Arnout Hellemans

Since 2004, this community has helped make Firefox and the open internet possible. Our “Come Back to Firefox” campaign reunites a few early internet icons to remind people what made the internet special, and why it’s worth protecting.

🎥 How to Scale AI Search Optimization with AI Workflows Without Losing Quality? We go through it in the latest edition of Crawling Mondays AI Search Optimization roadmap with @theseomermaid.com, @lazarinastoy.com, Alfonso Moure. Watch it now: www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2vw...

David Iwanow explains that YouTube remains the world's second-largest search engine, and alongside TikTok and Instagram, consumer demand for video content across these platforms has never been higher. maj.to/3QmghlM

Publish stats, get cited: The tactic that put my data all over the web - via @metehan777.bsky.social #seo

If you're starting to use JEV, there are a lot of websites posing as TypeSafe AI's JEV using exact match domains, which Google happily ranks. Screenshot is a website posing as the 'official' JEV site to get API keys, but will charge you x10 what it costs if you go direct to the TypeSafe AI website.

1Password launches a way for AI agents to log in on your behalf without seeing your password

70 percent of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Most excellent writeup @markwilliamscook.com

Pieter Serraris recommends only pursuing backlinks that are genuinely relevant to your topic and strategy because targeted link building has a far greater impact than chasing links indiscriminately. maj.to/3MhQSrD

⚡️Russia behind Britain's Brexit vote, UK prime minister admits for first time.

The deal was never about getting diesel into America. It was about getting cash into Russia and keeping Epstein off the front pages.

Just shipped a big update to my Edge Images WordPress plugin! Automatically transform image URLs and HTML markup to be ultra-performant, sized to fit, and avoid Cloudflare's unique-trandforms-per-month billing model (by localizing generated variants). wordpress.org/plugins/edge...

At the #SEOIRL conference, @joyhawkins.bsky.social just showed an example of a local AI pack in the personal attorney category - one lawyer’s self-promoting listicle was used as a citation for every one of the firms listed, and it determined the ranking order too. Embarrassing for Google tbh.

I *don’t* care how good your outreach is, how smart your agent can hook into posts i’ve written. If you email me without me asking, and especially if you keep doing that, i’ll block you out of principle and will surely never ever buy from you.

Are you doing ecommerce SEO? This course is for you: sitebulb.com/ecommerce-seo-... @nikkihalliwell.com, Ash Noad, Briony Cullin & @sagibson.co.uk deliver 4 training sessions, each one covering a different aspect of SEO auditing for online retailers. FREE & OPEN TO ALL! @womenintechseo.bsky.social

Even when he's on holiday, @hellemans.me is still working hard on his #SearchNorwichXL talk! Use 'Arnout' to get 20% off your ticket prices, that's just £100 per ticket! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/searchnorw...

Get the FIRST EDITION of While You Were Offline by Sitebulb x @not-a-robot.com THIS WEEK! Only the finest snarky SEO news... Sign up at bit.ly/seo-snark

SEO socials are so tiring. Same narcissists continuously sharing conflicting content (GEO is good then GEO is bad is just one example). Truth doesn’t matter as long as they’re ‘visible’. Incredibly fatiguing.

Seen similar, yet often they deny doing anything like that....

you shouldn’t have to show your ID and verify your identity to have a conversation with an AI agent authoritarian overreach into private conversations fueled by mass hysteria

Arnout Hellemans (@hellemans.me) says you should always check both the raw HTML and the rendered version of your pages, because JavaScript frameworks can alter titles, headings, and schema between the two, severely impacting discoverability. maj.to/40pUjAb

Exciting. Pre-orders are now available for the book I have been commissioned to write. The AI SEO Playbook a.co/d/0b46vFFB

Lmao

This isn't SEO, it's stupidity. No value in, no value out. Publishing words at scale isn't a strategy, it makes you look like an idiot.

I'm not saying correlation = causation, but I just want to point out that Google ranking volatility is well-correlated with crude-oil prices this month.

The official statement from Caitlin Kalinowski, former head of robotics at OpenAI, about why she quit company. I think this is the most significant ethical discussion in tech of our lifetimes. Should a computer be able to kill people shouldn’t be framed as a tiff between Hegseth and Anthropic.

Technical SEO isn’t just pages anymore. Agents will need a source of record: policies, pricing rules, inventory behavior, constraints, with provenance. Build a Verified Source Pack. duaneforresterdecodes.substack.com/p/the-verifi...

Anything for expanding reach and spend....#tinfoilhat

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

Are you @hellemans.me in disguise? Check your Sitebulb Wrapped to find out: sitebulb.com/wrapped/ #SitebulbWrapped #seo

This is pretty big: Pages that fully answer more PAA questions tend to rank higher. This is one of the conclusions of a brilliant independent study completed by @chris-green.net and published on the @alsoasked.com site today. alsoasked.com/insights/paa...

what AI reveals is just how many people have given up, or never cared to begin with clock in, slop around, clock out

I've had multiple cases like this, starting to really annoy me

Definitely worth it!

📅 SAVE THE DATE: 24th September 2026: SearchNorwichXL. It's happening! 250 people conference in #Norwich with some of the best SEO speakers in the world. Sign up for updates 💌 searchnorwich.org

Amen

2006: Less is more, don’t repeat yourself 2016: Beautiful code prevents technical debt 2026: trillions of lines of generated spaghetti code that generate other spaghetti code will save us

From @sengineland 👇 A little-known Google Ads setting can allow Google to add unapproved imagery to location-based ads, raising brand control concerns.  

Manual prompt engineering is done. Discover meta-recursive prompting where LLMs optimize their own instructions for superior accuracy, depth, and 3x quality. #llmoptimization

how good is Google's AI? well

hey did you see a headline on google? turns out that headline might be an llm hallucination www.theverge.com/tech/865168/...

Look alive, Jes Scholz is joining us for our January webinar coming soon! Register now to avoid disappointment 👉https://sitebulb.com/resources/guides/webinar-brand-visibility-optimizing-for-ai-citations/ #seo #aisearch

Some interesting nuggets there. Also, check out the chart of urls Google knows of versus indexed. Yep, that's crazy and why OpenAI, Perplexity, and other AI companies would love to leverage Google's search results. :) www.seroundtable.com/google-searc...

Beginning to roll out in the US, with partners such as Stripe, Etsy and Shopify www.seroundtable.com/microsoft-co...

Are you @hellemans.me in disguise? Check your Sitebulb Wrapped to find out: sitebulb.com/wrapped/ #SitebulbWrapped #seo

It's a biggie on SEO Office Hours today! And the last one before the holidays🎄 Joining Jo Juliana Turnbull and Michael Chidzey at 9:30 am (GMT): ⭐️ Dixon Jones and ⭐️ Dawn Anderson #SEOOfficeHours with Good Signals.

This is huge for CSS loading performance. Compression dictionaries are a little tricky to deploy today but totally worth the effort as the impact is enormous. #webperf

wrapped.uk.sitebulb.com?w=019ae9f117... Haha, am I really Arnout or disguised as Arnout. Love this geeky wrapped summary @sitebulb.com @jojofurnival.bsky.social

Judge limits Google's default search deals to one year