Your business doesn't get to decide whether it does SEO. It only gets to decide whether it does it deliberately. Every architectural decision, product launch, rebrand, and content change can affect how search engines understand and evaluate you. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/y...

You can't not do SEO

You can choose not to invest in SEO, but you can't choose whether your business participates in the systems that determine its visibility.

jonoalderson.com

Fuck yeah, after motherfuckingwebsite.com we now get the modern version: modernmotherfuckingwebsite.dreamstation.systems

This is a modern motherfucking website.

Zero of the bullshit.

modernmotherfuckingwebsite.dreamstation.systems

The "Fix" I'm seeing most tools make for Google's poisoned results is to keep scraping until you get 2 results that are over 90% similar - which means Google's anti-scraping defense is literally causing people to scrape almost 3X as much.

Most businesses don't have blogs. They have article factories. Recycled, anonymous "advice". Contrived internal links. All reported as progress. They've built expertise their competitors can't copy, and spent a fortune publishing things anybody could. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/y...

You don't have a blog. You have an article factory.

Most businesses don’t have blogs. They just have enormous collections of mediocre articles, written by nobody, for everybody, about nothing in particular.

jonoalderson.com

After 12 years, Scroll-Driven Animations are officially Baseline Newly Available 🎉 Pure CSS scroll-driven animations work across every major browser engine! Celebrate this milestone with our animated timeline tracing the feature's history since 2014 → goo.gle/3Urm9fT

Cloaking is back in SEO fashion. Everyone's busy serving dedicated content to LLMs. Yawn. Know what's more interesting? Cloaking Google using nothing but CSS. PS, don't try this at home. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/c...

Cloaking is dead. Long live cloaking.

Cloaking is making a comeback in the age of AI. But what if Google and users could see completely different websites, without serving different content?

jonoalderson.com

It's been a long road, but I think the WordPress core patch to eliminate script/style concatenation is ready to ship in 7.2! Goodbye load-scripts.php & load-styles.php (and all the headaches they have caused). This one PR will close 10+ Trac tickets: github.com/WordPress/wo...

Script Loader: Retire script and style concatenation by westonruter · Pull Request #14463 · WordPress/wordpress-develop

Retires script and style concatenation in the admin and on the login screen. Concatenation has been off by default since r64320, when the assets of the next admin screen also began to be prefetched...

github.com

If your marketing only cares about potential buyers, it’s broken. Some of the people creating the most valuable evidence around your brand will never become customers. I wrote about audience-centricity, and why “out of market” still isn’t far enough: www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/a...

Customer-centric thinking is too narrow

Customer-centric thinking is too narrow. The people who never buy from you still shape how your market, search engines and AI systems understand your brand.

jonoalderson.com

What if your SEO growth just measures how badly you treat customers? Confusing pricing, hidden support, painful cancellations... All generate search traffic. Your best-performing keywords might actually be bug reports. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/s...

Sometimes search volume is a bug report

What happens when fixing a customer problem makes organic traffic fall? Conventional SEO reporting can mistake genuine business improvements for failure.

jonoalderson.com

We celebrated @nickwilsdon.bsky.social’s 50th birthday early, in January. We knew he wasn’t well. But he never lost his spirit and positivity. He passed yesterday. I thought we had more time. Life is short and fragile. Hug your loved ones. Cherish every moment. And fuck cancer.

NBC with their anti-web, anti-user, self-serving bullshit enshittification approach to video on their mobile site. It’s all just so shortsighted.

Just shipped a big update to my Edge Images WordPress plugin! Automatically transform image URLs and HTML markup to be ultra-performant, sized to fit, and avoid Cloudflare's unique-trandforms-per-month billing model (by localizing generated variants). wordpress.org/plugins/edge...

Edge Images

Turbocharge your WordPress images by using an edge provider (like Cloudflare or Accelerated Domains) and optimizing your HTML markup.

wordpress.org

Bravery should be marketing's most important KPI. Unfortunately, it doesn't have an ROI forecast, so the board won't approve it. We reward fictional certainty, punish honest expertise, and call ourselves 'data-driven'. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/b...

Bravery is the most important KPI

When every marketing decision needs a measurable ROI, the most valuable work never gets funded. It's time for CMOs to be brave enough to say so.

jonoalderson.com

I meant to write a lot more, but this will do for now: dejan.ai/blog/prompt-...

Why we don't do prompt tracking.

Instead of infinite prompt variations, this measurement framework tracks canonical core entities across AI models to score brand visibility over time.

dejan.ai

Replacing your CMS with AI-generated pages? Enjoy discovering why content management systems exist, one production bug at a time. You’ve just inherited a thousand publishing problems your CMS used to solve without you noticing. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/y...

Your website needs a brain

If you’ve spent years fighting with a content management system, the prospect of replacing it with a prompt is understandably appealing.

jonoalderson.com

WordCamp Manchester is on it's way! We're meeting on November 6th, 2026 in Whitworth Locke Hotel in Manchester for a day of relaxed networking, learning about WordPress and collaboration. Hope you can join us! manchester.wordcamp.org/2026/

Hey Folks, Bit of news this morning. We're happy to present WordCamp Manchester 2026! The event will take place in the Whitworth Locke Hotel on November 6th 2026. Launch Post: manchester.wordcamp.org/2026/alright... Buy Tickets: manchester.wordcamp.org/2026/tickets/ #wcmcr #wordcamp

Search is shifting from “find this” to “tell me when”. From query to condition. Intent can persist after the user leaves, and businesses can move in and out of consideration without another query ever happening. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/q...

From query to condition

For most of search’s history, we’ve relied on people turning up and asking for something. They type a query, get some possible answers, and decide what to

jonoalderson.com

If AI unlocked your creativity, what was blocking you before? Senior people have always had access to developers, designers, agencies, teams and budgets. The constraint may not have been technical - it may have been you. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/w...

What stopped you from building it before?

If AI has suddenly made you capable of building things, and you're a senior leader, what exactly were you doing before?

jonoalderson.com

Most enterprise websites should be deleted. The regional clone. The campaign fossil. The acquired brand nobody dared to kill. They aren’t expanding your reach. They’re dividing your authority, budget and attention. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/f...

Fragmentation is not reach

More websites don’t create more reach. They dilute authority, clarity and investment. Every digital boundary must earn the cost of its existence.

jonoalderson.com

Google's crawlers don't parse JSON, they just download things. Parsing anything is done by, for example, indexing in case of Search.

Your SEO team is the cleanup crew for your organisational dysfunction. Endless audits, Jira tickets and developer cajoling aren’t strategy. They’re symptoms. Fix the systems. Make the cleanup unnecessary. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/o...

SEO is the cleanup crew for organisational dysfunction

There is satisfaction in walking into a mess and leaving it less broken. But an organisation with a reliable cleanup crew has less reason to stop making the mess.

jonoalderson.com

The SEO industry has invented another fake crisis. SEO vs GEO is a nonsense debate. AI isn’t creating a new marketing discipline. It’s exposing which businesses are clear, credible and worth recommending. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/s...

SEO vs GEO is the wrong question

Marketing is the work of shaping what the market discovers, understands and believes.

jonoalderson.com

I've just release v6.0.0 of the web-vitals library. It includes support for measuring Web Vitals per soft navigation (like those used in SPAs) for supporting browsers (Chrome 151+) to give more accurate performance metrics for those sites. github.com/GoogleChrome...

Measurement plans. Do then before you put your dirty little mits on GA! www.searchenginejournal.com/designing-a-...

Designing A Measurement Framework Before You Touch GA4

GA4 can collect the data, but it can not decide what matters. Build the measurement framework before the implementation starts.

searchenginejournal.com

+++ Speaker Spotlight: Barry Pollard +++ What if browsers could stream HTML where it's needed, without all the JavaScript? At Fronteers Dark Mode, Barry Pollard explores Declarative Partial Updates, a proposal that could reshape server-rendered apps. Oct. 2nd in Dordrecht 🇳🇱⛵️ 🎟️ fronteersconf.org

Someone in DC set up a “little free blockbuster” with DVDs inside instead of books lol

Some of the world’s most successful companies are zombies. They're already dead. They're unable to abandon the old model, unable to build the next one, and surviving only because the market has not finished looting the corpse. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/z...

Zombie companies

Many successful companies are already dead: sustained by past profits, customer inertia and leaders who mistake stagnation for resilience.

jonoalderson.com

A long, long, long road, but `clip-path` animations are about to be GPU accelerated in Chromium: issues.chromium.org/issues/40503...

If you're serving bots nicely formatted markdown but giving users div soup that forces them to download 15MB of JS that does nothing for them, you're treating humans as second class citizens. I wrote something to redress the balance a bit: chris-spann.co.uk/impersonatin...