Founder and CEO @SearchPilot, founded @distilled (acquired by @Brainlabs) Interest in basketball, whisky, cooking, auction theory Views may not be orgs'
Somewhere rainy
Joined March 2007
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I am very interested in @randfish's recent research into the growth of LLMs, their impact on people's search habits, and their impact on Google.
My summary:
1. Google is still growing, not shrinking as some would have you believe
2. Not everything people do on LLM-based chat platforms are "searches"
3. Even if you are fixated on AI-powered discovery, Google is the biggest for *that* too
This is not to say we should ignore the growth of the others, or get complacent, and in fact I think there's a lot of scope to test the impact of our activities on other LLM recommendations, but we should keep things in perspective.
It reminds me a lot of the growth of social media circa 2007. It was clearly a coming revolution, and there was noise about it being catastrophic for search because people were making the argument that users would prefer to ask their friends where to eat rather than searching for restaurants. It turned out, of course, that they did both.
NEW Research: sparktoro.com/blog/new-resea…
If we include ChatGPT, what is Google's *REAL* market share of search?
After years of speculation, we finally have enough reliable data to build high quality numbers for both.
About to set off on one of the busier weeks of travel I’ve had in a while.
Friends in Minneapolis who fancy a coffee or a beer Monday afternoon or New Yorkers who are around Wednesday afternoon, drop me a note!
Fascinated by the narrative that declines in reddit search traffic are indicative of, well, anything else really. Reddit is a truly unique outlier that Google preferenced more than ANY other site I'm aware of through 2023-2025.
Almost all the growth reported in logged-out users (2nd chart) is driven by increased search visibility (1st chart).
I'm sure they did a lot of things right, though I have no inside information, but most of that growth was due to decisions GOOGLE made, not decisions reddit made.
Logged-out daily users rose 2.7× (+171%) from mid-2023 to Q3 2026.
Seeing headlines like "search traffic dries up" and "bleak internet without Google traffic" as coverage of the potential end of a generational run of INCREASING search traffic to a single site strikes me as weird.
None of this is to downplay the negative impact Google's changes are having on other media properties, or to comment on Google's own ability to monetise AI mode. But reddit is BY FAR the biggest winner I know of in terms of search visibility through the roll out of AI features.
Finding that every time I read a take on “ant” (meaning anthropic) I read “Ant” (as in Anthony Edwards 🏀)
Big deal imo
Some big personal news: I'm moving to join Works in Progress as executive editor, starting next month. I have been hoping for an opportunity to work with @bswud and @s8mb for more than a decade, and I'm incredibly excited to finally have one.
WIP is expanding on every front right now. We'll soon begin coverage of business and finance, as well as putting out more reported features. To that end, we'll be hiring more writers and reporters in the year to come. I'm planning to remain based in the US to help build out our presence here.
The print edition of WIP has existed for less than 12 months, but sometime in the next week or so we will reach our 10,000th paying print subscriber. It's a group that now includes people who've been at the highest echelons of government and who run the world's biggest public companies. We’re already on track to 3x that number next year. We'll be in store at Barnes & Noble, Hudson News and independent newsagents next week too.
I think WIP is providing something that people are craving from physical media right now: fewer, extremely well-crafted pieces in a beautifully designed form. Issues now feature an amazing group of columnists, including Tyler Cowen, Dan Wang and Stephen Kotkin. Each edition is better than the last.
You'll see us in more and more places next year too. In January, our new weekly documentary films will launch on YouTube. We're expanding into the events space, with a new series in North America. The sky is the limit from here on out.
Google Search Console has AI visibility data! We have been going through a very painstaking and manual process of gathering and analysing that data for a number of our tests where there was a strong AI visibility hypothesis.
Punchline: we're detecting AI visibility impacts with statistical confidence for the first time.
Ever since we rolled out experiments that focused on AI clicks the top question we've been asked is "what about visibility?".
Well...
One problem with most AI visibility tracking is that there is no way to tell whether the numbers are changing because of things you did, or just because of <gestures wildly>.
Look at the purple line in this chart - growing both before and after the website change (dotted line) - it's only by running a controlled test where a control group is unchanged (producing the pink forecast line) that we can see that there is causality. The change we made helped!
The purple bar shows the uncertainty but also the statistical confidence with credible interval.
This is a big deal!
Best station in the world
It's also amazing how well connected to public transport you are, arriving in the UK on the Eurostar:
- St Pancras
- Kings Cross
- Piccadilly Line
- Circle Line
- Hammersmith & City
- Metropolitan
- District
- Victoria
- Northern
- Thameslink
- trains from LNER, Lumo, Great Northern, Grand Central, Hull Trains
Every city on the GB rail network can be reached in 2 or fewer changes.
Will Critchlow retweeted
It's also amazing how well connected to public transport you are, arriving in the UK on the Eurostar:
- St Pancras
- Kings Cross
- Piccadilly Line
- Circle Line
- Hammersmith & City
- Metropolitan
- District
- Victoria
- Northern
- Thameslink
- trains from LNER, Lumo, Great Northern, Grand Central, Hull Trains
Every city on the GB rail network can be reached in 2 or fewer changes.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that this conversation with @retailgeek had more moments of shock and surprise for me than any other interview I've recorded.
Not least when you see my jaw drop as Jason tells the story of being stuck in Minneapolis with Jeff Bezos on 9/11.
youtube.com/watch?v=MhN1qQg_…
Podcast listeners - we just released a new episode on the feed - this time with Christine Ullmann of John Lewis talking about how premium brands get found in AI search.
Don't miss out - The Business Class Lounge wherever you get your podcasts.
Kelly Wortham very kindly invited me to speak to the Test & Learn Community about AI search and discovery.
Her crew are extremely experienced experimentation experts when it comes to other channels - and particularly around conversion rate optimisation, UX, and product testing.
My job was to bring the perspective about how you can experiment with modern search and discovery.
I thought others might be interested in what I put together - here are my slides and the recording is on their YouTube channel:
![[SHARED] Bringing an Experimentation Mindset to AI Search - TLC - Will Critchlow, SearchPilot,...](https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/2117556096604708865/DfRkke6_?format=jpg&name=420x420_2)