David Wood

in this situation the cyclist is 100% stupid and the driver is in the wrong for not seeing them until the last minute. The cyclist here reminds me of those morons that walk behind your car while you are reversing, so secure in the knowledge you have to give priority to them that they lose all common sense.

“Yield to us, despite having priority in this situation, or we might kill you” Yes, cyclists can be annoying and self righteous. But in this situation the cyclist is 100% right and the driver 100% wrong. I drive in Cambridge. You have to know how to turn left properly there.

@GregClinker @duckyboycab pretty sure it does not. But even if the right of way was a thing in the highway code, its incredibly stupid to ignore a car indicating turning left and undertake them anyway just because you have this 'right'.

@duckyboycab The highway code says cyclists have the ROW. Hope that helps.

In the face of serious injury or death, it’s amazing how their sense of entitlement outweighs their common sense. 🤦🏼‍♂️🚴‍♀️

@dixi1960 @duckyboycab yes that will be of huge comfort to cyclists when they are in hospital getting their legs rebuilt. They can undertake cars signalling turning left and feel warm in the knowledge they are in the right.

@duckyboycab Turning left at a junction. You must give priority to pedestrians crossing or waiting to cross& cyclists going ahead

That's a great post with some much needed realism. This is something I always try and explain to clients in my niche (crypto). Most protocols have not even tried to own that space yet with seo/authority building as they initially relied on other methods of growth. But in 5 years time it will be like SaaS and an uphill battle to displace competitors that have years of compounding domain authority ahead of them. It sounds like a sales pitch to get them onboard but its true!

I had a call with a founder this week who wanted backlinks. Or at least that’s how the call started. He said he was looking for some sort of managed backlinks thing, maybe an SEO audit too, so I pulled up his site and started digging around. And honestly… it looked kinda good. Good long-tail content, growing traffic, smart positioning and a clear product. Not one of those SaaS sites where you open the blog and instantly know someone uploaded 200 AI articles and hoped for the best. But then we looked at the competitors he actually wanted to beat. And that’s where it got a bit less fun. Because the sites ranking above him weren’t just "slightly ahead" They had been around for at least 5+ years. They had DR in the 70s, 80s and 90s. They had hundreds, sometimes thousands, of referring domains. One of them had basically been stacking links slowly and consistently for five years And then he said the thing every founder says at some point:. "but their content is actually pretty bad" Which is funny because he was right. Some of it really wasn’t great. But that’s also the trap. I used to think SEO was mostly a cleverness game. Better content, better product, better page, better angle, better headline. And obviously all of that matters! But sometimes the annoying truth is that your competitor is not beating you because they’re smarter. They’re beating you because they started earlier and didn’t stop. They published for longer. They built links for longer. They got mentioned more. They showed up in more places. And while you’re sitting there thinking "how is this ugly page beating us?", Google is looking at five years of trust, backlinks, mentions, branded searches and user signals. That’s the part founders hate hearing because it means there probably isn’t a cute hack. You can’t just wake up, write one "10x better" blog post and expect to outrank a company that has been compounding since the early 2010s. That’s not how this works. So I told him pretty directly: If you want to compete with these guys, you probably need to think in years, not weeks. Five to ten good links a month. Every month. For a year or two. Layer that with the Reddit work you’re already doing. Add YouTube, Medium, LinkedIn posts. Build the actual content buyers need. Start tracking AI search too with aiseotracker.com, because people are already asking ChatGPT and Perplexity for recommendations before they ever search Google. None of that sounds sexy. But that’s kind of the point. Most of SEO is not sexy. It’s not some genius secret. It’s usually just a bunch of boring work that compounds until one day everybody calls you "the obvious winner" And I got tired of agencies selling SEO like some sort of a black-box casino. Just a bunch of mystery links with random reports and a mix of resold PBNs. You pay them. They disappear for a month. Then they come back with a spreadsheet and you have to pretend you’re excited about links from sites you’d never want your brand anywhere near. That’s why we built LinkDR.com differently. You see the opportunities before anything goes live. You approve the links. You know what you’re paying for. No weird mystery reports. No random coupon sites. No "trust us bro" SEO. Because the more calls I have with founders, the more I think this is the real SEO lesson: The competitors usually aren't smarter than you. They just had more time to grow.

@ConnorShowler 'lie sandwich' love that😂 The fillings include helpful information, strategic omissions, and subtle persuasion.

We dont really care what Google has to say on anything, least of all AI SEO.. Because we already know whats really happening from being in the trenches actively watching the SERPS in real time We dont need to hear their lie sandwich, we just reverse engineer the SERPS. 🤷‍♂️

@glenngabe its no different really to getting 'inauthentic links' but I bet people wont stop their efforts to build those. Remember when they claimed there was no site authority or sandbox or pagerank anymore? or when the HCU was about helping smaller, independent publishers...........

Companies buying visibility in content in order to be mentioned in AI Search should pay particular attention to the bullet in Google's new documentation referencing "Seeking inauthentic mentions". We have seen Google already start to address this, but I expect much more on that front. And that could include manual actions btw. That document, and bullet, should be a warning that isn't ignored.

@iPullRank yep, google search guidelines tend to be a mix of helpful information, strategic omissions, and subtle persuasion.

I mean, you knew I was going to have a thought on Google's AI Search guidance, right? Google wants SEOs to stay the janitors of the web. Their new AI Search guide is the proof. The "it's just SEO" crowd is celebrating it like an album release party. They were waiting for permission to keep doing what they were already doing. Naturally, I have a different position. Y'all are being naive af. ipullrank.com/google-ai-sear…

@chris_nectiv sponsored results in ai overviews and search?

Heads up SEOs: Google has officially rolled out ads in AI Overviews + AI Mode. There are now three "Sponsored" results at the bottom of many answers.

@Charles_SEO awesome read thanks. The chunking part was immediately a bit fishy to me, but you have highlighted so much more! Will give this a thorough read later👍

@foley_seo 'you can't argue with it, it came straight from the horses mouth' - that horses mouth has misled SEO folks for decades, you definitely can and should argue with it.

Google just published their official AEO/GEO optimisation guide - you can't argue with it, it came straight from the horses mouth. Mad spoiler, it's just SEO 😂 I'll save you 3,000 words - here's what the horses mouth literally told you NOT to do for AI search: Don't bother with llms.txt files Don't chunk your content for LLMS Don't rewrite content specifically for AI Don't chase inauthentic "mentions" Don't bolt on extra structured data for AI bots Now here's what every "Top 🏆 GEO Expert" on LinkedIn with AI search specialist in their job title has been flogging since AI was over-hyped for search. Custom llms.txt audits Content chunking strategies LLM-optimised content rewrites AI citation tracking subscriptions at £300+ a month AI-specific schema markup Yeh The entire AEO/GEO consulting industry just got fact-slapped by the very company they claimed to be optimising visibility for Imagine selling a "GEO Masterclass" for $497 only for Google to publish a doc saying GEO is literally just SEO Imagine charging clients £2k a month to track LLM prompt visibility, only for Google to confirm chasing AI mentions doesn't work Imagine writing a 47 slide carousel about why llms.txt is the future of search, only for Google to confirm they don't read it Imagine rebranding your bio from "SEO Consultant" to "Generative Engine Optimisation Strategist" in February, only for the source of truth to tell everyone you do SEO Awkward 🫢🫢🫢🫢 I'm not saying I told you so. developers.google.com/search/docs/fu… Show me the clicks

@pedrodias and my little schema study too, eclipsed by Ahrefs but published the day before🤣 cryptocontent.dev/ai-citation-vi…

Three independent sources said the same thing: the GEO playbook doesn't work. Frontier labs have already publicly hedged on what their systems can do. Ahrefs ran a controlled study and found no citation uplift. Last Friday, Google published documentation saying the prescriptions aren't needed. The frameworks keep selling. New on The Inference: Mt Stupid has a pricing page. 🔗👇🏻 theinference.io/p/mt-stupid-ha…

@enchil_ada_ @IOHK_Charles @BasedMikeLee no probs

@TheDavidWood @IOHK_Charles @BasedMikeLee Sorry, I commented on the wrong post D:

Raise your hand if you relate

@enchil_ada_ @IOHK_Charles @BasedMikeLee what are you talking about and how is it relevant to my post responding to a claim about people born 1965-1980?

@TheDavidWood @IOHK_Charles @BasedMikeLee So a baby born on 1990 and got into to congress and printed money?

@IOHK_Charles @BasedMikeLee not sure you can blame those born 1965-1980 for the debt or wars, there were plenty of both before they arrived

@BasedMikeLee Thanks for all the debt and war

@Charles_SEO Be really interested in the 'chunking' part. IMHO chunking = Making important information easy to scan, and structuring content into self-contained sections so readers do not have to hunt for context, and has always been good practice - even before AI retrieval.

I got an article coming out tomorrow on AI SEO that is about to blow the fkn roof off!!! 🔥 - Google lied (again) with the new guide - There's a HIDDEN layer in every major frontier model that NO ONE has talked about yet (and the companies wanted to keep hidden) - Chunks aren't called chunks but the AI models actually love/need them - Structured data is pointless for ingestion, but file type and HOST is SUPER IMPORTANT And a LOT more... Stay tuned folks! 🙌

@Charles_SEO when google says something they agree with, then its as if the search team carved it into stone tablets and left them on top of a mountain.

Seen a lot of people still quoting Google as fact, especially with the new AI SEO Guide they released... Remember, they've routinely put red herrings in the documentation and have explicitly said X doesn't even exist, when reality says otherwise. Negative SEO is one of them 👇

@CyrusShepard yeah its ridiculous. 'Chunking' content is not a new thing and predates AI retrieval. Making important information easy to scan, and structuring content into self-contained sections so readers do not have to hunt for context, has always been good practice.

Google: Don't "chunk" your content - that's a myth! Also Google: Organize your content into chunk-like sections plz

@ThereDidnt @Skkyyyyyyyyyyy @JohnSmith75757 @therobbieharvey and now the second, really feel bad now - can you throw me a bone and agree with my point yet again but pretend like its a rebuttal as usual 🤣

@TheDavidWood @Skkyyyyyyyyyyy @JohnSmith75757 @therobbieharvey This is next level cope lol

BREAKING: According to the arrest warrant, Chud the Builder pulled his weapon BEFORE the altercation. The arrest warrant specifically states Eatherly stood in a “bladed stance” and reached for his firearm. “Thereafter, a physical altercation ensued.” Translation, Joshua Fox saw Chud pull his weapon and acted in self-defense.

@ThereDidnt @Skkyyyyyyyyyyy @JohnSmith75757 @therobbieharvey hey thats your first post in this thread that didn't prove my original point, I feel a bit disappointed🤡

@TheDavidWood @Skkyyyyyyyyyyy @JohnSmith75757 @therobbieharvey You have a reading comprehension problem don’t you? lol also tracks, why are you so whiny and childish lol

@ThereDidnt @Skkyyyyyyyyyyy @JohnSmith75757 @therobbieharvey so he can claim it as I said, thanks for proving my point again, whats that 4x now🤣

@TheDavidWood @Skkyyyyyyyyyyy @JohnSmith75757 @therobbieharvey I never said he couldn’t claim it 🤷‍♂️ I just said with the evidence already available, probably not going to work. Keep acting like a child though lol it tracks