Base2026 index
Excerpt-first source records with attribution and original links.
This is how Google is busting local businesses. Google is asking, does this business offer rewards in exchange for reviews? Reviews are extremely important to the success of a local business. Lots of business owners are constantly strategizing new ways to get reviews. Offering rewards is a very common way. But this is what Google says about it. We do not...
OpenThe most effective way of getting recommended in AI search is to optimize and create new content on your website. This makes up about 70% of the work we do at our agency, and I like to think we've gotten pretty good at it. However, sometimes when I explain this to prospective clients, they have one of two responses. They'll either say, oh, AI could never...
OpenGoogle is launching AI performance reports in Search Console. (This is huge) Google Search Console will soon have dedicated Search Generative AI performance reports that allow you to track how often your website's pages appear as cited sources in AI-generated search results. This data was previously folded into aggregate organic search metrics, but it is...
OpenAlright, so most of you still don't really get this about website SEO, and we need to address it. Loads of you in my comments all the time asking me: how do I optimise for AI search? Does this tip apply to AI search? How do I do this for AI search? Website SEO in 2026 includes AI search. Google have literally just announced that they are leaning way more...
OpenIf you want to rank on Google but you're stuck around here or even lower, this is a simple way to fix it. Go to Google Search Console. This is Google's own tool for showing you how your site shows in Google search index. Go to performance, search results, go over to pages, toggle on average position, sort by best position. You want to see a bunch of ones,...
OpenJust when we thought Microsoft was out of the AI game, they go ahead and announce Scout, which looks truly incredible. So I just want to talk about what this is and why every business should be paying attention right now. Scout is a new always-on agent that works inside Microsoft 365. So instead of going to a separate app like ChatGPT, it just responds in...
OpenGoogle is finally starting to share data about when you show up in their AI results. Up until now, it's just been a black box. Google Search Console has shown us clicks to your website as well as impressions in traditional search results. But we've had no idea how often we're showing up in AI overviews or AI mode or new AI features. Based on what we know...
OpenI know this is gonna p- people off, but some of you really need to hear it. Niche blogging is over. I actually made the mistake of setting up a niche blog just before ChatGPT launched. I think it was about treadmill desks or something. And I bought a course on niche blogging that came with a community of people that were all doing the same thing. Not even...
OpenClaude Is Hiring an SEO Lead. And You Want It to Run Your SEO? The irony is hard to ignore. People keep claiming that AI tools like Claude will replace SEO professionals and SEO agencies. Yet Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is hiring an SEO Lead to improve its own organic search performance. If AI could completely replace experienced SEOs, surely on...
OpenFew days ago I posted a video about Claude 4.8 and how it had mixed reviews. Well, I've now been using 4.8 for three days and I gotta say, kind of like it. Someone talked about why I like 4.8 so much and why it might have got mixed reviews at first. When I first started using 4.8, I did feel it was a little verbose, sterile, academic, but over the last th...
OpenCan You Buy Backlinks for Your Website for SEO? (Read Here) Google’s official position is clear. Buying backlinks violates its guidelines and can result in penalties if detected. But the reality is far more complicated. Survey after survey shows that many SEO professionals buy backlinks, and most believe their competitors are doing the same. In competitiv...
OpenGoogle's May 2026 core update has officially finished rolling out, and here's what we know so far. On the same day that Google announced this update, they also announced that they were gonna be using Gemini 3.5 Flash in all of their AI-powered search features. And during this update rollout, every industry saw an impact, but it was finance, online communi...
OpenThis is such a big deal. People think Google is pranking us. Google is finally giving an AI report in Google Search Console. Google Search Console is Google's own tool for seeing how your website appears in Google's search index. Shows you how many clicks you get from SEO, what people search to find your website, who is linking to your website. Problems w...
OpenConnect Microsoft Clarity and Claude via MCP to Get Amazing Website Insights Microsoft Clarity now has an official MCP server that can connect directly to Claude. This allows you to ask questions about your website in plain English and get instant answers from your Clarity data. You can analyse pages, devices, scroll depth, countries, engagement metrics,...
OpenTechCrunch put out this article, Google Search as you know it is over. At its Google conference, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of search centered around the reimagined intelligent search box, with the company describes as the biggest change to its entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago. Lots of people put up po...
OpenIf your website isn't showing up on Google or any other search engines, this file could be the reason why. I can't tell you the amount of websites I've seen made this mistake, even when they've had professionals working on their site. This is why my course, the SEO Clinic, has an entire module on this foundational technical because it is so easy to miss....
OpenGoogle are rolling out their second core update of the year, and over this weekend some serious stuff went down. The update actually started rolling out on the 21st May, but it was on the 30th of May that people started to see some serious movements. And by that I mean that a lot of sites saw ranking and traffic drop. And this is happening pretty much acr...
OpenIf you want to see if Google is updating its algorithms, this is a really sweet tool: Google Search Volatility Aggregator. When Google updates its algorithms, the results in Google move up and down. This is what's called volatility. This also affects AI. A lot of major AI systems like ChatGPT rely on Google. When the results change, ChatGPT gets different...
OpenSearch engine optimization just hit an all time high in Google Trends. This is why. Go to ChatGPT, put in your prompt, copy the part of the URL that comes after forward slash C, right click inspect. Go to the network tab, paste in what you just copied. Click refresh. Click the orange brackets with the text that you just copied. Go to the response tab. Sea...
OpenWhy create content anymore? AI is just gonna train on that data and then give the answer directly to the user without sending anyone to my website. I get this question all the time. In fact, I recently had Claude analyze all my TikTok comments, and this was the question that came up most often. And it's true. Fewer people are visiting websites because mor...
OpenDon't put collapsible FAQs on pages you want to rank on Google. This SEO test had text within an accordion versus fully visible text. This was split tested across many product pages. The version with text fully visible got 12% more organic sessions than the hidden text version. Google even recently said they're ignoring FAQ schema altogether. Whereas it u...
OpenChatGPT's responses have always been heavily influenced by Reddit, but starting May 8th, Reddit went from making up 3% of ChatGPT citations to almost 12% now. The citation rate isn't evenly spread out across industries. For sometimes a prompt's Reddit isn't cited at all, and for others it's over 50%. But the point is we saw a nearly 4 x and the frequency...
OpenYouTube is automatically adding AI labels to videos using AI. This is a huge change. People are putting up AI videos targeting competitor brand names. For example, somebody puts up a video giving a review of a competitor's brand. This review uses a photorealistic AI avatar. The review is negative. It shows up on Google for anybody searching competitor, th...
OpenAnthropic just released Opus 4.8 and it has had a mixed response. So let's talk about where it excels and where you might want to continue using Opus 4.6. 4.8 was built on top of 4.7, and that's where a lot of the criticism seems to stem from. If you don't know, 4.7 also had a mixed response. Many people, our agency included, have continued using 4.6 for...
OpenIf you want your products or services to show up in Google's AI search results, which is going to be all of their search results soon, Google wants you to share more information with them. I want to talk about the new conversational attributes they've added to Google Merchant Center, what this means for e-commerce businesses, and what we can expect for al...
OpenCreate Product Video Animations Using ChatGPT and AI Video Generators You can now create professional product video animations using ChatGPT and image-to-video AI tools in just a few minutes. Simply upload a product image into ChatGPT and ask it to place the product into a professional photoshoot environment. Then ask ChatGPT to generate an image-to-video...
OpenMost WordPress websites have got way too many plugins on them, and you probably don't even need half of them. Having too many plugins on your WordPress website can make it open to breaks hacks, and it's gonna slow it down. I'm gonna show you how to condense them. Because there's plugins out there that will do multiple things. And this is streamline your e...
OpenThis is the greatest time to be alive. Huge software companies are begging to be unbundled in a day. You can take one of their features, make it yourself with a Replit, Cursor. Any vibe coding tool. See what that major SaaS company is showing on Google for. Any SEO tool will do this. Look for keywords like generator or people trying to do stuff. Record yo...
OpenWe're about to enter a world where most buying decisions are made by AI agents, not humans. At Google I/O, we just learned that after someone searches for the products or services you offer, Google will give them the option to have an AI agent to check pricing on you and your competitors. AI agents will be scouring your website. If you're a local business...
OpenThe Universal Cart from Google and Gemini takes agentic shopping to the next level! The Universal Cart is a Gemini-powered shopping tool by Google that consolidates products from different retailers across various Google surfaces (like Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail) into a single, intelligent cart. * Background Tracking: It monitors your saved items,...
OpenI am in shock that Google did this. Google actually put up an article about how to get mentioned in AI. They wrote it themselves: "Optimizing your website for generative AI features." They call out generative engine optimization. They have a whole section about myths that people spread about how to get mentioned in AI, over focusing on structured data. Th...
OpenIf you're an e-commerce business owner and you're trying to make money from Google without paying for ads, you need to know how to do proper keyword research, because a scary amount of you get this wrong. And we're gonna change that right now. Full disclosure, I show you this method in depth in my course, SEO Clinic, but I am gonna show you now. It's just...
OpenGemini Spark is Google’s new AI that is the real competitor to Clawbot! Gemini Spark is Google’s 24/7 autonomous AI agent built to work quietly in the background and handle multi-step tasks across your digital workspace. Unlike normal chatbots that only respond when you prompt them, Spark can monitor your apps, manage schedules, organise emails, and autom...
OpenGoogle is giving lists in Google Maps, literally telling users what businesses to go to. Imagine you're walking around the city trying to figure out where to go. Something like this will be very useful if you want to know how to get into these lists. This is what people are finding. These lists are generated from user-generated content, from blog style re...
OpenIf you are any sort of business and you are not putting up comparison pages, you are missing the plot. Try searching Rippling versus deal. See how Rippling compares to deal. Rippling is controlling the narrative. Guess what? This also gets cited in the AI overview if you ask ChatGPT, Rippling versus deal. It literally has it in its web search. In fact, if...
OpenAI is getting really good at making websites. But you don't want to vibe code your business's website. Right, but platforms like WordPress aren't really keeping up with how quickly AI is moving. If you've been thinking about what's the best platform to build your website on and whether or not you should migrate off to your existing platform, it can be rea...
OpenSo you know you should be doing more with AI. You know there's work you're doing right now that AI could do better, but you also know what it feels like to spend a week figuring out how to hand something over to AI, only for some new feature or tool to come out and completely replace your process. Or maybe to just give up after a week because it was too h...
OpenIf you have any type of business, put up a page on your website titled your competitor's name, then the word "alternative." Explain why you are a great alternative to your competitor. Explain it really concise. Give a button before people even start scrolling that lets people use your business right there. Get driving directions, use your app. Make a call...
OpenYou don't even have to be well known to get into top publications. You can get emails from journalists in top publications who are looking for experts to quote in their articles. Source of sources.com. This is well known in the public relations and SEO world. If you're a standard business, you might not know about this. Washington Post, Tripadvisor, MPR,...
OpenThis company's scaled its SEO results like these NYC skyscrapers, and now it's crashing. Its blog has been entirely removed from Google. If you want to know how to get your brand remove from Google search, pay attention. Hundreds of completely AI-generated articles in a variety of niches. Parable articles too. There are no images in these articles except...
OpenWe have officially entered the post ranking era of SEO. It is not just about ranking on Google. Your brand also needs to appear on ChatGPT, Claude, AI overviews. And it needs to have a presence on Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, and anywhere else your audience is spending time. Which means that SEO is now about your entire online presence. And here's why. First,...
OpenGoogle just announced a major update to their core search algorithm. I wanna talk about how you should think about updates like these and what they might mean for your business or website. So Google does three or four of these major updates every year. They used to have fun names like Penguin or Panda. Now they're just named after the month they came out....
OpenWay too many of you are focusing on things that don't actually matter when it comes to your website SEO. And one of the worst offenders for this is technical SEO. Some of you are spending so much time on this you don't need to. I've put together a checklist. Here's what you need to do. First, and I really hope you're all doing this, SSL certificate. And m...
OpenThis is absolutely bonkers. Google is now pulling social media posts directly into Google Maps. It looks like this: you see a business profile, then there's social media updates. If you are not posting on social and you have a local business, you need to start now. This is from one of the top voices in local SEO. Google is making it clear that social medi...
OpenIf you have a website, you need to make sure that not just humans, but also AI agents are able to use that website. This is an initiative that Google has been taking the lead on. And this week at Google IO, we saw their latest push in this direction. So I'll talk about two new things you're going to have to start thinking about when you're designing your...
OpenI just want to remind you it is incredibly easy to influence large language models. People are using press releases, Reddit, YouTube to rank number one on Google in hours. Large language models use web searches to get most of their information. They come across what is being planted by SEOs. They regurgitate it as if it is fact. They don't actually know....
OpenI Just Bought 3 Mac Minis to Take Our Digital Agency’s AI Capabilities to the Next Level AI is becoming a core part of how our digital agency operates. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and other models are now heavily involved in workflows, automations, research, testing, content, and day to day operations. If you take AI seriously, hardware starts to matter. The...
OpenMost of you are not using AI correctly, and it's why your SEO is not working. It doesn't matter what prompt you use. It doesn't matter what AI tool you use. If you're using it like this, you're doing it wrong. AI cannot come up with brand new information. It either works off the information that you give it, or it goes and finds it. So let's say there's a...
OpenThe old way of doing SEO doesn't work anymore. The old way was putting up pages, how, what, when, where, answering questions that people have. That is gone. A recent study showed that AI overviews reduce clicks to websites by 58%. What you have to do instead is figure out searches people are doing where they want your brand. These aren't how, what, when,...
OpenWe're entering the next chapter of Google Search, where AI features aren't just in search. Google Search is AI search through and through. That's a direct quote from the head of search at Google, Liz Reid, announcing at Google I/O something I've been predicting would happen by the end of 2026, but it looks like it's coming a lot sooner. Traditional search...
OpenIt still boggles my mind how people are hacking Google Maps. Driving directions are one of the biggest ranking factors in Google Maps. People get their friends and families to use driving directions to go to their businesses. Some people are crazy. They hire other people who drive around with hundreds of phones all using driving directions to get to the b...
OpenBlog posts are gonna stop working pretty soon, right? I talk a lot about how effective blog posts are right now for SEO, among other tactics, and one of the comments I get most often is, this is gonna stop working soon, though. Google's changing, AI is getting smarter, and these kind of tactics, we're just not gonna work much longer. We should focus on wh...
OpenBoost Local SEO Rankings with Driving Instructions 🚗 One overlooked local SEO signal is driving direction requests on your Google Business Profile. Most businesses focus only on reviews and keywords, but Google also tracks real user actions. When someone taps “Directions,” it signals real world intent and tells Google that people genuinely want to visit t...
OpenAs a business, you can't just be marketing to humans anymore. You need to be marketing to humans and AI. I'll explain what I mean and then talk about how you can take advantage of this change. Until recently, marketing was about getting attention on your brand through ads or SEO, and then once you have that attention, convincing a human to become a custom...
OpenHow many businesses out here could have an easier time doing marketing if they just knew some basics of automation? Go to Reusevideo com. This makes it so if you post a video to one platform, it automatically comes out to every other platform. You don't have to do anything. It automatically releases to every other platform. This means if you are a small b...
OpenIf your website isn't showing up on Google or being mentioned ChatGPT, do this before you spend any time or money on SEO. Search engines have an index where they store all of the data on the pages they show in their search results. And if your pages aren't in this index, they're never gonna show up on Google, ChatGPT, or any other search engine. First, yo...
OpenGoogle just released their guide for how to rank in Google's AI features. I wanna talk about what we can take away from it. Specifically, it's what Google's telling us not to do that I think is most insightful. The guide is called Optimizing Your Website for Generative AI Features in Google Search. The guide starts the same way all of Google's SEO guidanc...
OpenGoogle Premier Partners in South Africa 🇿🇦 - Top 3% of Digital Marketing Agencies Google Premier Partner status is awarded to agencies that demonstrate high level expertise, strong campaign performance, and large scale Google Ads management. To achieve and maintain this status, agencies must consistently meet strict requirements across performance, manage...
OpenReddit just became even more important for businesses. Reddit was already dominating Google search results and having an outsized return on AI responses, but now Google is experimenting with showing Reddit comments directly in the AI response as well as on Google Business Profiles. So I just want to talk about how you can take advantage of this trend towa...
OpenIf you have any type of business, buy a domain name. Your business name plus the word reviews. Your business name reviews. Put all of your reviews on this website. List them all out. Write everything. All of the reviews that you would want people to see. When people are doing due diligence on your business, ChatGPT goes to Google, searches your business n...
OpenHow many times have you seen this? SEO is dead, AI search is replacing SEO. This one is literally from Forbes. You see it everywhere. Google just released a guide how to rank in AI. Is SEO still relevant for generative AI search? Yes, the best practices for SEO continue to be relevant. Generative AI features are rooted in their core search and quality sys...
OpenGoogle is now ignoring the vast majority of content online. Let's talk about why this is and how you can make sure your pages don't get ignored. So it used to be that Google included the majority of content online in their index, meaning when you did a Google search, Google was looking through most of the pages on the internet. And that's because there wa...
OpenSEO Specialist, and these are the four things that I implement instantly on any ecommerce website I'm working on. The first is tiered and search driven collection pages. These are so underutilised by ecommerce sites and the ranking and revenue potential is huge. This is basically taking all of your existing product collection pages and looking for ways yo...
OpenThis is why you shouldn't let ChatGPT run your SEO. How to do SEO for LLMs? This is something that a lot of people are searching for right now. Key tactics: right answer first content. So if you're targeting informational keywords, you should know that AI overviews reduce clicks by 58%. A lot of the time AI will cite you, but people won't even care. They...
OpenMy friend told me to tell you to make sure you add keywords to the page and put in as many as you can.
OpenEvery modern day marketer needs to care about this. Google is finally giving you a dedicated way to measure AI traffic in Google Analytics. New AI Assistant traffic measurement medium. A new AI assistant value is automatically assigned when the referrer matches a recognized AI assistant. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. This update was just announced. It's about...
OpenIf you've been following GEO advice on how to rank an AI search, you definitely heard about the importance of structured data or schema markup. I think it's safe to say this is the most commonly repeated piece of advice for ranking an AI. If you want AI to notice you, you need to have structured data or schema markup on your pages. Most of the time, peopl...
OpenJust a reminder that podcasts are still a blue ocean. Back before I had any social following, before anybody had heard of me, I used this to go on 30 podcasts in three months. You can get on podcasts as a guest even if nobody has heard of you. Fill out your profile very thoroughly. This site uses AI to match hosts who want guests with relevant guests. The...
OpenGoogle have officially ditched FAQ rich results. If you don't know what I'm talking about, rich results are the expandable answer boxes that used to show up in Google search results, and adding FAQ schema to your content was the main way to get them. Basically, they were an easy way to improve your click through rate and visibility on Google. May 7th, 202...
OpenI want to talk about one of the methods we use for ranking in AI search because it's largely replacing what link building did for traditional SEO. Broadly speaking, ranking in AI search is pretty simple. Someone goes to Google's AI mode or ChatGPT and enters a prompt or a query. The AI then does a series of searches. In a traditional search engine, it sor...
OpenWasn't AI supposed to get cheaper over time? Why is it getting more expensive? The way things are going, it looks like AI usage is just going to cost more and more for the foreseeable future. So why would we keep spending more tokens if they're getting more expensive? And what did we get wrong here? Well, the truth is, if you control for capabilities, AI...
OpenOne of the most common ways SEO agencies will rip off clients is with unnecessary schema implementation. Schema is code that makes you get special features in Google like this. With no schema. With schema, you get a lot more clicks when you get the special feature in Google. But Google has actually deprecated a lot of schema over the years, and agencies j...
OpenGoogle is the biggest prankster of all time. No, I'm not talking about Google's April Fool's Day pranks. Google literally has a patent where, if you're doing too well in SEO, they will make you think you're doing poorly. It literally says Google's initial response to what the spammer is doing could cause the page's rank to be negatively influenced rather...
OpenI wish more ecommerce business owners knew about this because it is the easiest way to generate more revenue from Google, ChatGPT, and all the other AI search engines. And the thing that is gonna work for you, you've already got on your site, and it's one of the easiest things to double down. These pages work in millions of different ways. They're gonna h...
OpenNext time you're scrolling through your FYP, take a look at how short the video descriptions are. You'll likely see things like this, 1 to 2 sentences or less. Some of the best ranking sites in SEO right now are social media, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, X. Don't do this. Instead, take your video transcript, use it as your description....
OpenInstant Data Scraper Is One of the Best Chrome Extensions for Scraping Websites Instant Data Scraper allows you to extract content from websites directly inside your browser without writing code. One of its most powerful features is pagination support, which means it can automatically move through multiple pages and continue collecting data across an enti...
OpenIf you want AI to recommend your business, I'm gonna talk about one page you definitely wanna have on your website. This is one of the most common pages AI will look for when they're trying to get more information about your business. And when you build it right, you can strongly influence how AI talks about and recommends your business. I'm talking about...
OpenNobody talks about this, but Google's new update has made AI reporting disgustingly easy. Go to Google Analytics. Click their new Ask Analytics advisor. It's in beta. Say, "How much traffic did I get this month from ChatGPT?" It's going to look through your data and do it for you and tell you right away. Say, "How much traffic did I get this month from Cl...
OpenWhat Is Agentic Search Optimization (ASO)? Watch here to learn! Agentic Search Optimization, or ASO, is the process of making your brand discoverable and selectable by autonomous AI agents. Unlike traditional SEO, which focuses on ranking in search engines, or GEO, which focuses on appearing inside AI generated answers, ASO is about helping AI systems cho...
Open