I had an awesome chat with @lennysan on his podcast, and here’s my #1 tip for diving into SEO today: Put yourself in your users' shoes! 👟 At @SurveyMonkey , we all had to run our own surveys to truly understand what the user experience was like for our customers. That’s the secret—know your users inside and out, and your SEO will benefit. 💡 Pro Tip: Stop thinking like a marketer; start thinking like a user! Catch the full convo with Lenny for more insights! 🎧👇 YouTube: youtu.be/Z71yGshPTwk

Compounding is the entire argument for SEO. Every other channel stops the moment the budget does. productledseo.com/p/how-long…

Big news for local businesses📍 You can now link your @GoogleMyBiz Profile directly to Google Analytics 📣 Track local interactions, calls, bookings, & direction clicks right in GA for a complete, cross-channel view of your performance. Stay up to date → goo.gle/4xsqNsU

I found a study that tested the GEO tactics everyone sells. On three AI engines, they lost to doing nothing at all. The tactics are the famous ones: Add statistics. Add quotations. Cite sources. Use an authoritative tone. A new paper ran a page through these edits across three different AI engines and measured how often it got cited. On GPT-4o-mini, the untouched page got cited 13.34% of the time. The same page after the full GEO checklist landed between 10.92 and 12.21%. The AutoGEO method I shared earlier this year scored 12.12%. Every optimized version came in below just leaving the page alone. Before you burn your playbook, two caveats belong right here. This was measured on simulated engines, not live ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews. And it is a single preprint, so not peer reviewed. Other research, including the AutoGEO paper itself, reports the opposite, with citation gains up to 51 percent. So the honest read is not that GEO is bullshit: it is that nobody has settled this yet, and anyone selling you a fixed checklist as proven science is overclaiming. Here is what I think the data is actually pointing at: bolting tricks onto thin content does not move the needle. The same study found that strong credibility signals, meaning real statistics, citations and quotations, pushed one page from 8.4% visibility to 23.7%. The lever was never the tactic: it was whether the content earned the citation in the first place. It is just the fundament, not the strategy. So stop using GEO checklists like they are settled rules (except for Glippy, Haha!). Test your own pages instead. Track which ones AI engines actually cite, and build from what works, not from what a vendor pitched you. Sources: 1. Liu, Z. and Xu, P. "Think Before Writing: Feature-Level Multi-Objective Optimization for Generative Citation Visibility" (April 2026), arXiv. arxiv.org/abs/2604.19113 2. Wu, Y. and Zhong, S. et al. "What Generative Search Engines Like and How to Optimize Web Content Cooperatively" (2025), arXiv. arxiv.org/abs/2510.11438 3. Aggarwal, P. et al. "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" (2023), arXiv. arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735

Google zero click study shows only 27% of clicks from Google go to the open web seroundtable.com/google-zero…

how does a search engine measure experience (if they wanted to) They're not looking at your author bio, I promise you. It's all math. When you vectorize the entire internet, the "experience" sites will cluster together. Reddit, Forums, reviews, etc. There will also be a cluster of non-experience: wikipedia, dictionaries, news, etc. The engines just see what cluster's centroid is closer to your website. They don't need you to spell out experience - because your site is an entity, and it fits on a knowledge graph - and they can compare it to other "experts" on the same knowledge graph. Hope that helps.

The layoffs for SEO roles, IMHO, are because leaders have no idea who they should be hiring for these roles. productledseo.com/p/who-shou…

Not if it’s 5 @rustybrick’s

Pumped to see within all the awesome updates to @screamingfrog, the ability to get crawl comparisons via email. I wrote about a vibe coded solution I use to get similar daily emails for @SEOjobscom but this is next level. seoforlunch.com/p/goodbye-co…

Ahrefs' Domain Rating (DR) API endpoint is now 100% FREE. 🔥 Now that AI lets anyone spin up their own tools and automations, the bottleneck isn't coding anymore — it's access to quality data. And DR is one of the best shortcuts out there for sizing up how authoritative a website really is. So we're just giving it away! Grab it here: docs.ahrefs.com/en/api/refer… New to DR? It rates the strength of any site's backlink profile on a 0–100 scale. More here: ahrefs.com/blog/domain-ratin… Now go build something cool. 😉

@5le: "Now I think that brands, every brand should absolutely have a website because this becomes the real estate that you own and control, which then feeds into the LLM."

Q: Between all the platforms that LLMs pull info from, if you only had to choose 2 platforms to focus on. Which would you choose? Why? @5le: YouTube & YouTube.

@5le: "Here's a company I was consulting with recently, where I told the CMO to just tell the team: your job is to make me $4 million this quarter. Go. And that all of a sudden frames different things. A lot of things on the roadmap just fall away. So the question isn't, is it an ecosystem? It's like, what are you doing today to justify your job? And unfortunately, we're in an environment where you kind of have to do that."

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The SEO job market is tighter than I've ever seen in my entire career. If you have 3 to 5 years of experience you are worth a lot more than you think! If you're in the US and I can connect you to a great new job with people willing to pay for your skillset, DM me.

If you are looking for a new SEO/Growth role - I have some great hiring managers to introduce you to! Likewise, if you are hiring I have some great candidates for you to meet!