Tag: SEO
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5 Themes That Defined MozCon 2026
I made a last minute decision to travel to New York City for MozCon 2026. I’m glad I did! Full disclosure. 50% of the reason i went down was so I could hit my old pizza joint in my hometown in New Jersey. Nothing like a Federici’s pizza followed up with some ice cream from…
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When Does Reputation Management Become Reputation Laundering? SEO, AI, & the Responsibility of Influence
I’ve been wrestling with a particular question for several years. In fact, much of what lies behind this article began as notes and outlines I started writing a few years ago. I often found myself wondering what responsibility comes with the ability to influence what information people encounter online. At the time, I was thinking…
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The Evolution of SEO in One Year: From Traffic Loss to Entity Understanding
Last week was a good week to be an SEO in Boston. As someone who lives in the area, it’s not often that major search events come to your backyard. Between the SEOFOMO meetup hosted by Aleyda Solís and WhitePress and three days of SMX Advanced, the search industry effectively took over Boston for a…
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Google I/O 2026: Google Search Is Becoming Intelligent Search | What This Means for SEO, Search Console, and Website Traffic
At Google I/O 2026, Google made something very clear: Search is no longer just a search engine with AI features layered on top. Instead, it is becoming an AI-powered system designed to understand complex questions, maintain context, perform tasks on a user’s behalf, and even build custom tools directly within Search. Liz Reid, Google’s Head…
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Google’s New Guidance on AI Search: SEO, Query Fan-Out, and What Still Matters
For the past two years, the SEO industry has spent a great deal of time trying to determine what, if anything, fundamentally changed when Google introduced generative AI into Search. Do you need to create an llms.txt file? Should you break your content into tiny chunks? Is there a special way to write for AI…
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How Customers Find and Choose Local Businesses Online (Google, Reviews, Websites & AI)
I recently had the opportunity to present a webinar for Boston Business Mentors on a topic at the center of local SEO and digital marketing: how customers find businesses online and decide which one to contact. The presentation, How Your Business Gets Found Online, was designed for small business owners, but the underlying ideas apply…
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Streetlight Local: My New Mission to Help Small Businesses Get Found Everywhere
It’s been a while since my last post. If you’ve been following my work, especially my research on Google AI Overviews and AI’s role in search, you’ve probably noticed I’ve been a bit quiet. That’s not because I’ve run out of things to say. Quite the opposite. For the past few months, I’ve been hard…
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GEO? AIO? LLMO? No Thanks. I’ll Stick with Search Optimization.
The term “GEO”, short for Generative Engine Optimization, has been circulating more and more in SEO conversations. I’ve written about it before, including early takes on the original study by Aggarwal et al., which (I believe) introduced the term and offered some genuinely helpful insights about visibility in LLM-powered platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity. At…
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Measuring the Impact of Google AI Overviews on SEO Performance
Measuring the impact of Google AI Overviews is no small feat. Google Search Console (GSC) includes performance data for URLs featured in AI Overviews, but it doesn’t allow you to isolate this data specifically. During a recent interview with Aleyda Solis, Google’s Danny Sullivan indicated that an AI Overview filter in GSC is unlikely to…
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Google AI Overview Study: Link Selection Based on Related Queries
This study is the result of a joint effort between Rich Sanger and Authoritas. Understanding how Google AI Overviews source links is necessary for establishing visibility for your content. This year, multiple studies have taken the first step in identifying how links in AI Overviews correlate with existing search results. After reviewing these studies and…
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