This was a Talking Web newsletter on 19 May 2026 - join the newsletter here.

Hi,

  • Your invitation
  • Why it’s important
  • Something to do in the meantime
  • Your case study

On Thursday I’m holding another Masterclass – this time it’s about becoming a brand AI consistently recommends, rather than just mentions once.

It’s part 1 of my Agentic Web series (4 talks, May, June, July and September – each one stands alone but they all work together if you want the bigger picture of where websites are going).

👉 You can grab your seat for Thursday’s talk here.

Everyone’s obsessed with getting mentioned by AI right now.

Add schema, write FAQs, post more content, get on Reddit, keep things fresh.

And yes, all of that genuinely helps and you should absolutely be doing it.

But I think we’re moving into a more interesting phase.

Because some brands get mentioned by AI occasionally, and others become the brands AI keeps coming back to – again and again.

And the difference between those two things isn’t really about visibility anymore, it’s about confidence.

AI’s confidence in you.

AI recommendation is less like traditional rankings and more like a continuous trust check – built from consistency, corroboration, expertise and technical reliability, each time it verifies you.

So the brands that keep getting chosen aren’t necessarily the biggest or the loudest. They’re the ones that hold up every time something checks them.

Your one thing to do before Thursday

Your “one thing to do this week”, really, is come to the talk on Thursday.

But if you want one other thing to do, can I check if you’ve set up uptime monitoring yet?

Do you actually know if your site has been down this week? Because I keep being surprised how many people don’t realise until someone tells them.

Set up free uptime monitoring at SiteVitals.co.uk – it takes about 60 seconds and there’s no credit card needed.

And if you want to understand why this matters more than ever for AI recommendations specifically, that’s exactly what Thursday covers.

Your case study

Did you add a new case study to your site last week? Please let me know if you did! I’d love to read it.

We wrote one about onboarding a new client with a suite of WordPress websites, and working with their old agency to make the transition painless. So lots of opportunities to tell the bots that we regularly inherit websites, that we work with WPEngine, that we do design as well as the technical stuff – and just generally shout about our experience.

But I need to build it into our processes that we do one case study a week from now on. Watch this space!

Speak soon,

Lisa

Lisa Freeman

​Web development at 18a​

​https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisafreemanweb