Steven Willett

Interests are: Web dev, breaking things, business & technology.
Like PHP, learn #Laravel

[Lily Ray 😏 @lilyraynyc]

New AI reporting features finally coming to GSC.

Reporting on impressions and not clicks says a whole lot here 🫠

But yes, grateful to have any AI reporting at this point 🙏🏽

https://t.co/7MWjkYuNEh

[Joost de Valk @jdevalk]

Launching https://t.co/36UBUXMmiq.

A platform-agnostic spec of what a good website does: SEO, accessibility, security, agent-readiness, performance, privacy, i18n.

Every claim cites a source. Ships with a checklist, llms.txt, MCP server, and Agent Skill.

Free. Open Source.

[Lily Ray 😏 @lilyraynyc]

Exciting news: our SEO team at @amsiveagency has 3 SEO/AEO job postings up right now! Want to join our amazing team? 💜

If you are as passionate about SEO and AI search as we are, apply to join!

Note: we are starting our search with candidates based in the NYC/Nashville areas, where Amsive has physical offices, but may expand the search to the broader U.S. for a remote position.

These roles are not open to international applicants.

https://t.co/IadWAdCSwH

[Screaming Frog @screamingfrog]

Technical SEO Checklist: The Complete Guide For 2026 - https://t.co/20NEd4XXao from @mjcachon

[Glenn Gabe @glenngabe]

All the slides + JC's coverage. Some good nuggets here -> Google Search Central Live Toronto Slides (April 2026)

*Crawl vs. Index: “Crawled – Currently not indexed” is rarely a technical rendering issue; it’s usually a quality signal. Google may have tried the content and decided it “wasn’t good,” or it’s a canonical/duplicate issue. It could also sometimes be 404s, redirect issues or robots.txt issues
*Scaled Content Abuse: This is an important algorithm that could explain AI-generated content traffic drops, rather than the use of AI itself. Google wasn’t against AI per-se, but there are safeguards against scaling content and safeguard against what they decide to index.
*AI Overview (AIO) & “Agentic” Search
Reporting Gap: There wasn’t much new shared regarding AI Overview and AI Mode tracking; the team confirmed they are working on something but provided no timeline.
*Gemini in AIO / AI Mode vs. Gemini in App. They both use the same model, but Google Search “shapes” Gemini differently in search than the standalone app. Results from AIO and AI Mode are expected to be different
*There is no benefit in converting your site to Markdown for LLM or SEO purposes.
*There is no benefit to creating a llms.txt file for SEO
https://t.co/oQ9h1pZlE4 via @ChouinardJC

[Charly Wargnier @DataChaz]

🚨 Extracting data from PDFs just got solved.

Someone open-sourced a tool that turns PDFs into Markdown at 100 pages a second 🤯

It’s called OpenDataLoader.

It runs flawlessly on CPU and decodes tables, complex layouts, and nested structures like an absolute pro.

Best part?

100% free and open-source.

Grab the repo link in the 🧵↓

[Charly Wargnier @DataChaz]

🚨 Wow. Someone just built a Claude Code skill that clones any website in a single prompt 🤯

It uses the built-in Chrome's MCP to pull fonts, colors, and layout straight from the source.

100% free and open source.

Repo link in 🧵↓

[Cyrus | SEO AI @CyrusShepard]

Ouch. Google really needs to do a better job of promoting small publishers

Chartbeat data shows the smallest publishers (1,000–10,000 daily page views) saw the biggest declines over the past 2 years

Small publishers are the backbone of the web. We don't need a McGoogle

[Lily Ray 😏 @lilyraynyc]

It's live: @trippmickle & a few other authors from @nytimes published new research about how frequently Google's AI Overviews are wrong.

It includes a quote from both @thomasgermain and me about listicles influencing AI responses.

Check it out -

https://t.co/cIouYjP8kt

[Steven Willett @_StevenWillett]

@Syndicate It’s a bit late for April fools…..

[Steven Willett @_StevenWillett]

@Syndicate @TeamYouTube @YouTubeCreators @TeamYouTube support needed ASAP. #HelpACreator #YouTubeSupport #YouTubeBroken

[Steven Willett @_StevenWillett]

@The110Farm This has to be done for the 110 shenanigans!

https://t.co/QxKdeRLbW8

[Aleyda Solis 🕊️ @aleyda]

👀 Interesting insights from @_oshdavidson / @AirOpsHQ research about The Influence of Retrieval, Fan-out, and Google SERPs on ChatGPT Citations:

* 85% of Sources ChatGPT Retrieves Are Never Cited: Pages with stronger title-query alignment and clearer language were more likely to earn citations.

* 32.9% of cited pages that appeared in any top-20 SERP were discovered only through fan-out. That means tracking the original keyword alone is not enough to understand where citation visibility is actually won.

* Pages Ranking #1 in Google Were Cited 3.5x More Often Than Pages Outside the Top 20 SERPs (tell me again that SEO dead 😉 not)

Much more! Read: https://t.co/VfiFmSfSza

[Cloudflare @Cloudflare]

Time to consider not just human visitors, but to treat agents as first-class citizens. Cloudflare’s network now supports real-time content conversion to Markdown at the source using content negotiation headers.
https://t.co/B7wYH4PtA8

[Aleyda Solis 🕊️ @aleyda]

🚨 Microsoft is Introducing AI Performance in @bing Webmaster Tools: A new set of insights that shows how sites content appears across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations 👇

This is the first official AI search visibility dashboard directly provided by platforms 👏 This is what you can see in it:

* Total Citations
Shows the total number of citations that are displayed as sources in AI-generated answers.

* Average Cited Pages
Shows the average number of unique pages from your site that are displayed as sources in AI-generated answers per day over the selected time range.

* Grounding queries
Shows the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content that was referenced in AI-generated answers.

* Page-level citation activity
Shows citation counts for specific URLs from your site, making it easy to see which individual pages are most often referenced across AI-generated answers.

* What's not included? No intent or sentiment analysis, or an extract of the answers to check. Also, no data from other brands/sites, only yours.

There's room to improve/expand of course, but I'm thankful for this first step.

Go to Bing Webmaster tools and check it out 😎🙌

--- I want to thank @facan and team for the fantastic effort in the right direction to give official AI Search data to sites 🙏

Hopefully more platforms like Google and ChatGPT/OpenAI take note!

Announcement: https://t.co/fDpKjYqydg

[Aleyda Solis 🕊️ @aleyda]

🤖 Google has specified in its documentation that its crawl limit for HTML and supported text-based files is 2MB: Check if your HTML content is being cut off, with this free and handy validator by @CharlesMigaud 👇 Take a look: https://t.co/lL9jCnaUv5

[Steven Willett @_StevenWillett]

@rustybrick @Google I have the answer, save yourself time and effort. You can have this one for free.

Allow all users/sites to OPT-IN if they wish to use the feature/service, otherwise (by default) opted-out!

You’re very welcome and I have many more logical thinking available. 🙏🤣🫵

[Rand Fishkin (follow @randderuiter on Threads) @randfish]

Oh SNAP.

New Q4 2025 State of Search report from @LiveDatos + @sparktoro just went live. Some highlights on the growth of AI Mode, Pinterest's impressive rise in searches/searcher, Gemini's growth rate > ChatGPT's declining use (for the first time ever!), and more 👇

[Chris Long @chris_nectiv]

Oh man, the Google Analytics MCP is INCREDIBLY powerful for SEOs.

You can have AI gather analytics data, find top performing content, analyze your content strategy + More:

[Google Search Central @googlesearchc]

Today we released the December 2025 core update. We'll update our ranking release history page when the rollout is complete: https://t.co/7dmc4qr2hX