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SEO updates you need to know
Sponsor: Trendos
See Who’s Buying Ads in ChatGPT Answers
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Search with Candour podcast
HiveMCR 2026 recap
Season 4: Episode 72
Jack Chambers-Ward gives a recap of his experience at HiveMCR 2026 including all of the talks, panels and events over the two-day event hosted by Charlie Whitworth.
The event included live music, stand up comedy and talks from Jono Alderson, Dawn Anderson, Alex Moss, Sophie Brannon and many more.
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This week's solicited tips:
I'm not leaving my A2A up to chance
If you want to get the inside track on Agent2Agent (A2A) protocols, and what you might need to be thinking about, there's an easy way to do that! ⤵️
You can join the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) agent2agent mailing list, and get the discussions, proposals, and disagreements that are happening on this topic every day. 📨
I've found this really helpful, just to start slowly moving my thinking into the space it needs to be for the future, so it doesn't feel like a "cold start" when this future comes around!
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I'm an SEO, classifying queries is part of my religion
⚒️ New tool! The Google exploit we published in 2025 proved among other things, that Google classifies queries into one of 8 categories ⤵️
I am soft launching this free tool on QueryClassifier[dot]com, which is a server running a fine-tuned DistilBERT model that has been trained on 4.8M English queries and category pairs from the Google exploit data. 😎
You can paste or upload up to 10,000 keywords, and the model will run in realtime and give you a prediction on how Google will categorise those queries.
🤔 Why is this important?
> There are commonalities that Google is looking for on each query type. For instance, there is a substantial difference for "SHORT_FACT" if you lead with the answer vs build up to it
> These types relate to what kind of SERP features are present
> I have been doing some larger studies of SERPs vs these categories, and I hope making this information available at scale will encourage other SEOs to do their own research publish their findings.
More examples, details, and videos coming on this soon 😎
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I can bring you in 200, or bring you in 404
Here is one of the sneakiest technical SEO things I've encountered a couple of times with caching. ⤵️
🖥️ As one of their standard pre-crawl checks, Sitebulb will request a "made up" URL to make sure the server respond correctly with a 404 Not Found HTTP Header. This is to ensure among other things, you don't generate lots of Soft 404s, or even worse, get these pages indexed.
🤖 A few times, including this year, I have encountered setups which can still generate this problem, but get past this initial 404 check. What I discovered was happening:
1) A user requests a URL that does not exist, the server correctly responds with an HTTP/404 code, and shows the user a "Page Not Found" page.
2) However, because of how the caching is setup on the server, it creates a cached version of the page it has just served.
3) If the user (or anyone) requests that same 'broken' URL, the first thing the server does is check its cache for that page - and it exists! So it will return an HTTP/200 code and then show the user a "Page Not Found" page.
🔥 This could obviously lead to all kinds of other issues. So as standard, I will ping 404 URLs twice to make sure this isn't happening.
Hope this helps someone else :D
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Technology means more than you will ever know
Internationalisation is not just about language and culture, it's about technology too. 💡
While there are benchmarks set for what is a 'green', 'amber' and 'red' score for Core Web Vitals performance when you run a 'lab' text, it is very important to remember that the measurement of these by you is not objectively applied to everyone.
What do I mean by that?
You may run a test and get 3 'green lights' and believe everyone is fine. However, when you login to Google Search Console, you see you're in the red because the majority of users are perhaps from a country where the average internet connection is much slower.
In cases like this, it may be that you literally have to build a 'lighter' version of your site to serve these regions adequately. This is all part of internationalisation!
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JavaScript is the way
“There is no such thing as a rendering budget” ~Martin Splitt
Google used to have a heuristic to decide which pages were rendered; not anymore, everything is rendered.
Photo from Athens SEO
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Refer subscribers and earn rewards!
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