I’ve run StewArt Media since 1999. Most of my career has been SEO, ecommerce, and helping businesses get found. Now I’m rebuilding the agency around AI agents: Hermes, Search Engineer, SKAW, and a lot of operator judgement. I post notes on: - SEO after Google - Shopify and product data - AI-operated agency workflows - what agents still get wrong - practical search/ecommerce lessons from real client work

Be careful out there

The proposed Digital Duty of Care is bad enough but it gets worse. The scope is broad enough to potentially capture ordinary business websites and ecommerce stores. Assuming you're outside it because you only sell products online would be a mistake. For services covered by the proposed rules, the obligations include annual risk assessments and taking effective measures to address the risks identified. That's work someone in the business has to understand, do and document. There is provision for low-risk services to be exempted. But the ability to grant an exemption isn't the same as your business already having one. I'm not saying every website owner will automatically have the same obligations. I am saying small businesses need a clear answer about where they stand before this becomes law. If you run an online store, you should be able to find out whether you're covered, what you need to do and who is responsible. That shouldn't require a legal project just to get started. Senate submissions close on 30 October. If you run a business website, or represent businesses that do, now is the time to ask for that clarity.

INteresting to see "New takes" on AI in business getting posted from the LinkedIn crowd that surfaced here two years ago.

Next hire I will be asking "Tell me about your sock draw." I think the response will tell me a lot. Any others?

Number one on Google. Screen five on your phone. We used to joke that being number one on Google meant being on screen four of someone's phone. You had to scroll past the ads and shopping results before you got to the first organic listing. Now add an AI Overview to that experience. You can win the ranking and still be a long way from where the customer is looking. Screen five isn't a fixed measurement. Different searches produce different layouts. The point is that “number one” in your ranking report doesn't necessarily mean what a business owner thinks it means. And if you've spent months and a lot of money getting there, you should probably ask what you've actually bought. We changed what we expected SEO to do About ten years ago, we changed our focus at @StewArtMedia . We wanted to know what the SEO work was doing for the rest of the business. How was it helping the visitors coming from ads? What happened to people arriving from an email campaign? Could they find the right product, understand it and buy it? Look at the work itself. Speed. Performance. Navigation. Internal linking. Product information. Making sure the right pages can be found and indexed. A lot of that is improving the customer experience. It also helps search engines understand the site. Clear, accessible information gives an agent trying to interpret your products something useful to work with too. None of those improvements stops being valuable because the visitor clicked an ad rather than an organic result. That's why we treat SEO as infrastructure. Your catalogue, your site structure and the quality of your information support every channel bringing people to the business. Measuring that work purely by organic traffic misses a large part of what it can do. Organic traffic still matters. So do rankings. But they're by product of a strong brand with solid infrastructure and content that resonates with the buyer. The backlink question We moved away from backlink campaigns about fifteen years ago. For us, the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. There was the cost of getting the links, the question of whether they moved the rankings, and then the much more important question of whether any of that produced more sales. Someone said to me years ago that the best “backlink” was the one at the top of Google. You could buy it with an ad. Technically, an ad isn't an SEO backlink. It doesn't buy you organic authority. But the commercial point made sense: if you're paying for all this work to get in front of a customer, compare it with the cost of paying to appear in front of that customer directly. That doesn't mean ads always win. You still have to make the numbers work. It means the comparison should be about acquiring customers, rather than improving an SEO metric because an SEO report says it needs improving. Moving up a ranking report isn't much of a result if the extra sales don't justify the effort. Ads and organic are talking to the same customer It's rare that we'll take on an organic campaign without handling the ads as well. They're targeting the same audience and should work together. If you're running a paid campaign for a product while also trying to improve its organic visibility, you need to understand both. Otherwise, you can end up claiming success in one report without understanding what happened to the business overall. And both channels send people into the same website. If the product information is poor or the navigation makes it difficult to find anything, you have a problem regardless of which team delivered the visitor. Fixing that is useful work. Whether the resulting sale gets labelled paid, organic, email or direct doesn't change the fact that the site needed fixing. Agents change how much of this work we can do This is where I'm excited about what we're doing now. There has always been worthwhile work that was difficult to justify across an entire catalogue. Reviewing pages, identifying gaps, working out which searches they should serve, improving product and collection descriptions. The manual effort added up quickly. We now use agents to do much of that analysis and preparation. Work that was previously cost-prohibitive across a site becomes practical. You still need to know what good looks like. You still need to check the changes. Making it cheaper to produce a bad product description isn't much of an achievement. But being able to improve more of the actual site, rather than stopping after a handful of priority pages, is a meaningful change. That's where I'd put the effort: make the site easier to find, understand and buy from. Check whether the work helps customers and improves commercial results across the channels you run. And when someone tells you that you're number one on Google, open the search on your phone. See how far you have to scroll.

Damn I was just thinking we need something like this

Magpies get a lot of press but noisy miners try to kill you too. These are the same ones that land in my hand and take food. Crazy fuckets

Whatt Australia WILL become unless we say no.

i dunno what you think @grok?

SEO isn't dead - it's just done by agents now.

Perfect response.

This is the logical progression

But Mythos...?

so @wpengine