This is a new thing people are doing to hack ChatGPT. Self promotional listicles where all the other companies mentioned don't even exist. A self promotional listicle is when you give a list of the best X for Y, the top 10 best SEO companies in Belfast, then you name yourself as number one. That's why it's a self promotional listicle. Companies are getting next level lazy, making up competing companies that don't actually exist. These aren't real. When ChatGPT looks for the best X for y, it comes across these listicles. It recommends the top source. This year in 2026, companies were spamming these self promotional listicles. They were occurring everywhere. It might be tempting to try this yourself, but before you do. There is a very consistent trend among companies that try this. They tend to have this pattern. They're usually scaling these best listicles using AI. They'll see a crazy increase in traffic as they're doing this. They're also scaling bad user signals. Self promotional listicles do pretty poorly in Google. Searchers don't like it, they hit a tipping point. Their visibility collapses. Quickup did this. This is what happened to their entire blog. It got destroyed. Shopify did this too, and I made a podcast about it here. They got destroyed as well. The crazy truth. Self promotional listicles will work for a little bit, even if you make up competitors, but companies tend to spam them with thousands of posts. Hit a tipping point and Lose everything if you'd like to save years...

This is a new thing people are doing to hack ChatGPT. Self promotional listicles where all the other companies mentioned don't even exist. A self promotional listicle is when you give a list of the best X for Y, the top 10 best SEO companies in Belfast, then you name yourself as number one. That's why it's a self promotional listicle.

Companies are getting next level lazy, making up competing companies that don't actually exist. These aren't real. When ChatGPT looks for the best X for y, it comes across these listicles. It recommends the top source.

This year in 2026, companies were spamming these self promotional listicles. They were occurring everywhere. It might be tempting to try this yourself, but before you do. There is a very consistent trend among companies that try this.

They tend to have this pattern. They're usually scaling these best listicles using AI. They'll see a crazy increase in traffic as they're doing this. They're also scaling bad user signals.

Self promotional listicles do pretty poorly in Google. Searchers don't like it, they hit a tipping point. Their visibility collapses. Quickup did this.

This is what happened to their entire blog. It got destroyed. Shopify did this too, and I made a podcast about it here. They got destroyed as well.

The crazy truth. Self promotional listicles will work for a little bit, even if you make up competitors, but companies tend to spam them with thousands of posts. Hit a tipping point and Lose everything if you'd like to save years. Learning a sustainable type of SEO that gets you recommended in AI that specifically targets paying customers users.

Warm leads that doesn't use long blog posts which take forever to make. It instead uses short SEO landing pages. Learn this method at compactkeywords com.

Self-promotional listicles may work briefly, but large-scale abuse can hit a tipping point and collapse visibility. Main topics: Self-Promotional Listicles.

This is a new thing people are doing to hack ChatGPT. Self-promotiona...


Use cloud to rank No. 1 on Google in 30 seconds. Go to Google, type in your service, find your top competitor, go to their Google Business Profile, click view all Google reviews and copy all of them. Then go to cloud, ask it to extract common questions, pain points and objections from these reviews. Then turn those questions into blog topics and frequently ask questions on your website. If you want us to help you rank, comment SEO.

The creator recommends extracting recurring questions, pain points, and objections from competitors' public Google Business Profile reviews, then using those themes as... Main topics: answer-ready-service-page-checklist.

This free AI trick tells you exactly what to write on your website. C...


Watch this. If you go to your Google Business Profile, click edit profile, find your business description, add facts and specific numbers about your business, like same day roof repair and Tulsa. Add polls directly from your description to answer questions and maps and search. So when someone asks who does same day roof repair and Tulsa, that's how you show up. Comment SEO if you want us to help you rank.

Local SEO performance depends on maintaining specific Google Business Profile fields, local signals, and location evidence over time. Main topics: Local SEO operations and Google Business Profile maintenance.

Force AI to recommend your business with this one quick profile fix. ...


Local businesses can now connect their Google Business Profile to Gemini. I wanna talk about why this is more powerful than it might seem at first, and what this tells us about how people will be using software in general moving forward. So if you don't know, your Google Business Profile is essentially your listing in Google Maps. For a local business, it's arguably more important than your website. And a lot of SEO agencies out there will charge you hundreds of dollars every month just to manage it for you, which has always felt like a ripoff to me. Connecting your Google Business Profile to Gemini does two things for you. One, it makes it easier to manage your profile once it's connected to Gemini. You can just ask it to respond to reviews for you, to make updates to your business information, to give you data on how your profile is performing, and to get insights on things like your busiest times or what customers are saying about you. But the other thing it does is it instantly gives Gemini a bunch of context about your business. And if you've been watching my videos, I'm a huge advocate for providing all the information you can to AI about your business. So while I do think you should create a robust knowledge base with all the information available about your business, this is a nice little hack to get you started. Once your profile is connected to Gemini, It'll immediately know the basic information about your company...

Local businesses can now connect their Google Business Profile to Gemini. I wanna talk about why this is more powerful than it might seem at first, and what this tells us about how people will be using software in general moving forward. So if you don't know, your Google Business Profile is essentially your listing in Google Maps. For a local business, it's arguably more important than your website.

And a lot of SEO agencies out there will charge you hundreds of dollars every month just to manage it for you, which has always felt like a ripoff to me. Connecting your Google Business Profile to Gemini does two things for you. One, it makes it easier to manage your profile once it's connected to Gemini. You can just ask it to respond to reviews for you, to make updates to your business information, to give you data on how your profile is performing, and to get insights on things like your busiest times or what customers are saying about you.

But the other thing it does is it instantly gives Gemini a bunch of context about your business. And if you've been watching my videos, I'm a huge advocate for providing all the information you can to AI about your business. So while I do think you should create a robust knowledge base with all the information available about your business, this is a nice little hack to get you started. Once your profile is connected to Gemini, It'll immediately know the basic information about your company.

And then if you wanted to generate blog posts, social media posts, graphics, come up with strategy for your business, it can do all that with that context in hand. Again, it doesn't give an AI everything it could use, but it's a lot better than it having nothing. this trend of connecting large language models to software platforms is much bigger than just Google Business Profiles. More and more of our work is being handled by AI, and we're spending more and more of our day inside of these platforms, whether it's Gemini, Codex or Cloud Code.

If you're using tools like this regularly, you've probably started to notice how tedious it feels when you have to switch to another piece of software to do something, and how much better it is when that software is just integrated directly in the AI platform. If you're not using these tools regularly, I urge you to start trying them. This is the way knowledge work is going. I also recommend checking out the episode of Lenny's podcast where he interviews the CEO of every.

He lays out some really smart predictions about how this is going to evolve. But we're now seeing Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI fiercely competing to be that one platform everyone uses, and Microsoft's out there just giving it their best. But the big takeaway from this is if you're creating software, or even if you just Have a website. It needs to be usable by AI.

I think within the next one to two years, the AI experience is gonna be more important than the user experience.

Connecting a Google Business Profile to Gemini can improve profile management and give the AI immediate business context. Main topics: Google Business Profile.

Should I connect my Google Business Profile to Gemini? Yes, and here'...


Watch this. Go to Google Search Console and Performance Search results. Click the Average Position box to turn it on. Scroll down, click position and scroll until you get between 11 and 20. These are the keywords you're ranking on the second page for. Find the ones with the most impressions. These are high volume keywords you're almost winning for. Click on one of them. Then click pages to see what URL's ranking. Copy that URL, paste it into ChatGPT. Say here's my page. Give me 5 ways to make this more comprehensive for this keyword and paste your keyword and ChatGPT will give you sections you're missing. Add those and some internal links pointing to this page and you may be able to win for a keyword you didn't even think of. Do it and comment s. E. O. If you want our help ranking higher.

The creator recommends using Google Search Console to find high-impression query-page pairs with average positions between 11 and 20 as candidates for a content-gap review... Main topics: content-refresh-prioritization.

Your Website Is Hiding Page 1 Keywords From You… 🚨 Comment "SEO" and ...


Half your website might have disappeared from Google without you even knowing. Google just changed this recently, and a lot of people still haven't caught up. Since AI made it way easier to create content, Google raised the bar on what they'll actually show in search results. So now they're looking at more of your pages and showing less of them. Here's how to check if your pages are getting hit. Open Google Search Console, click pages, and look at crawled, not currently indexed. These are pages Google looked at and decided they weren't good enough to show to anyone. If any of these have the same generic info everyone else published, you're cooked. If it has potential, rewrite it with original data, screenshots, or examples no one else has. The bar has raised. Your content has to move with it. If you're a US-based business, comment SEO if you want us to help with your site.

SEO workflows benefit from specific research tools for keyword discovery, historical checks, backlink triage, citations, and search visibility diagnostics. Main topics: SEO research and tooling workflow.

Half Your Website Just Vanished From Google… 😳 Comment "SEO" and I'll...


If you've got a local business, Google has just done you a solid. Google Business Profiles have now got this direct integration with Google Analytics, which means that you can track calls, your bookings, any direction requests, and website clicks in one dashboard. The only bad news is it's still rolling out, but we're working on a custom Claude skill that's gonna help you set it up. If you comment GBP, I'll send it to you and I'll notify you when it's officially out so you don't forget about this.

AI visibility work depends on matching the right model, search surface, or answer format to the business outcome being optimized. Main topics: AI visibility and answer readiness.

Local businesses have been flying blind on Google Business Profile fo...


American government has shut down Claude Fable. On Thursday, Claude and Anthropic released Fable 5, their latest AI model, and everyone went crazy about it, saying how amazing this new system was. Then on Friday afternoon, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, put out a press statement saying that the American government had reached out to them and they're worried about security issues with Fable 5 and Mythos Five. Then what Anthropic said that for the moment, they have pulled back Fable 5 and no one can use it anymore. Now, this is just fascinating and amazing. The American government have said that they're worried about people jailbreaking it and using it, obviously for the wrong things. Now this just shows, and I think it's quite amazing to see that the government still has control of AI. And importantly as well, it's showing how powerful these AI systems are. Obviously, one just has to keep an eye on this and it's going to be fascinating what's going to be happening in the next few days, weeks, and months. Let me know your thoughts.

The source frames jailbreak risk as a reason governments may scrutinize powerful AI systems. Main topics: AI Security Risk.

Anthropic has had to disable Claude Fable due to security concerns  J...


Damn, blocking you now. Sell your shady add ons or an outdated product WordPress somewhere else. WordPress is free by the way. 10 comments? Dude, no one is using WordPress in 2026. So tell me, who's using WordPress in 2026? Like for me, obviously. There's the emergence of AI now. AI is able to code and build websites faster than I ever could. I don't think it's that good at design yet. I don't think you can quite get the design perfectly right, but we can build some really good WordPress websites with AI. So the way that I'm looking at things now is I'm using AI to help me build websites, but I'm still using the WordPress CMS. Because whether you like it or not, when you build a website, there's normally a client assigned to that website that's gonna have to use it and manage it or want to manage it afterwards. And for me, there's no easier CMS than WordPress. Don't get that confused with page builders or using Gutenberg. I'm talking about a custom built CMS using WordPress so that clients can log in. They can do their blog content, they can update their SEO meta, titles, descriptions, whatever they want. They can update page content. There isn't a better platform on the market that can do that. So why wouldn't you use WordPress? But I agree, we can utilise AI to make it a bit more modern.

AI can speed up WordPress builds, but the creator still keeps WordPress as the client-facing CMS for content, SEO meta, and page updates. Main topics: AI-assisted WordPress CMS workflow.

Replying to @Petersilie am Zahn whether you like it or not, WordPress...


Every business needs an AI agent. I think by 2027, having an AI agent for your business is going to be even more important than having a website for your business. A year ago, most business owners would have found that statement insane. But a lot has happened in a year, including how we think of AI agents. So I wanna talk about what an AI agent actually is in 2026, why? I think we can now make a confident guess about what AI agents will continue to look like in the future and why creating an AI agent for your business is actually very easy. A year ago, if someone said they created an AI agent, they probably either meant some kind of n8n. Workflow or some custom coded scaffold that we would now refer to as a harness. These were difficult to set up, and they worked all right, but they weren't great, and as of today, they're completely obsolete. So what happened? In short, I think clawed code and open claw happened. Both of these products showed us how good a harness could be and also how general purpose they can be. Shortly after Anthropic and Peter Steinberger realized this, OpenAI realized they're behind and made similar updates to Codex. These platforms or harnesses are so good and improving so rapidly that it just doesn't make sense to make your own. Whether it's Codex or Claude Code or Openclaw or Hermes or whatever new Better harness comes out next. It's clear that we all want our agents running on one of these platforms. And since these platforms tend to leap frog each other, we need the ability to switch our agent from one platform to another...

Every business needs an AI agent. I think by 2027, having an AI agent for your business is going to be even more important than having a website for your business. A year ago, most business owners would have found that statement insane. But a lot has happened in a year, including how we think of AI agents.

So I wanna talk about what an AI agent actually is in 2026, why? I think we can now make a confident guess about what AI agents will continue to look like in the future and why creating an AI agent for your business is actually very easy. A year ago, if someone said they created an AI agent, they probably either meant some kind of n8n. Workflow or some custom coded scaffold that we would now refer to as a harness.

These were difficult to set up, and they worked all right, but they weren't great, and as of today, they're completely obsolete. So what happened? In short, I think clawed code and open claw happened. Both of these products showed us how good a harness could be and also how general purpose they can be.

Shortly after Anthropic and Peter Steinberger realized this, OpenAI realized they're behind and made similar updates to Codex. These platforms or harnesses are so good and improving so rapidly that it just doesn't make sense to make your own. Whether it's Codex or Claude Code or Openclaw or Hermes or whatever new Better harness comes out next. It's clear that we all want our agents running on one of these platforms.

And since these platforms tend to leap frog each other, we need the ability to switch our agent from one platform to another. When I talk about having an AI agent for your business, I'm not talking about the AI model. I'm not talking about the harness. So what am I talking about?

What is an AI agent in 2026 and I think for the foreseeable future? An agent is just a folder. That's it. It's just a folder full of markdown files.

That might sound weird, but consider that a website is also just a folder. A folder full of mostly HTML files. Now, unlike a website, we don't yet have an agreed upon standard for how we should arrange our agent files. But if you haven't already, please watch my video on Google's Open Knowledge format that they just announced.

I'm optimistic that this will finally give us an agreed upon standard. But how can an AI agent be nothing more than an organized folder of markdown files? Well, it's because all the capabilities that an AI needs are already handled by the platforms like Codex or Claude. All that AI needs to act as an agent for your business is knowledge and instruction.

If you give it enough knowledge and really good instructions, it's pretty amazing what it can already do for your business. In fact, at this Point. I believe anything that can be done on a computer for your business can be handled by a well structured agent, which, again, is just a folder of markdown files. At our marketing agency, the first thing we do for every client is to build a folder like this.

In fact, at this point, we can't really do any work for a client until that folder is built, because all of our systems live on top of that. And if, as a business, you plan on keeping up with AI, in other words, if you don't plan on going out of business, then you also need to think about how you're gonna put together a folder like this for your business.

A business AI agent can be treated as a portable folder of markdown knowledge and instructions, not as a custom model. Main topics: AI Agent Documentation.

What is an AI agent for your business? In 2026 it's just a folder of ...


Okay. Hundred percent agree. WordPress is awesome if you actually know what you're doing. And for me, hundred percent, I agree with this. Okay? It's crazy the split down the middle when it comes to WordPress. The amount of people that love it and the amount of people that absolutely hate it. I honestly don't know what there is to hate about WordPress. Okay, I understand people might not like certain page builders or might not like the block editor, but if you know how to use it properly, you can make amazing websites and you can make systems that your clients can use and manage and update. So easy. There's so many things that you can automate from it as well. Like, it's for me, it's a no brainer as to which platform to use. Like, I've yet to see a platform that beats WordPress.

WordPress can function as a client-manageable system when it is built by someone who understands the platform, including updates, management, and automation. Main topics: WordPress client-manageable CMS capability.

Replying to @Dan Fully agree. There is nothing better than Wordpress ...


The winners and losers of Google's May 2026 update reveal where AI search is heading. And there's two patterns. The first, Google's favoring locals. All the local shops leapfrogged the giant overseas ones that had thin or localized content. So make sure your website says plainly what you do, where, and who for, so that Google can see when you're the right answer. Google also made it super clear it rewards sites where users actually complete the task, not summarize pages based on someone else's work. I made a Claude skill that tells you if you're winning or losing from this update, plus some suggestions. If you comment winner, I'll send that over to you.

Google's May 2026 update split the internet into winners and losers T...


Use WordPress for years, but moved to Laravel for backend. So I used that WordPress for years. I've used it for 15 years. And there was a period where we went through. We were building some quite bespoke projects. And at the time I felt like we needed to move to something else. And I built probably four projects, I think, in Laravel. And while the front ends were great and they were light and fast and, you know, I was really impressed by the way it worked, what frustrated me was having to build out the CMS. In the background. So that's why I went back to WordPress and carried on building with WordPress. Because I felt like that was one less thing that we had to build. I didn't have to build a back end for my clients to manage the content. And that's why I think WordPress is so powerful, because it has this admin that you can use and customise any way that you want. So for me, I sort of build now with the thought process of Laravel. I build a custom front end, but I just utilise WordPress's backend to manage the content for the clients. And then I customise that. So, yeah.

The creator returned from Laravel to WordPress because WordPress already provides a customizable admin backend for client content management. Main topics: WordPress backend versus custom Laravel backend.

Replying to @Graeme Mullins Laravel is so powerful but I stopped usin...


Okay, thanks for the question, and I think it's a valid question and something that need does need addressing. So WordPress is the most popular platform online. You know, I think it's like 40% of websites are built in WordPress. I can see why it could be a concern for someone looking to get into WordPress, you know, having to do all these updates all the time, and it's even annoying for people that already work in WordPress. But the bottom line is it is the most popular platform online, and because of that, it's the most targeted by hackers. And then because of that, it constantly needs to be patched and updated. So when plugins and WordPress himself release updates, sometimes they're just new features that are being released, and sometimes they are patching vulnerability. So don't think every time there's an update is because WordPress or the plugin is insecure. That's not always the case. You know, there's lots of reasons why plugins are released. Like there's new features being released, there's compliance, there's bug fixing, there's technology advancements. Now, all of these release new code into the internet. So, you know, when they release updates that fix bugs, that's new code. That's new code that hackers can try and get into. If they find a way in, then there has to be patched. And that patch is what you're talking about is the vulnerabilities that need updating. And, you know, when a new PHP version is released, That's got nothing to do with WordPress. But WordPress and the plugins have to release new updates to work with that PHP...

Okay, thanks for the question, and I think it's a valid question and something that need does need addressing. So WordPress is the most popular platform online. You know, I think it's like 40% of websites are built in WordPress.

I can see why it could be a concern for someone looking to get into WordPress, you know, having to do all these updates all the time, and it's even annoying for people that already work in WordPress. But the bottom line is it is the most popular platform online, and because of that, it's the most targeted by hackers. And then because of that, it constantly needs to be patched and updated.

So when plugins and WordPress himself release updates, sometimes they're just new features that are being released, and sometimes they are patching vulnerability. So don't think every time there's an update is because WordPress or the plugin is insecure. That's not always the case.

You know, there's lots of reasons why plugins are released. Like there's new features being released, there's compliance, there's bug fixing, there's technology advancements. Now, all of these release new code into the internet.

So, you know, when they release updates that fix bugs, that's new code. That's new code that hackers can try and get into. If they find a way in, then there has to be patched.

And that patch is what you're talking about is the vulnerabilities that need updating. And, you know, when a new PHP version is released, That's got nothing to do with WordPress. But WordPress and the plugins have to release new updates to work with that PHP.

And then that releases new code. That new code then becomes subject to being compromised. And if they find a compromise, the hackers, then, you know, another update needs to be done to patch that.

Some other reasons to mention, you know, there's obviously browsers advancing, you know, they need new code. There's server updates that get released that, you know, websites need to comply with them. Browser compatibility.

And then there's compliance, you know, WordPress releasing updates to comply with new laws. Then there's, you know, best practices that they have to keep up to date with, you know, industry standards, all these things.

Frequent WordPress and plugin updates are not automatically proof of insecurity; they can include features, compliance, bug fixes, compatibility work, and vulnerability patches. Main topics: WordPress update cadence nuance.

It would be a bigger concern if there were no updates for these issue...


What is something most SEOs still believe that stopped being true a couple years ago? Links matter more than mentions. I don't think they do. I think mentions matter more than links. If you're still link building, I have great news: you can stop. You don't have to do it. It's like washing chicken. You don't have to do it, man. Just stop. You can see where this train is going: mentions. Less people are putting up niche blogs than before. More people are posting on YouTube, are posting on Instagram. The future is big platforms dominating more and more of what gets surfaced, what's popular, what people think about topics, what people think about products, what people think about brands. You have to be present in these places with a message that resonates, with content that gets watched, listened to, read. If you were starting a brand, brand new company today, you had zero audience, you had zero reputation, what would your marketing look like or your first 90 days of marketing look like? I will always pick channels, tactics that do three things. One, serving my audience in the places they pay attention. Second one is, I don't think it is worth your time, energy to do something where you have no personal passion. The third one is, I would need something where I can provide unique value that nobody else provides. What is something different that I'm doing in this place where my audience pays attention that other people are not doing?

The source recommends choosing early marketing channels where the audience pays attention, the brand has energy, and it can provide unique value. Main topics: Channel Strategy.

Godfather of SEO, Rand Fishkin: “Mentions matter more than backlinks....


Here's a hack to quickly convert SEO keywords into AI prompts at scale using Google Sheets. You can use the equals AI function to convert every keyword into a query that searches the way a real person would ask it at scale. I refine the prompt so that it writes in first person like real AI queries, and you can feed your audience context into a second column here that'll then give you the context of what someone might be using that query for. Reason this matters is once you've got real prompts instead of keywords, you could feed them straight into AI visibility tracking and then see if your brand actually shows up.

Spreadsheet-generated first-person prompt variants can seed an AI-visibility tracking set, but they remain synthetic until validated against real audience language. Main topics: measure-ai-search-visibility.

Keyword tracking is dying because AI doesn't search the way Google do...


Will AI take my job? This is the most common question worldwide that everyone is asking, and rightfully so. People are very worried about it. Now, I'm not clever enough to answer this question for you. Rather, I'm going to let Jensen Huang answer for you. He was asked the same question. Now, for those of you that don't know NVIDIA, you should. It's a company with the largest market cap in the world, almost $5 trillion. Jensen Huang is CEO and founder of it. Look what he answered when he was asked the same question. I would say to the people who are worried about losing their jobs to AI, learn AI, you're not gonna lose your jobs to AI. You're gonna lose your job to somebody who learned AI better than you. Now, this is unbelievable. And this is the answer that I think is straightforward. You have to embrace AI. You have to start learning AI. You have to be understanding it. And most importantly, you can't be afraid and you have to be comfortable with it. AI is here to stay and we have to be on top of it if you want to get ahead in this world. Let me know your thoughts.

The practical job-risk message is not that AI replaces everyone, but that people who learn AI gain an advantage over people who avoid it. Main topics: AI Skills.

Will AI Take My Job? - See What Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says This is ...


If you are a new brand and you need to quickly build credibility, go to aipodcastmatcher.com. It makes it really easy to go on podcasts, even podcasts that not a lot of people listen to. These podcasts show up on Google when people search your name. In a month, it is not unreasonable that you could go on 10 to 20 podcasts. A lot of these podcasts come out to YouTube. YouTube is the most clicked website in Google. It shows up for everything. When you go on podcast, the podcast title and description uses your name. This makes it show up when people search you. If you are a new brand, not a lot of credibility, very little about your brand is out there. You do this, and in a month you will be shocked at how much will show up when people search your brand name or just your name. Crazy opportunity for new brands who want to increase visibility.

Podcast titles and descriptions can help a name or brand show up when people search for it. Main topics: Brand SERP.

If you are a new brand and you need to quickly build credibility, go ...


AI has taken your traffic. You're not gonna get it back. But it was never gonna make you any real money anyway. It's just people looking for information, like what is a brand strategy or what size running shoe. Don't know what happened there. You were essentially just building an audience that was never gonna buy. The searches that actually matter, like when someone is ready to book your services or buy your product, AI can't actually fulfil those. They still need you. If you've done a good job of search optimisation on your site, AI should be recommending you and sending customers to you. If those visitors were never gonna become customers, then that drop shouldn't actually matter.

The source says AI-driven loss of informational traffic may matter less than visibility for searches with buying or booking intent. Main topics: AI Search Traffic.

Let’s talk about AI’s impact on your website SEO strategy. Because ye...


This is crazy. Google is now asking your customers to snitch on you. Some users are seeing this question, does this business offer rewards in exchange for reviews? So if you're giving people discounts, gifts, or freebies for leaving a Google review, you need to stop. Google reviews are extremely important for rankings and conversions, but incentivizing reviews is against Google's guidelines. In the best case, incentivized reviews just get removed. In the worst case, your Google Business Profile could get suspended. So don't buy or incentivize reviews. What you should do is ask every customer, make it easy with a review link and just let them leave an honest review. There's an awesome free tool that will generate a short review link and QR code for asking for Google reviews. So save this post and let me know if you want a link to that tool.

Search reputation management is about controlling and monitoring how a name or business appears in search results and reviews. Main topics: Search reputation management.

If you’re a business owner or an agency managing Google Business Prof...


Right now, every serious business is trying to figure out how to incorporate AI into their workflow. The most important part of that is how you structure your company's knowledge. As of today, June 12, we have the very first standard for how that knowledge should be structured. This is the moment we've been waiting for, and as I guessed, it's Google who's putting forth this standard. No surprise there. They just put out a blog post announcing what they're calling the Open Knowledge Format, or OKF. I'm so excited about this. I already recorded a video, and I had to record another one, even though it's 100 degrees outside right now. If Google is successful in getting businesses to adopt this standard, and I think they will, they've had a lot of success with Universal Commerce Protocol and Web MCP. Getting your company's knowledge base set up using this standard is going to be the most important step for you to take before integrating AI. If you watch my videos at all, you know how bullish I am on setting up a knowledge base like this for your company. We build this out for all of our clients. We call it their brand ambassador, and me and my team are already talking about how we might adapt our current brand ambassadors to this new standard. So what makes this standard so great? The standard itself is pretty simple. I mean, it makes sense. I like it. But what actually makes it great is just that there's a standard at all...

Right now, every serious business is trying to figure out how to incorporate AI into their workflow.

The most important part of that is how you structure your company's knowledge. As of today, June 12, we have the very first standard for how that knowledge should be structured. This is the moment we've been waiting for, and as I guessed, it's Google who's putting forth this standard. No surprise there.

They just put out a blog post announcing what they're calling the Open Knowledge Format, or OKF. I'm so excited about this. I already recorded a video, and I had to record another one, even though it's 100 degrees outside right now.

If Google is successful in getting businesses to adopt this standard, and I think they will, they've had a lot of success with Universal Commerce Protocol and Web MCP. Getting your company's knowledge base set up using this standard is going to be the most important step for you to take before integrating AI.

If you watch my videos at all, you know how bullish I am on setting up a knowledge base like this for your company. We build this out for all of our clients. We call it their brand ambassador, and me and my team are already talking about how we might adapt our current brand ambassadors to this new standard.

So what makes this standard so great? The standard itself is pretty simple. I mean, it makes sense. I like it. But what actually makes it great is just that there's a standard at all.

If we can all agree how your knowledge should be structured, then every AI agent or harness or prompt or skill can assume knowledge is structured in that way, and then we move from having to create custom processes in isolation and into a world where we can all share and iterate on each other's processes.

This absolutely has to happen for us to make quick progress. We still don't know yet if Google Standard will be adopted, but I mean, come on, it's Google. There are no real competing standards right now, and it does make sense.

Alright, TJ, just tell us what it is already.

First of all, it's just files. There's no SDK or compression schema that you have to worry about. It's just a series of markdown files in a nested hierarchy. Within each folder, you can have an optional index file that describes all the other files in that folder, and at the top of each markdown file, there's a mandatory YAML front matter.

If that sounds complex at all, trust me, it's not. It's just some text at the top of each file defining fields like title, description, tags, type, resource, and timestamp. Only a few of these are mandatory. That just lets the agent quickly look up relevant files, and then you can add as many custom fields as you want.

What Google has released so far is just version 0.1 of the standard. It'll probably change some, but I think it makes sense in its current form. I think the biggest changes will come from people actually implementing it and seeing what best practices emerge, and then over time, those best practices will likely be integrated into the standard.

Where will these files live? Well, ultimately, you want all this knowledge to be platform agnostic, and you want each file to live in a single location. The way things are heading, I'm guessing most businesses will set this up inside of Github. That's what we're planning to do ourselves.

It's a huge rush to adapt to this standard. However, it's so close to the best practices that already exist, and it makes so much sense given where AI is headed, that I think you'd be safe adopting it now.

And if you haven't already started collecting this knowledge base, I highly recommend you start doing that immediately.

The source describes Open Knowledge Format as markdown files with YAML front matter and optional index files. Main topics: Open Knowledge Format.

What is Google's Open Knowledge Format? The first real standard for s...


Gamma just hosted one of the biggest New York City Tech Week events I've ever been to. They rented out the Manhattan Ballroom, and every single creator and founder that I know in the tech space was at the event. If you don't know what gamma is, which I actually didn't know before the event, it's an AI tool that lets you make really cool and aesthetic presentations, slide decks, and web pages from just prompts. Went into the event not knowing what to expect. So they had an open bar with a bunch of small bites from waiters walking around. I didn't know what to do, so I spent a lot of time eating every single piece of food that I could get my hands on from the waiters, and every single one was so good. I told myself to stop being awkward and not socializing with anyone. So I grabbed a drink from the bar in order to give myself some confidence. I happen to be sitting next to Silicon Valley Girl, so I talked to her about the growing AI space and if the bubble will pop. Then I got interviewed and basically told everyone that my hot take in AI is that AI valuations are not inflated because the demand for AI is still insanely huge and growing at an accelerated rate. After talking to a few more people I met on the internet, I got really tired of socializing until I met this guy, the founder of Stan Store, who I respect a lot because he just hit 40 million ARR for building tools for creators. I got interviewed again, but this time by him and he mentioned how they were building an AI personal assistant tool for content creators. The main show started...

Gamma just hosted one of the biggest New York City Tech Week events I've ever been to. They rented out the Manhattan Ballroom, and every single creator and founder that I know in the tech space was at the event. If you don't know what gamma is, which I actually didn't know before the event, it's an AI tool that lets you make really cool and aesthetic presentations, slide decks, and web pages from just prompts.

Went into the event not knowing what to expect. So they had an open bar with a bunch of small bites from waiters walking around. I didn't know what to do, so I spent a lot of time eating every single piece of food that I could get my hands on from the waiters, and every single one was so good.

I told myself to stop being awkward and not socializing with anyone. So I grabbed a drink from the bar in order to give myself some confidence. I happen to be sitting next to Silicon Valley Girl, so I talked to her about the growing AI space and if the bubble will pop.

Then I got interviewed and basically told everyone that my hot take in AI is that AI valuations are not inflated because the demand for AI is still insanely huge and growing at an accelerated rate. After talking to a few more people I met on the internet, I got really tired of socializing until I met this guy, the founder of Stan Store, who I respect a lot because he just hit 40 million ARR for building tools for creators.

I got interviewed again, but this time by him and he mentioned how they were building an AI personal assistant tool for content creators. The main show started. I was able to hear talk from Malcolm Gladwell, which is insane because growing up I read a lot of his books, including outliers and Tipping Point.

Go check out Gamma if you haven't already. I've been trying it out and it's super useful for creating any aesthetic presentation or slide deck when I present to my leads.

Gamma took over NYC Tech Week #ai #tech #GammaPartner @Gamma AI Social and personal-brand work can become a lead engine when publishing, proof, and referral loops are measured together. Main topics: Social and personal-brand growth engine.


The FIFA World Cup starts tonight and I'm so excited. There are going to be 104 games over the period. So that's quite a lot and you have to schedule accordingly if you anything like me and are a big soccer fan. The problem is with all that many games and all the different time zones, it's quite hard to schedule accordingly specifically with the different times that it's happening. But I worked out a quick hack with Claude that helps you sync all the games and all the schedules specifically to the South African time zone or I suppose any time zone that you want into your Google Calendar. It's very easy to do. Go into your Claude app on your desktop, then go to customize, then go to connectors, then look for the Google Calendar. Once it's done, copy this prompt below into Claude. You can see it's very easy. You literally can just copy and paste from below and I'll even put the prompt in the chat once it's done. It's very cool. And you're gonna see when you open up your Google calendar that all the games are perfectly synced. It's great. You can keep your schedule up to date now and you can plan accordingly. I hope you enjoy the World Cup because I know I certainly will.

Claude can turn a complex, timezone-heavy event schedule into Google Calendar entries when the calendar connector and prompt are set up correctly. Main topics: AI Workflow Automation.

Sync the World Cup Fixtures to Your Google Calendar with Claude ⚽📆 S...


I've just seen a video where an agency owner said that her agency is no longer using WordPress because they want their websites to look more professional. Like, that doesn't even make sense. I'm assuming she must have had some backlash for this because the comments to the video were totally disabled. I couldn't even reply with my opinion. So let's break this down now. The platform and the design, they're two totally different things. WordPress is a CMS. It's the engine. It's got nothing to do with the design. On the front end, the browser doesn't render. Whether it's WordPress or not, the browser just renders whatever the designer or you if you've used it as developed. If the site looks unprofessional, that's because your designs are unprofessional. It's got nothing to do with WordPress. So whatever platform you use, you're gonna have the same problem. Now, I've said it before, you can build absolutely anything with WordPress, like Pixel for pixel design, whatever you want. However, the reverse is not always true. Try picking one of these sites off awards.com and building that in one of these lockdown page builders. So when I hear them saying that they were leaving WordPress to build more professional websites, what I actually hear is that they were probably using off the shelf templates or some sort of page builder and they've never learnt how to use WordPress properly. Some of the biggest brands in the world are using WordPress. And you would never know by looking at their website. And that's the whole point. You can't tell by looking at the front end...

I've just seen a video where an agency owner said that her agency is no longer using WordPress because they want their websites to look more professional. Like, that doesn't even make sense. I'm assuming she must have had some backlash for this because the comments to the video were totally disabled.

I couldn't even reply with my opinion. So let's break this down now. The platform and the design, they're two totally different things.

WordPress is a CMS. It's the engine. It's got nothing to do with the design.

On the front end, the browser doesn't render. Whether it's WordPress or not, the browser just renders whatever the designer or you if you've used it as developed. If the site looks unprofessional, that's because your designs are unprofessional.

It's got nothing to do with WordPress. So whatever platform you use, you're gonna have the same problem. Now, I've said it before, you can build absolutely anything with WordPress, like Pixel for pixel design, whatever you want.

However, the reverse is not always true. Try picking one of these sites off awards.com and building that in one of these lockdown page builders. So when I hear them saying that they were leaving WordPress to build more professional websites, what I actually hear is that they were probably using off the shelf templates or some sort of page builder and they've never learnt how to use WordPress properly.

Some of the biggest brands in the world are using WordPress. And you would never know by looking at their website. And that's the whole point.

You can't tell by looking at the front end. Just look at some of these websites that are on awards.com. Like, these are WordPress websites.

You would never know. These are some of the most beautiful websites that are around. So if you can't make WordPress websites look professional, then I blame the builder, not the platform.

I don't know. Is it just me? Let me know in the comments.

Do you agree with me or am I going crazy?

WordPress is the CMS engine, not the front-end design quality; professional-looking sites depend on design and build skill, not the platform label. Main topics: WordPress CMS versus design quality.

The platform you build on has nothing to do with how professional you...


This is huge. Google just turned Gemini into your Google Business Profile assistant. You can now connect your Google Business Profile directly to Gemini, and this changes how you manage your local presence. Once connected, you can just ask Gemini to update your hours, attributes and links, draft replies to your latest reviews, create and schedule Google posts, analyze your performance metrics and find out what keywords people are using to find your business. And they also announced a new business notebook that'll proactively flag things like unanswered customer questions or missing holiday hours. Here's what you need to know. 1, it's rolling out globally on the Gemini web app first. And 2, for the moment, it only works if you only manage one profile. So if you manage multiple profiles, you may not see this in your account. This is a clear signal we've seen yet that Google wants AI to manage every aspect of your presence on Google. So save and share this video and follow me for more tips.

AI visibility work depends on matching the right model, search surface, or answer format to the business outcome being optimized. Main topics: AI visibility and answer readiness.

🚨 Breaking Google News: Gemini can now help manage your Google Busine...


Here's another terrible and atrocious Google Ads audit that I've just completed for a client this client is a big accounting and auditing firm with a national coverage the first thing is that they're using max conversions. If you go into the conversion section in Google Ads, you can see that the conversion tracking is not set up correctly the conversion, the main one that they're tracking is people actually clicking on the Contact Us page, not completing the contact form, but the Contact us page they're not tracking any conversions well at all and if they're using a max convert strategy, obviously it's not gonna work at all and obviously you can see it's a stuff up before we start, if we look in the search campaigns, and again we've seen this so many times, we click on the ad groups and they've got one or two ad groups with lots and lots of broad keywords. We keep on saying this, please guys just listen to me, broad keywords don't work. Google just match you with the biggest junk in the world and you're just gonna waste your money if we go look at the search term reports on both of these search campaigns, you can see the junk that they're coming up for. People are searching and clicking for them and they're coming up for business funding, business loans, small business loans, jobs, junk straight away you can see what has happened with this account literally I don't Think there's any clicks that are coming to them for the services that they offer. Google are using broad match keywords and are matching them with words that are totally irrelevant to them...

Here's another terrible and atrocious Google Ads audit that I've just completed for a client this client is a big accounting and auditing firm with a national coverage the first thing is that they're using max conversions.

If you go into the conversion section in Google Ads, you can see that the conversion tracking is not set up correctly the conversion, the main one that they're tracking is people actually clicking on the Contact Us page, not completing the contact form, but the Contact us page they're not tracking any conversions well at all and if they're using a max convert strategy, obviously it's not gonna work at all and obviously you can see it's a stuff up before we start, if we look in the search campaigns, and again we've seen this so many times, we click on the ad groups and they've got one or two ad groups with lots and lots of broad keywords.

We keep on saying this, please guys just listen to me, broad keywords don't work. Google just match you with the biggest junk in the world and you're just gonna waste your money if we go look at the search term reports on both of these search campaigns, you can see the junk that they're coming up for. People are searching and clicking for them and they're coming up for business funding, business loans, small business loans, jobs, junk straight away you can see what has happened with this account literally I don't Think there's any clicks that are coming to them for the services that they offer.

Google are using broad match keywords and are matching them with words that are totally irrelevant to them. They're literally throwing money down the drain. You can see straight away what is going on here and it's quite a easy fix guys. I've said this so many times.

Just because you're using a agency or so called expert in Google, majority of people don't know what they're doing. They're just following the playbook and they're just wasting your money. They're gonna start doing so much better on Google Ads once we fix it up. We're gonna do tight ad groups, we're gonna do better ads, we're gonna do better conversion tracking.

We're gonna add negative keywords, we're gonna use exact match keywords and phrase match keywords only so they're gonna get the right clicks. Google Ads works so well when you do it correctly but on the flip side, if you're using people that have no idea what they're doing, you're just throwing money down the drain and you're never going to get results.

Max Conversions bidding is unreliable when Google Ads is only tracking page clicks instead of real lead conversions. Main topics: Google Ads Tracking.

Here Is Another Atrocious Google Ads Audit. This Account Has No Chanc...


Oh, he's fine. Anyways, I found this website that feels illegal, but it's not. Come here and you type in what you sell. I'm gonna go with nail salon because I'd love to open a nail salon one day. That scans the internet and finds questions that your customers are actually asking about your industry. Answer these questions on your website in the form of blog posts. This creates what we call topical authority and it helps Google realize that you're an expert in your niche. This takes less than an hour a week and it'll get you ranking. Hi, I almost forgot. It's called FindQuestions.com.

That’s cool Technical SEO depends on site speed, architecture, topical coverage, engagement, and freshness rather than isolated keyword edits. Main topics: Technical SEO and site architecture hygiene.

That’s cool


Alright, cheers for the comment, Mike. So Mike is asking what's the best approach to find out why external images don't load or show as blank images. This is what I would do in 30 seconds to get this resolved. First of all, external images means that your website is trying to load images from somebody else's website. So either their server is saying no, or your browser is refusing to load those images. This is what I would do. Load up the website that you're trying to check it on, right click anywhere, and then go to inspect. And then what you'll see is you get the inspector to load up. What you wanna do is open up network. Now when you go to network, it might look like this. If it looks empty, just click reload page, wait a second, and you'll see every single resource and file loading on that page. I would filter by image, and then what you're gonna see is every single image on that page listed here. And what you'll see then is the status of every image. These are all showing 200, which means they've loaded. So if you see 404, that means the image is gone. The external website that you're trying to load it from has moved it, it's not in the right place, and it's no longer available for you to load. If you see 403, then that just means that the external site is blocking hotlinking. And what that means is that they're not letting other site URLs load their images. Only if the URL is theirs will they load the images. Now if you're seeing blank images, one thing it could be is that if you look in your inspect tool, you might see that it says mixed content...

Alright, cheers for the comment, Mike. So Mike is asking what's the best approach to find out why external images don't load or show as blank images. This is what I would do in 30 seconds to get this resolved.

First of all, external images means that your website is trying to load images from somebody else's website. So either their server is saying no, or your browser is refusing to load those images. This is what I would do.

Load up the website that you're trying to check it on, right click anywhere, and then go to inspect. And then what you'll see is you get the inspector to load up. What you wanna do is open up network.

Now when you go to network, it might look like this. If it looks empty, just click reload page, wait a second, and you'll see every single resource and file loading on that page. I would filter by image, and then what you're gonna see is every single image on that page listed here.

And what you'll see then is the status of every image. These are all showing 200, which means they've loaded. So if you see 404, that means the image is gone.

The external website that you're trying to load it from has moved it, it's not in the right place, and it's no longer available for you to load. If you see 403, then that just means that the external site is blocking hotlinking.

And what that means is that they're not letting other site URLs load their images. Only if the URL is theirs will they load the images. Now if you're seeing blank images, one thing it could be is that if you look in your inspect tool, you might see that it says mixed content.

And what that means is that your website is loading as HTTPS, but maybe you've loaded the images as HTTP. Just double check and make sure that everything is using HTTPS.

Now one thing you can do is take the image URL and open it in a new tab. And if it loads, that means the issue is hotlinking because it'll be loading using their URL, but inside your website it's not loading.

One other thing I check, just to make sure, is that it's not some lazy loading plugin that you've got in that's just not triggering it. Could be that. I doubt it, but it'd be worth checking.

Always test an incognito window as well and see if that makes any difference because that will give you some indication whether it's your cache or not. And the best fix really is to get the images onto your website so that you're loading them directly from your server and not relying on someone else. So hopefully that helps. Give it a try.

Let me know how you get on. See you on the next one.

Sales quality depends on offer fit, pricing friction, and follow-up discipline, not only on generating more leads. Main topics: Sales process and offer-fit discipline.

Replying to @Mike Thompsett This is what I would do to investigate wh...


I know you're doing this. Don't even pretend that you're not. Let's say that your marketing agency sends you a strategy that they wanna implement. A bit of work that they're doing. You are either taking what they've sent and putting it into AI To get it broken down for you so you understand it more, which is fine. Or you're giving it to AI And you're asking if it's a good idea or if there's anything else that could be done to improve it. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. None of them are experts in anything. They are unbelievably biased towards something they think you wanna hear. Especially ChatGPT. My god. Person that sent you that has probably got, like, 10, 15 years of experience. So when you get that output from AI And then you copy and paste it into an email and send it back to them, the person on the receiving end has to go through the AI response that you've sent them, make sense of it and send you a reply. And you and I both know you're gonna put that straight back into AI

AI feedback on a marketing agency strategy can mirror what the client wants to hear rather than expert judgment. Main topics: AI Review Risk.

Nothing says “I don’t trust the people I’m paying” like running their...


You want to learn how to absolutely tank the traffic for your blog? Pay attention to what this company did. They put up 2,815 templated posts in 16 months. For starters, Google has an entire scaled content abuse policy calling out using generative AI tools, which this company was using. A lot of these pages looked like this. This is what's called a self promotional listicle. You have a list of the best products, you place yourself number one. Every single one of their listicles put themselves at No. 1. The top section about themselves is always four to seven times longer than their competitors. Even though this is supposed to be an informational article, they used a ton of call to actions promoting themselves on each page. They just repeated the same template for everything. When someone searches ChatGPT alternatives, they want a curated list of genuine alternatives with honest assessments. This company optimized each page for their conversion funnel, not for the searchers questions. Then they did this at scale. This is the result. Their blog traffic fell off a cliff. If you want to avoid this happening to your website, you can go deeper on exactly what happened with this podcast. From 1.19 million to 28,000 click UPS. SEO collapse and what it teaches us episode 1,038 of the Edward Show Podcast.

In the creator's audit example, repeated self-promotional listicle templates were written around the publisher's conversion funnel rather than the searcher's request; the... Main topics: content-refresh-prioritization.

If you want to learn how to absolutely tank the traffic for your blog...


These are the five things that I check if any of my websites go down. Almost every broken website that I fixed has been one of these things. Having uptime monitoring is a lifesaver because generally speaking, if something goes wrong with one of my clients' websites, I'll know about it and be able to fix it before the client even knows about it. So that's one thing that you should definitely have in place. The first thing that I check is, is the website actually down or is it just slow? These are two very different problems and require two very different fixes. If it's just slow, then that normally points towards hosting. So the second thing I check is, has anything changed recently, as in a plugin update? Has WordPress updated? Has there been a theme update? And having access to error logs can save you a lot of time here because they'll just give you the answer. No. 3: has anything expired? This could be anything like the SSL certificate or it could even be the domain. Honestly, the amount of times that a domain has expired and one of my customers thinks I look after it but I don't, and they just forgot to renew it, this is an easy one. And it takes sites down all the time. Obviously if it's expired, get it renewed as soon as possible and things should kick back in within a matter of hours. No. 4: if all of that looks good, I'll be checking the client's hosting limits because quite often they can run out of memory or storage...

These are the five things that I check if any of my websites go down. Almost every broken website that I fixed has been one of these things. Having uptime monitoring is a lifesaver because generally speaking, if something goes wrong with one of my clients' websites, I'll know about it and be able to fix it before the client even knows about it.

So that's one thing that you should definitely have in place. The first thing that I check is, is the website actually down or is it just slow? These are two very different problems and require two very different fixes.

If it's just slow, then that normally points towards hosting. So the second thing I check is, has anything changed recently, as in a plugin update? Has WordPress updated?

Has there been a theme update? And having access to error logs can save you a lot of time here because they'll just give you the answer.

No. 3: has anything expired? This could be anything like the SSL certificate or it could even be the domain.

Honestly, the amount of times that a domain has expired and one of my customers thinks I look after it but I don't, and they just forgot to renew it, this is an easy one. And it takes sites down all the time. Obviously if it's expired, get it renewed as soon as possible and things should kick back in within a matter of hours.

No. 4: if all of that looks good, I'll be checking the client's hosting limits because quite often they can run out of memory or storage.

And if it is a hosting-related problem, just check their status because they could have a known outage, and that would be worth checking instead of wasting time trying to debug something when you can't. An easy one for this is checking if any other sites that you know of on their hosting are working or not.

No. 5: if everything looks clean, then you wanna be checking if you've been hacked. You wanna see if anybody's been inside your site or not. Most modern hacks don't announce themselves straight away; they sit there dormant for a period of time.

So log in to your host, go to your file manager, and then just check if there are any suspicious modified dates on any files or folders. Also check if there are any files or folders that shouldn't be there that look suspicious. You can get into the admin and you can see if there are any admin users that you don't recognise.

And obviously if you've got any way of checking audit logs to see who's logged in when and what they've done, that can also help. So most broken sites are one of these five. And generally all of these are preventable.

But the real question is, if one of your sites went down now, would you know what to do, who to call, and how to get it back up and running? Let me know in the comments.

WordPress outage triage should first separate a site that is down from a site that is slow, because the fixes are different. Main topics: Broken WordPress site triage.

Most "broken" WordPress sites are one of these five things. The real ...


This is what it looks like when you rank on top of Google and all the AI and all the L m models out there. We've been working with an amazing brand in the U. S called Sun Ninja for just over 18 months. They are one of the leading beach tent brands in the whole of America so take a look at this first thing first if you open up Google and you can see that it's in America over there and you type in the word beach tents you can see that they're organically the No. 1 search. Great. The next thing is on AI mode in Google as well you'll see over there once again they're number one on the result. Then if you open up ChatGPT again we gonna look for beach tents there you can see straight away they're on top. Then we gonna go look in Claude again no surprise they're number one. We are then going to go look in Gemini again the No. 1 then Perplexity no surprises. Then finally I even use groc as you can see the results are great. I'm very happy and so is the client. The first thing I just want to put out there is obviously everything comes from above and I'm very grateful that I have the skills that I know how to do this. The second thing is that the client has got a great brand and a great Product which made things a whole lot easier. Their website is great as well. It's a Shopify website and everything just works great and it's simple and it's so easy to work with. Importantly, and this is an important thing that I want to put out there, we didn't do any fancy tricks. We worked on traditional SEO. We worked on the pages, on the collections, on the products, on the blogs...

This is what it looks like when you rank on top of Google and all the AI and all the L m models out there. We've been working with an amazing brand in the U. S called Sun Ninja for just over 18 months. They are one of the leading beach tent brands in the whole of America so take a look at this first thing first if you open up Google and you can see that it's in America over there and you type in the word beach tents you can see that they're organically the No.

1 search. Great. The next thing is on AI mode in Google as well you'll see over there once again they're number one on the result. Then if you open up ChatGPT again we gonna look for beach tents there you can see straight away they're on top.

Then we gonna go look in Claude again no surprise they're number one. We are then going to go look in Gemini again the No. 1 then Perplexity no surprises. Then finally I even use groc as you can see the results are great.

I'm very happy and so is the client. The first thing I just want to put out there is obviously everything comes from above and I'm very grateful that I have the skills that I know how to do this. The second thing is that the client has got a great brand and a great Product which made things a whole lot easier. Their website is great as well.

It's a Shopify website and everything just works great and it's simple and it's so easy to work with. Importantly, and this is an important thing that I want to put out there, we didn't do any fancy tricks. We worked on traditional SEO. We worked on the pages, on the collections, on the products, on the blogs.

We did deep work on the on site SEO. We've been doing a lot of work on off site SEO, building backlinks and a lot of digital P R. You don't have to do fancy tricks. You don't have to go do some tricks and schemes on Reddit and all these other social media things and do some funny things on Skema and wow, wow, wow.

All these fancy tricks. Additional SEO is how we've got the client to these top results that is ranking on top of Google and all the LLM's and the AI models out there to simple SEO. And this is how you get these results. If you want to contact me and see if we can do this for your brand, you can contact me at info at top click dot c o dot z a.

SEO workflows benefit from specific research tools for keyword discovery, historical checks, backlink triage, citations, and search visibility diagnostics. Main topics: SEO research and tooling workflow.

Ranking Number 1 on Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and G...


So plugins aren't the answer? So this is in response to using Query Monitor in order to debug a slow WordPress admin? Now, while I agree, adding unnecessary plugins for no reason is not the answer. This is for debugging. So if you've got a WordPress admin, and in case you didn't realise, WordPress uses plugins. Like, people that use WordPress will use a lot of plugins, and quite often it will result in a slower WordPress admin. So in order to speed it up, sometimes people don't know which plugin is causing the problem. So by enabling this plugin just for debugging, it'll give you the answers. It doesn't fix the problem for you, it just points you in the right direction. So in this case, plugins are the answer.

Temporary debugging plugins can be justified when they identify which plugin is slowing WordPress admin, as long as they are used for diagnosis. Main topics: WordPress admin performance debugging.

Replying to @Host Luma UK in this case I have to disagree with you. T...


If your website SEO strategy is focusing on publishing new content, I need you to stop what you're doing and do this instead. So I recently did an SEO audit for a client that noticed their website traffic had dropped off a cliff over the last year. And as part of this audit, I was analysing the pages that had seen the biggest traffic drops. And they all had one thing in common. Actually make that two things. The first, they were all blog posts. But the second, which is the most important bit, was that they were published in 2024. And up until 2025, when Google rolled out an algorithm update, they were doing super well and bringing in loads of traffic. Now the update that massively changed this for them was a spam update. After the update, like always, the SEO community analysed it and found that there were certain sites that were impacted the most by this. There were quite a few things they found within this. Like they were low authority sites, publishing 100% AI generated content. I tell you guys all the time not to do this, but the thing that stuck out to me, that is definitely what happened with this site is that their content was out of date. And Google started favouring fresher content after the update, that content was already a year out of date and now it's 2 years out of date and In the meantime, all of their competitors have been updating or publishing new content around these topics that was ranking, whereas they were focusing on just publishing new content on different topics. Feel like you probably know where I'm going with this...

If your website SEO strategy is focusing on publishing new content, I need you to stop what you're doing and do this instead. So I recently did an SEO audit for a client that noticed their website traffic had dropped off a cliff over the last year. And as part of this audit, I was analysing the pages that had seen the biggest traffic drops. And they all had one thing in common.

Actually make that two things. The first, they were all blog posts. But the second, which is the most important bit, was that they were published in 2024. And up until 2025, when Google rolled out an algorithm update, they were doing super well and bringing in loads of traffic.

Now the update that massively changed this for them was a spam update. After the update, like always, the SEO community analysed it and found that there were certain sites that were impacted the most by this. There were quite a few things they found within this. Like they were low authority sites, publishing 100% AI generated content.

I tell you guys all the time not to do this, but the thing that stuck out to me, that is definitely what happened with this site is that their content was out of date. And Google started favouring fresher content after the update, that content was already a year out of date and now it's 2 years out of date and In the meantime, all of their competitors have been updating or publishing new content around these topics that was ranking, whereas they were focusing on just publishing new content on different topics. Feel like you probably know where I'm going with this.

Stop publishing new content and go over your old content. Start out with anything that's over a year old. Check if it's ranking, check if it's bringing traffic, see if there's been a decline, and most importantly, see what currently is ranking. Because this content has already been published on your site, if you can update it and get it ranking or improve its rankings, it's gonna take you way less time than getting a new piece of content to rank.

Thank me later.

Updating an already-published page can be faster than trying to rank a new piece of content from scratch. Main topics: Content Refresh.

Your website SEO strategy doesn’t always need more SEO content. Somet...


Here's how to rank on AI overviews and before you call bullshit, I just did a massive study where I analyze 100 queries across 10 different industries this finding was the most interesting most AI overviews are built from one page so I had to test this out I searched why is car insurance so expensive for new drivers? And I looked at the results this one site is coming up for for every single query so this entire AI overview is built from this one page which brings us to our next finding. Google's AI writes the answer first then finds the sources to support it means since this one built the page, they had to find other sources that agreed with it so theoretically you could just do a search look at the AI overviews and write content that just agrees with that but websites that did this did not actually show up in the AI overviews and things like adding FAQ blocks answer boxes and structured layouts didn't matter as much as we thought so although you need to agree with what everybody else is saying, you should add your expert content immediately after the claim that everybody else is making so if everybody else is saying the kitchen renovation cost between 25 and 75 k but you charge 100 k you need to mention that before you mention your but here's the thing that no other studies show you most of the websites referenced by AI Overviews aren't stable, meaning they aren't the same every single time. However, if you want to increase your odds of getting recommended by AI, here's some best practices. Feel free to take a screenshot or check the description. Bye.

AI Overview source sets may be unstable across repeated checks, so one captured citation is not reliable evidence of durable visibility. Main topics: AI citation volatility.

How to rank on ai overviews 👇👇👇 What to do this week 1. Open your mos...


I wanted to talk about schema. What is it? Does it help your SEO? Well, Jake Hundley has done a pretty good deep dive on this. What did he find? Did it have any positive impact? Well, no, not in search results. But here's the shocker. Schema did have a noticeable impact on ChatGPT. Kind of surprising. Mark Williams Cook, he says that LLMs do not use schema. He is very convinced of this. His article explains it in more detail than his LinkedIn post that I covered before. So I put the challenge out for these two guys to get into a cage match and figure out what's happening here. So I just think it's really interesting to talk about both of these cases because it's the schema episode of the west. Oh, yeah.

There’s a big schema discourse in AI SEO right now, and two very prom...


If you're a business owner and you got a WordPress website, here's five things you should be checking every single month so it doesn't quietly cost you customers. Now stick around till the end or save this post for later, because No. 5 is gonna be really important. Okay, so No. 1 are your updates outdated plugins are the number one cause for WordPress hacks, and 90% of vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem come from plugins, not WordPress itself. So if you log in and you see that there's a red circle for updates, you wanna make sure that you're running those. Now don't run them blindly. Make sure you've got a staging environment or you've got backups just in case something goes wrong. And No. 2 is broken links. Now these are links that go nowhere. Now they annoy visitors and Google notices. So run your site through a broken link checker because this can run down your SEO. Most of the time people never check this and they've got no idea what broken links are on their website, so this is a great way to get to the bottom of it. Now No. 3 is your page speed. Now you wanna be checking this every month cause it will fluctuate, so test it. See what your score is so you know what you're dealing with. Speed is super important because it has a direct link to user experience and your SEO rankings. Slow sites will generally make people Bounce. Like, I'm sure you've done it before. You've gone on a website, it's really slow. You've gone stuff this, I'm going somewhere else. And Google knows that most business owners have never checked it. And it's free, so just go and do it...

If you're a business owner and you got a WordPress website, here's five things you should be checking every single month so it doesn't quietly cost you customers. Now stick around till the end or save this post for later, because No. 5 is gonna be really important.

Okay, so No. 1 are your updates outdated plugins are the number one cause for WordPress hacks, and 90% of vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem come from plugins, not WordPress itself. So if you log in and you see that there's a red circle for updates, you wanna make sure that you're running those.

Now don't run them blindly. Make sure you've got a staging environment or you've got backups just in case something goes wrong. And No.

2 is broken links. Now these are links that go nowhere. Now they annoy visitors and Google notices.

So run your site through a broken link checker because this can run down your SEO. Most of the time people never check this and they've got no idea what broken links are on their website, so this is a great way to get to the bottom of it. Now No.

3 is your page speed. Now you wanna be checking this every month cause it will fluctuate, so test it. See what your score is so you know what you're dealing with.

Speed is super important because it has a direct link to user experience and your SEO rankings. Slow sites will generally make people Bounce. Like, I'm sure you've done it before.

You've gone on a website, it's really slow. You've gone stuff this, I'm going somewhere else. And Google knows that most business owners have never checked it.

And it's free, so just go and do it. No. 4 is backups.

You wanna make sure that you've got off site, off server backups that are safe and that they work. If you get hacked or you break something when you're updating the website without backups, this can be really painful. Now, I know a lot of people say they've got backups, but have you tested them?

Can you use them? Can you get the website back up and running in a matter of minutes? I suggest that you just check that.

Make sure that you've got the files ready. And No. 5 is Google Search Console. this is the most powerful tool that you get for free to help you rank.

You set it up once and you let it collect data. Once it's got enough data, you can see exactly how people find you and how they don't find you. It shows you clear content gap and all the stuff that you should be ranking for that you're not.

So make sure you go and check all of these. If you're behind on a couple, that's perfectly normal, but it's exactly the stuff that will cost you down the line. And the Google Search Console one, that's where most small businesses Are leaving money on the table.

So be honest with me. Let me know. How many of these do you do every month?

Let me know in the comments.

WordPress backup claims are not enough; maintenance should verify off-site/off-server backups can actually restore the site. Main topics: WordPress backup restore testing.

Be honest, how many of these are you actually doing? Number 5 is wher...


This might be the biggest Google Business Profile update of the year. Google Business Profile data is coming to Google Analytics. you'll be able to connect your business profile directly to GA four and see local performance data like calls, website clicks, bookings, direction requests, and total interactions. And this is great because the local SEO reporting has always been messy. Your website data is in GA four, your Google Business Profile data is in the Google Business Profile, and you have to piece it all together manually. Now you'll be able to see all of that data in one place and get a clearer picture of how your business profiles, helping people find you, contact you, and visit your website. And if you care about local SEO reporting, there is no better tool on the market than Whitespark's local ranking grids.

Local visibility depends on Google Business Profile and local ranking settings that need active category, service-area, Q&A, and ranking QA. Main topics: Google Business Profile local SEO operations.

Google Business Profile data is coming to Google Analytics.  You’ll s...


more and more people are learning about your business through AI instead of a traditional search engine but the other trend we're seeing right now is wherever they learn about your business they're then going to AI to ask its opinion of your business so I'm gonna talk about how to make sure that opinion is a good one because a recommendation from AI means a lot more than ranking at the top of a search engine in fact in a lot of cases it means more than a recommendation from a human people tend to trust what AI says about you I think by now essentially every business owner has asked AI what it thinks about their business and at first glance that makes sense if you want to know what AI thinks about you just ask it but of course these are probabilistic models it's gonna give you a different spot each time and more importantly the way you ask and the question you asked makes a huge difference in its response so you really want some kind of software that can track a variety of prompts every day there are a lot of different options for this we use peek...

more and more people are learning about your business through AI instead of a traditional search engine but the other trend we're seeing right now is wherever they learn about your business they're then going to AI to ask its opinion of your business so I'm gonna talk about how to make sure that opinion is a good one because a recommendation from AI means a lot more than ranking at the top of a search engine in fact in a lot of cases it means more than a recommendation from a human people tend to trust what AI says about you I think by now essentially every business owner has asked AI what it thinks about their business and at first glance that makes sense if you want to know what AI thinks about you just ask it but of course these are probabilistic models it's gonna give you a different spot each time and more importantly the way you ask and the question you asked makes a huge difference in its response so you really want some kind of software that can track a variety of prompts every day there are a lot of different options for this we use peek.

AI the next thing business owners will typically do is they'll ask the AI said what it did why did you give us that evaluation why didn't you mention this benefits and of course the AI is gonna give you a very confident response but here's the thing you have to understand AI really doesn't understand how it works and that of course feels counterintuitive but the truth is it's gonna answer that question the same way it answers any question based on its training data and that training data does not include insights on why it recommended your brand to understand why it truly said what it did about your brand you need to look at the pages it cited before it gave a response what you'll find most of the time is that its response is essentially just summarizing the content on the pages that it cited so if you want AI say nice things about you you need to make sure the pages it citing are saying those nice things about you there are two ways to do this one is you can look at the pages it's already citing and figure out how you might be able to change the content so it says nice things about you however you'll realize pretty quickly that this is hard to do there will be some low hanging fruit maybe there's some directory listings that haven't been updated maybe there are some Reddit threads that you can leave a comment on maybe you can even get some customers to leave reviews on review sites that are being cited you're gonna run out of these easy opportunities pretty quickly you're gonna find yourself emailing publishers and begging them to say nice things about you in their article because being cited by AI and you totally should do that but don't expect more than a 5% response rate but the second way to make sure the pages AI is citing or saying nice things about you is to create those pages yourself on your own website or if AI is citing sites like Reddit or LinkedIn or medium you can create the pages there but most of the opportunity is typically on your own website and here's the thing when people are asking about your brand specifically those are branded searches the AI is performing your website is the number one authority in the world on your brand so all you need to do is identify the types of phrases people are asking about your company and make sure there's content on your website directly addressing those questions and the question itself should either be in the title of the page or in a subheading but if you put it in a subheading and the AI still isn't finding that content in its search I'll create a separate page with that question as the title some pages you definitely want in your website a page about your reviews a page about your awards and achievements and an FAQ page

The creator recommends examining the pages cited before an AI brand evaluation instead of trusting the model's own explanation of why it produced that evaluation. Main topics: measure-ai-search-visibility.

How to make AI say good things about your business: it mostly just su...


Hey Harry, we're gonna do keep four, cut four. You ready? Ready. E-A-T. Cut. Site structure. Site structure I wanna keep. That's important. Internal links. Cut internal links if we have good site structure. Information gain. Keep information gain. That's super important. Lessons between information AI already knows versus new information that you're giving it. Low volume, low difficulty keywords. Cut. I don't like the idea of keywords anymore. I like the idea of topics. Digital PR. Keep. That digital PR is such a cheat code. High volume, high difficulty keywords. Oh, you do. Cool. I don't like the keywords. Last one is topical authority. That's what we do like. We want that topical authority for sure. So your team is site structure, information gain, digital PR, and topical authority. Sounds pretty bad ass to me. I'm pretty happy with that.

Technical SEO depends on site speed, architecture, topical coverage, engagement, and freshness rather than isolated keyword edits. Main topics: Technical SEO and site architecture hygiene.

Keep 4 Cut 4 with the biggest SEO concepts of 2026 Let me know which ...


Most website traffic now comes from bots, not humans. Clover just did a study and found that 57.5% of website traffic comes from bots. Business owners that are keeping up with this realize things are changing. I get emails every day from businesses worried that they're falling behind. They recognize that we're quickly entering a world where the primary user of your website is an AI agent. They're ready to rebuild their website for this AI world, fully integrate a into their workflow, and take advantage of these trends before their competitors do. And that's awesome. If you're thinking like that, I think you're in the top 5% of businesses right now. But here's what I tell them. We can totally speculate about what the web is gonna look like a year from now and start building towards that. And I do think we're finally getting to the point where we can make some confident guesses about what that'll look like. If you want to take full advantage of this moment, you have to take some risk. But before you take any risks, let's figure out what you can do right now that is guaranteed to be future proof and is also guaranteed to help you right now. So here are the main opportunities I recommend you take advantage of before you start experimenting. 1. Create an internal knowledge base for your company. Document all the information about your company in a way that's easy for AI to understand. You're Gonna need this before you do anything sophisticated with AI, and it can help you a lot right now. 2...

Most website traffic now comes from bots, not humans. Clover just did a study and found that 57.5% of website traffic comes from bots. Business owners that are keeping up with this realize things are changing. I get emails every day from businesses worried that they're falling behind.

They recognize that we're quickly entering a world where the primary user of your website is an AI agent. They're ready to rebuild their website for this AI world, fully integrate a into their workflow, and take advantage of these trends before their competitors do. And that's awesome. If you're thinking like that, I think you're in the top 5% of businesses right now.

But here's what I tell them. We can totally speculate about what the web is gonna look like a year from now and start building towards that. And I do think we're finally getting to the point where we can make some confident guesses about what that'll look like. If you want to take full advantage of this moment, you have to take some risk.

But before you take any risks, let's figure out what you can do right now that is guaranteed to be future proof and is also guaranteed to help you right now. So here are the main opportunities I recommend you take advantage of before you start experimenting. 1. Create an internal knowledge base for your company.

Document all the information about your company in a way that's easy for AI to understand. You're Gonna need this before you do anything sophisticated with AI, and it can help you a lot right now. 2. All information about your company that you're willing to share publicly should exist on your website, and it should be structured in a way that makes it trivial for AI to find that information.

3. You need to be tracking how AI does, research and ultimately recommends a brand when people are searching for the product or service that you sell. Identify the types of pages and articles that AI likes to cite before making that recommendation, and make sure you have more visible versions of those pages on your website. Take note of all the third party review platforms and directories and discussion forums that AI sites, and make sure your brand has a strong presence there.

Not only is this the most effective form of digital marketing right now, there's no sign that any of this will become less important in the foreseeable future.

An internal company knowledge base is a practical first step before more sophisticated AI-agent work. Main topics: AI Knowledge Base.

How to prepare for the agentic web: 57% of web traffic is bots now. D...


How do I set up the lighting for my social media videos? I've made close on 700 videos and I've used the same lighting in almost all of them. I want to show you how simple it actually is and I'm going to show you step by step. The first thing that I want to show you is the room that I'm recording in. As you can see, it's a simple room. It's got fluorescent lights. You can see my iPhone put up on a tripod over there connected to my microphone with a simple cable. It's important to note my background, I think is quite simple as well and most importantly, I've got completely black curtains over there that keeps all the light coming in from the windows. Simple as that. The next thing I'm gonna do is put on a Godox spotlight. It goes overhead of me as well and you'll see what a difference it makes when I turn it on. There you go. As you can see, it's on top of me in a bit of a angle to try keep the reflections away from my glasses. The next step that I'm gonna do is that I've got these newer lights in the background. I choose different colours for all my videos just to add a cool background effect to it. Okay, now for the final step, because as I mentioned in my office I've got complete blackout curtains. Look what happens when I switch off The light. And this is where the magic happens. Wow. There you go. It's as simple as that. Can you see what a difference it makes? Again, everything's completely black. I've got the spotlight over there. I've got the backgrounds. And there you go. This is the lighting that I use for all of my videos...

How do I set up the lighting for my social media videos? I've made close on 700 videos and I've used the same lighting in almost all of them. I want to show you how simple it actually is and I'm going to show you step by step. The first thing that I want to show you is the room that I'm recording in.

As you can see, it's a simple room. It's got fluorescent lights. You can see my iPhone put up on a tripod over there connected to my microphone with a simple cable. It's important to note my background, I think is quite simple as well and most importantly, I've got completely black curtains over there that keeps all the light coming in from the windows.

Simple as that. The next thing I'm gonna do is put on a Godox spotlight. It goes overhead of me as well and you'll see what a difference it makes when I turn it on. There you go.

As you can see, it's on top of me in a bit of a angle to try keep the reflections away from my glasses. The next step that I'm gonna do is that I've got these newer lights in the background. I choose different colours for all my videos just to add a cool background effect to it. Okay, now for the final step, because as I mentioned in my office I've got complete blackout curtains.

Look what happens when I switch off The light. And this is where the magic happens. Wow. There you go.

It's as simple as that. Can you see what a difference it makes? Again, everything's completely black. I've got the spotlight over there.

I've got the backgrounds. And there you go. This is the lighting that I use for all of my videos. I've put the brands at the bottom that you can go look them up yourself if you want to choose any of them.

And there, I hope you enjoy this video and keep on following me for more videos and tips like this.

Video performance depends on basic production quality, hooks, and repeatable capture workflows as much as on the idea itself. Main topics: Video content production quality.

How I Get the Perfect Lighting for My Social Media Videos People ofte...


Or AI slop bores me. That's basically what a lot of people are telling Google right now as they switch to duckduckgo's new no AI search engine. According to duckduckgo, its app installs increase 30% as people reject Google's AI features. Duckduckgo has a no AI search page where AI features are turned off by default. Many people just don't want to be force fed AI every time they search for something simple. Duckduckgo still has AI features if you want them, but their big selling point is choice. So the next time you want to search for something simple, like what are the best headphones to get in 2026, you don't love Google's AI generated results, you can use Duck Duck go to get direct results from authoritative sources with no AI. And that is exactly what a lot of people are looking for right now.

AI visibility work depends on matching the right model, search surface, or answer format to the business outcome being optimized. Main topics: AI visibility and answer readiness.

People are flocking to DuckDuckGo in protest of Google’s AI driven re...