Jono Alderson
@jono.id
Award-winning technical SEO consultant. I help brands to compete on technical SEO, performance, and structured data. https://www.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...
github.com
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...
Chromium
issues.chromium.org
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...
Impersonating LLMs as an Adblocking Strategy | Chris Spann is Ar Waith
Because we've decided bots deserve better treatment than users
chris-spann.co.uk
AI is about to make every gap between your marketing and reality easier to find. For years, companies have survived because scrutiny was expensive. AI makes it cheap. Now visibility is becoming less of a prize, and more of a threat. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/w...
When scrutiny becomes cheap
In an information-abundant world, the challenge was being visible. In a scrutiny-abundant world, the challenge is being inspectable.
jonoalderson.com
AI is about to expose your marketing bullshit. Every brand has trade-offs, and AI makes them harder to hide. When comparison gets cheaper, hidden compromises become liabilities. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/m...
Marketing after the fog clears
The task is no longer to persuade the market that your trade-offs do not exist, but to make those trade-offs the reason the right people choose you.
jonoalderson.com
Green City Wars is out this week, US and UK covers below. A cyber/solarpunk noir detective story starring a raccoon. Available at your bookshop of choice, ebook, audio and hardback.
Every new AI standard exposes and amplifies the cost of your technical debt. Standards like llms.txt and WebMCP - and whatever comes next - are revealing how (unnecessarily) expensive change has become inside most organisations. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/t...
Technical debt is becoming an AI problem
The debate around llms.txt, WebMCP and other AI protocols is revealing an uncomfortable truth about how businesses handle change.
jonoalderson.com
SEO killed the creative web. AI might bring it back. For thirty years, websites have been shaped around what machines could understand. That's why everything became pages. The irony is that smarter machines may finally free us from that constraint. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/t...
The future of the web is weirdly human
The future of the web may end up looking a lot less like documents, and a lot more like the things it's trying to describe.
jonoalderson.com
Ok, the new @aptshadow.bsky.social sounds great! Meet Skotch, freelance raccoon investigator, in Green City Wars: artificially enhanced animals serve humans, but their own world is filled with conflict, crime & power battles... Out 26.6, signed #preorder: www.waterstones.com/book/green-c... 💙📚🪐
The best new science-fiction books of June 2026: There's plenty of intriguing sci-fi on offer this month, whether it’s solar-powered cities from @aptshadow.bsky.social or a strange future from M. John Harrison www.newscientist.com/article/2528...
The best new science-fiction books of June 2026
There is plenty of intriguing sci-fi on offer this month, whether it’s solar-powered cities from Adrian Tchaikovsky or a strange future from M. John Harrison
newscientist.com
Running multiple CMSs is almost always a death sentence for a website. Shopify + WordPress. React + Webflow. AEM + whatever marketing bolted on afterwards. This pattern is everywhere, and it cripples businesses. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/o...
One website, one CMS
Running multiple CMSs on one website doesn’t just create complexity. It quietly destroys coherence, agility, and growth.
jonoalderson.com
Your website was built around a moment AI is starting to remove. The web spent decades obsessing over conversion rates, checkout UX and lead-gen funnels. Now, brands need to rethink what websites are actually for. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/t...
The inversion of purpose
The web spent decades optimising for conversion, just as AI began turning conversion itself into commodity infrastructure.
jonoalderson.com
Scaled “comparison / alternative” pages are the new scaled “listicle” pages
Model collapse was supposed to be a training problem. Something slow. Something that unfolds across generations of models. Something researchers could warn about in papers while everyone kept shipping. That's not what's happening. New on The Inference: theinference.io/p/the-ourobo...
The Ouroboros Learned to Cite Itself
Everyone’s been watching the wrong pipe. The synthetic content is already in the retrieval layer, and the answer engines are laundering it as fact.
theinference.io
Wanna measure Core Web Vitals for SPAs? It's been a long-standing gap, but one that we've been working hard to fill. We're approaching the final stages and have launched one last origin trial (🤞) as the "last call" before we ship it! More details: developer.chrome.com/blog/final-s...
Final Soft Navigations origin trial starting in Chrome 147 | Blog | Chrome for Developers
Take a last chance to try out the Soft Navigations API before release with this final origin trial.
developer.chrome.com
You can (but probably shouldn’t) use your traffic to slow your competitors’ sites. No bots. Just a browser feature. Real requests. From real users. At scale. If you’re not protecting against it, it can quietly hit your servers and your costs. www.jonoalderson.com/performance/...
Speculation rules for evil
You can use speculation rules to make your site feel faster. You can also use them to make other sites do work they didn’t ask for.
jonoalderson.com
I am 100% in favour of this. Introducing a new spam policy for "back button hijacking" developers.google.com/search/blog/...
Introducing a new spam policy for "back button hijacking" | Google Search Central Blog | Google for Developers
developers.google.com
🤔 Google has rebranded Looker Studio to ... Data Studio (again)! Read: cloud.google.com/blog/product...
Headless websites are usually a mistake. Sold as flexible and fast. Delivered as complex and slow. Most teams end up rebuilding what the web already does, just worse. This isn’t progress. It’s engineering vanity. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/h...
Headless websites and the cost of engineering vanity
Headless sounds like a route to freedom, but too often it just swaps one set of constraints for another, heavier one.
jonoalderson.com
PSA Googlebot tries to render pages to understand what they look like, to better understand the value & context of your site's content. This requires that your JS & CSS files be crawlable. Don't block these files for Googlebot in robots.txt, if you want Google to understand your site optimally.
Most websites are built on the wrong stack. Not because the tools are bad. Because teams pick based on identity, not reality. There are only four sane choices: React → products Shopify → selling Static → simple WP/Drupal/TYPO3 → publishing www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/f...
There are only four sensible ways to build a website
Most teams don’t pick the wrong stack because they misunderstand the technology. They pick it because they misunderstand themselves.
jonoalderson.com
One of the worst things you can do for AI search visibility? Destroying your SEO performance with shiny new AI search tactics that are ultimately dangerous for SEO - and by extension - AI search. (1/2) open.substack.com/pub/lilyrayn...
Your GEO Strategy Might Be Destroying Your SEO
Many tactics designed to win in AI search can undermine SEO performance - which is, ironically, necessary for success in AI search.
open.substack.com
Clicks don’t count. They never did. SEO spent 20 years pretending the search interface was the market. Now people are doing it again with prompt tracking. Measure competitiveness, not clicks (or prompts). www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/c...
Clicks don't count (and they never did)
Rankings, traffic, and prompt tracking all measure the interface, not the market. If you want visibility in AI search, start measuring competitiveness.
jonoalderson.com
