Knowledge base v2.13.0 · Community edition · data through 2 October 2026
Day 1 · Wednesday 30 September 2026 · 16:20
Two community talks were recorded: similar URLs (Tobias Schwarz, CTO and Founder, Audisto, from his self-introduction) and why technical SEO still matters in AI search (Jovana Avramovic, SEO Consultant: hand-over 'Joanna' in the speech-to-text, matched to the official speaker list). Transcript from a second attendee recording.
A community speaker said similar URLs are an indicator of duplicate content, broken links, unnecessary redirects and other technical issues.
Speaker Tobias SchwarzEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-URL-11glossary term Similar URLs
In a community speaker's definition, similar URLs are technically different URLs that differ in only a small portion of their characters.
Speaker Tobias SchwarzEvidence transcript
Used byglossary term Similar URLs
A community speaker showed five kinds of similar URLs on well-known brand sites: a different protocol or host (HTTP vs HTTPS, www vs non-www), different capitalisation, a different number of delimiters such as slashes, a space encoded as %20 in one URL and + in another, and parameters in a different order.
Speaker Tobias SchwarzEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-URL-11glossary term Similar URLs
To find similar URLs in a URL list, a community speaker first applies basic normalisation that keeps the meaning: lowercase the scheme and host, remove default ports such as 80 for HTTP, resolve relative path segments and usually drop the fragment, which matters only to clients.
Speaker Tobias SchwarzEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-URL-11
A community speaker then derives a uniform URL that deliberately changes the meaning (one scheme, everything lowercase, www and index files such as index.html removed, duplicate and trailing delimiters removed, parameters sorted alphabetically) and sorts the URL list by it, so that similar URLs group together.
Speaker Tobias SchwarzEvidence transcript
Similar URLs usually come from programming errors or manually set links, but anyone can link to them from other sites, including malicious actors, so a site should be hardened against them.
Speaker Tobias SchwarzEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-URL-11
A community speaker advised that a web application compute the expected URL for every request, for example with reverse routing from the page type and ID, and redirect or return an error page when the requested URL differs.
Speaker Tobias SchwarzEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-URL-11
For query parameters, a community speaker advised checking that every parameter in a request is actually used and in the expected order, and otherwise redirecting to the expected URL with only the used parameters in the correct order.
Speaker Tobias SchwarzEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-URL-11
A community speaker said most web applications wrongly accept a numeric ID in a URL written with leading zeros or as a decimal with trailing zeros, which creates further similar URLs, so such variants are worth testing.
Speaker Tobias SchwarzEvidence transcript
A community speaker said that more than half of internet traffic in the previous year (2025) was non-human; the source of the figure was not named.
Speaker Jovana AvramovicEvidence transcript
A community speaker cited more than 900 million weekly active ChatGPT users and 2.5 billion monthly users of a Google AI feature (the recording is unclear which), adding that these are not comparable market-share figures.
Speaker Jovana AvramovicEvidence transcript
A community speaker argued that search no longer happens in one place, so SEO is about how content is found, understood and trusted wherever search occurs.
Speaker Jovana AvramovicEvidence transcript
A community speaker argued that the change in search behaviour is not only longer AI Mode queries but conversation: a follow-up such as 'compare these two' relies on the context of earlier turns.
Speaker Jovana AvramovicEvidence transcript
A community speaker described a cognitive offloading shift: people increasingly hand remembering, comparing, analysing and even decision-making over to search tools.
Speaker Jovana AvramovicEvidence transcript
In a community speaker's view, AI search changes the workflow but not the foundation: where one query once returned ten blue links and left research and comparison to the user, one query can now lead to many different answers.
Speaker Jovana AvramovicEvidence transcript
A community speaker described AI search as turning one query into many related searches, including searches in other languages, before the information is retrieved.
Speaker Jovana AvramovicEvidence transcript
A community speaker said technical SEO remains the foundation for AI search, with site architecture showing the structure and thematic connections of content and structured data adding clarity, but that a technically sound site is only the beginning.
Speaker Jovana AvramovicEvidence transcript
A community speaker linked the serial-position effect in human memory (people best remember the first and last items of a list) to the 'lost in the middle' pattern that research has found in large language models.
Speaker Jovana AvramovicEvidence transcript
Used byglossary term Lost in the middle
A community speaker advised placing the most important information at the beginning or the end of a piece of content, because information in the middle is less likely to be cited by AI systems.
“It's relevant to put your most important information at the beginning or at the end.”
Speaker Jovana AvramovicEvidence transcript
A community speaker reported that on client sites information towards the end of the content got cited, and invited others to check their own examples.
Speaker Jovana AvramovicEvidence transcript
A community speaker summed up the shift as SEO's target expanding rather than moving: besides asking whether a page can rank, ask whether its information is useful as a source and easy to extract.
“The target is not shifting; it is expanding.”
Speaker Jovana AvramovicEvidence transcript
Placing key facts first or last is a community heuristic based on research into language models, not something Google has said its systems do; Google's own advice (D1-C054) is to write for people without chopping content, and a short summary at the top serves readers either way.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Used byglossary term Lost in the middle
Of the two answers a community speaker offered for a request to a URL variant (redirect, or an error page), Google's canonicalization guide favours the redirect: a redirect is a strong signal that its target should become canonical, while an error page throws away any links pointing at the variant.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
For query parameters, a community speaker advised checking that every parameter in a request is actually used and in the expected order, and otherwise redirecting to the expected URL with only the used parameters in the correct order.
If faceted URLs must be crawled, use the standard & separator, keep filters in a consistent order, and return a 404 when a filter combination has no results.
A community speaker described AI search as turning one query into many related searches, including searches in other languages, before the information is retrieved.
Query fan-out means running several related searches at once to gather more results; a question about lawn weeds may also search herbicides and weed prevention.
Log files are worth checking on sites with filter parameters or complicated URLs, because crawlers can easily wander off into URLs that make no sense for the site.
A community speaker said similar URLs are an indicator of duplicate content, broken links, unnecessary redirects and other technical issues.
One fix for parameter variants of a URL is to work out the normalised URL and redirect the variants to it: the redirects cost crawl budget at first, but leave the site with a clean slate.
A community speaker advised that a web application compute the expected URL for every request, for example with reverse routing from the page type and ID, and redirect or return an error page when the requested URL differs.