iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 06/10/2026

You made me do it. Response was mostly from my own about page. 😁

Reposted by Tony McCreath

Jono Alderson @jono.id · 04/10/2026

Replacing your CMS with AI-generated pages? Enjoy discovering why content management systems exist, one production bug at a time. You’ve just inherited a thousand publishing problems your CMS used to solve without you noticing. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/y...

jonoalderson.com

Your website needs a brain

If you’ve spent years fighting with a content management system, the prospect of replacing it with a prompt is understandably appealing.

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 24/09/2026

I'm using the BigQuery MCP and instructions/skills to let Claude query GA4 data. The instructions include example queries on ways to dig in the data and avoid costly queries. I've used it for prompts like "our client using dataset xxxx is complaining that attribution is bad, can you dig into it".

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 25/08/2026

Does the Merchant Center use the same parser?

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 19/08/2026

My mate calls ChatGPT Pete. It took me a second.

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 12/08/2026

I've set up a few MCPs to help in my Analysis and Auditing. I'd add BigQuery and Google Ads to this list. I'm also finding setting up skills to guide the agent in the use of the MCPs works well.

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 30/07/2026

A site was altering the price in JavaScript and the Merchant Center sometimes complained about the visible price. In the Merchant Center you can view the price it thinks is on the page, and that told us if the bot rendered or not.

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 29/07/2026

The merchant centre does its own crawling, and last I checked, it did not render the page most of the time. The system also considers what is visible on the page.

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 29/07/2026

"But yeah, 5.25 is now another magical number." 🤣

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 23/07/2026

I was one of the people talking about the 5-second limit. It's more complex than that.

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 23/07/2026

Another thing I notices is that random numbers are not random, and all requests start at midnight according the the browser. More tricks to ensure consistency. Always the same random banner. So it does not get distracted by non-changes.

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 23/07/2026

Hopefully I'll get back into the analysis and publish the article.

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 23/07/2026

So its not a real world 5 seconds limit. It's anything that sequences delays that exceed 5 seconds that get excluded. A separate limit is for just under a minute. The page has to be seriously slow to hit that.

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 23/07/2026

But it still honours deliberate delays (setTimeout, setInterval). And that's where the 5.5 second limit comes in. At 5 seconds of "delays" it re-adjusts the viewport to cover all known content. 0.5 seconds of "delay" later and it shuts everything down and takes its snapshot.

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 23/07/2026

Googlebot plays with time. Loading resources uses up no time, probably for consistency as Googlebot aggressively caches, and it wants consistency, so it pretends everything is cached.

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 23/07/2026

I was one of the proponents of a 5.5-second limit, based on my observation that review widgets failed to register their structured data because they were slow to render. I decided to dig deeper

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 23/07/2026

I'm not surprised you picked up on this. A long time ago, I started analysing how Googlebot worked; I even have a draft article on it. But my dad's ailing health put things on hold.

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 10/04/2026

In the Search Console URL Inspection or Rich Result Test tools you can see if resources are blocked if you click View Crawled Page->More Info->Page Resources. The filter can be set to show successful resources as well.

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 10/04/2026

Google Tag Manager is on a different domain (normally) which means that domains robots.txt is what controls if it can be crawled or not. You can't decide that from your domain. Interestingly, quite a few tracking resources are crawlable. Chrome is not a bot and does not check robots.txt.

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Reposted by Tony McCreath

Dave Smart @tamethebots.com · 09/04/2026

Lighthouse 13.1.0 is out, and brings a new audit, checking the baseline status of features used on the page. Release notes here: github.com/GoogleChrome... Or give it a spin in my fetch and render tool: tamethebots.com/tools/fetch-...

Screenshot of the new baseline report in lighthouse 13.1.0

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Reposted by Tony McCreath

Benjamin Gaines @benjamingaines.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

Folks, you’re not going to believe this, but

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Reposted by Tony McCreath

HTTP Archive 💾 @httparchive.org · 16/01/2026

The 2025 Web Almanac by HTTP Archive has been officially released! 🚀 We would like to thank all of our contributors from around the globe who made this extensive report possible! Check out the full report here: almanac.httparchive.org

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Reposted by Tony McCreath

Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

If we migrated the googlebot.json file to a new location with a 301 redirect, would that break your fetches? Or the fetcher would just follow the redirect developers.google.com/static/searc...

developers.google.com

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 24/12/2025

Can you just duplicate it. Or will that mess with its PageRank and indexing! 😶‍🌫️

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Reposted by Tony McCreath

Barry Pollard @tunetheweb.com · 12/12/2025

LCP and INP are now Baseline newly available /since they are now available in all major browsers! 🎉🥳🍾 Really, really, really curious to see what sort of new performance insights we’ll see as sites start to collect and look at the data! #CoreWebVitals

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 10/11/2025

More seriously, I have a separate script on the page that monitors for errors in the main script, and sends them to our ga4 app error property. A scenario is to check if the main script has set a proof of life variable. So many browser or configuration specific bugs were found and fixed this way.

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 09/11/2025

Add some PubSubHubbub for fun. Does Google still subscribe?

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 09/11/2025

My tests run in my clients browser 😁

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Reposted by Tony McCreath

John Mueller @johnmu.com · 27/10/2025

New in Search Console Insights: Query Groups. Makes it easier to track how things are changing (or not) for a group of similar queries from traditional search, AI Overviews, and AI Mode. #SEO #AEO developers.google.com/search/blog/...

developers.google.com

Introducing Query groups in Search Console Insights | Google Search Central Blog | Google for Developers

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Reposted by Tony McCreath

Barry Pollard @tunetheweb.com · 07/10/2025

I mentioned before that we’re switching Lighthouse Performance audits to the new and improved Insights. The same Insights that you can see in DevTools Performance panel traces. That’s happening in Lighthouse 13 due to be released very soon. Maybe even this week!

developer.chrome.com

Performance | Chrome for Developers

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Reposted by Tony McCreath

Barry Pollard @tunetheweb.com · 01/10/2025

Core Web Vitals mystery for ya: Why does Google Search Console same my LCP is bad, but every example URL has good LCP? I see developers asking: How can this happen? Is GSC wrong? (I'm willing to bet it is not!) What can you do about it? This is admittedly confusing so let's dive in... 🧵 1/12

Screenshot of Core Web Vitals graph in Google Search Console, with the URLs greyed out. The Group LCP is 2.6 seconds and so the group is in amber and saying there is an issue as it's longer than the 2.5 seconds "good" threshold. Yet all the examples have green LCPs of 1.7 seconds, 2.4 seconds, 1.2 seconds...etc. which is confusing.

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 20/09/2025

We can never be given nice things.

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Reposted by Tony McCreath

Anton Shulke @antonshulke.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

Cats, like humans they eat every day (hopefully), and they get ill. The difference is that they can really help themselves. #seocharity This is a real kitten; the shelter needs money to save her. Donate today! donate.stripe.com/6oE15C1Srfzn... Maybe it will be your $10 that will save her

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Reposted by Tony McCreath

Anton Shulke @antonshulke.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

-What is the best day to donate? - Tuesday! #seocharity If you love (and can) help buy food and medicine for cat and dog shelters in Ukraine, please donate! single donation (any amount) donate.stripe.com/6oE15C1Srfzn... regular $10 a month buy.stripe.com/9AQ9C87cL4UJ...

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 15/08/2025

Farewell faithful G510, you did me proud, but I do need the letters n and f. Time to learn a new setup.

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Reposted by Tony McCreath

Gaston Riera @gastonriera.com · 13/08/2025

There's a video I took of @methode.bsky.social from the past month's Search Central Live in Bankok. It captures him at his best. The addition of the squealing chicken as the bell was a very nice and fun touch #scldd25

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 12/08/2025

I feel that many of the support responses I get now are LLM enhanced. Accurate and helpful responses, but a bit too grovely. Like chatgpt, when you tell it that it is lying. I miss the lack of response, misdirection, not answering the question, blaming others or irrelevant responses.

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 07/08/2025

The original is transparent, I'll put it somewhere.

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 07/08/2025

I used my nonexistent graphics skills and some mixed advice from ChatGPT. Is this any good...

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Tony McCreath @tony.mccreath.id.au · 06/08/2025

LOL, I'd have to make one. The favicon is just an image from Font Awesome. I'll see what I can come up with. And thanks for the shoutout.

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