If you're serving bots nicely formatted markdown but giving users div soup that forces them to download 15MB of JS that does nothing for them, you're treating humans as second class citizens. I wrote something to redress the balance a bit: chris-spann.co.uk/impersonatin...

I've added a convert to Markdown button to convert the rendered, or initial, html of the page you fetched to (you guessed it) Markdown, in case you like that kind of thing. tamethebots.com/tools/fetch-...

Do you think this linkedin request is from a genuine human? Because if so, I am totally jealous of their name.

A while back quite a few of you answered me on your annoyances with web payments. I've collated your responses and it looks like we're still doing forms like it's 1999 out there. More detail in the article, and let me know if there's more of your e-concerns with e-commerce rowan.fyi/posts/web-pa...

It's happening... We've asked Chromium API owners for permission to ship The Soft Navigation work to allow measuring of Core Web Vitals for SPAs!!

Now Google are rolling out some Generative AI reporting, I thought I'd take a quick look at how much crossover there is in the pages Google and Bing show in AI results: tamethebots.com/blog-n-bits/...

The Chrome DevTools team are doing a "papercuts" sprint where they try to address lots of small, irritating bugs and annoyances. Reply with crbug.com links (no bug, no fix—that's the deal!) and will see what we can do. No promises though as some may be features/too big/unclear how to solve.

⚠️ Important PSA You can add poop emoji based properties in Google search console just fine. What a relief

Speaking at this tonight, come on down if you're in Manchester, there's a few free tickets left. techseonorth.com

Hey check it out! Come along if you're in the northwest!

SEO freelancer, or a tiny SEO team? Tired of finding out too late that a change no indexed your big product pages Meet Coffeepot: a tiny SEO monitoring tool that checks your URLs daily & alerts you to problems. JS rendering, 90-day HTML history, dirt cheap. Good stuff. coffeepot.app

We’ve decided to take another break for the Web Almanac this year. This wasn’t an easy call to make, but we feel it’s the right one given the huge effort the project takes and not wanting to half-commit. There’s a lot going on at the moment and we’re all pretty busy and many of you are too. 1/4 🧵

A good, balanced view on markdown etc. for search 👏 youtu.be/Vkn3R6DUJ34

Our statement on the UK gov't's demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the UK be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification & content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all. signal.org/blog/pdfs/20...

Fact: When abroad, James Bond is known as +44 07.

I have only seen (outside of unverifiable random bot traffic) Claude code and whatever this is: parallel.ai/parallel-web... explicitly state markdown in the Accept: http headers they send, anyone seen anything else of note?

Around Manchester on the 18th, catch me and some great speakers at techSEO north! Find out more about the event here: techseonorth.com And grab your free ticket here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/techseo-no..., there's snacks.

Wtf. www.404media.co/hackers-simp...

⚒️ Casual AI search tool weekend free launch: QueryFan.com ⤵️ 🧏 Find prompts specific groups are likely using on LLMs 💬 Predict the next most likely questions in the conversation 🪭 See what fan out queries LLMs are doing 🆓 100 free community uses a day

Declarative Partial Updates and the Dynamic Markup (streaming HTML insertion) APIs have the potential to change web development. declarative-partial-updates.paulkinlan-ea.deno.net

Want to run one-off page speed tests without setting up monitoring? Our new quick tests feature makes that easy, through the app or via our API. www.debugbear.com/docs/quick-t...

I decided to start a Substack to keep my throughts in one place, rather than screaming into the void on LinkedIn. I did a "more longerer form" version of the AI 'convergence problem' that I touched on at my talk at @athensgrease.bsky.social markwilliamscook.substack.com/p/the-ai-con...

Out-of-Order streaming, a la next js, is cool, but there are things to think about, which I have done here through the medium of rabbits: tamethebots.com/blog-n-bits/...

Did I mention I'm speaking in Cambridge at Optimisey's FREE SEO event? Tickets here:

Fancy out-of-order streaming as an browser API? nice! developer.chrome.com/blog/declara... For the curious, I've stood up the example demo here: testing.tamethebots.com/nativestream (Chrome 148+, flag enabled, see post) & with the polyfill here: testing.tamethebots.com/nativestream...

Get the FIRST EDITION of While You Were Offline by Sitebulb x @not-a-robot.com THIS WEEK! Only the finest snarky SEO news... Sign up at bit.ly/seo-snark

Inspiration Monday!! If you like illustrations and technical drawings, you will love the work of Bryan Macomber. He created those amazing dataviz that explains, step by step, how some items work technically. For example, the Pez dispenser: mechanical-pencil.com/products/pez

Got a notification from a medieval copyright lawyer

OMG it's happening!!!

Looking forward to giving a talk at this! 3 great speakers & me. 📍WPP Campus, 1 New Quay Street, Manchester 📅 Thursday 18th June 2026 ⏰ 5:45pm to 9:00pm 🎟️ Free tickets, limited spaces available Grab a ticket here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/techseo-no...

An important update courtesy of @tunetheweb.com! csswizardry.com/2026/05/bett...

Me: "This SEO talk so brilliant, so interesting!" Also me when asked: "Any questions from the audience?":

An attacker bought the Essential Plugin portfolio (~30+ WordPress plugins, ~400k installs) via Flippa. ➡️ First code commit introduced a PHP deserialization backdoor ➡️ Dormant for 8 months ➡️ Apr 2026 - injected cloaked SEO spam across thousands of sites 🔗 bit.ly/4uCLXSN #InfoQ #Security

I’ve been working with a client who runs a lot of social media and ad campaigns, so we’ve been deploying the experimental `No-Vary-Search HTTP` header. It’s amazing to see it actually working! Read all about it here: csswizardry.com/2026/05/bett...

Added DuckAssitBot to the real LLM Bot IP? lookup tool here: tamethebots.com/tools/real-l... Quack Quack 🦆 #FeedMeIPsNotBread

@ilovechoclates.bsky.social's videos are fun! Find their channel here: youtube.com/@packted?si=...

Web page minification: If you’re using HTML Minifier or HTML Minifier Terser, I’d at this point strongly recommend to update to the maintained and significantly improved successor/alternative, HTML Minifier Next. Why and how? mas.to/@j9t/1165171... #html #htmlminifier #minification

Google experimenting with Web Bot Auth to verify genuine bots, looks like AI agents for now? developers.google.com/crawling/doc...

I have an announcement! 🏫 I’ve just taken a handful of lessons from my new course and made them public, 100% free. You don’t even have to register for anything. 😄 I call it the Whimsical Animation Open House. The doors are open until the launch sale ends, early next week. ✨

Some interesting nuggets from the latest Search Off The Record Podcast: Here is Google's Nikola Todorovic, Director of Software Engineering at Google Search, about how AI is used to impact rankings and why simpler linear systems are sometimes easier to debug than more complex AI systems:

There's a new #webperf measurement API in the works! Check out this post looking at the work @jason-williams.co.uk and @jdapena.bsky.social have been putting into there Container Timing—available as an origin trail from Chrome 148 (rolling out next week). developer.chrome.com/blog/contain...

I really do think this has promise, it really can be super easy to implement (add a few attributes to forms, or hook into JavaScript functions you already have). It feels like working with the platform instead of inventing something new.

Also added the ability to add a custom robots.txt, scoped to either the origin you're testing, or all, based on an excellent suggestion from John McAlpin. tamethebots.com/tools/fetch-...

Couple of quick changes on my fetch & render tool: tamethebots.com/tools/fetch-..., you can now choose to disable JavaScript, so you can see what things like AI bots might see:

Goddamit. I guess I'll have to resubmit all these again.

If you like SEO, there is 1 day left for silly cheap Early Bird SearchNorwichXL tickets to hang out with 200+ SEOs and see some excellent speakers. If you don't like SEO, there is a free bar and that is still pretty cheap for that too. searchnorwich.org

Quick lunchtime fun play with WebMCP, seems remarkably simple to implement, at least for this simple case. Live on tamethebots.com/tools/cwv-hi..., but you'll need chrome canary / enable the flag etc: developer.chrome.com/blog/webmcp-... I can definitely see this being helpful in some cases

If your SEO isn't in your CI/CD, you’re playing on Hard Mode for no reason 💀 The most satisfying green checkmarks you’ll ever see. Who’s on this level yet? 📈

Also interesting they will/might pass what you say in the report over with the manual action.