Winning SEO Strategies for Chaotic Times with Candour

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of the BuzzStream Podcast. My name is Vince Nero. I'm your host. Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by Mark Williams-Cook and Jack Chambers-Ward. Together, you probably know them from the fantastic agency, Candor. Mark is the marketing director. He's also the founder of AlsoAs, which is a fantastic tool. We might get into. Jack is the marketing and partnerships manager, but you also might know him. He's the host of their podcast, Search with Candor, which I was lucky to be a guest on about a year ago. They both also contribute to a fantastic newsletter. It is a Core Updates weekly newsletter. Today we're going to be really digging into the things that they've learned having this deep background in SEO, but also like running this podcast where he gets to talk to all different people in the space because as I'm sure all of you are feeling, we're in this crazy time of uncertainty and things are moving super quickly and there's so much going on. I think it's important. You can get overloaded. So, um, before we get into all that, I just want to remind everybody to like, subscribe, share this stuff with your colleagues. The more you do, the more I can have great guests on like Mark and Jack. And secondly, just a quick reminder to check out ListIQ. Our new tool is an AI-powered tool that is for Digital PRs like you to help you build media lists directly from Google News. And it streamlines a lot of that manual digging, finding journalists' info, finding their bios, recent articles, all that stuff that typically takes a long time, condenses it down into a few seconds of work. So that's my spiel. Let's get into the podcast. Jack, Mark, how you guys doing? Thanks so much for joining.

Thanks for having us. Yeah. Lovely to be joining you. I know, like I said, it's been almost a year since you were a guest on Search for Candlelight. I know we've hung out in Brighton a couple of times since then. Always, uh, we ended up staying at the same hotel and I bumped into you in the bar that one time as well. Yeah. That was fun. Yeah.

I don't get to get over there much, but, um, when I do, yeah, it's always great to see you guys. Um, yeah, I mentioned a lot of the stuff in the intro and I know, like I said, like you guys are both very involved in a lot of different things and which, you know, and I'm calling them extracurriculars as well, which I think is really cool because I think it's important for people to have interests outside of their work. I think, you know, it makes you a more well-rounded person. But I want to start with kind of like this icebreaker idea of, you know, like, what do you get out of doing things that are outside of SEO, right? Like, for instance, Mark, you I know you scuba dive, right? Like you also own a dog harness company. Jack, you, you know, you, you had a podcast for a long time before this, which I think is where you and Mark connected, The Sequelizers, which was, you know, like a movie podcast. But, you know, you also write comic books and you're an author and that kind of stuff. So let's start with you, Jack. Like, what is that? Why do that? Is that, is that, intentional, you know, to just keep yourself outside of this? Or like, what are some things you've learned from this? I'm really interested.

Yeah, it's not necessarily intentional. I think that's just how my ADHD brain works. I'm just like constantly chasing a new thing to try or do, or, you know, a new hobby to give up in the next 3 months or whatever it is. But I think things like the podcasting obviously directly led to me joining Canva, which is very cool. And it was a real kind of moment where it was kind of full circle moment when I did my Brighton SEO talk last year. I used a lot of examples from my experience as a content creator. And I think it's things like that, even if you're not doing it in your day job, you're just, you know, filming videos or making podcasts or writing or whatever it is, anything creative there can give you a different perspective on what it's like, right? If I wasn't doing those things, I wouldn't be able to bring the perspective like, oh yeah, we saw a big traffic boost from this thing or like, we did this strategy and all this kind of stuff. But even outside of that, I think it's healthy to not completely dedicate yourself to work and do things like, I know Mark does a lot of boxing. He helped me train for an MMA fight last year, like keeping yourself physically healthy and mentally healthy, I think is a big part of it for me as well.

Yeah, that's fantastic. What about you, Mark?

I like doing things that I'm naturally really bad at. So kind of the computer stuff, was how I spent a lot of my youth. So a lot of that just feels like it comes naturally to me. And actually how I got into diving was I took a career break after leaving an agency I was a director of and decided to move to Egypt and become an instructor. So a scuba diving instructor, because it was something completely different. It was a completely different culture to live in, different language. It was a job that went from a knowledge-based job to a physical show people how to do things. And yeah, you just learn a lot when you're completely outside your comfort zone and doing something completely new. And a lot of those things are transferable. Same with boxing. So, the first time I tried boxing, I was like, wow, this is really difficult and terrifying. So, I'm going to keep doing this. So, Yeah, it's great timing actually for a little black eye. So, I had a bout at the weekend, um, but I've been training now for, I think, 6 years, like 5 times a week. And I'm, I'm very mid now after dedicating like thousands of hours, I'm incredibly mid at it. But yeah, I just enjoy trying to, you know, just get out of my comfort zone, do different, um, things, but I tend to stick to those things. So it sounded like, Jack, you said you like find something and find something and move on. I'm very much like, this is going to be my new thing and I'm just going to grind away at it till I'm good at it or mid.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm probably more like Jack in that regard where I have to really struggle to keep those things going that I've started, but I do know that tying things into work has actually helped me kind of keep My, hold myself accountable for some of these things. So like, I'll give myself a new project. I'm going to find, you know, content from around the web that, you know, that I really like every week. I'm going to write this newsletter every week. Those weren't really things I was like hired to necessarily do, but there are things I like doing. So I was like, I'm going to do it, you know, but let me see if I can kind of make this segue here. I think one of the things, at least for me, getting out of my comfort zone, it's like with SEO, I, you know, worked at agency for a long time and you get into kind of these routines of like, this is what I know works right now. Right. And I'm going to kind of rinse and repeat. Agencies like to work this way. They like to, you know, create standard operating procedures for certain tasks and services and whatnot. But right now in the past, like 2 years, I feel like things have just been totally upended, you know, the helpful content updates, like the way that Google's moving, um, behind the scenes, and then obviously all of this AI stuff. Um, I mentioned this in the, in the beginning, but one of the things I like about your newsletter is you have that little section where you highlight, you know, 5 key news items. I think you do a great job of highlighting what I think is important. Um, let's start with you, Mark. How do you decide what is important to highlight in the email, but also just kind of in general, like what is important in all of this news that we're getting inundated with?

Yes.

Core Updates came about because I was trying to essentially make the newsletter that I wanted to receive. And the issue I had was some of the news sources and even existing newsletters, there was just so much in there. I felt I didn't have time. And then I was maybe getting frustrated because I was reading something and it's basically like, yeah, Google's testing a new font or something. And I'm like, I don't care about that. It doesn't change what I'm doing. So, when I spoke to Jack about working on this together, I was basically like, pick things where once you know it, you might do something differently in your job. So, I have this information and it means it's going to change a decision that I make, or it's going to change how I'm going to do something, which is why we don't necessarily cover things just like interesting articles, even if they're really great articles, unless there is something in there that's like, ah, this is new. I might actually change what I'm going to do now. We rarely cover like an article, rarely cover tools. It's more, here is this like data study that shows this or this new feature. So it means, you know, every week we still get 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 bits of those news every single week. When we started, I was a little bit worried, like maybe there'll be nothing some weeks, which is also fine. Because if there's only 2 bits of news, I don't want a newsletter that's just kind of giving me filler. Just be like, good news. It's really great news. You've only got 2 things to think about this week. Have some brain space.

We've got compliments on that before. I think somebody, you know, replied to us saying like, and we literally did like 2 or 3 pieces of news. Usually it's like 8 to 10-ish, but we did 2 or 3. And then the note underneath, I think Mark wrote, was like, nothing of note this week. So that's all you got. Enjoy. the extra 5 minutes of your Monday. And somebody replied like, I appreciate you not just filling that with fluff for no reason and just like filling out, which I think is true for so much of, you know, newsletters, content, podcasts, all that kind of thing. And there's plenty of fluff in the content we consume. So if you can streamline it to make it as digestible as possible, and as Mark said, make the most impactful, important stuff highlighted, then. That's a job well done, in my opinion.

Even in the way when I spoke to Jack about how we write the summary of the update, I said to him, I want you to try and write it so it never, it's never more than 3 lines on the email. And I said, ideally, I don't want people to have to click the story, the link to find out what the information is. So there's no, it's essentially the opposite way of thinking to like clickbait, you know, to Google Discover. Like there's this really important thing you need to know that. I'm like, no, just tell them the thing, give them the number, the study, the conclusion, and they can read more if they like, but don't make them work.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like Steven, who is kind of our CMO here, is really good at kind of pushing me to do that with our content, even just writing the content, you know, is do we need this? Do we, you know, is this Are you just adding this for SEO sake? Is this, you know, something that people are getting that they can't get from AI? You know, that, that sort of thing. I think in the short term, you might have more gains with kind of the clickbaity approach or that, you know, optimizing for SEO, but long term, if you're thinking about building, you know, recognition and trust from readers, I feel like, I mean, you guys The type of content or the commentary you're getting is like, that speaks to that. It's like that, that is what builds trust. And I really do prefer that. So, all right, let's get into some of kind of the bigger pieces for our listeners, which is this idea of like digital PR, link building, and just like SEO in general, right? So stuff is moving fast. AI, you know, it's changing every day and we, all these studies are coming out and, you know, somebody publishes something that citations, matter from this, and here's this top citation study, whatever. I've done the same. I've published that kind of stuff. So, you know, I feel like we're getting all this information and people are trying to parse through it. I'd love to hear your guys' take on— start with digital PR, right? Obviously, a lot of people are moving into the space. I think there's this— The kind of data-backed thread that I've— the only one that I really feel like has stood up to My kind of research, I guess, is Ahrefs showing that brand mentions are highly correlated to showing up in AI responses. And I think people took that and ran with it that, okay, so we need digital PR. There's a lot of other stuff like, you know, EEAT is great. And, you know, you want to show up in high authority publications because that's where Google or that's where AI is pulling from. I haven't really seen, and I'm probably like shooting myself in the foot. Like I haven't seen tons of research to back up some of these other claims, kind of more generalized claims. But so I'd love to hear how you guys think about this stuff. Is digital PR important? Why? If why not, in specifically showing up in AI and appearing in AI, who'd you want to go first? Jack, Jack, you take it first. Go ahead.

Yeah, I think you're totally right that there's been a big conversation about the unlinked mentions, right? And I think We're having a similar conversation in SEO when it comes to like clicks versus impressions and all that kind of stuff. Has the value of that changed with the growth of AI search and LLMs? And you're right, there's studies from people like Ahrefs showing that those brand mentions do matter. And it's not just the linked mentions or, you know, even if it's a nofollow, it's still relevant to you and the conversations that are happening online regarding your brand. We have seen, you know, having conversations with clients here, we do digital PR here. We are a BuzzStream customer. I know our digital PR team do a lot of work talking about that with clients and things like that. And I don't know if there's necessarily anything that's changed. I think people are kind of realizing the value of digital PR and kind of understanding it's not literally just link building. It is a broader kind of thing of what people are saying about you and your brand across the internet.

What do you have anything to add to that, Mark?

Always loads. So I think if we work backwards, I was talking to Jack earlier about the ChatGPT 5.4 query fanouts, which are specifically doing site searches for specific websites and known brands that they're connected to. Topics. And we know that the fan-out queries across all of these LLM-based systems are generated by the LLMs themselves. So it would make a lot of sense to me to think that the co-occurrence of brand names consistently alongside specific products, services, things is what's going to connect them on a token probability level, which is different to entities as we have traditionally understood them in terms of SEO. So I think what's changed is from an AI point of view, the actual link placement is less important than it used to be, but is still important for a raft of reasons. Firstly, the links are literally how the training data is gathered. So the actual core model training data, we know that all of the major LLMs are buying up link graph data from the big vendors because that's something they can use in pre-training, which is adjusting maybe who they listen to in terms of token probability for specific topics. Or we listen to Wikipedia more than, you know, Bob's random blog about something. So I think there is still importance to links outside of traditional search. Links are still massively important for traditional search, which again, underpins a lot of the stuff that's happening with AI when anytime the retrieval augmented stuff is happening, it's grabbing stuff from traditional search results. Some of the studies as well I've seen on this, I feel are a little flawed when they look at They take a query and they say, okay, we did this query in ChatGPT and only 2 of those sites are in the Google top 20. But what they haven't looked at is which sites are ranking for the actual fan-out queries, which are happening, which is actually quite different. So I would say that digital PR now is more important than ever in terms of being mentioned in multiple places because that visibility is no longer your single website and trying to get it to numerically rank higher. It is more, you need to appear as many times as possible across the sites that are being fetched for all these fan-out queries, which is like hundreds of sites because it's, again, the fan-out query is not taking one website. It's kind of summarizing the chunks it's grabbing from all these different sites. So there's a whole other, I would say, branch of digital PR apart from, you know, we want to be in these main newspapers or these magazines. It's as well, well, these websites specifically are being fetched around this topic. So how can we appear on there? So yeah, I mean, it's certainly something we've been ramping up and digital PR has always been a big lever, I think, to pull in terms of visibility.

Yeah.

I mean, it's interesting to hear you guys like Jack, I feel like you kind of explained it from the brand building perspective. And I think that's something that resonates with a lot of clients. Right. And then Mark kind of seems like, you know, there's a technical aspect of that and like how that actually works, right. From the backend of this idea of, you know, the tokens and like getting your brand mentioned alongside of keywords that you want to be known for and like on the different sites. And then there's kind of this idea of working backwards from query fanouts and understanding where those platforms are pulling from. I'm curious in your perspective, I mean, with some of these things, I wrote down a couple of questions like query fanout, for instance. This is a question I get asked a lot, and it is this idea of like, if you are working backwards from prompts to understand like where sites are typically getting pulled or where information is getting pulled from, but we're also seeing information showing that the query fanouts aren't always the same, right? It's going to be different sites every time you search. So how do people rectify that, right? When they're working strategically, if it's pulling from different places, are you just looking for instances of duplicate sites and, you know, where is it mostly pulling from, you know, most of the time? I mean, are you seeing patterns after doing this at scale? Is that kind of the solution?

So I think I just wanted to mention, because it's an interesting point when you were talking about brands, the actual concept of brand, because to me, when someone now says, you know, When they talk about brand, to me, that's becoming what is actually stored in these AI systems and what it can tell people. So, you know, 50 years ago, people put billboards up everywhere with slogans on, and that's what your brand was because you were telling it to people over and over again. Then everyone got hyperconnected on the internet. So before you buy something from a new brand you haven't heard of, you might look them up on review sites, on forums, on Trustpilot. And that's what the brand has become. So it's the living essence of people's feedback. So it doesn't matter if you say, oh, buy Mark's cars, we're super reliable, then everyone on Reddit's being like, this broke down in 2 months. My brand is not what I'm saying about it anymore. I think that's where we're getting now in that we have these machines, these systems that are summarizing huge swathes of the web. And people can interact with them and ask them about brands. So I believe that footprint is literally what brand is. So I think some people, especially internally, when they're like, oh, this is our brand and they're sort of clutching their pearls of their brand document, it's kind of like, unless you're living that and it's out there and that's what people are saying, that's not your brand. That's just like a wishlist you have. So that's why I like going Starting at that other end to try and show people like, well, that's very cool. You've written down all these, you know, your mission, your vision, and all this stuff, but this is what people are actually saying, and this is what we need to affect. So jumping back to your question then about, yes, the LLMs are generating their own query fanouts. So by definition, they're non-deterministic. The things I would mention about that is yes. You can't then specifically say, okay, these are always the queries that happen here. There's a couple of methods you can use. So one of the things we do when we're working with trying to understand how people are prompting these systems is we sideload like personas. So I was giving demonstrations of this where if you ask ChatGPT for like a vegan recipe, it will give you one. If you then say, hey, can you recommend some running shoes? It will be like, sure, here's some leather-free vegan running shoe brands because it's remembered what it's said to us about. So the query fanout will be different. So when we're loading in kind of the descriptions of the things we're after, we actually ask the LLM, what might this kind of person, and then sideload the persona, ask about if they're looking for this information? And it will generate then its own kind of prompts, which tend to be more specific. And it narrows the type of query fanout that you get. Yes, you can repeat it. The thing I would say is because the query fanouts are happening in search engines, there is some stability there in terms of yeah, you do get slightly different sites, but the search engine understands that maybe semantically they're asking for the same thing. And this is again giving you a direction rather than necessarily a. paint-by-numbers, these are the exact sites. So I'll give you an example that we spoke about on the podcast, which was when we were building one of our fanout tools, I was looking for best SEO agency UK and the query fanouts were specifically searching for agencies shortlisted on named awards websites.

Mm-hmm.

Which is kind of frustrating for us because we like have a whole thing where like we don't enter awards. And I was like, hmm, we might need to rethink this. My point is I didn't know that before I did that research, but strategically now I know if I want to consistently appear in best SEO agency UK type queries, the LLM has determined a way to get an unbiased list of that is to search for like, you know, the Drum Awards 2026 European Search Awards shortlist. That's the strategy we need to take. That's the important information. you need to know, in my opinion, in AI search, because like other types of analytics, it's not a precise science. It's a directional thing.

Yeah. I mean, this is why I like talking to guys like you who have kind of been doing this and like boots on the ground rather than kind of just thought leaders in the space. Because you have kind of concrete evidence and examples. I'm curious, you know, from, as a podcast host, Jack, like, And like the guests that you guys have on the podcast, do you feel like people are generally on the same page with this stuff or is it all over the place?

Generally, I think a lot of people are on the similar sort of line to what we were talking about earlier about the value of digital PR and the state of link building and where we are now. I think there's still a lot of room, as Mark was saying there, in terms of strategic thinking and things like that for the industry as a whole. But I do, I'm pretty selective with the guests. I turn down a lot of like, I'm sure you get this as well, Vince, a lot of like cold email type stuff of like, hey, my CEO would love to be on your podcast. I'm like, then he can email me, like be an adult about this. Like it drives me crazy. And I realized sort of a little while ago, we were getting emails to be like, hey, my news story could be featured in Core Updates. I was like, Hold on a minute. Now I'm the publicer. I'm the publisher. And I'm like, I've gone from writing content to being the guy that publishes other people. Oh no, I've turned the industry on its head in my brain. Like, but I think in general, like talking to a lot of people on Search Canvas, pretty much a new guest every single week, give or take the episodes that we do here in the studio. There's a real kind of, I noticed like overarching themes over a long period of time. And 2024 was SEO shouldn't be a silo. Like there would be, give or take every other episode, somebody would be like, and I learned from this from the PPC team. And I started speaking to our link building team and SEO shouldn't be a silo. And then 2025 executives were just saying, everyone's talking about brand, brand, brand, brand, brand's a big thing. I haven't noticed that. Obviously we've just finished at time recording Q1 of 2026. There isn't like a clear theme of that yet, but there is often like a broader kind of consensus. And from what I understand, then, you know, the guests aren't talking to each other and stuff like that. Right. But you get the kind of reflections of the broader industry happen when you have 50+ conversations a year on mic, you know, do you have a similar kind of thing happen with guests on this show, Vince?

Yeah, but it's funny. In the PR space especially, I feel like, like I try to get kind of more traditional PR people and digital PR, then also UK versus US, just because that's kind of where our customers are. And it's like, you know, UK and US are pretty aligned, although the tactics are very different. Everybody kind of is talking about this stuff in the same way, but it is always interesting to see, like the traditional PRs are very behind when it comes to connecting the dots to a lot of like PR to the bottom line, or, or, you know, they, they speak in, in more abstract terms. And so, and there are definitely some agencies that do that. And like, that's why it was interesting to me to ask, like, for you, if it seems like everyone's on the same page, because I feel like some people just kind of spout those generalities, but they don't really have the data to back it up or like, You know, the data is, when you start to dig into it, you're like, this doesn't make, you know, you're citing this thing, which is citing this, which cites back to the first one. And then none of them makes, you know, so, um, yeah, it's, I don't know. I find it really tough sometimes, like to try to, do I push on this? Do I try to, you know, understand where they are coming from with some of this, this data? Because I do think. That's such an important piece of where we're at in the industry now, right? Like, we actually like getting all of these studies and seeing them all come out. You know, I was kind of joking about that earlier. It's like, I think we're in a good spot in that we're getting all this data and like, maybe we're not quite at the place where we can be making these theses, theses, these, these, um, because, you know, stuff is moving so fast and Yeah. Um, like to your point, Mark, earlier you, you mentioned this idea of like, okay, you know, do the query fan out for best SEO agencies is showing a lot of awards. And to me it's like, maybe they are doing that on purpose because they've noticed SEOs are gaming the system and putting out all these best listicles. So like, where else can we go? Like, let's work this into the algorithm so that like we can, you know, kind of get around these best listicles and find some third-party source that we can maybe trust. But like what happens if that somehow gets exploited? And it's like this idea that now you're going to spend time into a strategy like that, that maybe they're going to pull the rug out from under you in a couple months.

So we just, we discussed that as well actually. So the cool thing about how, well, cool, interesting. I mean, these are very subjective, I guess, to your interest. I find it interesting. So the way that LLMs are working with this token probability makes it almost impossible for them to like program in specific explicit rules about the output it gets, because they're essentially just very, very fancy next token, next letter word combination predictors, which is why I was saying to Jack, I find it hilarious every time these system prompts get leaked. So these system prompts, if you have listeners that don't know about this, is when— think of a system prompt like the model is if you've been training to play your sport for years and years. And the system prompt is what your coach tells you just before you go on the field that's fresh in your memory and you're more likely to obey it. So a lot of the guardrails and the way that these chatbots interact with us are from these system prompts, which kind of get pushed at the same time it's receiving the user query, which will say things like, we saw the Gemini one recently, like, you know, don't mention the user's question back to them. Don't give them advice on things that could be harmful to them. Don't use 12 exclamation marks in a row. Don't do that.

Right.

Like just begging the machine and being like, being like, remember to check this. So it's very hard for these LLMs to explicitly tackle specific types of content like the listicles, which is why I think there may be some more generic system prompt around if you're being asked to rank things, you know, try and find Verifiable third-party sources that are steering it in the right direction. And there's always, you know, ways and exploits around this, but generally they're tackled further downstream, I think, with the actual search engine, because the search engine still has a lot more hard and fast rules. And we were actually talking about in Google's AI mode now, when it returns listicles, when you ask it questions about best of such and such, a lot of the time it has like a little warning that says, be aware, this type of content is, can be very self-promotional or something along those lines. Because I think what's happening there is at the point where the LLM has got the content, it can say, oh yeah, it matches this, but I can't kind of do anything about it because I've already surfaced it, but I can put a warning on telling the user to be careful here. And the last point I was gonna make was the things like the awards are fundamentally different to me as a strategy to things like listicles, because critically, if search engines didn't exist, if LLM systems didn't exist, you would not be making these listicles. If those things didn't exist, you would still be entering awards. You'd probably be entering awards more. So it's those kinds of things, in my opinion, that seem to survive recurrent updates because there's no point penalizing people that are entering awards because they're going to do that. It's a genuine signal of—

Yeah.

maybe a good company. So that's my litmus test for, is it going to last?

Yeah, I love that. I mean, you could probably make the same case about the listicles. Like there are some that would be great for you to appear on, right? But the idea of like spamming the entire web, creating these tools that find every listicle and automatically email and outreach email you know, asking to get on that, like that's probably not 100%.

I was talking about ones that people write themselves and post on their own sites that, you know, when they, they always put themselves at the top, it's kind of like, right, come on.

When I write the best SEO agency article and I put Kander as number 1, or you write best digital PR tools and oh, look, BuzzStream's number 1. Like, thanks.

Okay. So I want to get into a few of these key kind of news elements or news pieces that I pulled from your, your recent newsletters. And these are questions that I've had and I've, I've had other people kind of talk to me about on the podcast. So I'll start with Core Updates. It's the name of your newsletter, but also obviously something that comes out often, seemingly more often nowadays than they used to. How closely do you think SEOs should be paying attention to them and taking action on them?

I think it depends on the strategies and tactics you're using, right?

You said it.

Yeah. It depends. Everybody drink. That's the rule on Search with Candid. But yeah, I think it matters what you're doing in terms of, I know you've talked about this before, Mark, like the black hat versus white hat kind of thing. And I was thinking from your question earlier, Vince, of like, do people tend to agree? I feel like, I guess I kind of live in my little white hat SEO bubble in general, really. I've not really dipped my toe into much black hat stuff in my career. And that's also kind of like. The long-term strategy stuff of like adhering to general guidelines, going through best practices, all that kind of stuff. I think a lot of people can get caught out with core updates if they're doing those short-term, you know, make a quick buck and escape by the time Google catches you kind of thing. And what we do with our clients, the kind of conversations we have with them, whether that's, you know, digital PR strategies, that's the SEO clients, whatever it is. We're thinking about the long-term things. So like when a core update comes around, unless something weird happens, you won't be affected too much. Obviously you never actually know what's going to happen. You sometimes get, as you mentioned, the helpful content update earlier, Vince. Obviously we've had, so the listicles one wasn't even part of a core update really. But I think you're also right, Vince, that Google have confirmed we're getting more and more core updates and they're more and more nuanced than they were. You know, people talk about pre-Penguin and they'll have these like like big fancy, like eras defined by when big shifts happen in the industry. And now it's like, oh, it's the March 2026 core update. Cool. Okay. What's next? Oh, it's going to be the June 2026 core update. Cool. Like the only one anyone remembers anymore. Exactly right. The only one anyone ever remembers is September 2024 helpful content update. Because that was the thing that killed all of those content sites. And that became the huge And even then, most people don't remember that date. I bring it up on the podcast enough that I remember that date specifically. But I think, yeah, you're getting to this era now where obviously with the addition of things like AI reviews, AI mode, and Google engineers have talked about this, where it used to be the case of, oh, okay, if something goes really wrong, we can roll that back. You know, if we really did make a big mistake and we killed the traffic of a bunch of huge sites, we really shouldn't have done. We pressed the wrong button somewhere, whatever, you know, tick box we did on this update. Now they're more intricate and nuanced and everything is so intertwined that you can't roll back one little piece of the core update without unpicking a whole mess of stuff. And it often feels to me like that kind of sounds like a runaway train with no engineers who know how to stop it. It's like, there's a bunch of people there that in theory You could stop it, but nobody actually knows the full intricacy of search algorithms anymore. I guess that's kind of scary in one way, but I think that makes these core updates not quite as impactful as they would have been 5, 10 years ago where they are like pretty significantly changing the value of links or the value of this particular tactic or strategy. For me, I think the long-term strategy stuff is where you survive in the long term. And obviously we do talk to clients about core updates. I know we had a couple of inquiries, not even clients come to us, like people in our inbox being like, hey, we lost a bunch of traffic. Can we recover from this? Can you guys help us kind of thing? And that was from the listicle stuff that happened recently. So it, I think it still does happen, even if in theory you're doing mostly good work. There's still room for wiggle room there, I think. But mostly I think you can protect yourself by doing good work and not being too self-promotional, being too up yourself about everything, basically.

Do you feel like at this point, the, like with these core updates, and this might be the total wrong thinking by me, but like this idea that like Google is so invested in AI now and Gemini and beating ChatGPT and keeping up with, you know, these others that they are maybe just kind of like search and search results, the SERP itself is kind of taking a backseat. And, you know, SEOs in general, like combating the spam and that sort of thing is kind of deprioritized for them. And they're just kind of trying to— like, that's what these core updates will, you know, we'll change it a little bit here, here, here, rather than like, this is a huge problem, we've addressed it, we've figured it out. And here's this big update. I mean, Do you get that sense at all? Or am I kind of barking up the wrong tree? Mark, what do you think?

I don't think from a technology standpoint, Google's trying to catch up with ChatGPT. I mean, it was Google who invented the transformer technology that ChatGPT was based on, and they had LLMs before anyone. When I spoke to Gary Iesh about it, he was kind of like, yeah, we thought people would hate this. I.e., just like nicking all their content and like writing it. And then he was like, yeah, we were quite—

Some people do, to be fair. Publishers are quite annoyed. There's a lot of lawsuits happening.

But I mean, the general user was like so starry-eyed about when GPT-2 and 3 came out and we were just generating paragraphs. They were like, whoa, this is the best thing ever. So I think they were behind in terms of how do we make this a viable business? Because they had the beautiful hundreds of million dollars a month cash cow of Google Ads. And then why would you rock that boat? Because it's a lot harder to just change to this conversational mode and somehow get ads and monetize that. So I don't think they were behind in terms of the technology side of things, but I don't think they wanted to go down this route, or at least hold it off as long as possible because every quarter there was like record profits from Google Ads from what they were squeezing out with their own AI there, you know, just, just trust us more broad match, raise the budget. With the spam fighting, I think spam is always a priority for Google because spam stops them making as much money, which is why they care about it. They want good search results because they want people to choose Google because then they can sell them ads. I think in terms of what Jack mentioned on black hat, white hat, if we can call it that. I mean, I've got nothing against if we want to call it black hat. To me, black hat isn't actually SEO because you're not optimizing for the system, you're gaming it. It's a bit like, we'll play chess, I'll optimize how I'm playing and someone else being like, well, I'm just going to cheat. It's like, you're not getting better at the game. You're just Cheating and seeing what you can get away with, which is fine. Like I've got nothing against people doing that as long as it's legal. Google's pretty good at tackling black hat. It's rarely, in my view, it seems to be rarely tackled in core updates because they have it under wraps. There's black hat stuff I see that works, tends to last 6, 7 months, then it gets nuked and then they move on because they've made a lot of money in that time. You know, I was in my last presentation I gave this year in Sofia, I was showing these casino sites that were getting up to 10,000, 20,000 visitors a month within 48 hours of putting the domain live because they're using these cross-canonical tricks on old domains that have been penalized. And it really works. Google's kind of on top of that though. It just takes their systems a while to tackle it. What I think gets tackled in the core updates is the stuff that sits in the middle, which is, I don't know, you want to call it gray hat. So the programmatic, I think SEO is a really nice example of that. That's what has been getting hit recently. And we've had big companies that you would recognize, like SaaS names that have lost like 40% of their traffic because they've spent the last year pumping out thousands of pages of us versus their competitor and this product be this one with no real human intervention. They're designed for search. And not only have they lost all the traffic to these pages, there seems to be like a wider suppression of their commercial pages where Google's been like, well, 90% of the content on your site seems to be, you know, self-promotional, low quality. So I'm not going to really trust the other things, just like how Vince, you know, if you met someone that was constantly lying to you, you would be skeptical about anything they say, right? And that it seems the view that Google's taken. So that's what I think core updates are tackling. So your original question was, you know, what should people be actioning on core updates? Firstly, I don't think there's anything you can specifically action because Google doesn't tell you what they're doing. Regardless of whether they know or not, they're not telling us. So we can't be like, oh, we need to look at the links or whatever. What it does change, I think, is the expected value you get over time from specific strategies. So 10, 15 years ago, I was buying loads of links. I was spending tens of thousands of pounds a month on links and making clients loads of money. And everyone was super happy. I wouldn't do that now, because the expected value is much smaller because of how Google's set up. So I think it's more profitable now if you are a real brand to follow Google's guidelines. If you're going to— I always tell people now, if you're going to cheat, cheat hard, really well, smash the window, take everything and run. Don't do this middle ground of we're kind of going to break Google's rules. But yeah, no, it will be fine. It's things like programmatic SEO. It's not egregious. It's not going to get you wiped out in 12 weeks. But they're gonna come for you. And it's going to take years to come back. These clients have come to us with like 40% traffic loss. And they're like, how do we fix this? So you can fix it. But it's probably going to take years, like a couple of years to get back. And that's less profitable than just doing the right thing, if you want to call it. And cumulatively building on that. That's what I think has changed with the core updates, the economics of the best way to do SEO.

Yeah. I always think back to the— I commented once on a Reddit thread, was kind of like a programmatic SEO, you know, plan that this guy had using AI to spit out all this content, blah, blah, blah. And I commented like, hey, I think this is something that Google would catch you on, you know, eventually. And he responded. You keep thinking that way and we'll keep making tons of money.

Yep.

I was like, I guess that, you know, that is the 2 kinds of mindsets. I mean, it really depends on what kind of company you want to be, but, you know, to, to both your points, Jack, you had mentioned, you know, um, when these clients come to you, um, and they've lost traffic, I mean, are they— Is it the kind of thing where they are aware that they kind of were playing dirty and, and Or is it like, they didn't know, you know, like we were just following what we saw on LinkedIn. 'Cause I feel like you can go down these paths where, and we see it on our side from the digital PR. It's like, oh, you know, send out, I send out to 1,000, 10,000 people and I got all these links. And then people come to us and they're like, we just tried this and we got banned from our email service provider or something. So like, what should we be doing right? But I'm curious, like what, Just the level of knowledge of this stuff, is it as, I mean, we're inside, you know, this world and we know kind of the colors, the white, gray, black, but do clients see it like that?

Sometimes. That's often one of the first questions we have is like, you know, do you know why you've lost this traffic? If they come to us and say, we've lost a bunch of traffic or something's gone wrong.

So you're the principal. Do you know why I've called you in?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You've come to the principal's office and Do you know why you're in trouble? And sometimes they'll be like, yeah. Sometimes they've been manipulated by, you know, a previous agency has done crap work, right? We've had that happen a lot before where, you know, our clients have been burnt by previous experiences of like, we thought they were doing digital PR and they just bought a bunch of links and, you know, redirected a bunch of domains and now we're in trouble and we've lost all of our links or similar kinds of things with, we didn't realize they were Doing a bunch of programmatic content where you didn't have the oversight on that or whatever it is. It definitely, I think people are getting more and more educated, but you're totally right, Vince, that it's, I often find it hard to kind of step out of, I cover the news every single week. I do a podcast every single week. I'm always having conversations, listening to other podcasts, all this kind of stuff, very in the industry and in the little bubble that we're in. And then I'll have a conversation with my partner or my parents or my sister or anything like that. And she'd be like, what? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this thing and this thing and this thing and this thing. And like, and my dad is suddenly like, what's an LLM? I'm like, okay, right. So let's start and like have a whole conversation about it. Obviously I know my dad's not one of our clients. He's retired, but I think it totally can depend on how much they have experience in this industry. And something we try and do is educate our clients in that. process, right? Like, when we do an initial audit, even if they're not coming to us with, you know, we have seen a massive drop in traffic and we need to be saved, essentially, we're like, okay, what's working? What isn't working? Have we seen any significant trends in your data over the last year, 16 months, you know, using Search Console and GA4 and stuff like that? And in that initial audit, we will do a review of the content, do a review of the backlinks, do a review of the technical health of the site and Quite a few times we will unearth something and be like, yeah, it turns out there's some parasite SEO on this site you didn't even know about. Somebody's been latching onto your domain. And as Mark said earlier, doing, you know, casino stuff or whatever they've been doing. And that can be an interesting conversation to have of like, so there's a lot of stuff that you didn't know was broken and here's why. But that's what keeps us in the job at the end of the day, right? If everybody knew exactly what they were doing, they wouldn't need to work with Agencies, I guess.

Yeah. I mean, it got me thinking, I was going to ask this, you kind of, kind of answered it, but, but I know the kind of the backstory as far as I remember it, Mark and Jack, you guys were both kind of telling me like you hired Mark, sorry, Mark, you hired Jack to kind of run the podcast. Um, and there's this idea that like, you know, educating your clients, like it is a good thing because you're, you know, they're going to potentially be better Clients for it, right? It's easier to do your job sometimes when you have a better running site and they're doing the right stuff. But on the flip side, to your point, if if people know everything, they don't need you, right? So I guess what I'm getting at is I love to hear your thought process for something like thought leadership, something like a newsletter that shares a lot of news and potentially tactics and secrets, right? Or a podcast that gives listeners insight, gives clients insight. I know a lot of people shy away from that sometimes because. they are afraid of giving away too much information, giving away the secret sauce. Talk me through, probably from both of you, I'd love to hear kind of, are there things that you hold back? Are there things, are there times when it's important to, or is it just, you know, you're an open book? Like the more we can share this information, the better we are as an industry kind of thing. Mark, why don't you go first?

I mean, it's kind of in our name, I guess, for Candor being Frank, open.

Pretty candid, right?

Honest. I think that's— Yeah. So I've always shared pretty much everything. Generally, as soon as someone starts mentioning secrets, I'm immediately suspicious. There are very, very few actual secrets in this industry. And normally when you find secrets, if you want to put them, it's because they're tricks and then you can put them in gray hat or black hat and then As I said, they're not necessarily things that are going to give you good value long-term. And this is coming from someone that, you know, we've, we found a Google exploit a couple of years ago that gave us all kinds of actual metrics they were using for sites and queries and stuff. And I wouldn't, while there was stuff you could have done to lean into some of those things, it didn't strategically change what we were doing.

We got a bunch of inquiries that were like, how do we optimize for search quality score, site quality score, or whatever?

And I was like, why do you want to know? So people are like, what's our site quality? And I'm like, well, why do you want to know that? What possible help for you is that? You don't know how it's used. So I think it's kind of like when people are scared to tell other people their brilliant business idea, you know, like someone will copy it. It's like, they won't. Not because the idea is not good, but there's a lot to be said for execution.

Yeah.

Right. And I see this. So one of the things I used to do was, um, as an independent game developer. So I released like my first iOS game several years ago and I was in that community and there was always someone that was like, oh, I've got a great idea. I just need someone to kind of do the design and programming. It's like, yeah, the actual work.

Everything. Yeah.

It's very true in SEO. You know, I could explain to someone exactly how we do our technical audits and what we look at and how we do competitor stuff and, What metrics we think are important. And I do this all the time. For them to go and find a team that can execute this competently, consistently work together is like a massive thing. And the information is constantly changing, as we know from talking about sending out new stuff on core updates every single week. And being able to pass all that information and understand it in context and translate it into a strategy is a lot harder than it sounds. So I'm completely not afraid of— I'd say the only exception is there's some internal tools we've built that I don't give away because they give us slight efficiency edges, but I've gone on stage and explained how to build them and explained what we've done. I'm not going to give you my dev time for free, but sure, take the idea if you like and run with it. I feel there's more benefit in people knowing that we came up with that process or that idea than trying to closely guard it. So I'm always, always happy to kind of share stuff. And you're very right, Vince, in that it makes better clients. The whole reason in 2019, I started doing my unsolicited SEO tips was at that stage of the agency, we were getting quite a few small companies ask us to do SEO for them. And they didn't have anywhere near enough budget. We're talking, you know, like Oh, I've got $500 a month. Can you do all my SEO? And I felt bad because there were people being like, yeah, I'll do your SEO for that and just doing the most damaging, stupid stuff. So I was like, I'm just going to start putting out things that I see that I know are wrong to try and help those companies. And that gradually evolved into, it's impossible to tackle everything that's wrong. So I'm just going to start telling people what I think from a very generous point of view, what is the correct thing to be doing consistently every day? And if they follow me, that will help them make better decisions. They'll grow quicker. Then they might be able to kind of come up the food chain and work with, you know, what I consider to be proper SEO, whether it's freelance consultants or agencies or whatever.

Yeah, I think that's a pretty interesting point, like educating a client at the really early stage before they're even a client, and then maybe down the line, we regularly get inquiries of, I've been reading Mark's SEO tips for a couple of years, or I've been listening to the podcast or reading your newsletter. You have built that relationship without even realizing through your free content, through all your free stuff. This is something I talked about in my Brighton talk as well. It's like that, that's how you build that initial audience and how you get people invested in you as a company, as a brand, as a creator. You can't just start charging stuff for free, right? You can't just be like, yep, here we go. There's, um, I'm going to charge 5 grand for my initial thing. I was like, do you have any case studies, any history, anything like that? No, no, no. I'm just going to wing it, you know, like, okay, maybe you should start actually doing the work as you were saying, Mark, like get the work done first and prove yourself. And then, yeah, I think being open and sharing knowledge is kind of a brilliant part of this. industry and why it works so well in so many ways. And even things like, I'm sure you've encountered this, Vince, like going on a podcast or hosting a podcast and people are like, so you just talk? I'm like, yeah, it's not as simple as that. And people just assume like you just sit down and talk at your mate and then it's a podcast. Oh, anyone can do that. I was like, go on then. I dare you. Come and set up the cameras, set up the mics, make sure the levels are correct. Are you using a noise gate? Are you using noise reduction? Are you EQing anything? What platform are you using to upload all of this kind of stuff, right? There's so many elements to the tiniest little thing that you're right, Mark, like the execution of it matters so much. And when you bring on a new team member as a hire, or you're working with a new agency, or, you know, client is working with you, even, you know, working with you guys being a SaaS customer of BuzzStream and what we did with Awesome Ask as well, right? That started off as an internal tool of Mark and the team using People Also Ask data for part of their content strategy and then realized like, actually, those are the things probably the industry needs. Let's open that up to the wider world. And as Mark said, we're constantly building tools. Our dev team, we have an innovation lead here at Candor who is doing some great work building cool tools and stuff. Tom and a couple of other developers are working on internal tools. Maybe they'll turn into external tools eventually if we think the, you know, the business requirements are there, but there is huge value in just like sharing your knowledge, but not literally doing the work for people, I think.

Yeah. I, I, let's kind of leave it there. I want to be cognizant of you guys' time. I know you're very busy, um, doing all the things you do. So I want to give you a quick, um, opportunity to shout out Search Norwich XL. Um, Mark or Jack, do you want to give the listeners what that entails?

It's coming up on the 24th of September, 2026. It is basically the culmination of a few years. Mark started doing Search Norwich, which were smaller kind of meetups. Was it 2019? I think he started doing them, something like that. And it was a long-running, every other month kind of meetup and had some fantastic speakers and stuff like that. And a couple of years ago, we thought maybe we could do something bigger. We can do a one-day conference. And that's what Search Norwich XL is. We've got a theater here in Norwich. That's a nearly 300-capacity theater. We've got 12 incredible speakers. We've got a bunch of different like topics that are being covered from very like, how does Google's index work from Adam Gent to multimodal search from Myriam Jessier. We've got a panel of experts talking about the future of search and SEO. So it really feels like a culmination, a lot of the kind of community building stuff we've been doing over the last few years. Um, and yeah, tickets are on sale now. You can go to searchnorwich.org and, uh, get your tickets if you want to come over to Norwich and hang out with some very cool SEOs and learn some cool things from very smart people.

Yeah. Love it. Okay. Best place to find you guys? LinkedIn. Is that where you're most active?

For me, for me, LinkedIn.

Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. That's the easiest way to find both of us, I think. And withcanda.co.uk is our website. You can find the podcast there. coreupdates.com is where you find the newsletter as well. And then yeah, Mark's always posting his SEO tips on LinkedIn and I'm sharing Search and Origin stuff. You can follow Search and Origin on Instagram and a few other places as well. So yeah, keep up with all the news from the podcast, the newsletter, the conference. As you said, we're busy with extracurricular stuff. So yeah.

Yeah, it's fantastic stuff, you guys. Please keep up the good work and everyone listening, I highly recommend You know, check out the podcast, check out the newsletter. And if you're in the UK, go to search Norwich XL.

It doesn't have to be in the UK, Vince. You can fly here. It's fine.

You can fly in. You can fly in as well. Guys, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I will share all of this stuff that we talked about in the show notes, but if people have questions about this, if you have questions for Mark or Jack about any of the stuff we talked about, leave it in the comments. I'll make sure they get them answered for you. And I want to thank you all listeners. For spending your time, I know this is a little longer than we normally do, but these guys have been so grateful their time and and have shared a lot of good stuff. So I wanted to keep it going. So thank you all for listening. Thank you, Jack and Mark. Take care.

Thanks a lot, Vince.

Cheers, Vince.