Greetings! When your local electrician tells you he’s getting the majority of his search leads through AI Search now, you know we’re in uncharted territory. Here’s my pick of the week to help you stay ahead.
Top News SEOs & Audience Growth Experts to Follow in 2026
John Shehata has put together a handy directory of the people working on news SEO and audience growth around the world. A useful way to freshen up your reading list, although your LinkedIn feed may never recover. Most of what I learn about news SEO comes from people sharing what they’ve tested, and this is a quick way to find more of them.
Dan Petrovic: Is Apple building a search engine?
I’m a big fan of Dan Petrovic’s blogs and research into LLMs. He recently found that Applebot was the busiest crawler of his own website clocking in 73,232 of 190,662 requests - roughly twice as many as Baiduspider and well ahead of every AI crawler. I think the takeaway here is simply check your log files regularly, because there’s a lot of movement happening right now.
Dan Hinckley: Grade Every Page the Way Google’s Quality Raters Would
Elsewhere, Dan Hinckley has done something equally funky - and that’s funk in the good sense. He used an AI model to assess 1,600 pages against Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines in under two minutes, for less than $1. He plotted the pages by topic, with each point sized by its Search Console clicks, to highlight weaker pages that still attract traffic and others worth reviewing for removal. A really interesting way of approaching a potential content audit.
Sean B. on reviewing an SEO report written by Claude
This deserves a high five as it’s something I see ALOT. Sean reviewed a recent SEO report a client had produced with Claude. It looked pretty convincing, but its conclusions were completely wrong as it lacked any expert context. AI driven audits without an expert human in the loop can go badly wrong.
Myriam Jessier: Multimodal GEO
Myriam has done a wonderful job here on how to help AI find and interpret your images, video and audio. Her practical tips include keeping product shots and text overlays on screen for at least three seconds, allowing for models that sample video at around one frame per second. She also suggests using Google’s Vision API to check whether it identifies what you intended to show in your photos which is a great tip.
Why it matters: As AI search draws on images, video and audio, the way you shoot, script and label your work can affect how easily it is found and understood. Get multimodal!
Everyone wants to be your personal assistant - and media should notice
Florent Daudens explores what happens when personal AI assistants choose our news and read our newsletters for us.
Why it matters: If AI assistants are going to decide what reaches the reader, publishers will need to fully understand how these agents work.
AI Search KPIs: Measuring Success in the New SEO Era
In his lightning talk at Google’s Search Central Live Deep Dive, Eduard Blacquière argues that we focus too much on whether AI selects our content and too little on the steps that come before it. He proposes measures for five stages: whether AI knows you exist, associates you with a topic, finds you in the searches it runs to build an answer, retrieves your pages and, finally, selects your content.
Why it matters: These measures can help distinguish problems with recognition, crawling and content. Top job, Eduard!
Jan Ehrlinspiel at Peec AI explains why an AI visibility score can move even when nothing has changed. Drawing on an analysis of 120 million chats, he compares each prompt to a ‘biased coin’: some outcomes are more likely, but individual answers still vary. In his example, a daily score based on 50 runs can shift by up to 12.4 percentage points through chance alone. His advice is to track a wider range of prompts and assess changes over a month rather than a day.
This is a really useful tool for AI-tool enthusiasts and news junkies alike. Sergei Yakupov’s database now covers more than 1,300 AI initiatives from over 900 newsrooms in 112 countries. Filter by use, from content production to monetisation, to find real examples when someone asks what other publishers are doing.
Dan Hinckley: New SEO Tool, Quality Rater Jev
Dan Hinckley introduces Herringbone’s free Quality Rater Jev tool, which he says can assess a page against Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines in under a second. It examines the page itself, without checking the site’s wider reputation. Use it to identify pages that deserve a closer look.
Why it matters: Applying a 180-page set of guidelines to every article takes time. A quick first pass could help you prioritise the pages that need a fuller review.
Here’s the tool itself. Quality Rater Jev
Gemini 4 Argon - One Step Closer to ‘Model as an Employee’ Paradigm
Dan Petrovic explores Gemini 4 Argon and the idea of a ‘model as an employee’: AI that can carry out long, complex tasks with less supervision.
Why it matters: These advances are useful to clock. The actual model might not be accessible yet, but you should be aware of what it’s capable of before it drops.
Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots
ICYMI: Reddit is switching off RSS on 13 November and closing its public API in March 2027, blaming scraping by AI bots. Developers of approved apps have until 12 January 2027 to register. Sarah Perez at TechCrunch points out that Reddit’s ‘other revenue’, which includes its AI licensing deals, grew 24% year on year to $43 million in the second quarter.
Why it matters: Reddit’s move highlights a question facing publishers too: how much access should AI companies get, and on what terms?
Google Lighthouse Adds Audit For AI Agent Resource Discovery
Lighthouse 13.5 has just added a check for Agentic Resource Discovery, a proposed standard that helps AI agents find a website’s tools and services. The check looks for an Agentmap entry in robots.txt, an ai-catalog link or a file at /.well-known/ai-catalog.json.
Until next time,
Steve