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…]
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.
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…]
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.
One of the longest-running debates in the SEO industry is whether sending traffic to a website can influence Google rankings. The theory is simple enough: if Google sees large numbers of real users visiting a website, engaging with pages, and clicking around, then perhaps Google interprets those signals as indicators of quality or popularity. [Read more…]
Google just released an official guide called “Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search,” and honestly, I’m glad they finally published it.
Why?
Because it confirms something many of us who have been doing SEO for decades have been saying all along: SEO is still SEO. [Read more…]