🤔 Google has rebranded Looker Studio to ... Data Studio (again)!

Read: cloud.google.com/blog/product...

Headless websites and the cost of engineering vanity Headless sounds like a route to freedom, but too often it just swaps one set of constraints for another, heavier one.

Headless websites are usually a mistake.

Sold as flexible and fast. Delivered as complex and slow.

Most teams end up rebuilding what the web already does, just worse.

This isn’t progress. It’s engineering vanity.

www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/h...

For years, the performance ceiling in the browser has been clear: the CPU.
WebGPU changes that. 🧵

It’s not a library or a framework. It’s a browser API that gives direct access to the device’s GPU, enabling a level of parallelism the CPU cannot match.

#WebPerf #WebGPU

PSA Googlebot tries to render pages to understand what they look like, to better understand the value & context of your site's content. This requires that your JS & CSS files be crawlable. Don't block these files for Googlebot in robots.txt, if you want Google to understand your site optimally.

It's in Paint, too!

Most websites are built on the wrong stack.

Not because the tools are bad. Because teams pick based on identity, not reality. There are only four sane choices:

React → products
Shopify → selling
Static → simple
WP/Drupal/TYPO3 → publishing

www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/f...

Your GEO Strategy Might Be Destroying Your SEO Many tactics designed to win in AI search can undermine SEO performance - which is, ironically, necessary for success in AI search.

One of the worst things you can do for AI search visibility?

Destroying your SEO performance with shiny new AI search tactics that are ultimately dangerous for SEO - and by extension - AI search.

(1/2)

open.substack.com/pub/lilyrayn...

Clicks don't count (and they never did) Rankings, traffic, and prompt tracking all measure the interface, not the market. If you want visibility in AI search, start measuring competitiveness.

Clicks don’t count. They never did.

SEO spent 20 years pretending the search interface was the market.

Now people are doing it again with prompt tracking.

Measure competitiveness, not clicks (or prompts).

www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/c...

Speed is the first competency test Speed isn’t just a technical metric. It’s one of the clearest places where the health of an organisation’s digital systems becomes measurable.

Your website is slow because your organisation doesn’t understand the web.

Not because performance is hard.
Not because browsers are limited.

But because you've lost control of your systems, culture, and vision.

www.jonoalderson.com/performance/...

Raise the floor CMSs, browsers, standards and platforms aren't immutable forces or constraints. They're shaped by people. And if you depend on them (you do), you can shape them too.

We’ve normalised building around constraints we don’t question.

But CMSs, browsers, standards and platforms aren’t weather. They’re shaped by people.

If you depend on them (you do), you can shape them too.

That’s where the real leverage is.

www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/r...

Stop trying to rank for keywords Almost all SEO briefs and ambitions begin with a sentence like, "We want to rank for X". It sounds reasonable, but it's completely the wrong place to start.

“I want to rank for X” is how almost everyone gets SEO wrong.

You don’t choose what you rank for. You’re inferred.

Keywords describe demand. They’re not a strategy.

If you’re not building unique, experience-backed utility, you'll be invisible.

www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/s...

Genius tech bro move:
Inventing the paragraph,
Calling it a chunk.

#showerthoughts

Been saying this for a while but the really exciting stuff on the web right now is all about how things we used to need JS for can now be done with pure CSS.

There are a lot of opportunities to cut out client side bloat.

I haven't, but I'm sure it's ̶a̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ delightful!

website.bmp

Google's Top Crawling Challenges For 2025 Gary Illyes, along with Martin Splitt, of Google posted a podcast explaining the top crawling challenges Google noticed amongst its 2025 year of crawling. The top challenges Google had with crawling i...

If you run a large-scale/complex site, this is important. Make sure you know where Googlebot could go crazy crawling. E.g. As Gary said, "once Googlebot discovers a set of URLs, it cannot make a decision about whether that URL space is good or not unless it crawled a large chunk of that URL space"

A page is more than just a container for words The latest SEO fad is the idea that websites need a machine-only version. Strip out the layout, remove the “noise”, and hand LLMs a simplified view of your content.

Stop turning your website into markdown.

Meaning lives in structure, hierarchy and context. Flatten it and you don’t make it machine-friendly, you make it meaningless.

Yes, AI might fetch your .md file. That’s convenience, not trust, and it won't scale.

www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/m...

The middle is a graveyard Why breadth, mere adequacy, and the “middle of the market” fail in an age of omniscient, agent-led decision-making.

The middle of the market is quietly dying.

Breadth and “good enough” used to work because humans couldn’t see everything.

Agents can.

If you’re not the safest default or clearly the best, you’re just noise.

www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/t...

❤️ Right back at you

Fit width text in 1 line of CSS
`text-grow: per-line scale;`

nerdy.dev/css-text-grow

(prototype in Canary 165+)

Don't forget all the GEO-Detox work that will be paid for next year. The cycle of ""SEO"" life.

I’ve been getting pitched by companies who create markdown/“LLM-friendly” variants of webpages.

Curious to hear others’ perspectives on this (especially the longterm feasibility)…

Optimising for the surfaceless web The web we built had surfaces. We could design them, decorate them, and fight for space upon them. That web is gone. There are no more surfaces - only systems.

The web you’re optimising for doesn’t exist anymore.

Most of what you publish will never make it to the surface - it’ll be scraped, compressed, and digested by machines that don’t see pages, only patterns.

I wrote about what this means for marketing.

www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/o...

Hah, love it. Yes.

The Hotmail effect Once, a Hotmail address meant you didn’t know what you were doing. Now, it might mean you’re the only real thing left.

A plumber drove past me with a Hotmail address on the side of his van.

For years, that would’ve been a red flag.

Now, in an age of AI-generated everything, it might be the most trustworthy thing I’ve seen all month.

www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/t...

Find someone who doesn't know your business. Show them your homepage for exactly 5 seconds. Then ask:
"What does this company do?"
"Who do they do it for?"
If they hesitate, get it wrong, or give vague answers, you've found your problem. And it's costing you rankings, traffic, and customers.

With View Transitions now being Baseline Newly available, and the View Transition API consisting of various features, it can be confusing to know what is supported in which browser versions.

To help with that, I created this VT Feature Explorer (powered by View Transitions)

web.dev/blog/same-do...

The web might change overnight. Are you ready?

On PodRocket, @jono.id makes the case for hedging our bets... not by chasing trends, but by doubling down on the fundamentals.

YT: buff.ly/xE4udjk
Apple: buff.ly/azaJQ9g
Spotify: buff.ly/YgpSFz4

The death of a website The call came in after midnight. Another site down. Same pattern. Same rot. Somebody’s killing the web, and nobody’s talking.

I’ve been investigating dead websites for years.

Same symptoms every time - bloated code, missing structure, too many dependencies and not enough care.

It’s not murder. It’s neglect.

And it’s everywhere.

www.jonoalderson.com/misc/the-dea...

Yay ty!