Mainly Marketing

Your last point is the key. Google's whole ecosystem depends on them showing the best results to users so users keep coming back. So, yes, if their results get worse people would be less inclined to use them. Google will do everything it can to remove "spammy garbage" (not AI content, just bad content) AI also uses these same results to generate their answers, so in turn they benefit from the "policing" Google does.

Thinking about blogs and AI - generate content to get noticed by AI - AI users might not click links AI gives them If blogs feel like spammy garbage, and AI answers to users are saturated with that, will people end up using both less (blogs AND chat)?

@DavidGQuaid 4th for me... "turbo charged indexing" is the hook I think and this shows it the clearest. 2 and 3 are good too but seem to tell opposing stories which threw me off a little

Which thumbnail ?

I don't understand why these things have to be binary. There are other factors too: - do you have a budget? - are you trying to validate an idea? - do you have bandwidth for multiple channels? In my opinion you can do both... start SEO and paid together. If you only do paid then in a few years you might be still thinking "I should do SEO but it is going to take a while to see results"

100% agree with this. This is why I turn down every newly established ecom brand that's looking to invest in SEO from the start. It's not worth it! You need revenue now. You need cash flow now. SEO won't give you that. Start with paid ads. Get proof that there's demand for your product. Scale things up. And then, when you have solid cash flow, invest that into SEO to diversify your sales channels and improve customer acquisition costs. If you're investing in SEO from the start, you're setting your business up to fail.

@eliasxreyes Congrats!

Had my first $1000+ MRR 🙌🏽🙌🏽 almost $1500!! I guess it’s time to try and reach $10,000 MRR in… 60 days??

Do you consider pricing strategy a part of marketing?

@shoguncarroll One more for you!

Very close to a 100 verified followers. England won It’s a good day, lets connect with the remaining 20!

@DavidGQuaid Situation dependent, but if I see articles cannibalizing themselves, then consolidation of an article that could just be a section of a more comprehensive one (which in fairness could be considered republishing)

@mainlymktg 10/10 - thanks for the morning laff Why would it - happy to hear? I think re-publishing but lets hear it

This is why SEO myths persist - no logic, no evidence, just trust me bro confidence. Every idea in SEO doesnt deserve to support itself; the claim needs evidence.

Just saw another post this morning which showed that the average "information gain" i.e. how unique a piece of content is, is typically lower in top results than results on page 2+. In effect, if you're a very authoritative site, then "good content" kind of means "perfectly adequate content" (not advising people to try this!)

Almost all of the white hat SEO advice you hear on this platform just boils down to "JUST WRITE GOOD CONTENT" 🙄 Surprisingly, the exact SAME talking point Google has been trying to ship for many years now..... BUT, what really IS "GOOD CONTENT"??? Because it's NOT what the white hats OR big G are claiming!! GOOD CONTENT IS: - Content built around the consensus of what is ALREADY ranking, but doing it better/more efficiently/to a higher degree of REAL expertise and insight. - Content built around the entities, topics and sub-topics the highest visibility competitor pages collectively cover, not whatever you personally felt like writing about. - Content that is optimized for AI Overviews, AI search and ALL the SERP features it SHOULD be getting pulled into... Structured to be extracted, with clear answers, clean chunks, proper headings. - Supporting content engineered to earn links naturally. - And Google watches what users do after they land on it... Optimize for dwell, scroll and task completion. If your content is evergreen, then you only need to update it annually, if its fresh then it needs its required refresh cycles. In SEO, good content isn't a writing standard, it's an ENGINEERING standard. It's reverse-engineered from the SERP, built for both human engagement and machine extraction, backed by the authority to compete, and maintained over time. Google says "write good content" because it keeps you focused on the one variable they're happy for you to obsess over, while ignoring the links, authority, technical and user signals that actually move rankings... Then the influencers repeat it because it sounds virtuous, feeds into the glorification of their supreme algorithmic overlord, and ya know, it's safe to say at conferences.

@DavidGQuaid @Charles_SEO I think this is common in many industries. Complexity sells, simplicity doesn't.

@Charles_SEO Tell me that the Ivory Tower SEOs aren't all paid off by the Branding Industry? Is confusion intentional in the SEO speaker circuity?

Fantastic post! On this point though: "I've spent too many hours in meetings explaining how the old-world SEO model is dying (clicks and rankings) and the new model is about being selected for AI-powered answer recommendations." This is really nuanced in my opinion. What has changed here, the outcomes or the input? 1. There is a difference in measurement as you say (clicks and rankings vs. AI citations) 2. There may even be a massive shift in attribution (your point 8) 3. HOWEVER I disagree that the strategy, for the majority of sites, will differ much from "content, links, technical" i.e. SEO. What do you think?

I’ve spent the last 18 months doing AI SEO / GEO / AEO for B2B SaaS companies... and here's the 10 biggest things I've learned: 1. Most companies do not have an "AEO problem." Most do not have an unfixable technical SEO problem either. They have a positioning, category alignment, and market validation problem. 2. I've spent too many hours in meetings explaining how the old-world SEO model is dying (clicks and rankings) and the new model is about being selected for AI-powered answer recommendations. 3. Brand selection depends on whether the market, your website, your customers, and third-party sources all tell the same story about why your brand belongs in the answer. This is not about llms.txt or paragraph chunking. 4. Bulldozing your way to the top with listicles and backlinks may help you rank, but not get recommended. Especially if your brand doesn't belong in that category. 5. The best AEO strategy starts with positioning and category alignment. Here is the proper diagnostic framework for: “What's our AEO strategy?” Do we have clear product positioning? Do we have messaging that's aligned to the category? Does the website make our category alignment obvious? Do we have a BOFU content strategy aligned with the desired category? Do we have an external authority gap? 6. AI referral traffic is negligible for most B2B SaaS companies. For most of the companies I work with: ChatGPT / Perplexity / Gemini / Claude, etc. is a tiny fraction compared to Google. It's common to see a range of 5% (AI) vs 95% (Google). Why? Because AI SEO eliminates top of funnel, whereas traditional SEO sends mostly informational traffic. 7. Visitor to page conversion rates from AI referral traffic tend to be higher than traditional Google traffic. This is because of personalization, long-tail BOFU intent, and the elimination of TOFU intent. 8. There's a "Dark SEO" funnel emerging where buyers are shortlisting vendor options with AI search, verifying the brands they want to evaluate with Google search, and then converting directly on the website from branded search much later in the buying process. 9. Off-site authority matters, but the GEO vendor claims are getting out of control. I'm skeptical on things like: “90% of AI visibility comes from third-party sources.” etc. Claims like these are confusing and pulled out of context. This causes marketers to have the wrong reactions and think irrationally. 10. Buying AEO tools is not a strategy. I have personally worked with companies that purchased AEO tools with no strategy in-place. The mere fact that a tool was purchased only buys them time with the board... "we're working on it" ... but it's not a real strategy. Bonus: There's a "research" study out there which fits any narrative you want to push. Be wary. And be skeptical.

Could this not also be read as... "even if you create informative content you might not rank as Google values authority and other factors higher" The bar for original content might be low, yet the bar to rank top 1-3 seems to just not depend on original content. What's your take?

SEOs, it turns out the bar is VERY LOW for original content in the top 1-3 results. This study found the median top-3 ranking page had an Information Gain Score of 52/100, suggesting that much of the content was semantically similar to other pages ranking for the same query.

Healthcare is where I'd have expected to see the least amount of AI summaries, not the most. Full analysis here: machined.ai/blog/state-of-…

@MartinTale 8 projects in 6 months is no small feat, congrats! Out of interest, how do you determine if something has failed? Less than a month per project doesn't feel like a long time to get traction, do you think if you spent longer on fewer projects that would change outcomes?

6 months of building in public: - $95 profit 🥳 - 1,800 people decided to follow my journey 🥰 - shipped 8 projects 🚀 - 7 failed, 1 has potential 💪 Had many doubts along the way, but I kept showing up. Lets see where this leads 😊 Never give up and keep shipping! 🏴‍☠️

Even diversification seems somewhat risky if you're only choosing "borrowed" platforms. Thanks for sharing Joe's post about owned audiences. Though I'm still primarily an SEO and still think it is a great channel, building these owned audiences (X, email list etc) does seem like a safe long-term play.

@mainlymktg Thank you, @mainlymktg, for reviewing it. I appreciate it. Indeed, traffic diversification is key to a sustainable digital business nowadays; otherwise, relying solely on SEO arbitrage is high-risk, and my study proves it.

Should you start or maintain a blog in 2026? Last week, I ran a study on 100 blogs and compared their total traffic and SEO traffic in 2022 and 2026. The results are shocking: 🟥 49% lost 80%+ of their traffic 🟥 21% continued to grow (in organic traffic) 🟥 11% lost traffic moderately (-50% to -79%) The 21% of blogs that continued to grow all had a few things in common: 🟢 Firsthand experience - I call it "irreplaceability," meaning that an AI can not summarize or reproduce your content easily 🟢 Owned & Other Rented Audiences - Email Newsletters, YouTube channel, etc 🟢 Real product - You offer something more than content: a tool, book, course, product or service 🟢 Branded Searches - Have a strong, established brand that people search for on Google So, to answer the question of whether you should start a blog in 2026, I would say you should do it only if you can produce high-quality, firsthand experience content that cannot be summarized by AI. Also, don't treat SEO traffic as the main source of traffic; treat it as one channel in your traffic mix. The link to the full study and data: danielstanica.com/posts/Great-Bl…

I'd be hesitant to recommend this to anyone other than large directories. "X service in Y location" pages may have worked but I think the content is going to be seen as thin (and Google seems to be deprioritizing these programatic pages). It works for Airbnb (or other companies like Indeed) as they genuinely have unique content in these pages.

Airbnb wrote one page and turned it into 18 MILLION visitors a month not 18 million from one page they built a single template and let it spin out 1.1 million of them a page for every city, neighborhood and type of stay "cabins in big bear", "lofts in austin", "beachfront in tulum" every search someone could make about where to stay, Airbnb had a page waiting for it they didn’t need a team writing 1.1 million pages by hand literally just one template plugged into the data they already had we ran the same method for an eCommerce SaaS client instead of city pages, we built one for every product and use case their buyers searched their traffic went from 132 clicks a day to 1,709 in 6 months the lesson is simple… one good template plus a list of what your buyers search outperforms a hundred blog posts

SEO research of the week: The Great Blogging Collapse @danielstanica10 analyzed 100 blogs over 4 years + tracked the aftermath of Google's HCU and AI Overviews 85% lost Google traffic, 11 were gutted, but interestingly, a few actually grew. That's where the lesson is👏👏👏

Very interesting indeed! Thanks for sharing and thanks @danielstanica10 for creating. I find the recipe part so interesting: 1. Perhaps this is a personal take, but it feels like a recipe is something I'd be happy to take AI generated, yet financial tips I'd much prefer from a source I trusted (yet from the trends here it seems to be the opposite) 2. Hard to differentiate why for example Kitchen Sanctuary has done so well, and Fork in the Road has suffered (if we're basing purely on "first-hand, genuine experience") - obviously ranking has many factors yet from a first glance Fork in the Road seems editorially very authoritative. 3. Last part that I found interesting (and probably many people would love this change!) - most of the top ranking pages for the recipe blogs seemed to be very image-heavy and very direct (no fluff and unnecessary content, just ingredients, method, and maybe a few tips). I just cherry-picked a couple of pages, but certainly a change from old-style recipe blogs.

@buildwithmaya It's really nice! I've been toying with the idea to add something similar to our product, just to make it feel more friendly/approachable. Tried a couple of AI prompts but found it hard to get the line between too casual and too formal... I think you've nailed it.

@mainlymktg Thank you! No I didn’t it was Ai Generated, but I wanted it to be like a juice box since it’s like marketing and distribution for newbies or people just getting started out, and reminded me of chipotle kids meal where we get the apple juice 😅

🔥🔥 issue 2 of newbie marketer just dropped 🔥🔥 In this article i share all the tips that I have used to grow my account from 0 to 1600+ followers