Notebook
How I think about search, in public.
Working notes on technical SEO and AI search — the things actually changing, the things being mis-sold, and the bits worth your attention. Written by me, when I have something honest to add.
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The Burson credibility report is GEO inventing its next product
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Business data is becoming a ranking signal
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Google’s new SEO guidance is a slow-motion power grab
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The Burson credibility report is GEO inventing its next product
Burson's new AI credibility report uses a proprietary model to score 55,000 AI answers. It's not analysis — it's the GEO industry inventing its next product.
Business data is becoming a ranking signal
Ask Maps and agentic search reward data completeness, not just content. The SEO industry's vocabulary hasn't caught up to where visibility now lives.
Google’s new SEO guidance is a slow-motion power grab
Google's Friday docs aren't isolated housekeeping. They're part of a 12-month consolidation that makes Google the publisher, measurer, and editor of SEO.
Google just declared itself the only legitimate SEO source
Google's new guidance positions itself as the canonical source of SEO truth. The third-party ecosystem isn't a competitor — it's the immune system.
Google’s SEO guidance now tells you to call the FTC
Google's updated SEO hiring page tells businesses to report shady SEOs to the FTC, casts doubt on third-party tools, and quietly formalises AEO.
The agent knows the answer before it reads your page
Gemini Deep Research Max ships blended retrieval — agents arrive with private context fused into the query. Your content competes with the user's own data.
The measurement gap Google just made permanent
Google's new AI search reports give us impressions, not clicks. The industry is treating that as the new ranking. It isn't, and the gap is structural.
Wikipedia is the AI search index nobody’s optimising for
Wikipedia accounts for nearly half of ChatGPT's citations. It's the highest-leverage surface in AI search and almost nobody treats it that way.
Semantic similarity scores are not ground truth
Vector embedding scores look like measurement. They're a higher-resolution approximation. Treating them as ground truth is the next SEO failure mode.
Your audience may have left Google before you noticed
SparkToro's developer data shows Claude over-indexing by 299% and Google under-indexing by 14%. The audience is the variable SEO strategy ignores.
Google finally gave us AI visibility data. Half of it.
Search Console's new AI performance reports ship today for UK sites. Impressions only — no clicks, no queries. Useful, incomplete, and worth reading carefully.
Google’s ad stack got more useful. Its organic story didn’t.
DV360, Data Manager API, and Commerce Media Suite all got upgrades yesterday. The asymmetry with Google's organic measurement story is the actual story.
EntityMap and schema can’t fix what’s actually broken in AI search
EntityMap entered consultation today. It's useful work. But the attribution problem in AI search lives after retrieval, where no publishing standard reaches.
Machine Media is here. The playbook is two years behind.
Mike King and Rand Fishkin diagnosed Machine Media correctly. The operational response has been weak. Here's what UK businesses should actually do next.
Amazon vs Perplexity decides who your visitors are
On June 11 the Ninth Circuit hears Amazon v Perplexity. The ruling decides whether AI agents count as authorised visitors to your website.
The May 2026 core update is the last of its kind
The May 2026 core update is normal. The environment around it isn't. Why this is the last core update the old SEO playbook fully applies to.
Tom Capper just dismantled the rank-tracking industry
Tom Capper's SEO Week data showed branded search now predicts rankings better than domain authority. The industry has been selling the wrong metric.
The attribution crisis is the real I/O story
Google's agentic search demos quietly killed the attribution model SEO was built on. The transaction stays. The intent data doesn't.
Ranking number one now means nothing. The pixel does.
57% of #1 results sit below the fold on desktop. Rank tracking is measuring a coordinate the user never sees. Pixel visibility is the real metric.
The AI search measurement problem is a definition problem
Every GEO tool measures one of four AI visibility layers and sells it as the whole picture. The measurement gap isn't tooling. It's definition.
Google’s Merchant Center pivot quietly contradicts its GEO line
Google just shipped AI visibility metrics in Merchant Center that Search Console still refuses to add. The asymmetry tells you everything.
The judgment layer is the only part of AI that pays you
Most senior practitioners use AI for drafts and summaries. The actual leverage is in four modes nobody has built a workflow around.
Google just made AI Overviews a popularity contest
Google's Preferred Sources now shape AI Overviews citations. It quietly grafts a follow-graph onto AI search — and the SEO industry hasn't noticed.
The death-of-the-web pieces argue for building one
Mike King and Rand Fishkin both wrote eulogies for the open web this week. Read carefully, both arguments lead to investing in owned media, not abandoning it.
Gmail is now a ranking signal. Nobody asked for that.
iPullRank tested Google's Personal Intelligence. Gmail content lifted brand citations in AI Mode by 46 points. The discovery layer just went private.
The tool registry is the new search index
LLM tool registries are an unregulated ad market. Puffery wins, disclosures fail, and almost nobody in SEO is talking about it yet.
Rand Fishkin is right. “Inimitable product” is the wrong frame.
Rand Fishkin's call to build inimitable products is half right. The problem isn't your product. It's that AI just nationalised the discovery layer above it.
Reddit is the loudest input. That makes it the cheapest target.
Reddit dominates AI search citations. The SEO industry sees opportunity. The real story is a structural vulnerability with a closing window.
The AI search measurement layer is being built by outsiders
Cloudflare, Microsoft and independent researchers are building the AI search measurement layer. Google isn't. The gap tells you everything.
Google and Bing now run opposite GEO playbooks
Google says GEO is just SEO. Bing built tools for it. When two competitors describe the same tech in opposite terms, the asymmetry is the signal.
The Agent Readiness Score is useful. The number is a trap.
Cloudflare's Agent Readiness Score measures real things. The composite number is structurally misleading — and the industry is about to misuse it.
OpenAI’s Ads Manager update is the story I/O obscured
OpenAI quietly shipped DMA targeting, daily budgets, and dynamic CTAs in ChatGPT this week. It matters more than anything Google announced at I/O.
The machine-readability problem is the SEO problem now
AI search visibility isn't a content problem. It's a knowledge architecture problem — and most businesses are paying agencies to solve the wrong one.
Mike King vs Google is the only fight that matters
Mike King's three pieces this month form the sharpest critique of Google's GEO posture in years. Why the SEO industry is wrong to nod and move on.
The intelligent search box is the end of the keyword
Google's redesigned search box isn't a UI tweak. It's the end of the keyword as the organising unit of search marketing — and most tooling won't survive it.
Gmail is now a ranking signal. You can’t audit it.
Google Personal Intelligence makes Gmail an AI Mode ranking signal — and the first major signal publishers cannot see, audit, or optimise conventionally.
Agentic RAG is real. The GEO industry isn’t ready.
Mike King's right that AI search has moved to agentic retrieval. The implications for the GEO consulting industry are worse than his piece spells out.
Mt. Stupid has a pricing page. And it’s been busy.
AI builders publicly admit they don't know how their models work. AI optimisation consultants sell guaranteed outcomes. The gap is the story.
90% of brands have zero AI mentions. That’s the opportunity.
A new study found 89.8% of brands have zero AI search mentions. That sounds like a disaster. Read properly, it's the opposite.
Citation is not traffic. Don’t confuse the two.
AI citation counts are about to become the new keyword rankings — a real number that mostly misleads. The substitution gradient is what actually matters.
Mike King is right about Google. And right about Bing.
Mike King's read on Google's GEO guidance is correct. So is his read on Bing. But 'more candid' isn't 'more correct' — both platforms have incentives.
Google just published the GEO playbook. It’s the SEO playbook.
Google's new generative AI optimisation doc kills the GEO consulting playbook. The myth-busting section is the most important thing it's published in a year.
Web Bot Auth is the story. Robots.txt isn’t.
Google-Agent ignoring robots.txt is the boring half of the announcement. Cryptographic bot identity via Web Bot Auth is what actually changes things.
Google-Agent doesn’t read your robots.txt. That’s the small problem.
Google-Agent bypasses robots.txt — but the real story is what agents do to attribution, conversion data, and the single-bucket model of 'Google traffic'.
Meta is dying. Google just told you why.
Meta is losing users while Google publishes documentation calling GEO 'still SEO.' Same week, same story: who knows what business they're in.
The AI citation trap: when being cited costs you more
GA4 just made AI assistant traffic visible by default. The Ahrefs schema data is more damning than people noticed. The GEO industry has a measurement problem.
Mike King’s case for cloaking LLMs is right. And a trap.
Mike King's case for JavaScript-cloaking AI crawlers is technically sound. It still solves the wrong problem for almost everyone who'll deploy it.
AI visibility isn’t a content problem. It’s a diagnosis problem.
Duane Forrester's three-layer AI visibility model is right. But most marketing orgs can't use it, because the diagnostic step doesn't exist in the workflow.
Lily Ray just put a number on the AI content collapse
Lily Ray tracked 220+ sites named in AI content vendor case studies. The pattern: climb, plateau, collapse. The press release is never the whole story.
Why your SEO doesn’t ship, and what to do about it
SEO work doesn't ship because the org design is wrong, not the tickets. The implementation gap is structural — and AI search is making it worse.
Scaling AI content is the strategy. The strategy is the problem.
Enterprises ranked scaling AI content as their #1 AI search priority. The same report's experts called it a likely cause of visibility collapse.
The enterprise AI content scaling strategy is a coordination failure
Conductor's 2026 report shows enterprises ranking AI content scaling as their #1 AI search priority. The experts in the same report think it's a mistake.
Schema markup doesn’t move AI citations. Stop pretending.
Ahrefs ran a controlled test on 1,885 pages. Adding schema didn't increase AI citations on any platform. The GEO pitch needs revising.
The data retention cliff nobody is pricing in
Google Ads is capping reporting history at 37 months just as AI agents take over campaign management. The audit trail is thinning at the worst possible time.
The protocol layer is eating the SEO stack
UCP, 499 eligibility gates, and schema deprecations describe one shift: a protocol layer between your data and AI systems that most SEO teams aren't auditing.
Google killed FAQ rich results. Good.
Google deprecated FAQ rich results this week. The feature died in 2023. The real story is the industry's refusal to update its schema playbook.
Google’s UCP update is the agentic commerce story SEOs are missing
Google's March UCP update added carts, live catalogues and loyalty linking. The agentic commerce protocol layer is moving faster than SEO is tracking.
Google’s bounce clicks defence just collapsed under a test
A randomised experiment removed AI Overviews and clicks rose 38% with no satisfaction drop. Google's bounce-click defence doesn't survive the test.
Google’s link expansion is a confession dressed as a feature
Google's five new AI search link features arrived without click data. The pattern of how Google talks about AI Overview clicks is the real story.
The 499 status code is the AI search problem no one audits
Mike King's new data shows HTTP 499s and slow origins quietly remove pages from AI citations entirely. Most SEO tools can't see the problem.
The agent runtime is the new SEO evaluation layer
AI models don't read your website. The runtime does, and hands the model whatever survived the fetch. That changes the optimisation stack.
Rand Fishkin tested AI rank tracking. The answer matters.
Fishkin's new research with Gumshoe shows AI rank tracking is mostly noise — but visibility share is real. The distinction is where the money goes.
The ROI conversation about AI traffic uses the wrong vocabulary
AI systems were never built to route traffic. Measuring AI visibility with SEO-style ROI metrics is asking the wrong architectural question.
Bing just told the industry what GEO actually is
Microsoft's Bing team published the clearest engineering spec we've had for AI search grounding. The GEO industry should be paying closer attention.
The bit of GEO advice that doesn’t survive the architecture
Pedro Dias called out the GEO industry's load-bearing claim today. Schema doesn't 'ensure' anything in a probabilistic system — and most of the playbook collapses with it.
OpenAI’s self-serve ads turn ChatGPT into a media channel
OpenAI just opened self-serve ChatGPT Ads with CPC bidding and conversion tracking. The GEO industry's measurement story just got harder to defend.
Execution stopped being the constraint. Most agencies haven’t noticed.
Kevin Indig's piece today framed it as an existential moment. The deeper story: SEO agencies are still priced around a constraint that no longer exists.
Browsy queries are the SEO concept that needed a name
Liz Reid named a category Google's been using internally for years. 'Browsy queries' reframe most current GEO advice as wrong.
The website-as-source thesis is the argument that matters
Every current SEO debate is downstream of one shift: your website is a source, not a destination. Here's what that actually means in practice.
The March core update was a referendum on aggregators
Google's March core update demoted aggregators and lifted first-party brands across travel, jobs, and health. The pattern matters more than the headline numbers.
Your website is becoming a wire service
AI agents are reading and recompressing your website before humans see it. The brochure model is dying. Here's what replaces it.
Google’s agent-friendly guidance is just accessibility, finally winning
Google's new web.dev guide tells developers to build for AI agents. The recommendations are the same accessibility checklist we've ignored for 15 years.
The Google Network is shrinking and nobody will say what it means
Google Network revenue fell below $7bn while programmatic grew 20%. The publisher economy is being squeezed and the SEO industry isn't covering it.
Preferred Sources is the first ranking signal you can’t earn, only be granted
Google's Preferred Sources went global this week. The framing is wrong — it's not a publisher tool, it's the first ranking signal that explicitly…
The bounce-click defence is a measurement story, and Google is losing it
Google's Liz Reid keeps arguing AI Overviews only remove low-value 'bounce clicks.' A new randomised trial says otherwise — and Google still…
Bing just hit a billion users and the SEO industry is still pretending it doesn’t exist
Bing crossed a billion monthly active users and grew ad revenue 12%. It's also the index under ChatGPT. Why the SEO industry's dismissal of Bing…
Your brand is now in comparisons you’ll never see, being judged by reviews you didn’t know existed
AI assistants are pulling negative reviews into comparisons users never asked for. Why this isn't traditional reputation management and what UK…
How to Measure AEO/GEO: Visibility, Mentions & Leads
Measure AI Search Optimisation (AEO/GEO) properly. Track AI visibility, citations, referral traffic, brand mentions and—most importantly—leads.
Google: The Fishing Easter Egg
If a Google search returns nothing, look closer. Buried on the no-results page is a cartoon Yeti with a fishing rod — click him and he yanks a random object out of the ice.
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