Hi, I'm Mark 👋
I work on search & AI.
SEO & AI-search professional, agency director and SaaS founder. I run experiments, build tools, and share what actually moves the needle in search.
Mark Williams-Cook
Public speaking
Audience-voted recognition from search conferences around the world.
Latest writing
Experiments, tests and opinions on SEO and AI search.
How cats.txt showed llms.txt evidence is GEO astrology
How the joke web standard cats.txt took the fancy of some SEOs and became cited at the same evidential level as llms.txt for optimising websites for search a…
SubstackChatGPT Is Secretly Googling Things. QueryFan.com Shows You Exactly What.
ChatGPT and Gemini don't just answer questions. They fire traditional searches in the background, and the results of those searches determine who gets surfaced.
SubstackSchema, LLMs and the Low Bar for “Evidence” in GEO
I built a fake company with nonsense schema. The LLMs returned the address anyway. That is not the win the GEO industry thinks it is.
SubstackThe AI Convergence Problem
Where LLMs are weak, they're stupid. Where they're strong, they're dragging your marketing toward the mean.
SEOcats.txt Specification (Draft v1.0)
1. Introduction The cats.txt file is a proposed web standard for declaring cat-related metadata about a domain. Ins
SEODoes it use meta description or OG description?
Hello, this is the meta description you are seeing! These are some extra characters to hit minimum thresholds
20+ years in search — building, testing, teaching.
I'm Director at Candour, a 25-person SEO agency in Norwich, and founder of AlsoAsked, used by 100,000+ people at companies including TripAdvisor, Lego, Deloitte, Gymshark, IKEA and Oracle.
I also build side projects — IntentGaps, QueryClassifier and QueryFan — hold a directorship at Top Dog Harnesses, and have been featured by BBC News and the Wall Street Journal.
Away from screens: competitive amateur boxing and technical scuba diving (former PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer).
Things I run
Upcoming conferences
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