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...


Harry, what do you think about businesses using AI to write their content? I think that using AI is good, but businesses replacing their content writers with AI, they're about to disappear from Google. The reason might not actually be what you think though. If you got two brands in the same niche and you got Brand a who just gets rid of all their writers that fire them all and they go AI only and then you got Brand B who keeps their writers but says, hey, we're gonna augment AI. Brand a is gonna pump out 100 articles a month using generic AI and they're gonna be articles like top 10 tips for running or just really generic stuff like that and Google's helpful content now flags those as low value. So what's gonna happen to brand a is they're gonna lose 70% of their traffic just by putting out shit basically. Brand B is gonna produce a lot less, maybe 10 articles, but real click worthy content with real customer stories or ideally unique data or perspectives, which means it's gonna be AI assisted, not AI only articles like we tested every type of running shoe are gonna outperform by a shitload because of what we call information gain. Information gain is a difference of what AI knows already versus what new knowledge you're giving it. So if you've got personal experience that you're adding that we tested every shoe, that article is gonna do so much Better. Here's the math. Brand a spends $0 on writers, but they lose tens of thousands in traffic value. The AI doesn't replace humans, it multiplies them...

Harry, what do you think about businesses using AI to write their content? I think that using AI is good, but businesses replacing their content writers with AI, they're about to disappear from Google. The reason might not actually be what you think though.

If you got two brands in the same niche and you got Brand a who just gets rid of all their writers that fire them all and they go AI only and then you got Brand B who keeps their writers but says, hey, we're gonna augment AI. Brand a is gonna pump out 100 articles a month using generic AI and they're gonna be articles like top 10 tips for running or just really generic stuff like that and Google's helpful content now flags those as low value.

So what's gonna happen to brand a is they're gonna lose 70% of their traffic just by putting out shit basically. Brand B is gonna produce a lot less, maybe 10 articles, but real click worthy content with real customer stories or ideally unique data or perspectives, which means it's gonna be AI assisted, not AI only articles like we tested every type of running shoe are gonna outperform by a shitload because of what we call information gain.

Information gain is a difference of what AI knows already versus what new knowledge you're giving it. So if you've got personal experience that you're adding that we tested every shoe, that article is gonna do so much Better. Here's the math.

Brand a spends $0 on writers, but they lose tens of thousands in traffic value. The AI doesn't replace humans, it multiplies them. See, a lot of brands right now firing content team because AI looks cheaper.

That's the wrong move. Yeah, it's cheaper. You can mass produce stuff, but it's gonna kill your visibility long term, especially your AI visibility.

But the brands that use AI to scale with humans in the loop to keep it credible, they're gonna win.

the content strategies that worked last year are bloody useless now w...


Google just gave us the ultimate shortcut to rank No. 1 in AI results. And I don't even mean sometimes. And this is something you better start doing immediately before your competition does. The new thing is called Preferred Sources. And here's how it works. If someone adds your website as a preferred source, then it'll be way more likely to appear in AI overviews and AI mode. And it even gets highlighted with a little preferred badge. If your website regularly publishes helpful content, you need to make it as easy as possible for people to add you as a preferred source. Here's how. 1, create a link using this format. 2, add that link on your website, on every blog post, on your newsletter, every social post. And third, when someone clicks it, they just have to check off your website. And now Google knows that they want to see more of your content. So save this post and then follow me for more SEO advice.

Google just gave us the ultimate shortcut to “rank” #1 in AI Overview...


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


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.

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.

A company published 2,815 templated posts in 16 months while targeting search demand. Every listicle put the publisher at No. 1 and made its own section four to seven times longer than competitors. Main topics: Scaled Content, Self-Promotional Listicles, SEO.

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

Scaled Content
Self-Promotional Listicles
SEO


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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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


Crazy that marketers don't know about this. This is a patent from Google designed to trick people trying to do SEO. Google has this flow chart showing how it works. You make a change to your webpage, Google looks at the old rank of your page, then decides on your new rank. But before they do that, they put in what's called a rank transition function. This rank transition function is designed to give you unpredictable fluctuations in your rankings. It figures out what your fluctuated rank should be, publishes the wrong rank, then observes your behavior. Google explains why they have this. They say that this patent exists to catch spammers. This observed behavior step allows Google to see if spammers freak out over the ranking fluctuations. The spammers might do things like remove backlinks, change keyword positions. If Google sees weird behavior during this stage, they might not give you the good ranking you expect. Now it's important to note that this patent expired. Some SEOs think this is because Google doesn't want people thinking they still use it. They had the patent long enough to get ahead of other search engines, but admitting to putting in volatility to trick people? Well, it will make it harder to trick people. This is a super interesting patent. I made a podcast about it here. And another newer interesting patent Google's new AI patent could replace your website! Episode 974 the Edward Show Podcast.

Google uses a rank transition function to create unpredictable ranking fluctuations The source describes a Google patent that used ranking fluctuations to observe spammer behavior. The content references a podcast discussing Google's SEO-related patents Main topics: AI and SEO Integration, Content Strategy, Patent Expiry and SEO, Ranking Volatility, Search Engine Algorithms.

It’s crazy that more marketers don’t know about this. Google had a pa...

AI and SEO Integration
Content Strategy
Patent Expiry and SEO
Ranking Volatility
Search Engine Algorithms
SEO Patents
SEO Strategies


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

AI citations depend on the content of the pages it references Local businesses should focus on creating content for AI citation The source says AI answers about a brand often summarize the pages the model cited. Main topics: AI Citations, AI Reputation, AI Reputation Management, AI Visibility, Content Strategy.

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

AI Citations
AI Reputation
AI Reputation Management
AI Visibility
Content Strategy
Local Business Visibility
SEO Optimization


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.

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


Most people don't realize there's an AI influencer called Itana Lopez that's making 10K a month in brand deals. She doesn't exist and has done brand deals with big companies like Victoria's Secret and razor. This is the four file system in order to build this out. The first file is Persona MD. This is who your influencer actually is as a person. You write out their full backstory, where they grew up, their personality, interests, opinions, how they type in topics they never talk about. It's done when you can answer 20 questions about this person without even thinking. The second is voice dot MD. You buy 90 seconds of clean audio from a voice actress off Fiverr for about $40. Clone in our 11 laughs for about 10 minutes, and now your AI influencer has a real sounding voice for reels and stories. Make sure to not use the templates because they all sound too fake. You add roles for how she sounds when she sent voice notes and little details that make it huge so she can engage with her audience. The third file is Flux MD and this locks down what your AI influencer looks like. You pick a base face and lock six to eight physical descriptors, including eye color, hair, hair, jawline, and any distinguishing features. Then generate 50 variations and fine tune a low rank adoption or Laura so every future image looks exactly like the same person. You then set up three Different lighting setups so you always have variety without the face ever changing. Alora cost about $80 on rented GPU...

Most people don't realize there's an AI influencer called Itana Lopez that's making 10K a month in brand deals. She doesn't exist and has done brand deals with big companies like Victoria's Secret and razor. This is the four file system in order to build this out.

The first file is Persona MD. This is who your influencer actually is as a person. You write out their full backstory, where they grew up, their personality, interests, opinions, how they type in topics they never talk about.

It's done when you can answer 20 questions about this person without even thinking. The second is voice dot MD. You buy 90 seconds of clean audio from a voice actress off Fiverr for about $40.

Clone in our 11 laughs for about 10 minutes, and now your AI influencer has a real sounding voice for reels and stories. Make sure to not use the templates because they all sound too fake. You add roles for how she sounds when she sent voice notes and little details that make it huge so she can engage with her audience.

The third file is Flux MD and this locks down what your AI influencer looks like. You pick a base face and lock six to eight physical descriptors, including eye color, hair, hair, jawline, and any distinguishing features. Then generate 50 variations and fine tune a low rank adoption or Laura so every future image looks exactly like the same person.

You then set up three Different lighting setups so you always have variety without the face ever changing. Alora cost about $80 on rented GPU. The fourth file is brain, not empty, and this is super important because it makes the whole thing scalable.

This is a memory file that stores all the information about every brand follower conversation, including all the content that they engage with. Clock code reads all four files before every interaction so the influencer never breaks character or contradicts itself. Set this up with a cron job checking the messages.

Build one AI influencer in a specific niche and consistently post for a few months before starting to drive traffic and getting sponsorships. I built a step by step guide along with detailed prompts in order to build this out just like the video and comment. Build and I'll send it to you.

Follow for more advice on making money and running your business with tech and AI.

PART 1 of making money with AI: How to build an AI Influencer on Clau...


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.

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.

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


If you're a small business, this is great news. 74% of ChatGPT citations go to sites with a domain authority under 80. This means you don't have to have the most SEO backlinks to get mentioned in ChatGPT. High intent pages are winning the actual citations. Instead of putting up low intent blog posts pet food the good, the bad, the healthy 5 Ways to building stronger customer relationships, you put up high intent pages. Organic grain free dog food, comprehensive CRM system with 360 degree customer view. These high intent pages are what are getting cited. For a long time, SEOs have been preaching make 4,000 word blog posts, that's the best way to do SEO. The truth is, high intent pages, not blog posts, was always the best. And it just so happens this is what is winning in AI search. Here's more research showing SEO landing pages SEO product pages are two of the most cited content by ChatGPT. Target high intent language use pages, not blog posts. If you want to learn this exact method, I have it all at compactkeywords.com.

High-intent landing and product pages can win AI citations even when a site does not have the strongest backlink profile. Main topics: AI Citations.

If you're a small business, this is great news: 74% of ChatGPT citati...


This is a big day for SEO. Google is finally giving us a way to see how our sites perform in AI search directly in Google Search Console. These reports will show when your site appears in Google's generative AI features like AI Overviews, AI Mode, and discover. You'll be able to see things like which pages appeared, what countries the searchers were from, which devices they were using, and how this is changing over time. The reports are only rolling out to a subset of sites right now, so you might not see them in your reports yet. But this is a big signal for SEO because it shows that Google's finally starting to separate regular search visibility from AI visibility. And if AI search continues to grow as we expect it to, then this data is going to become very important.

This is a big day for SEO: Google is finally giving us a way to see h...


I remember back in 2023, people were talking about this idea of creating an AI version of themselves and then charging per access to it. That sounded crazy to me. Why would someone pay for access to an AI that's trained on your information when they could just use ChatGPT that's trained on all the information available online? But it turns out they were mostly right. Not only are people going to pay for access to AI agents, they already are. It just doesn't look quite the way people imagined it would. Take my agency, for example. The number one asset at our agency is the people, but the number two asset is definitely our cloud skills. I never would have thought a set of marked down documents could be so valuable, but we've now put thousands of hours into developing and iterating on them. Now, all the services we provide for our clients still involve a human, but most of the work is done by Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini in some cases. The Assumption is that over time, more and more of the work will be turned over to these agents, and humans will spend more of their time on what they're best at and enjoy most, building relationships and applying judgment where necessary. So when you hire us, you aren't merely paying for access to an AI agent, but that is part of what you're paying for. And these days, I'm getting more and more People asking if they can just have access to the AI, they'll say something like, how about you just train my team how to use your work clothes?...

I remember back in 2023, people were talking about this idea of creating an AI version of themselves and then charging per access to it. That sounded crazy to me. Why would someone pay for access to an AI that's trained on your information when they could just use ChatGPT that's trained on all the information available online? But it turns out they were mostly right.

Not only are people going to pay for access to AI agents, they already are. It just doesn't look quite the way people imagined it would. Take my agency, for example. The number one asset at our agency is the people, but the number two asset is definitely our cloud skills.

I never would have thought a set of marked down documents could be so valuable, but we've now put thousands of hours into developing and iterating on them. Now, all the services we provide for our clients still involve a human, but most of the work is done by Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini in some cases. The Assumption is that over time, more and more of the work will be turned over to these agents, and humans will spend more of their time on what they're best at and enjoy most, building relationships and applying judgment where necessary.

So when you hire us, you aren't merely paying for access to an AI agent, but that is part of what you're paying for. And these days, I'm getting more and more People asking if they can just have access to the AI, they'll say something like, how about you just train my team how to use your work clothes? And I don't have a good way to do that right now, but even if I did, I have no idea how I would price something like that. And I think this is just something we have to figure out as an economy.

How do you price and sell an AI agent? On one hand, it's just a series of markdown files. And sure, maybe there's some database connection or sophisticated file structure, MCP servers, but most of the value is in those markdown files. I suspect many people will be hesitant to pay a heavy price tag.

But on the other hand, we're now seeing that these AI agents can produce very high quality work. We're personally only using AI where it does a better job than a human could. So I don't have any answers here. I just think it's an interesting open ended question for now.

AI-agent value is often sold as part of a human service layer, not as raw access to the agent alone. Main topics: AI Agent Services.

Will people pay for access to AI agents? They already are, it just lo...


Once a day, once a week, once a month. Once a day, once a week, once a month. Once a day, once a week, once a month. Once a day, once a week, once a month.

The simplest SEO framework that actually compounds, explained 👇 Conte...


It's a week later and as promised, I'm gonna choose a winner of the soccer shirt competition. First of all, thank you to everyone who entered. There were thousands of comments on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube, on X, on LinkedIn, everywhere as mentioned you could enter. So without further ado, let's go into the competition. Just to tell you what I did, I copied all the comments into Claude. I made a program and I'm getting Claude now to choose a random winner for us. So here we go. Jason Snuka. He commented on Instagram. There we go. Brilliant. He's a Liverpool supporter like me. Jason, I'm going to reach out to you that we can arrange collection and well done guys. Thank you again to everyone who entered. Please keep on following all my pages. I share the latest news and tips on SEO social media, Google Ads and AI and I run competitions like this on a regular occasion. Thanks again and keep on following.

The Winner of the South Africa World Cup Soccer Shirt Is... 🇿🇦⚽ A hug...


Don't ignore image SEO. This person optimized for images. 7000+ clicks 2 hundred forty one thousand plus impressions 2.9% CTR. If you put out lots of images with your brand name in the images, that's hundreds of thousands of people seeing your brand. Most people with websites don't even know what to do with images. Use keyword rich file names. Descriptive alt text optional, but use webps instead of PNGs or JPEGs. Webps are faster. Compress your images. Tiny PNG handles all types of images. It's really good. Those simple things and you will get so many more impressions with your images showing up on Google Images getting picked by ChatGPT. Easy marketing real estate.

Image SEO can create additional search and AI visibility when files are named, described, compressed, and served efficiently. Main topics: Image SEO.

Don't ignore image SEO. This person optimized for images: 7,000+ clic...


Harry, everyone's panicking about not putting clicks through AI search. Should they be? It depends. Informational search is dying. AI just summarizes searches now, but the only people who made money off those clicks were informational blogs selling ad traffic. If you're a real business focused on commercial terms, it actually doesn't matter at all. The quality of traffic that you get now is much higher, it's more commercial, and we're seeing better customers off the back of it. Google still lets you retarget people who saw your brand in AI overviews. Informational traffic is down. You should be worried about those clicks if you're an informational website. But at the end of the day, it's not about traffic, it's about getting conversion. So the stuff that turns into leads and sales, that is better than ever.

Everyone's panicking about low AI click-through rates but most busine...


Like the post and comment ”skills” for the 20 that I use in my workfl...


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 allow merchants to offer incentives such as payment discounts, free goods and/or services in exchange for posting any review or revision or removal of a negative review. Google, in fact, has a whole section on what you can't do to get reviews over here. Getting caught can lead to reviews being deleted or, even worse, the business listing being suspended.

Rewarding customers for reviews can put local Google reviews and even the business listing at risk. Main topics: Review Policy Risk.

This is how Google is busting local businesses. Google is asking, УDo...


OpenAI just announced ChatGPT sites. Are we gonna talk about why every business should be looking at this right now, but also why this can't be the future of websites? If you're familiar with Claude artifacts or dashboards, Sites looks like the two combined with authentication added on. It's one of those products that solves an issue you didn't know you had until you see it. The main use case seems to be when teams of people need to make an important decision. Instead of putting a document together and then calling a team meeting to explain that document to everyone, you just give all that information to Codex and it creates a web application for you. You can then share that web app with everyone on their team, and they just authenticate with their ChatGPT account. I've been doing this for a while now with Claude artifacts, and you only have to do it once to see it's just far superior to creating a document. It's essentially bespoke software spun up for one specific purpose. But even though I think every business should be utilizing this technology right now, I think looking back, we're going to see this as an awkward transition phase. It just doesn't fit within the model I think we're heading towards. For AI to effectively work in your business and ultimately run your business, there needs to be a single knowledge base. Each piece of information needs to live in a single canonical document written for AI. Otherwise, if important information is scattered, isolated, or duplicated across multiple sources, you'll never truly be able to turn that data over to AI...

OpenAI just announced ChatGPT sites. Are we gonna talk about why every business should be looking at this right now, but also why this can't be the future of websites?

If you're familiar with Claude artifacts or dashboards, Sites looks like the two combined with authentication added on. It's one of those products that solves an issue you didn't know you had until you see it.

The main use case seems to be when teams of people need to make an important decision. Instead of putting a document together and then calling a team meeting to explain that document to everyone, you just give all that information to Codex and it creates a web application for you. You can then share that web app with everyone on their team, and they just authenticate with their ChatGPT account.

I've been doing this for a while now with Claude artifacts, and you only have to do it once to see it's just far superior to creating a document. It's essentially bespoke software spun up for one specific purpose.

But even though I think every business should be utilizing this technology right now, I think looking back, we're going to see this as an awkward transition phase. It just doesn't fit within the model I think we're heading towards.

For AI to effectively work in your business and ultimately run your business, there needs to be a single knowledge base. Each piece of information needs to live in a single canonical document written for AI. Otherwise, if important information is scattered, isolated, or duplicated across multiple sources, you'll never truly be able to turn that data over to AI.

I believe in the next two years, we're gonna see businesses starting to adopt AI operating systems that fully own and maintain all information about the company. Sites is a really cool tool that's useful right now, but this can't be what knowledge work looks like two years from now.

These web applications are completely isolated from the rest of your work. They're incredibly useful for collecting information, coordinating across your team, and making important decisions. But that information and those decisions need to be reflected in your knowledge base.

Personally, I'm hoping the major platforms will stop making prototypes and toys and actually start building the operating system that's gonna run future businesses.

In the meantime, we'll continue building our own operating system at our agency. And if you haven't already started doing it for your business, start building that knowledge base. It's gonna be mandatory no matter who builds the platform.

Single-purpose AI-generated sites are useful, but durable AI operations still need one canonical company knowledge base. Main topics: AI Knowledge Systems.

What is ChatGPT Sites in Codex? Useful now, but not the future of kno...


Google just did something really sneaky that most people missed. And if you don't have a Google Search Console account, go sign up right now. It's what lets you submit your site to Google and see into the algorithm. And if you wanna rank on Google, you need to know about this. They're releasing a new feature that lets you see how your website is ranking in generative AI. If you're ranking in AI Overviews, that means that Google trusts your website and will be more likely to recommend your products or services. So here's how to gain their trust. Let's say somebody makes a search like, what hot sauce pairs with Pinot Noir wine? I don't know why they search that, but they did. AI Overviews is going to give you the answers, but they're going to be citing very specific places. And the only way to show up here is if you have a piece of content that is answering that question. Now when you ask, where can I get a good Pino Nero in Saint Catherine, you'll be more likely to show up here. When people are ready to buy, go to a free website like FindQuestions.com, type in what you sell, and it'll give you some of these questions. Grab one of the questions and come to ChatGPT and use this prompt. "I'm writing a blog post answering this question." Paste in that question there. Ask me anything you need to know the answer to in order to write a blog post that is truly helpful and unique. It should include my experience, expertise, case studies, examples, opinions, etcetera. Keep it limited to 10 questions. Ask me them one at a time. I'll be using voice mode to answer them...

Google just did something really sneaky that most people missed. And if you don't have a Google Search Console account, go sign up right now. It's what lets you submit your site to Google and see into the algorithm.

And if you wanna rank on Google, you need to know about this. They're releasing a new feature that lets you see how your website is ranking in generative AI. If you're ranking in AI Overviews, that means that Google trusts your website and will be more likely to recommend your products or services.

So here's how to gain their trust. Let's say somebody makes a search like, what hot sauce pairs with Pinot Noir wine? I don't know why they search that, but they did.

AI Overviews is going to give you the answers, but they're going to be citing very specific places. And the only way to show up here is if you have a piece of content that is answering that question. Now when you ask, where can I get a good Pino Nero in Saint Catherine, you'll be more likely to show up here.

When people are ready to buy, go to a free website like FindQuestions.com, type in what you sell, and it'll give you some of these questions. Grab one of the questions and come to ChatGPT and use this prompt.

"I'm writing a blog post answering this question."

Paste in that question there. Ask me anything you need to know the answer to in order to write a blog post that is truly helpful and unique. It should include my experience, expertise, case studies, examples, opinions, etcetera. Keep it limited to 10 questions. Ask me them one at a time.

I'll be using voice mode to answer them. Give me time to breathe as well before going to the next question. You don't even need to type.

You just need to talk into chat. Do this once a week. You can thank me later.

This is the future of SEO 😲


The 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 write our content. We need to write it ourselves. Or they'll say, oh, you're just having AI write the content, right? We can do that with ChatGPT. I'd like to tell you what I tell them and then give you the exact process we use to create content in our agency. We create content for some of the most complex industries, including immigration, attorneys, cyber security, finance, education. We'd yet to find an example where we couldn't get AI creating content that's of the same quality as they can create themselves. But it's not easy. Take time. And if you have ChatGPT just spin up a bunch of content for you, it's very unlikely to rank, and if you're doing it at scale, it could get you penalized. The first thing I understand is the topic matters a lot. If you're not writing on a topic that AI is actually searching for, or you're writing on topics that are way too competitive for your brand, you're wasting your time. I have other videos going through how we pick topics, but in short, we're using Peak that AI to see which pages AI is citing, and then finding patterns in those topics and identifying which ones would be relevant for our client...

The 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 write our content. We need to write it ourselves. Or they'll say, oh, you're just having AI write the content, right? We can do that with ChatGPT.

I'd like to tell you what I tell them and then give you the exact process we use to create content in our agency. We create content for some of the most complex industries, including immigration, attorneys, cyber security, finance, education. We'd yet to find an example where we couldn't get AI creating content that's of the same quality as they can create themselves.

But it's not easy. Take time. And if you have ChatGPT just spin up a bunch of content for you, it's very unlikely to rank, and if you're doing it at scale, it could get you penalized.

The first thing I understand is the topic matters a lot. If you're not writing on a topic that AI is actually searching for, or you're writing on topics that are way too competitive for your brand, you're wasting your time.

I have other videos going through how we pick topics, but in short, we're using Peak that AI to see which pages AI is citing, and then finding patterns in those topics and identifying which ones would be relevant for our client.

The main reason companies often feel like AI can't write their content, it has to be someone on their team. Is it? AI doesn't have the complete understanding of your company, and it doesn't have that tacit knowledge you get from experience. And so, of course, you need to give that knowledge to the AI.

You need a knowledge base. This is the first thing we do for every client. We call it their brand ambassador, and we create this for them. It's typically about a dozen markdown files, but it might also include Pdfs or spreadsheets.

You want to provide comprehensive information on your company, on each of your products and your services, your unique value proposition, your ideal customer profile. You want to understand every important page on your website and when to reference those page. Share information on your brand, voice what to say, what not to say. As many examples as possible of things you've written. The canonical version of any guides or processes you've detailed.

If you're having it. Create images for your content. You want guidance on how to create images in your brand style.

Don't worry about collecting this all at once. Just collect as much as possible and then assume that you're gonna be iterating on this forever. I think two years from now, this is just gonna be a standing operating procedure. Imitation like this is no longer for humans. It's for AI. And if humans need information, they can go to the AI.

Ideally, all this information only lives in one place, so you don't have to be updating multiple sources. As of right now, when we create this for our client, we store everything in Google Drive, so it easily connects to cloud. But pretty soon, I think we'll start integrating it directly with their internal systems.

That knowledge base is half of the puzzle. The other half, to get an AI to write high quality content for you, are the instructions. And nowadays, those instructions take the form of Claude Skills.

First skill we use generates an article brief. For this, we give it the topic and any other information we have. So perhaps the client has given us some notes or a voice memo, or they've done a video on this topic, and we can use the transcript. Other times, we just have the topic. Whatever we have, we dump it in there, we give it the skill, and we let Claude go.

Claude then searches in a search engine for the term we're trying to target. It starts doing some research. It's trying to identify a few things.

One, what's the intent behind this term? And what type of information does the searcher expect to find? We want to make sure we're matching that intent.

Two, what information do we need to collect to make sure this article is robust. That will ultimately define the research we need to do.

And 3, what insights from the client need to be incorporated into the article. That will anchor the point of view of the article.

Next up is the actual research, and we currently use ChatGPT's deep research for this. It's still better than clouds. That takes 10 or 15 minutes. We give the research and the article brief to another cloud skill. This skill creates the first draft.

This is one of our largest skills. It contains a detailed description of what success looks like. It has SEO guidelines, guidelines for maximizing fact density and for structuring the article to maximize the chance to get cited by a I. Search. And of course, throughout this whole process, the A I. Has access to that knowledge base.

That knowledge base is also helping it match the tone of voice for this specific brand. And then once that draft is complete, we're giving it to our first revision skill.

First revision compares the article to all content guidelines we created for this brand. And those guidelines come from all previous content we reviewed and provided feedback on. Anytime we or the client had feedback on an article, all of that is getting fed back into this document. Part of their knowledge base.

And this entire step is devoted to making sure any feedback that has been received in the past is applied to every article going forward.

Then the second revision skill is a fact checker. We make sure that every factual claim in the article is backed up by another source. We make sure we're never linking to competitors, and we make sure that every link is working and actually backs up the fact it claims to.

Finally, we have a steel that extracts descriptions for any infographics we might want to put throughout the article. We'll usually add five or six, and then those descriptions are given to ChatGPT to generate the images.

High-quality AI content needs a brand knowledge base, reusable instructions, revision memory, and fact checking. Main topics: AI Content Workflow.

Can AI write high quality content for your business? Yes, with the ri...


Google is finally giving us AI performance reports inside of Search Console. For those of you that don't know Search Console is a free amazing tool offered by Google that allows us to see all the stats for our website relating to Google Search. We can see the queries, we can see the pages, we can see the issues with our website, what Google is picking up and what it's not. But finally, Google are giving us something that everyone has been waiting for for so long, an AI performance report. This AI performance report which is slowly rolling out is going to see the clicks and the impressions and the stats that have been bought our website from AI overviews and AI mode. This is huge and massive because all people, me included that are involved in the SEO world have been begging Google for it. I can't wait for it to roll out. It's gonna give us so much information and finally we'll be able to show our clients the impressions and the clicks and the information that is coming from AI overviews into their websites. It's really such big news. It's rolling out slowly and I can't wait to see it happen.

AI performance reporting in Search Console gives SEOs a way to discuss AI Overview and AI Mode visibility with clients. Main topics: AI Search Reporting.

Google is launching AI performance reports in Search Console. (This i...


Google revealed exactly what content ranks No. 1 for any keyword and nobody's talking about it. It's the opposite of every SEO blog post that you've ever been told to write. At a recent Google conference, they revealed this about ranking content. You need to be unique, specific and authentic. Most of your content has none of these. Here's what it actually looks like. Take a running brand boring blog post, like top 10 things to consider when buying running shoes. Every brand has created that article. Instead, create click me type content saying things like, I tested 11 shoes over 100 km. Here's what I Learned. It's way more interesting. It's worth clicking on and nobody else can give you that unique experience. Stop publishing generic tip and an experience that nobody else can replicate. People need to understand that a story is the ranking factor that people need to optimize for in 2026. I created a skill that turns any boring blog post into a click me one in under five minutes. Comment, click me, and I'll send it to you.

google just told us the exact formula for ranking content and nobody ...


Alright, 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 into AI Mode being the default way people are searching. So when you're optimising for Google, you are optimising for AI search. And more importantly, if you've been focusing on visibility rather than rankings, then you're already doing what you need to do. But if you're still obsessing about rankings, clicks, using ChatGPT to generate one click blog posts, you're just following out of date practices. It's not like you're not optimising for AI. You're just not optimising for any search engine. SEO in 2026 is optimising for AI search. That's it. I don't know how many more ways I can say it.

SEO in 2026 is inseparable from AI search visibility, so ranking-only tactics are no longer enough. Main topics: AI Search Visibility.

Website SEO in 2026 IS AI search optimisation. Google SEO and AI SEO ...


If 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, things around 1. Look at your relevant high ranking pages, then link from one of these pages to the page you have that is stuck around here. This is what's called an internal link, and it'll help take your page to here.

Relevant high-ranking pages can be used as internal-link sources to help lift pages stuck below top positions. Main topics: Internal Linking.

If you want to rank on Google, but you're stuck around position 3 or ...


This stupid red line is ruining your rankings. Here's the deal. If your business is inside that red line, then you're good. But if your business is even slightly outside of it, Google will pretend your business doesn't exist and you will not rank in that city. And the same thing happens in surrounding cities. Here are three things you can do to fix this problem. No. 1, specialize in something uncommon. Provide a service that most of your competition is not providing. If you're a plumber, be the plumber that specializes in retrieving wedding rings from toilets. The more specific your service is, the more likely you are to rank in a much wider area. No.2, focus on the factors that you can control. And that means getting more reviews, optimizing your Google Business Profile, and building better content on your website. 3, work on your AI. Local SEO. While Google Maps is heavily limited by that red outline, AI search tools will pull from trusted sources all over the web. Get your business listed on local blogs, industry sites, YouTube, podcast, best of lists and citation sites. If you want to rank in surrounding cities, you need more than an address. You need relevance, trust, and mentions. We just published a full guide on how to do this. So save this post and let me know if you want the link.

If you're located just outside a city border on Google Maps, you may ...


Just 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 real time the way a teammate would. It has its own email account. It can respond to messages and teams. It can work across your calendar, Docs, spreadsheets, any Microsoft product, and connect with external tools. Essentially, it can do anything your teammate could do on a computer. Now, if you've been following AI, you know this technology isn't new. This has been happening ever since the release of Openclaw. And in fact, Scout is built on top of Openclaw. And that's part of what makes it potentially so powerful. The other part is that it's very inexpensive. Microsoft has made a strategic move to not keep up with the frontier models. Instead, they're intentionally staying about six months behind those frontier models so they can keep their prices much lower. And I think that's super smart on Microsoft's part. Right now, a lot of companies are realizing they can't continue to spend on AI like they are right now. Uber just announced that they blew through their annual AI budget in the first four months. And a lot of people are realizing, with the right harness, you don't need the smartest model for most work these days...

Just 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 real time the way a teammate would. It has its own email account. It can respond to messages and teams. It can work across your calendar, Docs, spreadsheets, any Microsoft product, and connect with external tools. Essentially, it can do anything your teammate could do on a computer.

Now, if you've been following AI, you know this technology isn't new. This has been happening ever since the release of Openclaw. And in fact, Scout is built on top of Openclaw. And that's part of what makes it potentially so powerful.

The other part is that it's very inexpensive. Microsoft has made a strategic move to not keep up with the frontier models. Instead, they're intentionally staying about six months behind those frontier models so they can keep their prices much lower. And I think that's super smart on Microsoft's part. Right now, a lot of companies are realizing they can't continue to spend on AI like they are right now. Uber just announced that they blew through their annual AI budget in the first four months. And a lot of people are realizing, with the right harness, you don't need the smartest model for most work these days. Also, Microsoft is making it easy for businesses to fine-tune on their own data and processes, which should further improve performance without increasing the cost.

Now if you've been keeping up with this stuff, you know that Google also recently announced Gemini Spark, which is essentially the exact same idea, except, of course, it's inside of Google Workspace and it's not built on Openclaw. They built a harness themselves. And then, of course, OpenAI recently hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of Openclaw. They're trying to build something similar inside of Codex. And then Anthropic, which sued Openclaw for their original name, is now preventing its users from using the Max plan within Openclaw, forcing them to pay API rates. Which, of course, is because they're trying to build the exact same thing.

All the major players understand that this is coming. But question is no longer: should you be using an always-on agent for work, but rather which always-on agent is right for your business?

Now, for any large enterprises already using 365 or Google Workspace, I think the decision is gonna be pretty obvious. You'll just use the AI agent built into that workspace. It just won't make sense to use anything other than Scout or Spark, respectively.

However, for smaller organizations, say those with fewer than 50 people, I think these agents are likely to have guardrails and limitations that are hard to swallow. Now, if you're a solo entrepreneur, I think the decision is easy. You should just create your own custom agent using Openclaw or Hermie. But there are some real challenges to using a custom agent like that inside of a team. So smaller teams are going to have to choose between the challenges of setting up their own custom solution, or the limitations of choosing one of the out-of-the-box solutions.

Microsoft Scout vs OpenClaw vs Google Spark: which one fits YOUR busi...


Most people don't realize that every productivity system they've ever tried breaks for the same reason. On good days you file everything correctly, but on bad days you forget to add things in and then you stop using it. This operating system in Obsidian uses Claude to maintain itself even when you forget. Set up these eight folders in Obsidian. The most important file is the capture file. You put everything into this file without any decision making. Don't think about where it belongs; just throw it in. Then you have your active file for current projects, resources file for reference materials, system file for a Claude configuration, generated file for Claude outputs, a queue file for tasks for Claude to handle, and then the calendar file and archive file. You throw everything inside the capture file. This system sorts it out for you. Write one file called Claude.md that tells Claude everything about your life, your projects, priorities, and the status of every area of your life. Update the priority section for about five minutes once a week. I like to do this on Mondays because it plans out the rest of your week. Now every single thing that Claude does for you for the rest of the week is based on what matters at that time. Without this file, Claude starts from scratch every single week. With it, Claude has all of your life context...

Most people don't realize that every productivity system they've ever tried breaks for the same reason. On good days you file everything correctly, but on bad days you forget to add things in and then you stop using it.

This operating system in Obsidian uses Claude to maintain itself even when you forget. Set up these eight folders in Obsidian. The most important file is the capture file. You put everything into this file without any decision making. Don't think about where it belongs; just throw it in.

Then you have your active file for current projects, resources file for reference materials, system file for a Claude configuration, generated file for Claude outputs, a queue file for tasks for Claude to handle, and then the calendar file and archive file.

You throw everything inside the capture file. This system sorts it out for you. Write one file called Claude.md that tells Claude everything about your life, your projects, priorities, and the status of every area of your life.

Update the priority section for about five minutes once a week. I like to do this on Mondays because it plans out the rest of your week. Now every single thing that Claude does for you for the rest of the week is based on what matters at that time. Without this file, Claude starts from scratch every single week. With it, Claude has all of your life context.

Set up five workflows that run on their own: a morning briefing that tells you the most important thing to do, a capture processor that files everything that you put into capture, a weekly review that reads your notes and tells you what to focus on for next week and what you did well for this week, a processor that picks up any task that you dropped into the queue folder and has an output ready, and a project health monitor that flags anything that's stalled for more than seven days.

This whole system maintains and runs by itself every week, and it only takes a few hours for you to build out. If you want the step-by-step detailed playbook to build this out just like the video, comment setup and I'll send it to you. Follow for more advice on making money and running your business with tech and AI.

How to turn Obsidian into a personal operating system with Claude #ai...