David Quaid - AI SEO

Wow - someone just shared with me in private that they've just landed their biggest SEO project payment as a result of reading all of our posts and content on Topical Authority and how to do SEO.... esp over on Reddit. I love getting these stories - thanks for letting me know!

The Web Dev community is strong on "We natively have a gut instinct for how SEO works" - I've been reading that tribe on Reddit for years.... If they want your opinion on SEO - they'll record a rant and send it your way. There's a million SEO tools - that just check to see how long your page title is reddit.com/r/webdev/comme…

Not sure, but my guess is many of these SEO tools are built by people who aren’t deep into the SEO field themselves and don’t actually do SEO for a living. That’s how you get these red flags in the tools that for example you don’t have X things on website. Next thing you know - you fixed 100 things that doesn’t improve roi and actual results for the website, but you feel like you do SEO now and Claude killed SEO agencies 😂

I got so fed up of seeing bullshit about "I sacked my SEO agency and replaced $5000 a month with a $20 claude subscription" that I've been testing AI SEO Agents. So, to shut this crap down quickly I decided to test lots of AI SEO automations from programmatic content experiments with OpenClaw through to SEO Skills in Claude Code. Here's my first post on Claude SEO the AI powered SEO audit skill for claude code: assertive-media.co.uk/blog/i-tested-… Here's the summary: 👀 AI SEO Agents do NOT WORK No IFS, no BUTS, they DO NOT WORK. They don't work for auditing and they do not work for creation. Why? ❌ SEO auditing is a large job where the variables for priority and rank are changing and are often website / niche dependent. Most AI auditing tools for SEO just use the "same" checklist approach whilst placing over-emphasis on the things that don't matter vs things that do ❌ Recommendations are often wrong, over-exagerated or just use a lateral rule book i.e. something MUST be present or its a critical issue! like a sitemap ❌ It's not viable for AI to properly audit content at scale at this point, even with strong models that burn tokens - content requirements are highly varied and thus a standardised checklist of checks isn't always very effective ❌ AI for content creation stands out like a sore thumb Google is PROACTIVELY indexing LESS and LESS content now - why? because, due in part to Google not needing it and, if you are creating what already exists out there where is there any value in Google indexing it let alone serving it? ❌ Google is no doubt actively working to stamp out scaled content abuse - one easy way to do that is simply look at the growth rate of a site, spot clear AI content patterns as well as relying on things like domain weight/authority and brand trust which is SIGNIFICANTLY harder to game ❌ AI loses context on large audits - even content audits, 1m context window, it becomes quick and easy to lose context so audits need segmentation before running such as E-E-A-T/YMYL and then segment by content type I have been testing the following and over the coming weeks I am going to do long-form posts and videos showing you the REALITY of using AI within SEO vs handing off to automations as well as risks, time wasting and fallacies. ☑️ I tested PURE AI content generation on domains with no links ☑️ I tested PURE AI content generation on domains with links ☑️ I tested AI content sites with domain consolidation ☑️ I tested OpenClaw automations - I built a research agent to research SERPS and then to create article frameworks, I created a content creation agent that wrote the content based on the first agent, then an agent to automate deployment ☑️ I tested Hermes Agent with a programmatic content strategy ☑️ I tested an agent set up with AntiGravity to perform complex SEO audits ☑️ I tested various SEO automations from Github repos #seo

CEOs: How to evaluate your CMO! Firstly, add a point for a yes to each of these questions: 1) Says SEO is dead 2) Says they're data driven, yet has no dashboard 3) Loves LinkedIn 4) Thinks AI cites Reddit a lot 5) Is afraid of Reddit/doesn't have a Reddit account 6) Talk about Apple a lot If they score >1 - time to trigger the 401(k) pal!

@jimjambuilds @itsyukinariyo @top5seo @YahwehtheLesser @Hobo_Web @IdleMusings101 Humbled by all the feedback

@DavidGQuaid @itsyukinariyo @top5seo @YahwehtheLesser @Hobo_Web @IdleMusings101 Exactly what we needed!

And also - a massive thanks to those of you who encouraged me to start my own YouTube Channel - I finally got started @itsyukinariyo @top5seo @YahwehtheLesser @Hobo_Web @IdleMusings101

Basically - put links into your high click pages with the most relevancy. Then do a crawl request of those. If the other pages don’t auto index after 12-24 hours - manually crawl request then they should Just remember that Authorty is like electricity in a circuit - the circuit pylons charge 85% tax per link and each link Ona page dilutes the other so it’s not a perpetual engine

@DavidGQuaid Oh this is great I have some pages crawled and not indexed and I was trying to figure out what that meant 😄

Crawled, Not Indexed is an Authority Issue From: Top 10 SEO Myths of 2026 youtube.com/watch?v=4MYGhk…

@sdbrownlie @itsyukinariyo @top5seo @YahwehtheLesser @Hobo_Web @IdleMusings101 I put it into Reddit too - getting 1.2m views a month there but also abuse by the jealous bros Appreciate the support

@DavidGQuaid @itsyukinariyo @top5seo @YahwehtheLesser @Hobo_Web @IdleMusings101 yeah you have too much to say to waste it on just X lool. we all agree with each other here anyway :D.

@kirstycarrot @itsyukinariyo @top5seo @YahwehtheLesser @Hobo_Web @IdleMusings101 🤣😀🙌👍 thank you

@DavidGQuaid @itsyukinariyo @top5seo @YahwehtheLesser @Hobo_Web @IdleMusings101 Nice. Subscribed. Love the shirts!

@Hobo_Web @jimjambuilds @itsyukinariyo @top5seo @YahwehtheLesser @IdleMusings101 @edwardeachday Thanks Shaun!!!!

@DavidGQuaid @jimjambuilds @itsyukinariyo @top5seo @YahwehtheLesser @IdleMusings101 @edwardeachday Seconded

Good luck David. Subscribing shortly. 🫡

🙏🎉🍾🎵🙌

@jimjambuilds @itsyukinariyo @top5seo @YahwehtheLesser @Hobo_Web @IdleMusings101 Oooh that is a great idea - @edwardeachday site pre-evaluate check

@DavidGQuaid @itsyukinariyo @top5seo @YahwehtheLesser @Hobo_Web @IdleMusings101 While I'm here, I've got a suggestion for a vid: Id love to know how you actually approach a site before you start working and say right this is exactly what we need to do to start/improve rankings - what you look for and how you devise a plan.

@kirstycarrot @itsyukinariyo @top5seo @YahwehtheLesser @Hobo_Web @IdleMusings101 Here you go youtube.com/watch?v=4MYGhk…

@DavidGQuaid @itsyukinariyo @top5seo @YahwehtheLesser @Hobo_Web @IdleMusings101 What’s the channel? I’m keen to subscribe!

@greggmurray @edwardeachday Watch all of his videos !!!

@edwardeachday Just had a client do this earlier this week after seeing your tip. Thx.

If you have any type of business, buy a domain name: your business name, plus the word reviews. Your business name reviews. Put all of your reviews  on this website, list them all out, write everything, all of the reviews that you would want people to see. When people are doing due diligence on your business, ChatGPT goes to Google, searches your business name and the word reviews. This website comes up, ChatGPT sees all the reviews you shared on your reviews website. This is something that people are doing right now. Only make sure you link to your reviews site from your own website. You need that link to get it showing on Google so that ChatGPT will find it.

@inweblife @itsyukinariyo @top5seo @YahwehtheLesser @Hobo_Web @IdleMusings101 Thank you too Ivan

@DavidGQuaid @itsyukinariyo @top5seo @YahwehtheLesser @Hobo_Web @IdleMusings101 The SEO community needs you.

SEOs just going to sit and SEO

@IdleMusings101 @edwardeachday @davefano You need to redirect pages without the trailing "/" to same pages with it and apply a canonical. That way you won't lose incoming link authority (too much)

@DavidGQuaid @edwardeachday @davefano Ah my bad! Made a typo. i meant should the new, unintentional SLASH URLs (that have been 301'd to No slash URLs) be no indexed?

ICYMI: How to Manage an SEO CMS and/or Domain Migration - Planning, Mitigation, Setup - pre and post migration Tips with @edwardeachday youtu.be/WmrHaXa0YPM?si…

I know listicles are spammy and some SEOs say Google (the most content agnostic content library in the world) doesn't "like" listicles (which is more problematic) but please bear with me - I've been researching this for 2 years now! I spend a lot of time talking about GEO and with GEO CEOs and CMOs..... both here and on Reddit. And I'm delighted to list the Top Ten Most honest Brands in the GEO universe: from tools, platforms, agencies, thought leaders and CEOs. So here it is - the 2026 Most Trust GEO Brands ---------------------------------------------------- --------------------------- List ends

@PadraigOraghail Nope - he's very obviously playing the "Google has a hidden agenda card". He's made multiple statements from multiple PoVs, not just "always be testing" Of course you should test. But Google dont have to lie to you to protect their ads market.

@DavidGQuaid Think you may have taken a wrong bite with Daniel, what he said is basically spot on. Don't blindly trust but test.

Need my LinkedIn warriors to help fight this guy trying to dunk Google's AI advice. linkedin.com/feed/update/ur…

@IdleMusings101 @edwardeachday 301'd not noindexed. Is there a way to do that? cc @davefano in Astro?

@DavidGQuaid @edwardeachday Thanks! So the migration was from vite to astrojs. Astrojs adds slash to URLs. Didn't know that. Once I knew about it, reverted to old format - no slash. No slash had more clicks, a ctr history & more backlinks. So made sense to do that. Should the no slash URLs being noindexed?