let my kids access unsupervised I wouldn’t trust references without review 🧵 1/4

Final shout for Issue 1 of This Station Is Non-Operational, a newsletter for human computer users forced to live under the yolk of big tech. buttondown.com/thisstationi...

Been a busy week, so busy I barely clocked this one go out - www.searchenginejournal.com/what-the-lat... Thanks @shelleywalsh.bsky.social for the interview and the cracking write up too!

This experiment from Dan is really interesting, and it's great that he's sharing it. I am worried it’ll be taken the wrong way though… What if this gets boiled down to “Google AI only uses ~500–800 words, so we should all write 500–800-word articles again”? That doesn’t seem right… 🧵 1/6

These questions from Despina stopped me in my tracks: - If your brand is cited in AI Overviews, will it also appear in AI Mode? - Do you need separate optimisation strategies for each? - What does it mean when two AI systems agree on what to say but not where they found it? 🧵 1/6

This experiment is as fun as it is scary. Can a fake brand, with “official facts”, be cited in AI answers? Can AI be made to cite fictitious counter-facts (“lies”) about the fake brand? Yes! It’s a little more complex than that, but it proves a few worrying things we ALL need to be aware of: 🧵 1/6

When machines can do almost everything, which parts of your SEO work are you deliberately choosing to keep human? For years, SEO has trended toward scale. AI and agents are assumed to be here to finish the job. By 2026, most “commodity SEO” will be easy to replace. 🧵 1/5

For most of the web’s history, humans browsed, and websites responded. That assumption is starting to break. Agents now compare options, check availability, monitor prices, and filter constraints for users. In many cases, they don’t need pages at all. They just need reliable information. 🧵 1/5

Gemini’s interactions API probably won’t be super interesting to you,, but I think this is likely a huge step in AI/Agent development. 🧵 1/5

Bot management (for SEOs at least) used to be simple; a few search engine crawlers, some bad actors, and simple controls. That world is gone. Today, visibility depends on a growing ecosystem of bots: crawlers, scrapers, training bots, AI search providers, and agents acting on behalf of users 🧵 1/5

Love this, great stuff from Dawn!

The 2025 Web Almanac was published this week and I've put together some insights from the chapters I contributed to. Huge thanks to the community who made it possible. It was a real pleasure working with you all. montserrat-cano.com/insights-fro...

Best excuse for missed assignment due date goes too…

🚨 This week's SEO & AI Search News of the Week with #SEOFOMO [Jan 18, 2026] 👇 * ​OpenAI will start to test ads in the US * ​Apple is finally upgrading Siri, and Google Gemini will power it * ​Microsoft releases a Guide to AEO and GEO for Retailers More: seofomo.co/posts/the-se...

Our first webinar of 2026 is a corker! Join us for a panel discussion with 2 SEO heavyweights: @dejanseo.bsky.social & Jes Scholz. sitebulb.com/resources/guid... Note the earlier time to accommodate our Australia-based panelists. If you cannot make this time, sign up anyway to get the recording.

The Almanac is out! If you work in digital, then you should read it to understand where the web is at. Thanks for the opportunity to work with so many brilliant people on the page weight again and SEO chapters, eg, @tamethebots.com @not-a-robot.com @chris-green.net