Jim Hunt

AEO Is Just SEO With New Acronyms (Here’s What Actually Changes)

The vendor industry has spent eighteen months selling AEO, GEO, AIO, and a dozen lesser acronyms as new disciplines that need new tools, new budgets, and new specialists. Google’s own Search Advocate, John Mueller, called that pattern out on Bluesky in August 2025. The quote is the cleanest summary I have seen of where the […]

Information Agents: When the Searcher Is Software, Not a Human

Google’s I/O 2026 letter dropped one announcement that nobody is sequencing properly. Most of the recap coverage led with AI Mode hitting 1 billion monthly active users or AI Overviews reaching 2.5 billion. The bigger story was a paragraph buried under those numbers: Information Agents. Personalized AI agents running 24/7, monitoring the web for users, […]

Stop Guessing How Your Customers Search (The Data Will Surprise You)

You probably cannot guess the words your customers search. Real volume data shows why, and how to find the exact phrases that win in Google and AI search.

How to See Your Lighthouse Agentic Browsing Score (It’s Not in PageSpeed Insights)

Chrome added an “Agentic Browsing” score to Lighthouse. You went to check yours, opened PageSpeed Insights or Chrome DevTools, and it was not there. You are not missing a setting. The score genuinely does not appear in the two tools most people use. Every guide currently telling you to “open PageSpeed Insights and check the […]

Google’s Preferred Sources Comes to AI Search: Why You Can’t Optimize for It (and What Actually Helps)

On May 27, 2026, Google extended its Preferred Sources feature into AI Overviews and AI Mode. It is one of the few levers in AI search that a publisher can actually pull. It is also one of the most misunderstood, because the vendor content that appeared within days framed it as something you can optimize […]

The Data Disagrees With the ‘Google Is Dying’ Narrative

Every earnings call, every LinkedIn thread, every tech-media headline tells the same story: AI is eating Google’s lunch. The actual numbers say something different. Berkshire Hathaway’s Q1 2026 13F filing showed the firm tripled its Alphabet stake to roughly $16.6 billion, making Google the firm’s fifth-largest holding (IBTimes, 2026). It was the first quarterly disclosure […]

Google’s AI Content Rules: What “Meet the Standards” Actually Means

Google’s new AI optimization guide spends most of its word count saying the quiet part out loud: keep doing SEO, just be smarter about it. Buried in the “create valuable, non-commodity content” section is one line that does a lot of work without explaining itself: If you’re using generative AI tools to assist in content […]

Why LLMs.txt Doesn’t Work: The Definitive Verdict After Google’s May 2026 Guide

LLMs.txt is the most-promoted, least-effective piece of “AI SEO” the industry produced between mid-2024 and mid-2026. Google made the position official in its May 2026 AI Optimization Guide. The hard data behind that position has been in server logs for over a year. I’ve been writing about it since October 2025. None of this is […]

What Google’s New AI Optimization Guide Actually Says (and What It Leaves Out)

Google’s new AI Optimization Guide landed in Search Central on May 15, 2026, and it’s the first official, vendor-neutral document the company has published on how to show up in AI Overviews and AI Mode. It also debunks five popular tactics the AEO and GEO industry has been selling for the past 18 months. That’s […]

Vibe Coding and SEO: What Google’s John Mueller Just Confirmed

Vibe coding and SEO have a problem with each other, and on Search Off the Record episode 110, Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt finally said it out loud. Sites built by AI tools like Lovable, Bolt.new, v0, Cursor, and Replit AI Studio look great in the editor, ship in days, and routinely fail at […]