Building SEO tools at https://xitter.cf/t.co/ALjciBXHZp, podcasting at @britstrapped.
Bude, England
Joined April 2008
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Isabel got to ring the end of treatment bell today. Quite an emotional morning! @bloodwise_uk @CLIC_Sargent @LPTrustUK @GraceKellyTrust Massive thanks to all the doctors, nurses and charities that have helped our family through this.
Nick Swan retweeted
An SEO expert, a GEO bro, and an AEO guru walked into a bar near me.
The SEO expert had a beer.
The GEO bro copied him and had a beer, then claimed that he invented beer.
The AEO guru spammed Reddit, had a beer, drunk all the spirits, smashed the bar up, set it on fire, then posted a case study about how the press coverage of the bar burning to the ground had caused its citations to skyrocket 400% in ChatGPT over a 6 week period.
Pre-ordered 😊
Here we go...
I have written a book! It took me *absolutely ages*. Be More Bored is coming in February from @BloomsburyBooks, and I can honestly say it’s the hardest I’ve ever worked on anything and the best thing I’ve ever done. And here it is:
Sneaky way for Google to improve CTR to organic links for the set of all queries that now show AI overviews.
“But look, SERPs with AI overviews, we’re sending more clicks…”
Been meaning to use our campervan as a mobile office for ages - we’ve had it 4 or so years. Finally did it today.
More and more customers are reporting non-existent URLs on their sites getting impressions in Search Console reports (and hence @seo_testing).
Could AI Overviews be hallucinating URLs and sources?
I'm seeing more people posting about the issues with prompt tracking and watching, and even though we are getting some generative AI data in Search Console and Bing, it's vanity metrics rather than really showing what's driving business results.
But there are some lagging indicators we can track to see whether our AEO strategy is working - @5le is the latest I've seen to cover these in his email newsletter.
- Direct traffic
- Brand clicks
- Session clicks originating from LLMs
Your brand starts to get cited in LLM responses more, which leads to more brand searches in Google, clicks from LLMs if the chatbots are adding these, and an increase in direct traffic where tracking is undefined (blocked tracking on mobiles etc)
So we've added a Brand Signals chart to the dashboards on your @seo_testing sites. Just integrate GA, set up your brand keywords, and start tracking the data from direct, brand clicks, and LLM clicks.
Now you can easily report real numbers around your AEO strategy.
Happy back to school day! We celebrated the kids going back to school with a yummy breakfast together 😊
The new SEOFOMO State of AI Search survey (h/t @aleyda) in 3 numbers:
→ 69% of teams now have AI search budget (38% last year)
→ 92% are tracking AI visibility
→ but 81% attribute ≤5% of revenue to it - or can't measure it at all
We've bought the dashboards before solving the measurement.
Telling detail: the top tools people lean on are Search Console, Semrush, Ahrefs and GA4 - the familiar SEO stack, not the new wave of AI visibility trackers. And the only two that can connect visibility to actual outcomes are GSC and GA4: your own first-party data.
You can't attribute AI search cleanly (no referrers, no rankings, no repeatable results). But you can watch branded searches and direct traffic climb together. That's the lagging indicator AI search leaves when it's actually working.
ps we're just testing a brand signals graph on our @seo_testing dashboard made up of brand clicks from GSC and direct traffic from GA
AI Visibility is a Vanity Metric, here's how to tell your boss - by @wilreynolds seerinteractive.com/insights…
Nick Swan retweeted
Today we released the August 2026 spam update. We'll update our ranking release history page when the rollout is complete: status.search.google.com/inc…
I really dislike people talking about past team members with such little regard.
Yes - times are changing, but you can be kinder with your language.
I fired my 3 person $180K SEO team in 2024 and replaced them with 1 person + AI at 40k
same output, 78% cheaper.
that experiment is the content team now. a year in: 158 posts shipped, organic clicks up 12x, search impressions up 78x (8K → 647K a month), organic search sessions up 14x. buying those clicks as Google Ads would run $11–18K a week.
most content teams are an expensive middle layer. hire for output, not org charts.
It's interesting that Google is taking the time to improve its own documentation by removing or improving vague language and sentence structure. Good for users and LLMs! searchenginejournal.com/goog…
ps we've got a tool in SEOTesting to help with this: seotesting.com/ai-seo-tools/…
And of course, once you've made some changes - set up an SEO test!
Back from a long weekend camping on Exmoor with Sophie and the kids. The girls have got so many football trials and training sessions over the summer we can’t do a long holiday so fitting in short escapes where we can. 3 days without devices did everyone the world of good!
Pretty cool SEO/GEO tender for the Imperial War Museum! Est. value £175K
Imperial War Museums seeks a supplier for ongoing consultancy in SEO, GEO, and AI search visibility to enhance online discoverability and audience engagement across its digital platforms.
Link to the tender below...
Here it is: tenderlake.com/Notice/Tender…
