Host Jack Chambers Ward shares a special episode of Search With Candour highlighting two talks from SearchNorwich 18 ahead of the first SearchNorwichXL conference on 24 September 2026.

🎟️SearchNorwichXL tickets: https://searchnorwich.org/

In the first talk, Crystal Carter (Wix) discusses using AI tools for “actual intelligence” in SEO by emphasizing human experience, real examples, and opinion, noting forum visibility (e.g., Reddit) and practical ways to add EEAT-style signals, primary-source content, and social proof while using tools like transcribers, image enhancers, and NotebookLM.

In the second talk, Martin Splitt (Google) presents “Maybe it isn’t JavaScript,” explaining that many indexing issues blamed on JavaScript are actually caused by blocked resources (e.g., robots.txt blocking APIs), caching/CDN behavior, or incorrect status codes in SPAs, and recommends using Search Console and rendered HTML to diagnose problems.

00:00 Introduction

00:26 Search Nor Excel Preview

01:05 SearchNorwich 18 highlights

01:49 Crystal Carter Intro

04:59 AI Reality In SEO

07:41 Why Humans Still Win

09:54 Experience Signals Matter

15:17 Real Examples And Proof

17:39 Opinions Drive Clicks

20:51 AI Tools For Humans

23:39 NotebookLM Workflow

25:32 Wix Built In AI Tools

27:40 Crystal Wrap Up

28:58 Why JavaScript Gets Blamed

30:55 Use Search Console Rendered HTML

33:04 Missing Content Cats Case Study

35:32 Robots TXT Blocking The API

37:52 Google Rendering Bug Noindex JS

41:24 Phantom Noindex From CDN Cache

47:10 SPA Error Pages Returning 200

50:57 Fixing SPA 404s Properly

51:54 Summary Tools And Q&A

54:42 Wrap up