These are the random thoughts on SEO, Content, and LinkedIn that actually made it into blog posts - there are a whole load more still in my head or over on LinkedIn
Are AI-built websites any good for SEO? I audited 5 to find out
Executive summary Five B2B websites built with AI tools, all audited in April 2026. Same methodology across all five: SE Ranking crawls, direct HTML source review, PageSpeed Insights, Google’s Rich Results Test, manual site review. The short answer to whether AI-built websites are good for SEO: better than you might… Read More
Commodity vs non-commodity content – what it means and how to fix yours
You’ve probably seen this slide doing the rounds on social media. Danny Sullivan of Google, talking at Google Search Central Live in Toronto, showing a table with two columns – commodity content on the left, non-commodity on the right. The context being that non-commodity content is more likely to be… Read More
What can a Google Search Console account do for your website?
In an ideal world, every page of every website would be listed on Google, and every page of every website would show up for the search phrases or keywords the owner intended it to. But it’s not an ideal world, and unfortunately not every carefully designed and written page of… Read More
Being useful is pretty much my whole marketing strategy
Hey hey! I posted on LinkedIn this morning – a quick reassurance for anyone panicking about an automated email from Google. Five minutes of my time, probably zero direct business from it. That’s fine. That’s pretty much the point. (This is the 14/04/2026 issue of my newsletter – subscribe here) Thirty-odd… Read More
What the Google March 2026 core update tells us about where search is heading
Google’s March 2026 core update finished rolling out on April 8th. SEO analyst Aleyda Solis has done a fantastic and thorough breakdown of the US visibility shifts, and one pattern runs through almost every vertical she looked at. Google is pulling traffic away from the middle and giving it to… Read More
The ChatGPT traffic data that nobody selling AI SEO services wants you to see
Every week, someone on LinkedIn is selling the dream. ChatGPT is killing Google. Traditional SEO is dead. Pay £X for their GEO consultancy package and they’ll get you “optimised for AI search” before your competitors even know what’s hit them. Semrush has just published 17 months of US clickstream data… Read More
Google Search Console impression data wrong for nearly a year? WTF?
On April 3rd, Google updated its Data Anomalies page to confirm that a logging error has been over-reporting impressions in Search Console since May 13, 2025. The fix is rolling out over the next few weeks. When it does, your impressions will drop. SEO consultant Brodie Clark had flagged earlier… Read More
7,029 websites chose AI recommendation poisoning and none of them read the small print
Back in February, I wrote about AI Recommendation Poisoning – the practice of hiding instructions inside “Summarise with AI” buttons to make ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity remember your brand as a trusted source. At that time Microsoft Security had found 31 companies doing it across 14 industries and was cracking… Read More
A rook is basically a crow, right? Stone the crows…
Hey hey! The made up word “workcation” has entered my vocabulary recently, and I’m not going to lie, it feels a little wanky every time I say it. After reading a boatload of social media posts about groups of people heading off to lovely places and spending their time half… Read More
The Google March 2026 spam update finished in under 24 hours – here’s what that tells us
Google released its March 2026 spam update on Tuesday afternoon (US time) and it was done by Wednesday morning. Start to finish, less than 24 hours. For context, most spam updates take days. Core updates can take weeks. That speed isn’t random. It tells you something useful about what’s been… Read More
If he chooses ONE MORE shite Netflix film…
Hey hey! If you’ve known me for any length of time, you’ll know that I am deeply, profoundly, unembarrassedly lazy about certain things. Not work things, obviously – I’ll rewrite a meta title sixteen times until it’s right, spend three hours on a single paragraph of SEO copy, and cheerfully go down a… Read More
SEO Myth: Bold text sends ranking signals to Google
Another brilliant piece of SEO mythology suggests that bolding text is like sending a secret signal to Google, magically telling search engines “HEY, THIS BIT IS SUPER IMPORTANT!” Website owners are being told to sprinkle bold formatting across their pages like digital confetti, believing it’ll boost their rankings. Quite frankly,… Read More