You probably put a third-party traffic chart in a client deck this month. A Similarweb screenshot showing a competitor’s monthly visits, a Semrush visibility graph, an Ahrefs backlink count. I have done it hundreds of times. [Read more…]
131 SEO Experts Just Ranked Google’s Ranking Factors. Backlinks Did Not Die.
Cyrus and Dawn Shepard published the 2026 Google Ranking Factors Expert Survey this morning. One hundred thirty-one SEO professionals scored more than 100 possible ranking factors on a seven-point scale, from strongly positive to strongly negative, producing 13,665 data points and about 43 hours of collective work.
I Analyzed Twenty Years of My Own Backlinks. Half of Them Are Gone.
1,301,839 links. 22,260 referring domains. Not one of them bought. Here is what the data says about how long a backlink actually lasts — and what it says about my own site.
I have been publishing on this domain since around 2006. Over that time it has accumulated 1,301,839 backlinks from 22,260 referring domains, and I have never bought a single one of them. Every link is natural, with the exception of my own properties linking here. [Read more…]
Legal Tech Media Group Bets Big on AEO
A New Front Opens in Search, and Legal Tech Companies Are Standing in It
Search just got a new gatekeeper, and it doesn’t wear a suit. It’s an AI model.
Legal Tech Media Group (LTMG), the exclusive HubSpot Certified Solutions Partner for legal technology companies, announced on July 7, 2026 that it has launched a new line of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) services. The goal is simple to state and hard to execute: help legal tech vendors show up, and get recommended, inside AI search tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot.
Remembering Bruce Clay: The Father of SEO and a Friend Who Changed an Industry
The SEO industry lost one of its most important figures. Bruce Clay, widely recognized as the Father of SEO, has passed away. And I lost a friend. I’ve been sitting with this news, trying to figure out how to put into words what Bruce meant to me, to the people who worked with him, and to an entire industry that many people don’t realize he helped build from the ground up. [Read more…]
Why Paid AI Mentions Could Become the Next Google Penalty
The SEO industry may be entering another familiar cycle. This time, instead of companies buying backlinks to manipulate traditional search rankings, marketers are beginning to experiment with buying brand mentions intended to influence AI-generated responses in Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and other large language model systems.