The SEO Turtle journal
What we’re working on, what we’re learning, and the questions worth spending a little more time with.
Screaming Frog has let you run your own JavaScript on every rendered page since version 20. Most people still use it as a link checker. Here is how the seoSpider API actually works, the snippets we run on real crawls, and when the built-in AI tab is the better tool.
Google renders your JavaScript. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity do not. That one fact changes what a JavaScript SEO audit has to check in 2026. Here is how Google's pipeline works, how to see exactly what it rendered, and the fixes we keep making on React, Next.js, Vue and Angular sites.
Nearly half of US adults have used ChatGPT and a billion people a month use Google's AI Mode, yet trust in AI answers sits at 20 percent and most users go back to Google to check. Here is what the survey research says about why people use AI search, what they use it for, and what a business should change.
In one week of July 2026, four companies guided to roughly $720 to $745 billion of capital spending this year, most of it on the machines that answer search queries. Here is the money in one table, what it buys, why it means subsidised answers, ads inside them and agents that book for you, and how much of the bubble talk is worth your attention.
Google still takes more than 91% of search referrals, ChatGPT has 900 million weekly users, and Gemini just passed a billion. All three are true and none of them measure the same thing. Here are the 2026 figures with dates and sources, what market share means when the AI answer lives inside Google, and the number a business should actually be watching.
Legal is the most expensive category in Google Ads again this year, and most law firm accounts waste the budget on structure, not bids. Here is how we would build a law firm PPC account in 2026: which campaign types earn a place, what AI Max and ads in AI Mode change, and how to keep intake and compliance under control.
A dental practice competes in a three-mile radius, and most of that competition now happens inside Google Business Profile, the local pack and AI answers rather than on the website. Here is the working checklist we use for practices: categories, services, reviews that stay inside Google's and the GDC's rules, treatment and location pages, schema and tracking.
Most multi-location sites fail in one of two ways: one page for the whole brand, or fifty pages that say the same thing with the city name swapped. Here is how we structure Business Profiles, location pages, schema, reviews and tracking for a business with more than one address, and what changed now that Google's AI answers read the profile before the website.
Most backlink advice still reads like 2015: chase DA, get the link in the body, make sure it's followed. Here is how we actually judge a link in 2026, what Google has said about links mattering less, and a checklist you can run on any prospect in five minutes.
Most of the industry pays for links and most of it will not say so. Here is what buying backlinks looks like in 2026, what Google's systems actually do with a paid link, what the May, June and August updates targeted (and did not), and where we would put the same budget instead.
B2B keyword lists get pruned by volume before anyone checks who is searching. That was always a mistake, and now that AI Overviews and AI Mode absorb most of the research phase it is an expensive one. Here is how we plan B2B SEO in 2026: which pages still earn clicks, how to get cited when they do not, and how to measure it without pretending clicks are the whole story.
Google has said for nearly twenty years that a .edu link gets no special treatment, and that it ignores a lot of them because they get spammed so hard. Some university links are still worth real effort. Most of what is sold as edu backlinks is not. Here is how to tell the two apart and what the outreach actually looks like.
The most common hreflang failure we see on casino sites has nothing to do with the tags. It is a geo-block that hands Googlebot a 403 because it crawls from the US. This guide covers codes, x-default, cross-domain licence setups, mirrored markets, the three implementation methods with working examples, and what to test with now that Search Console's report is gone.
Most publishers will not link to a casino at any price, so the market fills with PBNs and 'casino guest post' marketplaces that sell exactly what Google discounts. Add four regulators with different views on who is liable for an affiliate's marketing. Here is what a defensible casino link profile actually contains and how each part of it gets earned.
Search any head term in this vertical and you get an AI Overview, a wall of comparison publishers, then Binance, Coinbase and Kraken. A newer exchange is not in that picture. Here is where the winnable inventory actually is, why your MiCA or FCA status is a ranking input, and the technical faults that keep exchange sites out of the index.
Claims are down a quarter, HMRC checks one in six of them, and the finance directors searching for an adviser have read about claim farms. That changes what ranks. Here is the content, local and referral playbook for R&D tax relief advisers and grant consultants, and how to show up when someone asks an AI whether their project is eligible.
We sell SEO, and our honest answer is that it pays for roughly half the SMEs who ask us. Here is how to tell which half you are in, what public cost and timeline data actually say, the cheap wins to do before you hire anyone, and the cases where ads are the better first spend.