Founder & editor
Alex builds and advises online businesses. Six of his own so far, plus strategy, ecommerce and product design work for others. He writes Search Insider out of a standing suspicion of anything the industry calls best practice.
I've built more than six online companies and advised others on digital strategy, ecommerce and product design. Different industries, same lesson every time: the edge was never in running the accepted playbook faster than everyone else. It was in finding the places the playbook was simply wrong. So that's what I do now. I take a piece of advice the industry treats as settled, run it against real data, and publish what comes back, including the times the conventional answer turns out to be right. Being ahead of the curve isn't a personality trait. It's just checking things other people assume.
AEO RESEARCH · 14 Sept 2026
The year itself does not earn the citation. Pages carrying one are cited more often, but compare pages of the same age, on the same search, at a similar ranking position, and the advantage disappears.
SEO · 7 Sept 2026
Putting the current year in a title tag is among the most repeated pieces of advice in search. Across 1,000 Google results pages and 18,321 ranking URLs it holds up, barely. And roughly a third of what it delivers turns out not to be the year at all.