Tips Tuesday – Video Channel Updates, AI Bots and Tests, Feel-Good Movie

This week’s tips include:

• Updates on my video channels
• Why going back to kindergarten is fun
• Most AI bots are spoofs
• Cloudflare AI bot updates coming
• New AI Lighthouse test
• Black-hat AI SEO is here
• Feel-good movie for the summer

Welcome to Q3 and H2 y’all! 

Have you got big plans for your second half of the year?

I sure do!! And it’s all about the journey. Here’s a brief on the summer road trip I’ll be taking with my projects.

Video Channel Updates

Heartwood Art Channel

Despite all of my new videos, and this being the time of year that channel visits start increasing, my metrics have remained flat. All metrics including views, watchtime, new subscriber acquisitions, and revenue are less than half what they normally are by the end of June.

Honestly, I think there has been an update to the YouTube algorithm that came right after they rolled out the new Ask YouTube AI feature and that is why my metrics have remained flat instead of spiking from now through the end of the year.

So, it’s time to do some marketing outside of YouTube.

Last week I got busy making posts of all my new CAD tutorials. I just had them on Content Silo pages with a YouTube embed for each one and a super short title and description. (Content Silos are something I teach in the DIY SEO course.)

Now each one has a post, and those posts link back to the appropriate top-of-silo page. 

This week I’m making Pinterest Pins and the HWA Facebook page that will have two for each post. One will link to the post and the other will link to the video on YouTube.

I also updated the page on the site that I use for “link in bio” on platforms like Instagram and TikTok so that folks can easily find the new content I’ll be promoting on those channels.

Unreal for Reels Channel

Y’all already know the story about how I’m totally switching gears with this channel due to the rapid software changes and my inability to keep pace with teaching those changes in a way that will satisfy the YouTube algorithm in order to monetize the channel.

Well, Unreal just held their annual conference where they announced what’s coming over the next few years, and the changes are massive!!!!!!!

So, to further my goals of learning the more advanced methods and to keep up with the changes in the most expedient manner, I purchased lifetime access to a course that keeps pace.

Learning these advanced techniques is going to help me create environments and abstract motion graphics for ASMR videos way faster. And I’ll be posting the creations I make as I learn on the channel too, even if I’m not teaching how to make them.

That will keep the channel alive until I decide what I want to do with it down the road as I see where this leads.

The main thing is, I’ll be learning new things and having fun creating with it the whole time. And that is the point for me now.

Plus, I’ll stay on top of the changes as they roll out and will have an easier time adapting so that I can continue to create.

ASMR Channel

The Unreal software is not the only one that is having rapid updates. All of the music software I’m using has constant updates too. 

The problem is that I haven’t been spending enough time with it to get it all locked into my head, so I make copious notes and refer to them often.

But when an update rolls out on one of them, I have to do extensive updates on my notes and it’s like learning the thing all over again. The devs not only bring new features, they make drastic updates to the interface to accommodate the new features too. It’s like they have no concept of muscle memory.

So, for this year, I’ve been spending more time learning and relearning the software than I have with actually making music.

However, I’ve been collecting new voices all year that will lend themselves well to the ambient/ASMR videos. And playing around with them has been SO relaxing!!!!!!!!!

I was hoping to get an ASMR channel started before the end of the year, but with all of these software changes, I’m not sure if that is going to happen.

However, I’m enjoying the journey that leads me in that direction, and that counts way more than reaching a destination on an arbitrary deadline that I made up, right?

Kindergarten is Fun!!

I hope sharing these things encourages you to try new things and just roll with where the changes take you.

I go back to kindergarten every chance I get.

I think adults tend to forget that sticking your fingers in paint is fun!!!!!!!!!

How you smear them on the paper really doesn’t matter. The outcome on that paper is a snapshot of the fun you had while making it. 

Let go of the need for everything to be a masterpiece. Enjoy the act of creativity for its own sake.

AI SEO Tips

Most AI Bots are Spoofs

Search Engine Journal is reporting that fake AI bots which are spoofing real AI bot names are most of what’s visiting our sites now.

This is why I added extra protection to a new rule for us at Cloudflare. We are verifying the bot name against their published IP addresses and other criteria to ensure they are not fake spoofs.

This is critically important so that we don’t waste our hosting resources on bots that will not give us any return on the crawl, like being listed/cited in AI search queries.

Cloudflare AI Bot Updates Coming

Because these bad and spoofed AI bot crawls are getting so out of hand, Cloudflare announced that in September they will be rolling out a new way of seeing and dealing with them.

They are giving a bit of a sneak preview into this new process/feature, but it’s sort of vague still.

For the most part, it looks like a fancier way for big sites to lock out AI bot crawls altogether. I can understand where Enterprise-level clients and news sites would want that. But, it doesn’t do much for us bloggers.

I’ll be keeping close watch on this as Cloudflare releases more info. But for now, I’m going to go with the new rules I’m using on Cloudflare and then monitor them closely. I’m pretty sure we’ll be tweaking these rules, and other settings, as the whole internet continues to adapt to AI Agent crawling becoming the majority of site visits.

New AI Lighthouse Test

During site audits, I run posts through multiple testers for performance, SEO, and more.

All of these testers use the open-source Lighthouse criteria, they just emphasize different aspects of it as important.

Chrome has now included AI Agent readiness in its Lighthouse tester. But it doesn’t work very well. In fact, Search Engine Journal tells why it gives a false fail on the llms.txt file most of the time.

This is not a file that me or most of my clients will be using. Instead, we’re waiting for my tests on the new markdown that Google invented, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. Nothing is reading that file yet, but once Chrome replaces their current search for an llms.txt with this new thing, that’s when it will be heavily adopted. 

Hopefully by then, or soon afterward, there will be an easy way for us to add it to our sites. And that’s when I’ll start recommending it for us.

Black-Hat AI SEO is Here

You wouldn’t believe all that pro SEOs have been doing to get the brands they represent mentioned in AI SEO results. The workload of it is truly insane, and is more geared toward products than info posts, which is why I haven’t been mentioning it, or teaching it in the DIY SEO course.

It’s sort of like the game they used to play for auto updating the title, like “The Best Blender for July 2026” and such. That title would auto change the month/year as time went on so they would always stay the most current in Search results.

Well now, they are sneaking in code to be read by AI Agents that ensures it captures the brand info and logs it for the next person/agent who searches for it.

With this instruction, they are basically gaming the agents to remember that product/service as the best one.

Here’s the problem. Google has gotten wise to black-hat techniques like this pretty quickly. And they will eventually roll out an update that penalizes sites doing it.

But the other LLMs are not nearly as sophisticated as Google’s crawl bots and who knows how long it will take them to catch on and filter out such trickery on their Agents.

Google penalizing a site for trickery used to be a real deterrent. But given what Google has done to their own search functions recently, I’m not sure black-hat SEOs feel like it’s much of a risk anymore.

We’ll see how this plays out and if Google’s rules matter anymore.

Feel Good Movie

Project Hail Mary hit Amazon Prime video this past weekend.

Oh, I LOVE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The book was a #1 best seller, and there were a bunch more little details and science in the book but I think the movie version is way more fun.

It hit theaters this past Spring, but for me, it is the feel-good movie of the Summer.

If you get a chance, definitely watch it.