Salience is now live: connect your website for free and start measuring first-party data that most teams never see, let alone act on. Your server and CDN logs show what is actually reaching your site, what gets requested, how often crawlers return, what your infrastructure serves them and where things go wrong. Built alongside my co-founders @ndredding and @channel5 , Salience is designed to make that raw log data genuinely useful and actionable in real time. That includes seeing how search engines and AI crawlers such as ChatGPT and Claude interact with your site: which pages they visit, how frequently they return, what they request and whether they encounter errors. We originally built it off the back of problems we were solving for clients, particularly around crawling, indexing, and AI visibility across products, collections and editorial content, and large marketplace listing websites while giving teams access to a layer of insight they’d rarely had before. It’s designed for a broad range of sites, from Shopify and BigCommerce stores through to publishers, marketplaces and larger businesses running custom technology stacks. It’s also useful beyond #SEO and search, with insights for development, content and security teams, whether you’re in-house, an agency or a consultant. We’ve already had some great feedback from beta users, so thank you to everyone who has tested it so far. We’d love more of it: what’s useful, what’s missing and what could be better. There’s a working demo to explore, or you can connect a production site for free and see what your own data tells you. Please share it with anyone on your team who might find it useful. Visit: salience.com for more detail.

Technical SEO is so back! In the early days of Google, a lot of SEO was about making sure search engines could actually crawl, understand and index your website and get links, get so many links! Then, through the 2010s and into the early 2020s, the focus shifted much more towards content, digital PR (links), UX, brand, entities and trust. Technical SEO never went away, obviously, but on a lot of established websites it became less of the problem. That seems to have changed again. I’m seeing more technical SEO issues this year than I have in the last few years combined. A lot of that is down to how websites, apps, and web assets are being built and teams operate now. We’ve moved from fairly rigid CMS platforms to headless builds (often not required), custom frameworks, internal tools, dynamically generated pages and now a growing amount of vibe-coded websites, tools and content assets. That gives teams the autonomy they need and removes developer bottlenecks.  It also gives them far more ways to break things. - JavaScript rendering issues. - multiple frameworks. - subdomain party central. - Content that exists for users but not for crawlers. - Infinite URLs. - Cloaking. - Wrong status codes. - Internal links that aren’t really links. - Content hidden behind interactions. - Caching problems. - Server header responses. - Resources accidentally blocked. - Staging sites indexed. - Production sites accidentally noindexed. You’ve got Googlebot, Bingbot, AI search crawlers, training crawlers and retrieval bots, all behaving slightly differently. Some clients want certain AI bots to have access and others blocked. Some bots handle JavaScript better than others. Some follow the same controls. Others have their own. So after 20+ years of SEO, we’ve somehow ended up asking many of the same questions again. - Can the bot (all of them) access it? - Can it render it? - Can it understand what it’s looking at? - Is it seeing the version we actually want it to see? - Have we accidentally blocked it? The tech and internet has changed. A lot of the technical #SEO problems really haven’t.

Once you learn that SEO is contextual, a lot of advice starts to fall apart. What works in one search vertical may not work in another. What works for one website may not work for yours. What works for a competitor may be completely wrong for your site. That’s why SEO blueprints, frameworks and cheat sheets rarely scale cleanly across established websites. The context is the strategy.

Built a useful AI monitoring tool. hasaiwipedouthumanityyet.com

Felt cute, might delete later. A bit of fun at carlhendy.com.

Early days, but the recovery from this failed website migration is finally starting to get going. Hopefully, I’ll be able to talk about this one publicly one day. It’s a banger.

Updated my free StoreRatings.co tool. Compare 5 ecommerce competitors across 30+ signals, including Google Shopping, Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse, Knowledge Graph, trust checks, review momentum and more. Still 100% free. No signup. All public Google data.

I've rebuilt my free Knowledge Graph Search tool. Search any brand or person to see what Google knows about them, whether they have a verified Google profile, and how Wikipedia, Wikidata and Common Crawl see them. You can even compare two entities side by side.

2/2 Undefeated SEO Quiz Champion. Retiring at the top.

@Cloudflare's new AEO Visibility product feels like Similarweb for AI discovery: tracking brand mentions, citations, prominence and share of voice across models, then adding crawler and referral data from the site itself.

Nature is healing.

Nine years ago, I predicted Google would kill both cache: and site:. I was right about cache:, just years too early 😅 Now I’m doubling down: site: will be next, partly because LLMs and scrapers use it to access Google results.

Google has launched Search profiles for publishers and creators. So I built a tool to help you find Search Profiles from anywhere. search.audits.com/

Could Gemini overtake ChatGPT by year-end? Possibly. Similarweb data shows ChatGPT’s Gen AI traffic share fell from 77.6% to 53.7% in 12 months, while Gemini rose from 7.27% to 26.7%. If that trend continues, Gemini could get very close by late 2026.

"Don't worry, the SEO budget covers AI search too."

Looking for a frontend and brand designer with a recognisable style. Not generic or AI looking. Independent or small specialist preferred. Drop real work, not Dribbble collections. Tag or DM.

Sundar Pichai on Cheeky Pint: Search becomes an "agent manager." Query fan-out is now the default, passage-level retrieval beats page-level ranking, and 2027 is when it lands at scale. Antigravity already inside the Search team.

Just leaving this here..... More detail here: linkedin.com/posts/carlhendy…

Spotted a rare SEO issue today: Google showing “No information is available for this page” on branded queries. Turns out robots.txt exceeded the 500 KiB limit, so Google ignored part of it and blocked the page. Reminder: always check actual SERPs, not just tools.