Jono Alderson

Cloaking is back in SEO fashion. Everyone's busy serving dedicated content to LLMs. Yawn. Know what's more interesting? Cloaking Google using nothing but CSS. PS, don't try this at home. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/c...

It's been a long road, but I think the WordPress core patch to eliminate script/style concatenation is ready to ship in 7.2! Goodbye load-scripts.php & load-styles.php (and all the headaches they have caused). This one PR will close 10+ Trac tickets: github.com/WordPress/wo...

If your marketing only cares about potential buyers, it’s broken. Some of the people creating the most valuable evidence around your brand will never become customers. I wrote about audience-centricity, and why “out of market” still isn’t far enough: www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/a...

What if your SEO growth just measures how badly you treat customers? Confusing pricing, hidden support, painful cancellations... All generate search traffic. Your best-performing keywords might actually be bug reports. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/s...

NBC with their anti-web, anti-user, self-serving bullshit enshittification approach to video on their mobile site. It’s all just so shortsighted.

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...

Bravery should be marketing's most important KPI. Unfortunately, it doesn't have an ROI forecast, so the board won't approve it. We reward fictional certainty, punish honest expertise, and call ourselves 'data-driven'. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/b...

I meant to write a lot more, but this will do for now: dejan.ai/blog/prompt-...

Replacing your CMS with AI-generated pages? Enjoy discovering why content management systems exist, one production bug at a time. You’ve just inherited a thousand publishing problems your CMS used to solve without you noticing. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/y...

WordCamp Manchester is on it's way! We're meeting on November 6th, 2026 in Whitworth Locke Hotel in Manchester for a day of relaxed networking, learning about WordPress and collaboration. Hope you can join us! manchester.wordcamp.org/2026/

Hey Folks, Bit of news this morning. We're happy to present WordCamp Manchester 2026! The event will take place in the Whitworth Locke Hotel on November 6th 2026. Launch Post: manchester.wordcamp.org/2026/alright... Buy Tickets: manchester.wordcamp.org/2026/tickets/ #wcmcr #wordcamp

Search is shifting from “find this” to “tell me when”. From query to condition. Intent can persist after the user leaves, and businesses can move in and out of consideration without another query ever happening. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/q...

If AI unlocked your creativity, what was blocking you before? Senior people have always had access to developers, designers, agencies, teams and budgets. The constraint may not have been technical - it may have been you. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/w...

Most enterprise websites should be deleted. The regional clone. The campaign fossil. The acquired brand nobody dared to kill. They aren’t expanding your reach. They’re dividing your authority, budget and attention. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/f...

Google's crawlers don't parse JSON, they just download things. Parsing anything is done by, for example, indexing in case of Search.

Your SEO team is the cleanup crew for your organisational dysfunction. Endless audits, Jira tickets and developer cajoling aren’t strategy. They’re symptoms. Fix the systems. Make the cleanup unnecessary. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/o...

The SEO industry has invented another fake crisis. SEO vs GEO is a nonsense debate. AI isn’t creating a new marketing discipline. It’s exposing which businesses are clear, credible and worth recommending. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/s...

I've just release v6.0.0 of the web-vitals library. It includes support for measuring Web Vitals per soft navigation (like those used in SPAs) for supporting browsers (Chrome 151+) to give more accurate performance metrics for those sites. github.com/GoogleChrome...

Measurement plans. Do then before you put your dirty little mits on GA! www.searchenginejournal.com/designing-a-...

+++ Speaker Spotlight: Barry Pollard +++ What if browsers could stream HTML where it's needed, without all the JavaScript? At Fronteers Dark Mode, Barry Pollard explores Declarative Partial Updates, a proposal that could reshape server-rendered apps. Oct. 2nd in Dordrecht 🇳🇱⛵️ 🎟️ fronteersconf.org

Someone in DC set up a “little free blockbuster” with DVDs inside instead of books lol

Some of the world’s most successful companies are zombies. They're already dead. They're unable to abandon the old model, unable to build the next one, and surviving only because the market has not finished looting the corpse. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/z...

A long, long, long road, but `clip-path` animations are about to be GPU accelerated in Chromium: issues.chromium.org/issues/40503...

If you're serving bots nicely formatted markdown but giving users div soup that forces them to download 15MB of JS that does nothing for them, you're treating humans as second class citizens. I wrote something to redress the balance a bit: chris-spann.co.uk/impersonatin...

AI is about to make every gap between your marketing and reality easier to find. For years, companies have survived because scrutiny was expensive. AI makes it cheap. Now visibility is becoming less of a prize, and more of a threat. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/w...

AI is about to expose your marketing bullshit. Every brand has trade-offs, and AI makes them harder to hide. When comparison gets cheaper, hidden compromises become liabilities. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/m...

Green City Wars is out this week, US and UK covers below. A cyber/solarpunk noir detective story starring a raccoon. Available at your bookshop of choice, ebook, audio and hardback.

Stop trying to replace people with AI buff.ly/Nu3ioTL

Every new AI standard exposes and amplifies the cost of your technical debt. Standards like llms.txt and WebMCP - and whatever comes next - are revealing how (unnecessarily) expensive change has become inside most organisations. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/t...

SEO killed the creative web. AI might bring it back. For thirty years, websites have been shaped around what machines could understand. That's why everything became pages. The irony is that smarter machines may finally free us from that constraint. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/t...

Ok, the new @aptshadow.bsky.social sounds great! Meet Skotch, freelance raccoon investigator, in Green City Wars: artificially enhanced animals serve humans, but their own world is filled with conflict, crime & power battles... Out 26.6, signed #preorder: www.waterstones.com/book/green-c... 💙📚🪐

The best new science-fiction books of June 2026: There's plenty of intriguing sci-fi on offer this month, whether it’s solar-powered cities from @aptshadow.bsky.social or a strange future from M. John Harrison www.newscientist.com/article/2528...

Running multiple CMSs is almost always a death sentence for a website. Shopify + WordPress. React + Webflow. AEM + whatever marketing bolted on afterwards. This pattern is everywhere, and it cripples businesses. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/o...

Your website was built around a moment AI is starting to remove. The web spent decades obsessing over conversion rates, checkout UX and lead-gen funnels. Now, brands need to rethink what websites are actually for. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/t...

Scaled “comparison / alternative” pages are the new scaled “listicle” pages

Wanna measure Core Web Vitals for SPAs? It's been a long-standing gap, but one that we've been working hard to fill. We're approaching the final stages and have launched one last origin trial (🤞) as the "last call" before we ship it! More details: developer.chrome.com/blog/final-s...

You can (but probably shouldn’t) use your traffic to slow your competitors’ sites. No bots. Just a browser feature. Real requests. From real users. At scale. If you’re not protecting against it, it can quietly hit your servers and your costs. www.jonoalderson.com/performance/...

🤔 Google has rebranded Looker Studio to ... Data Studio (again)! Read: cloud.google.com/blog/product...

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.

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...

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. 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...

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/...

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...

“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...