Will Critchlow

I am very interested in @randfish's recent research into the growth of LLMs, their impact on people's search habits, and their impact on Google. My summary: 1. Google is still growing, not shrinking as some would have you believe 2. Not everything people do on LLM-based chat platforms are "searches" 3. Even if you are fixated on AI-powered discovery, Google is the biggest for *that* too This is not to say we should ignore the growth of the others, or get complacent, and in fact I think there's a lot of scope to test the impact of our activities on other LLM recommendations, but we should keep things in perspective. It reminds me a lot of the growth of social media circa 2007. It was clearly a coming revolution, and there was noise about it being catastrophic for search because people were making the argument that users would prefer to ask their friends where to eat rather than searching for restaurants. It turned out, of course, that they did both.

@levie @nxthompson Agree. Also, on the flip side, founders also do appear to be quite well placed to explore and play, I’ve noticed

CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI. So when they play with AI, they see the happy path results, often not considering the next 10 or 20 things that have to happen to get sustainable results from agents. “Look I made this awesome product prototype”. Yes but you didn’t have to review the code before it went into production and fix a bunch of issues. “Look I generated a contract”. Yes but you didn’t verify all the terms before it goes out to the counterparty and didn’t have to wire up all the past contracts to work with. The best thing you can do as a CEO is to use AI a *ton* to figure out the real implications of agents in the enterprise, and come out the other side with an appreciation for both the upside and the real work that goes into them.

Wow never saw this chart before - Google referrals compared to other search engines & LLMs (yes it’s from late last year) 👀👀 @filiwiese @athenseo

I’ve thought this would be a natural evolution of agent interaction for a while

👀

Who do I need to speak to at Google to get the account switcher put back somewhere prominent in the Gemini iPhone app?

@tomcritchlow reddit.com/r/slatestarcod…

@tomcritchlow slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noi…

Oh you like pace layers? Name all the paces

It's not an original thought, but my work is getting polyphasic: - Kick off agents to do things before I do other things (e.g. walk the dog, cook dinner) - Starting tasks when I've got tokens left - Going for a walk when I hit token limits

I'm biased, but I think that if you're interested in what REALLY works in SEO / GEO / AI discovery these days, there is nowhere better to learn than @SearchPilot . If you're spending Sunday thinking about your future, check out the SearchPilot jobs pages - we are hiring a consultant in the US.

@Sams_Antics Interestingly @levie said something similar - seeing 90+% of the work being done by ai. The difference is whether the total amount of work goes up 10x or 100x so the remaining 10% is more than current human work. If there is any need for human in the loop, that’s what happens no?

@willcritchlow In my mind the odds that AI + robots aren’t doing at least 90% of all work within 5-10 years is close to 0%. And all the incentives align toward that end. blog.thegrandredesign.com/p/defecting-in…

Some of the best articulation of the bull case for both software and human jobs from @levie on the @CaseyNewton podcast: overcast.fm/+ABXa90QaM2s

RT @alexfmac: London vibe shift in the last 12 months has been phenomenal. Great resources here for any founders moving to the city. 🚀🤌🏽

@Sams_Antics haha I thought you'd disagree ;) we'll see eh

@willcritchlow Pure cope

The other day, I was thinking about resources I wished someone had put together and I realised I wanted someone to collate the current state of play of how traffic referred from different AI sources shows up in server logs and web analytics. I (with some agentic support) aggregated research and pulled it together into a table to summarise how it works in mid-2026. It's a fast-changing area, and some details may vary in different circumstances, so validate specific details before relying on them, and let me know if you spot any mistakes: searchpilot.com/resources/blog…

Retail SEO leaders - are you setting yourself up to be a scapegoat or the GOAT? searchpilot.com/resources/blog…

RT @chrija: 1/ Since launching ai-pilled.com on Saturday, we got >700 submissions . I asked Claude to take a look at the data, gi…

I had a great conversation with @abbysuegleason recently, and it's now available on the Business Class Lounge podcast feed, available wherever you get your podcasts: shows.acast.com/business-class…

RT @CyrusShepard: You may have heard by now that Google is dropping support for all FAQ rich results So, should you remove all FAQs from y…