Search with Candour SEO Trends & Insights from the Web Almanac 2025
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Feb 2, 2026 
Amaka Chukwuma, SEO and content pro who contributed to the Web Almanac 2025. Chris Green, technical SEO lead focused on performance and web standards. They discuss the Almanac's data-driven process. Topics include AI and LLM crawlers, robots.txt and LLMs.txt shifts, CMS and plugin-driven SEO effects, structured data adoption, and lingering legacy web practices.
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The Web Still Has Widespread Basic Configuration Errors
- Large-scale scraping reveals persistent basic errors across many sites, challenging assumptions SEOs take for granted.
- Even fundamentals like robots.txt returning a 200 or excluding CMS pages are often misconfigured.
CMSs And Plugins Drive SEO At Scale
- CMS platforms and SEO plugins shape technical SEO more than individual SEOs do at scale.
- Changes rolled into WordPress, Yoast, All-in-One SEO propagate standards broadly and quickly across the web.
Robots.txt Is Becoming An AI Control Tool
- Robots.txt usage is shifting from crawl-budget control for Google to managing AI/LLM crawlers and other bots.
- Teams often lack mature bot-management practices, so robots.txt is being repurposed as a simple control mechanism.