Jim Hunt
Jim Hunt is a technical SEO architect and digital engineer specializing in search visibility for industrial-scale brands. With over a decade of experience in the "State of Search," he focuses on the intersection of technical performance and AI-first discovery.
Published Intelligence Feed // 51 Postings
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 […]
AI Searchers Visit Different Websites Than Google Searchers. The Data Proves It.
AI search destination domains reveal a different web than traditional Google search. Clickstream data from Q4 2025 shows GitHub at #3 after AI search (absent from Google top 15), while Wikipedia and Facebook dominate Google but vanish from AI destinations.
Zero-Click Searches: The Numbers Behind the Panic
A zero-click search is any Google search session where the user doesn't click on any result. They search, see the results page, and either leave Google...
Google AI Mode: The SEO Guide for 2026
Google AI Mode is a conversational AI interface within Google Search that allows users to have multi-turn conversations about their search queries. Here is what it means for SEO strategy in 2026.
How to Get Cited by ChatGPT
ChatGPT draws from two primary sources when generating responses: the data it was trained on and real-time web browsing. Understanding what triggers a citation gives you a framework for earning them.
ChatGPT is Now a Top-10 Search Destination (Here’s What That Means)
ChatGPT has climbed to the 7th most-visited domain after a Google search, up from 9th last quarter. The Datos/SparkToro data shows AI tools are becoming a routine part of how people navigate the web.