SEO for Paws 6, September 23, 2026
SEO for Paws 6, streamed on 23 September 2026, went almost entirely to AI search: how Google’s 2026 updates are landing, who AI answer engines trust, and what breaks when ChatGPT or Claude fetch a page live. Eight speakers in seven sessions, opening with Barry Schwartz and Glenn Gabe on the update landscape and closing with Louisa Frahm on personalising publisher content. As with every edition, the sessions were donated and viewers gave to Ukrainian animal shelters. The series has raised over $100,000 for the animals so far.
The conference is part of the SEO Charity project, organised by Anton Shulke, and Olesia Korobka hosted the stream. The full recording is below, with the session lineup and jump-to timestamps underneath.
Watch the full conference
Speakers and sessions
Each timestamp opens the recording at the start of that talk.
- 6:45 Barry Schwartz and Glenn Gabe on Google Updates & AI Search: What’s Working, What’s Getting Hit. No confirmed core update on the day, plenty of unconfirmed volatility: a big January 2026 update Google never announced, an early-September shake-up that sent some sites to near-zero visibility for a few days, and an August spam update with unusual reach because of scaled AI content abuse. One YMYL site dropped out of AI Overviews and AI Mode the day after Gemini 3.5 Flash rolled out. Glenn’s prediction: the next Penguin-style crackdown goes after paid inauthentic mentions sold as AI visibility. Use AI to research, let people with real expertise write.
- 36:36 Lisa Paasche on Who Does AI Trust? Rethinking Authority in the Age of AI Search. An answer engine needs evidence, not just information: who says this, who else says it, is the entity tied to the topic anywhere else. Lisa’s five parts of AI authority are discoverable, useful, corroborated, associated and talked about. Digital PR was building that footprint all along, and she argues no B2B SaaS niche is too dull for it.
- 1:06:44 Michał Suski on You’re Being Fooled by the AI SEO Industry. Surfer’s 30 million scraped AI answers against the hype. API and chat UI are different channels: for the same prompt only 26% of brands and 15% of cited sources overlap. Rephrased prompts return the same brands and sources 70% of the time, so monitoring thousands of prompts is a myth. PageRank, harmonic centrality and traffic show zero correlation with how often a page gets cited, and self-promoting listicles still make up 20 to 30% of cited pages.
- 1:37:16 Martin Stepanek on Google Forgives Almost Everything in Technical SEO. ChatGPT, Claude… Don’t. Google renders JavaScript and waits, with a 99th-percentile render delay of 18 hours. AI live fetches have seconds. ChatGPT shows “price unavailable” for Target.com laptops in a batch query, server logs fill with 499s where ChatGPT gave up on a slow page, and in a price-hiding test Gemini found 4 of 8 prices, ChatGPT 3, Claude 0. The fix is old: server-render, cut JavaScript weight, TTFB under 800 ms, answer in the first paragraph. llms.txt and markdown mirrors are not it.
- 2:06:42 Zach Chahalis on The New Playbook for SEO/GEO Content in 2026. SEO gets a site discovered, GEO gets it understood. AI systems score atomic chunks for synthesis rather than whole pages, and extractability is the first gate: a passage that loses its meaning when lifted out will not be cited. Chunk for the reader first (Cyrus Shepard’s broken-up article earned more links and four times the engagement time) and treat GEO as a content strategy, not a tool set.
- 2:36:39 Ana Precup on Humans Need Trust. Machines Need Structure. SEO Needs Both. One e-commerce product page, walked end to end. Valid schema is not accurate schema: the page says £89 and out of stock while the JSON-LD says £79 and in stock, two versions of reality. Fix the data source, not the markup. Then a clean measurement chain, impressions, visits, engagement, conversions, revenue, before anyone sells visibility as growth. She closes with five checks for Monday.
- 3:06:17 Louisa Frahm on Publisher Personalization Strategies for the AI Age. Ten years of enterprise newsroom SEO, most recently at ESPN, now her own consultancy. One query holds many reader needs: “what should I know about tonight’s game” means something different to a hometown fan and a bettor, so personalization changes the useful answer. Make it easy to choose you: clear publish and update dates, named reviewers, descriptive internal links, and a button to add you as a Google preferred source or Discover follow.
About SEO for Paws
SEO for Paws runs twice a year, alongside a separate series of one-guest webinars. Every edition follows the same idea: well-known SEO practitioners give their time for free, and the audience gives to animal shelters in return. You can find every edition and webinar on the SEO Charity hub, watch the March 2026 edition at its recording and lineup, or browse the SEO Charity webinars.