My SEO ins and outs for 2026. What are your predictions?

The December 2025 Core Update is here, but the GSC data is not. We already can't fully rely on GSC for accuracy. Now timeliness has gone as well. These are not 'nice to have' features. They are the product. Respect that Google. Deploy the data.

ChatGPT agent conversions sit at only 17%. Most abandoned because of poor website usability. The top 5 conversion blockers are: 🟣 Requiring registration to early 🟣 Hard to fill forms 🟣 Poor filter functionality 🟣 Usability of on-site search boxes 🟣 Pop ups covering the active window

How will AI search change the role of websites? At the core, it wont. A website is your brand's digital home. It stores your base facts and relationships. It empowers conversations and conversions. This role is consistent.

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.

What if your best marketing actions come from complaints? These expose the moments where expectations and brand promise diverge. The cause is either execution drift, only fixed by owning it… Or positioning misalignment... e.g. you can't be cheap & top quality. www.zoomsphere.com/blog/what-if...

Agent behaviour isn’t broken. Your site is. In ChatGPT Agent Mode, 63% of first clicks bounce. The most common causes are: 🟣 Bot challenges 🟣 301 redirect to an irrelevant location 🟣 4xx or 5xx status codes 🟣 Registration walls 🟣 Slow load speed 🟣 Landing pages don't satisfy the search intent

New article drop! An ChatGPT agents case study giving insights from over 100 journeys. Give it a read: searchengineland.com/insights-cha...

🧵 In 2025, I never thought I'd be using the same text-based browser I did in 1995. But here we are. Thanks to AI agents. Agents don't browser like humans. They don't always consume content in the visual browser of Chromium. In my testing with ChatGPT, 46% of agent visits began in 'reading mode'.

Where does AI search sit in context of the wider web? As an exercise in perspective, I estimated how people use different platforms to search for information in the same way they would on Google. Credit to Forbes, SEMRush, Sparktoro & DemandSage for the input data.

Is bot protection costing you tomorrow’s SEO sales? Brands like Wayfair, Lululemon and Glassdoor are shutting the door on agent-driven conversions, likely without realising it. A robots.txt allow doesn't guarantee access. Bot protection tools often challenge AI agents, stopping them mid-journey.

Wrote up my thoughts on crawling in the AI era. The piece covers: 🟣 Why you should allow (most) AI crawlers 🟣 How to win AI citations 🟣 Why indexing will always be essential 🟣 Why crawling is not only about googlebot What are your thoughts?

Perplexity Comet & ChatGPT agent browsers are at the SEO frontier. Brands don't care, but should. For years, Google mined Chrome data to inform visibility. AI companies want the same edge. Under the guise of speeding up tasks & easing cognitive load, we're being pushed toward agentic browsing.

Google alone won't future-proof your SEO. We all know the tea. ChatGPT now pulls from Google’s index when Bing’s falls short. That doesn't mean you can retreat into a Google-only mindset. SEO isn't Google vs Bing. Effective SEO goes beyond both. It's about corpus optimisation.

Logging in to an account is becoming a security drill 😤 🟢 Enter email & password 🟡 Pass Captcha 🟠 Get authenticator code 🔴 Finally get inside, only to be logged out for "inactivity" after a short period of time Authentication should not be an endurance sport.

5 Twitter tips for SEOs Done well, social posting is a low-effort way to boost visibility on search surfaces, drive engagement and earn some extra sessions.

Let's talk business incentives in the battle of Search David vs Goliath. For the Goliath Google, more searches means more money. Every query is another revenue opportunity. It monetises discovery. It personalises to serve ads.

Clickbait titles without real value are like online dating profile pictures… They get the clicks, but the bounce rate is brutal.

🧵 Sometimes the easiest way to disappear online is to do nothing at all. A certain CDN has taken it upon itself to “protect” domains by blocking AI crawlers by default. Causing instant invisibility on a whole swath of search surfaces. But only on their free plan.

New video interview drop where I take issue with domain authority, talk about entity optimisation and, of cause, discuss AI search. Check it out: www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3Hd...

LLMs.txt is not an official standard. It's not widely adopted. No indexing platform checks it by default. Might it be useful someday? Maybe. But don't waste a sprint on it yet. Focus on what matters now for AI visibility, not a hypothetical future that is unlikely to eventuate.

Did you know Google actually has two Google AI Modes? One in Chrome and another in the Google App. The surface a user selects drastically affects which sources get cited. Check out this travel example. When optimising for AI visibility, check both faces of Google.

Sorry to burst the bubble, but ChatGPT is not doing "real-time retrieval". I've lost count of how many times this week I’ve read that ChatGPT or AI Mode is "retrieving information from the internet in real time with RAG”. It’s not. What’s actually happening is far more familiar.

The number of articles beginning with "In today's digital age..." on what are supposed to be reputable SEO industry publications is appalling.

Google: Our new AI tools in Gemini are fire. No-one (read OpenAI) is better than us at AI-ing your life. Also Google...

AI Mode is here. Now what? 🟣 Indexing isn't about URLs, focus on content chunks 🟣 Stop chasing sessions, focus on topically relevant brand visibility 🟣 Forget the funnel, focus on category entry points Follow these 3 principles & your SEO will be flexible enough to success on any surface.

In the wave of new SEO AI tooling, one critical element is often missing. Multi-lingual and non-US regional coverage. Take AI prompt tracking tools, for example.

Live mode in Gemini & ChatGPT is another nail in the coffin for “traffic” as an SEO KPI. Alexa taught us that voice assistants are great… for playing music, turning on lights, and knowing today's weather. Not much more. Voice search never delivered on the promised utility. Until now.

Cookies are dying. LLM memories are born. And they’re reshaping SEO. Gemini and ChatGPT boast 1 million token context windows, giving them an exceptional short term memory. Layered atop of a persistent long term memory based on past chats, custom instructions and soon data from other applications.

Went to the doctors today. He Googled and started reading a treatment plan from an AI Overview. I've never been more concerned for medicine in my life. If health care comes down to 'who can Google the best', you can all now refer to me as Dr Jes.

Let's face facts. Despite the hype, ChatGPT isn't displacing Google in traditional search. So should you optimise for it? Especially when most websites report that AI chatbot sessions make up less than 1% of total sessions. My answer is yes. You need to care. And here's why:

Rewriting 1/3 of your deck just before the conference is fine... right? I do like this new slide... Google search is a destination you have to stop what you’re doing to go to visit. AI chatbots are companions you carry with you.

🚨 Spotted: Google’s bar now enlarged for your prompting pleasure This is not just a minor UI tweak. With more space to type, Google's nudging searchers towards longer, more context rich queries. It's another step toward conversational prompts. A heralding of the coming of AI mode.

OpenAI dropped o3 and o4-mini. And marketers should care. Until now, we had a split. o1 could think, but not act. Deep Research or Operator could use tools, but only in isolation. o3 and o4-mini can do it all: 👀 Perception (multi-modal input) 🧠 Cognition (deep reasoning) 🦾 Action (tools usage)

Think ChatGPT sees everything on your site? Think again. AISO put ChatGPT RAG to the test, finding: ⛔ JavaScript dependent content isn't accessible ⛔ Text in images is effectively invisible ⚠️ White-on-white text sadly spammable 🕷️ Only links with titles semantically relevant are followed

GEO, LLMO, AIO, AGIO... Really? Can we stop the acronym Olympics? It's SEO. Yes, we're optimising for AI chatbots and this comes with new tactics. Just like we optimised for Discover, RankBrain, BERT and every other algorithm update for the last 20 years, which all needed new tactics.

Want your content to stand out to AI chatbots? Break it into chunks. Chunking for LLMs involves breaking down large blocks of text into smaller, semantically coherent segments. Making it easier for LLMs to process, retrieve, and cite your content.

Looking to understand how AI Overviews impacts your site performance? Its impression and click data being lumped in with the rest of search results makes it hard to analyse. But knowing its common triggers, I wrote a regex to surface highly-likely-to-be-impacted queries.

New in-depth SEO guide dropped. This one is on indexing.

My 6 year old has started saying Skibidi. Save me.

If you're an SEO and you're not seriously investing in brand, you're losing market share. You should be spending at least 40% of your effort on content that isn’t expected to directly drive conversions. Why? Because less than 1/3 of your audience is in-market at any given time.

Let's talk about the value of LLM prompt tracking. It's tempting to track where you "rank" in AI-generated responses. But here's thing: LLMs don't work like search engines.

Google doesn’t need your XML sitemaps. But if you’re not using them, you’re making its job harder. And a bad sitemap is worse than no sitemap at all. So I wrote down everything I know about sitemap optimisation. Turns out, it's a lot. What do you think. Should I write more in-depth guides?

Let's talk SEO KPIs. If you follow me, you know I’m big on indexing. Google evaluates everything in its index as a domain-level signal. But it's more than that. Think of the Google & Bing indexes are your inventory, fuelling visibility across Search, Discover, YouTube, ChatGPT and other surfaces.

We're seeing a generational pivot because ChatGPT's fire. Kids don't want to share the same platform with their parents - no matter whether it's social or search. TikTok tired to take the title, but video search has limits. ChatGPT hits different. It's got the power of the indexed internet.

Google is starving for new content. And it's doing whatever it can to feed that hunger. 👬 Ignoring rel=canonical 🕷️ Breaking robots.txt rules 🛑 Following "nofollow" links 🧑‍💻 Even indexing pages behind logins The only way to reliably stop it is an all out noindex. But that comes at a crawling costs.

You need to control LLM crawlers, but not by blocking them. Search engine spiders serve 2 purposes: Indexing & discovery. LLM crawlers only index. So add robots.txt rules to guide LLMs. Don't let them access pages you don't want cited in AI responses. To boost visibility of content you do.

It's a great time to be an SEO, because PPC can't buy their way into LLM responses. But this time is fleeting. Ads will come. So now is the time to show how SEO creates sustainable value. AI spam and black hat tricks wont win over the executive level. Let's be better and focus on brand growth.

So Google is blocking SERP scraping, and now your rank tracking tool isn't working. Well....Good 😈 SERP rank is NOT a KPI. It's a distraction that is blinding you to more impactful SEO opportunities.

SEO vernacular is shifting from talking about 'ranking' to 'visibility'. And I'm here for it. It reflects the reality of an ecosystem of surfaces, which spans beyond traditional search to include Discover, Shopping, News, Gemini, ChatGPT and more.