Mark your calendars: Sydney SEO Conference returns on March 12, 2027 (with the exclusive VIP Mastermind taking place on March 11). Search is moving faster than ever. This year, we’re bringing together top global minds and local leaders to break down what’s actually working across SEO, AI Search and Digital PR. Here is a look at who’s taking the stage: @aleyda — Founder, Orainti & Co-Founder, Finchling Natalia Witczyk — CEO, Mosquita Digital Terry Kyle - Co-Founder, WPX & Founder, EveryDogMatters Jabez Reuben — Founder, The Blueprints @jgdeutsch — Fractional Head of Growth Amy Gibson — Strategy Director Rahul Sengupta — SEO & GEO Lead Melbourne Aaron Taylor - General Manager Beyond tactical takeaways, we’re wrapping up Friday with a massive networking event, complete with a very generous bar tab to keep the conversations going. Best of all? 100% of event profits will be donated to Chris O'Brien Lifehouse, supporting their vital cancer treatment and research work in Sydney. Level up your AI search strategy while making a real impact. Tickets are live and selling quickly, secure your spot at the link in the comments. prosperitymedia.com.au/sydne…

While much of the recent discussion around SEO emphasizes that LLM-driven traffic volume remains relatively small, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. What matters far more than raw traffic is intent and conversion. Across several of our client accounts, direct conversions originating from LLMs now represent 10% to 20% of total company conversions across all acquisition channels. Focusing purely on volume misses the bigger picture: LLM users are often further down the funnel and exhibit significantly higher intent. Even from our own lead sources we see similar numbers via our tracking data.

Never miss a milestone. In business, we often talk about crocodiles in the water, unseen risks, looming market shifts, or sudden industry disruptions. But spending time with my wife and son in port Douglas last weekend reminded me of a different kind of risk: missing out on the moments that actually matter. We had a great time at Wildlife Habitat Port Douglas, highly recommended if you are in the area with kids. Work will always be there, but these early years won't be. Taking a step back to reset with family doesn't make you less dedicated to your career it gives you the perspective to navigate whatever is swimming beneath the surface. How do you ensure you make time to disconnect from work?

At 16, I spent my school holidays and weekends working as a labourer for my uncle’s construction company. It was, hands down, one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever done. On the tools all day, doing heavy lifting in the heat. But looking back, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. That hard work allowed me to save enough money to buy my very first laptop at 17. That single purchase kicked off a 22-year journey into Websites, domains and SEO. Fast forward to today: we have a full-floor office in Sydney, an office in Melbourne, and a growing team I couldn’t be prouder of. Over the weekend, life came full circle. I paid my uncle to come over and help with some carpentry and fit a new dishwasher. I jumped right back on the tools for the day as his labourer. I’m incredibly grateful he gave a 16-year-old kid a chance back then, and grateful I got to learn what true hard work looks like early on. It built the foundation for everything that came after. What’s an early experience in your career that you’re still grateful for today?

One thing that has always bothered me in the event and SEO space: people tearing down community events and demanding refunds when everything wasn't tailored specifically to them. Having seen what goes into large-scale conferences, here’s the reality: Most organizers aren't doing this for a massive payout. They do it to give back, bring like-minded professionals into the same room, and elevate the industry. Behind every smooth 2-day conference is months of high-stakes stress: • Negotiating venue and AV logistics • Managing speaker lineups and last-minute dropouts • Driving ticket sales and sponsor relations • Balancing attendee expectations against unpredictable variables • Dealing with a host of random things. Events provide the platform, the content, and the network. What you extract from that environment is entirely up to you. If you walk away from a full conference without a single takeaway or valuable connection, that’s rarely an event failure it’s an engagement failure of your own doing. Huge respect to anyone in our industry putting in the work to host and bring people together. 👏 If you don't like the events to have attended go and start your own event and see how much work it really is.

Heading to Profound Zero Click in Sydney this month? 🚀 If you’re in enterprise search, marketing, or AI, this is going to be one of the standout AI Search events of the year. To kick things off, we’ve partnered with the .@profound team to host Profound Eve drinks at The Glenmore Hotel! What’s in store: 🍻 A massive bar tab & food. 🎶 A special guest performance on the night 🌆 Epic harbor views & great networking before the main event See you in Sydney .@thejamescad & .@dbabbs Main event - tryprofound.com/zeroclick/sy… Eve event - tryprofound.com/zeroclick/sy…

Is anyone else getting exhausted by these automated, AI-generated "diagnostic alert" emails about their Google Ads account? The irony is incredible: I ran the copy through Google’s own Gemini, and it immediately flagged the email as AI slop right down to pointing out that the sender was an external contractor (@xwf google com) running automated templates. It raises a fair question: why does Google continue to allow these aggressive, automated sales tactics to target Ads users under the guise of urgent system notices? What makes it even more ridiculous is that we don't even manage ads for clients, we specialise in SEO & GEO, yet this account exists purely for our own brand. Surely there’s a better way to handle outreach than sending pseudo alarmist cold pitches straight to the people using your platform.

Big thanks to James Oliver .@oliver__com coming down to the Sydney office today for a bit of a lunch and learn session covering - Parasite SEO, AI search, Claude, sharing his tools .@AnswerSocrates Some great knowledge getting shared.

OpenAI Launches Dots, yet Grok Bot already owns Dot.com nice one @elonmusk

Lately, I’ve been seeing an alarming rise in clients receiving 30+ page "AI Slop" audits generated in seconds with zero critical thinking. These reports look visually impressive at a distance. They’re full of scary red exclamation marks, polished pie charts, and "URGENT" warnings. But when you actually open them up, the claims are laughably out of touch: 🚨 "Missing llms.txt file: CRITICAL SEO ISSUE." 🚨 "Missed blocked directory in robots.txt: HIGH RISK." 🚨 "Missing ALT tag on an icon file: CRITICAL ACTION REQUIRED." Let’s be honest about what’s happening here: 1. Minor noise is being sold as major strategy. An unoptimized alt tag on a decorative footer graphic isn’t killing your rankings. A missing llms.txt file isn't wiping you off Google. Turning low-impact, micro-level best practices into "critical site failures" is just a trick to create fake urgency. 2. Quantity is replacing quality. Clients are being handed 30 pages of generic, auto-generated bullet points instead of 2 pages of actual strategic insight. If an audit doesn't tie its findings directly to revenue, search intent, site architecture, or core technical blockers, it’s not an audit it’s an export script. 3. AI is being used as a substitute for expertise, not a tool. AI is incredible for efficiency, but using it to pump out generic audit templates without human validation destroys trust in the whole industry. If your audit reads like it was generated by a bot that has never looked at a search engine result page, throw it away. What’s the most absurd "Critical SEO Flag" you’ve seen in an automated audit recently?

Australia is player really well against Brazil tonight. It's great to see the Socceroos taking it to the best in the world #socceroos

Two years ago today, I was rushed to RPA Hospital in an ambulance. What I initially thought was just severe food poisoning turned out to be a burst appendix, leading to severe sepsis across my entire abdomen. I was rushed into emergency night surgery and woke up days later in the ICU. The road back wasn't simple a major laparotomy, collapsed lungs, damaged vocal cords, and a long list of complications. It took three grueling months to recover, followed by a second laparotomy surgery just last year. Surviving something like that changes your perspective forever. I will be endlessly grateful to the incredible teams at RPA Hospital and Chris O'Brien Lifehouse for saving my life and taking such good care of me. Gratitude is best expressed through action. That’s why this year, through our main event, the Sydney SEO Conference, we were able to donate $34,500 back to support the Chris O'brien Lifehouse hospital. And we’re planning to do it all over again next year. Health is wealth.

GEO Citation Analysis: What LLMs Cite in Australia, and Why prosperitymedia.com.au/geo-c…

Important update for Australian business owners, founders, and web developers If you own a .com.au or .net.au domain, upcoming policy changes by .au Domain Administration (auDA) could affect your website. What's changing? auDA has accepted Recommendation 2 from its Licensing Rules Review, which removes section 2.4.4(2)(f). The old rule: An active ABN or ACN was enough to prove eligibility for your domain. The new rule: Every domain will strictly require a registered ASIC Business Name or IP Australia Trademark that exactly matches the domain name. Why it matters: 80% of current registrations (~2.7M domains) will no longer be compliant as-is. Domain owners face extra ASIC/IP Australia registration fees and registrar update costs just to keep existing web addresses. Uncompliant domains risk deletion complaints and potential loss of established web presence. A petition is calling on the auDA Board to halt Recommendation 2 and protect local businesses from unnecessary red tape and costs. ✍️ Sign and share the petition here: change.org/p/stop-auda-s-pol…

I prefer the old McLaren logo. Which one do you prefer?

Planning a website migration with millions of indexed pages? Bring your SEO team in on day one, not two weeks before launch. Recently, we’ve seen a spike in brands reaching out for last-minute support on massive, complex site migrations. The ask? Save a multi-million-page build in a matter of weeks while expecting zero traffic loss and zero liability for the agency. The reality? That isn't a migration strategy; it's a high-risk gamble no agency should take. When SEO is treated as an afterthought, you aren't just risking a temporary dip; you're putting organic revenue on the line. Last-minute patches cannot replace sound technical architecture, comprehensive redirect mapping, and rigorous testing. If you’re planning a migration this year, skip the fire brigade approach: 📌 Involve SEO teams early: at the architecture and wireframing stage, not post-development. 📌 Build in sufficient runway: mapping, testing, and auditing take time. 📌 Align investment with risk: if you're spending millions on dev work, underfunding the SEO team that protects your existing traffic creates a massive point of failure. You need real enterprise SEO experts on the job. An emergency SEO fix right before launch is always vastly more expensive and far riskier than getting the foundation right from the start. 💡 Want to dive deeper into enterprise-scale site migrations? Aaron Taylor GM at Prosperity will be speaking in Sydney next week for an exclusive breakdown on managing high-stakes enterprise migrations safely. 🎟 Register here: meetup.com/en-au/organic-sea… #SEO #WebsiteMigration #EnterpriseSEO

Want to build real buzz at trade shows? Bring in a crowd-puller. 🪄 This year, Prosperity Media has done a few events, and bringing in magician Jackson Aces always steals the show. Check out some of the highlights from Online Retailer! 👇

Can social agencies please stop claiming they "own" Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Slapping a new acronym onto your social media retainer because LLMs cite Reddit or scrape public posts doesn't mean you own the AI visibility strategy. GEO isn't just "creating good content for people to discuss on social." It is a multi-layered ecosystem, and claiming full ownership while ignoring the underlying technical and structural machinery is setting clients up for failure. Here are the key things social agencies consistently miss when they try to claim GEO: Technical Data Architecture: AI models digest data through structured entities. If your website lacks JSON-LD, proper schema markup, clean semantic HTML, and modular vector chunking, LLMs won't accurately understand your brand no matter how clever your TikTok strategy is. I see so many websites riddled with JavaScript issues that social agencies do not even look at. Crawl Infrastructure & Index Management: GEO requires direct control over how AI models scrape your assets. Managing robots.txt permissions, CDN restrictions (e.g., GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot), optimizing site latency, and ensuring machine-readable availability dictate whether LLMs can even access your content for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). Cross-Channel Knowledge Graph Consistency: LLMs build entity relationships across the entire web, not just inside social feeds. They cross-reference news publications, Wikipedia/Wikidata entries, regulatory filings, financial reports, and official corporate documentation to verify facts. Agentic Commerce Readiness: The future of GEO isn't just answering consumer prompts; it's serving AI agents acting on behalf of buyers. This requires open APIs, machine-readable product feeds, and structured endpoints, not carousel posts or user-generated content. Specific Attribution & AI Metrics: Measuring GEO goes far beyond engagement metrics or basic social listening. It requires tracking Share of Model (SoM), prompt citation frequency across specific LLMs, AI referral isolation in server logs, and active sentiment/hallucination monitoring. GEO isn't a single agency's domain; it's a cross-functional alignment of SEO, Digital PR, technical engineering, data architecture, and brand strategy. Social is certainly a valuable piece of the source-layer puzzle, but it is not the entire playbook.