And this is the reason SEOs are hated.

what if I told you most of google's quality score is based upon how many people search for your brand/site specifically? It's the real reason reddit ranked so high.

This site is 3 days old. Entirely planned and built on my Mac Mini via Herdr in about 12 hours the day before. Fable 5.1 was the lead orchestrator using Astra high for research and data, Astra low for backend implementation and Fable 5.1 low for design - all in parallel.

👋🙃🧵 I’ve followed @james_dooley for a long time. I wasn’t invited to the party, but it looked too fun not to join 😂 I’m not particularly public with SEO, but I’ve been doing it for almost 20 years now. I started when I was around 10, and experiments like this are still the part of SEO I enjoy most. There are actually a few different hypotheses being tested here. The EMDs are probably the least interesting part, because we already know exact-match domains can help establish strong lexical relevance when everything else lines up. What interested me more was building a very dense: query -> topic -> entity relationship across an entire corpus. Instead of: King of AEO -> one page -> Vithurs you create something closer to: King of AEO -> Answer Engine Optimization -> AEO -> entity authority -> AI search -> Vithurs Then reinforce those relationships through supporting documents, titles, headings, contextual internal anchors, breadcrumbs, About pages, schema, social profiles, backlinks, news coverage and consistent entity naming. That gives a retrieval system significantly more evidence about what the entity and corpus represent than a single optimised landing page ever could. There’s also an internal PageRank element that people massively underestimate. If you have 20 tightly related pages around one subject, you’re not just creating “more content”. You’re creating an internal graph. Supporting pages can reinforce the target entity and query pages contextually, consolidate relevance and direct whatever PageRank enters the domain toward the pages you actually want Google to prioritise. Do that properly and: lexical relevance + topical depth + document consistency + entity co-occurrence + internal graph reinforcement can be enough to establish the initial query/entity association before significant traditional external PageRank (eg: backlinks) is even introduced. Then multiply that across several separate domains and you start increasing the frequency and consistency of the same entity relationship across the corpus. That can influence retrieval before meaningful external authority even arrives. But this is where the experiment splits into two different layers: ranking ≠ entity consensus Getting Google to retrieve and rank one of my pages for: “king of AEO” is one layer. Getting Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and other systems to discover the sources and associate: Vithurs -> King of AEO is another. The LLMs are finding the sources, surfacing my name and recognising the association. The next layer is moving from simple recognition to becoming the default or dominant entity association across multiple systems. That progression is more like: retrieval -> ranking -> recognition -> corroboration -> dominant entity association Each stage responds to slightly different signals. Retrieval needs enough relevance to enter the candidate set. Ranking needs stronger query fit, internal/external authority and competitive strength. Recognition needs repeated and consistent entity relationships. Corroboration gets stronger as those relationships appear across more authoritative and independent sources. Dominant association comes when the evidence becomes strong enough that the system consistently prefers one entity relationship over competing ones. That’s the part I find most interesting (not just for this keyword but in other far more competitive and aggressive niches). 1/2

The linchpin link (for SEO) A concept few understand and I never see anyone talk about. It’s simple: for every query class there’s one link in Googles graph that carries more weight than any other. Landing this link takes you straight to top, and once there, it’s almost impossible to knock you off without parity. I first discovered this in 2014 when I realized I could get links on epa.gov because my products were made 1) in the US and 2) from recycled plastic and rubber. I was able to get links to our 3 most important category pages. Within a week we took #1 for each category head term (2 word product categories) and those rankings are still there TODAY. Over the years as I went looking for other examples, I found keywordtool.io was ranking #1 for a term I was going after for a client: keyword tool. Upon digging into their link profile I found out why; they had a landed a link n Wikipedia for the same term. They held that #1 ranking for years (and still have it today). In many cases, Wikipedia is the linchpin. In many others it’s .gov sites. There was a time when .edu’s were grail links until G devalues them (because like everything else that starts working and gets shared, SEOs ruined it)

Sometimes you just get lucky and find a market where it's incredibly easy to rank. This site is 6 months old.

What a joke.

SEO is now WAY bigger than ranking #1 on Google. Not because Google matters less, but because the job of SEO has expanded. Today, SEO is also about: 1. Getting found when someone searches on Google 2. Appearing in AI Overviews for Google searches 3. Getting recommended in ChatGPT answers 4. Owning the comparison searches in your category 5. Showing up on the sites influencing all of the above And you can’t do that by JUST: - Writing more blog posts - Building more backlinks - Adding schema - Tracking a bunch of AI prompts - Renaming SEO to “AEO” You need the entire system working together. Here’s how I think about the 5 layers of SEO in 2026: