Salience is now live: connect your website for free and start measuring first-party data that most teams never see, let alone act on. Your server and CDN logs show what is actually reaching your site, what gets requested, how often crawlers return, what your infrastructure serves them and where things go wrong. Built alongside my co-founders @ndredding and @channel5 , Salience is designed to make that raw log data genuinely useful and actionable in real time. That includes seeing how search engines and AI crawlers such as ChatGPT and Claude interact with your site: which pages they visit, how frequently they return, what they request and whether they encounter errors. We originally built it off the back of problems we were solving for clients, particularly around crawling, indexing, and AI visibility across products, collections and editorial content, and large marketplace listing websites while giving teams access to a layer of insight they’d rarely had before. It’s designed for a broad range of sites, from Shopify and BigCommerce stores through to publishers, marketplaces and larger businesses running custom technology stacks. It’s also useful beyond #SEO and search, with insights for development, content and security teams, whether you’re in-house, an agency or a consultant. We’ve already had some great feedback from beta users, so thank you to everyone who has tested it so far. We’d love more of it: what’s useful, what’s missing and what could be better. There’s a working demo to explore, or you can connect a production site for free and see what your own data tells you. Please share it with anyone on your team who might find it useful. Visit: salience.com for more detail.

The Norwegian Consumer Council somehow managed to turn “ensh*ttification” into a genuinely brilliant piece of content and generated 2M+ views across the socials. Funny, painfully accurate, and a great example of how to make a dry subject engaging. Credit: Forbrukerrådet / Norwegian Consumer Council 👏

There’s been a lot of recent reporting and discussion around Steven Bartlett and The Diary of a CEO. Rather than add another opinion, I wanted to see what the channel’s own public data could tell us. So I pulled together the history of the YouTube channel and analysed the videos, titles, guests, topics, colours, expressions, views and thumbnails over time. Some of the questions I wanted to explore: • When did business stop being the focus? • When did the topics broaden? • Why is Steven in every thumbnail? • How have thumbnails evolved? • Which topics perform best? • Do celebrity guests perform? • How much is A/B tested? The research maps those changes across the history of the channel, including the evolution of its content mix, titles and visual style. I’ve also published the underlying data and methodology openly, so journalists, researchers or anyone else interested can explore it themselves rather than relying on my findings. A lot more data and findings at doac.audits.com

Built a useful AI monitoring tool. hasaiwipedouthumanityyet.com

I've rebuilt my free Knowledge Graph Search tool. Search any brand or person to see what Google knows about them, whether they have a verified Google profile, and how Wikipedia, Wikidata and Common Crawl see them. You can even compare two entities side by side.

"Our procurement team uses Coupa"

Spent some time in @Cloudflare Radar looking at AI bot blocking across news sites. Training crawlers have largely plateaued, but real-time search bots are increasingly being blocked. The number of named AI bots in robots.txt files has jumped from 34 to 100 in under two years.

This isn't going to end well.

If you’re in media, this is worth a watch. Cloudflare handles ≈20% of global traffic, so when CEO Matthew Prince warns at Cannes that AI bots are reshaping the web, publishers need to adapt or risk being left behind.

Today feels like the right time to reshare this: