This post was sponsored by FirstPromoter. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. For years, software companies have published pages that rank the best tools in a category and place their own product at the top. The tactic was cheap and easy to scale, and for a long time it helped shape…
My last piece on Google’s Open Knowledge Format (OKF) was one of the most popular I’ve ever published. Since then, I have been heads down working on my own OKF structure. I’ve essentially built my own personal brain, and today, I want to show you how it works and why this standard is so incredibly…
As AI summaries compress traditional organic space, referral traffic to publishers is being squeezed, creating a world where search is more used than ever, but the search interface is also retaining users for longer, where it has historically acted like a switchboard. The outlook from publishers is pessimistic, with traffic expected to halve in the…
Last week, I argued that habitual publisher traffic – direct and branded – has been eroding for years, and that the under-35s are leading the charge. Not directly provable, but a theory. Now that I am no longer part of that cohort, it’s easier to pin the blame on them. Which is entirely what I…
In May, I wrote that the new search user was the trend and that Google’s product announcements were the distraction. Google has now handed us a year’s worth of data that confirms the behavioral shift and puts specific numbers on it. In the report “How People Are Using AI Mode in the U.S.” (published May…
AI has been public enemy No. 1 for at least two years. As the early wave of excitement wore off, people realized the content we, as SEOs and publishers, had spent years flooding the internet with was being used to make the richest even richer. We cannot deny the open web is changing – AI…
Avinash Kaushik has a gift for puncturing comfortable myths with uncomfortable data, and recently he dismissed a persistent meme that senior leaders pressure their organizations to adopt AI while quietly staying in the 1990s themselves. Notion data, he shared in his post, shows that most senior people, including CEOs, are actually the most advanced AI…
I keep getting the same question from clients and SEOs (GEOs?). “How do we show up in ChatGPT?” The answer is always the same. Write good content, do listicles, comment on Reddit. The usual. But, how do we actually know any of that works? Most of it gets repeated on faith, one expert quoting the…
Kevin Indig’s Growth Memo offers disciplined strategic analysis in the SEO and growth field, and his columns rarely veer from careful, evidence-grounded argument. So, when he stepped outside his usual lane in June 2026 to say, simply, “Stop trying to replace people with AI,” it was more diagnosis than vent. Indig calls the phenomenon “substitution…
Bruce Clay, one of the first generation of search engine optimization experts, has passed away. Much of the terminology that he coined and many of the concepts that he pioneered continue to be used today. Thirty Years Of SEO Clay was among the cohort of SEOs who were learning and applying the art of optimization…