Paul O’Banion 
Reviews are make-or-break trust signals on SERPs. Is AI changing the way people write, trust, and act on reviews? What review response frameworks actually drive loyalty and higher ROI (instead of just damage control)? Get your proven playbook to turn reviews + AI into measurable gains in visibility, conversions, & more. Consumers are now scanning …
Google updated its review snippet documentation to clarify that each review or rating in structured data should point to one clear target, reducing ambiguity. Google updated its review snippet docs to clarify how review targets should be specified You should avoid attaching the same review or rating to multiple different entities A quick audit of …
Most SEO professionals obsess over content, links, and technical implementations. We track algorithm updates and audit on-page elements with precision. But there’s one factor that determines whether all that work can deliver results. Your web hosting controls every user’s first interaction with your site. It determines load speeds, uptime consistency, and Core Web Vitals scores …
Marketing leaders are still budgeting to grow clicks in 2026, even though AI Overviews cut organic traffic in half and AI Mode kills it almost entirely. Image Credit: Kevin Indig Meanwhile, close to 60% of those who responded to my recent poll report their stakeholders don’t understand the value of brand mentions in LLMs. The SEO budget …
It’s that time of year again. The John Lewis Christmas ad has dropped – a little earlier than usual – and with it, the annual debate over whether the retailer has rekindled its emotional magic or lost its festive sparkle. This year’s ad, “Where Love Lives,” created by Saatchi & Saatchi, tells the story of …
Google’s Preferred Sources tool is meant to let fans of certain websites tell Google they want to see more of their favorite sites in the Top News feature. However, Google is surfacing copycat spam sites, random sites, and parked domains. Some of the sites appearing in the tool are so low quality that only their …
Local SEO includes several specific tasks geared to establishing the relevance and authority of a business within a targeted geographic area. Search engines and large language models (LLMs) like Google Gemini and ChatGPT reference many different data points to determine who will be surfaced in their respective result sets, which include AI Overviews and AI …
Twenty-five years ago, Google launched a modest advertising product that would evolve into one of the most influential tools in digital marketing. Back then, it was called Google AdWords; today, it is Google Ads. Over that quarter-century, the platform has transformed in format, scope, and ambition. While the technology behind Google Ads has evolved dramatically, …
Search isn’t ending. It’s evolving. Across the industry, the systems powering discovery are diverging. Traditional search runs on algorithms designed to crawl, index, and rank the web. AI-driven systems like Perplexity, Gemini, and ChatGPT interpret it through models that retrieve, reason, and respond. That quiet shift (from ranking pages to reasoning with content) is what’s breaking the optimization stack …
YouTube introduced separate filtering for organic and paid traffic metrics in YouTube Analytics, allowing you to distinguish between unpaid and promoted content performance. Channels can now filter views, engaged views, likes, comments, shares, and watchtime by traffic source. The update addresses longstanding questions about how paid advertising affects organic channel growth. YouTube’s announcement included clarification …
LLM referral traffic has been growing +65% year-to-date. But we should assume 0 in the future. LLM Referral Traffic Is Shrinking LLM referral traffic in B2B grew +65.1% since January – but dropped -42.6% since July. Image Credit: Kevin Indig My December prediction of 50% organic by 2027 is dead: In December 2024, I analyzed six B2B sites …
Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) covers topics that affect people’s health, financial stability, safety, or general welfare, and rightly so Google applies measurably stricter algorithmic standards to these topics. AI writing tools might promise to scale content production, but as writing for YMYL requires more consideration and author credibility than other content, can an …
In this edition of Ask An SEO, we address a familiar challenge for marketers: How do you keep stakeholders from abandoning SEO when algorithm updates cause traffic drops? This is an all-too-common issue that SEOs will encounter. They have strong plans in place, the buy-in from their leadership, and are making great strides in their …
ChatGPT Go, OpenAI’s heavily discounted version of ChatGPT, is now available in 98 countries, including eight European countries and five Latin American countries. ChatGPT Go offers everything that’s included in the Free plan but more. So there’s more access to GPT-5, image generation, extended file upload capabilities, a larger context window, and collaboration features. ChatGPT Go …
When it comes to thought leadership and great opportunities, professionals are missing out if they’re not on LinkedIn. It’s the world’s largest professional network with over 1.2 billion members in 200 countries and regions worldwide. LinkedIn’s popularity rose following a significant turn away from X (formerly Twitter), and users looked for continuation with their established …
The footprint of large language models keeps expanding. You see it in productivity suites, CRM, ERP, and now in the browser itself. When the browser thinks and acts, the surface you optimize for changes. That has consequences for how people find, decide, and buy. Microsoft shows how quickly this footprint can spread across daily work. …
When Google introduced the transformer architecture in its 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” few realized how much it would help transform digital work. Transformer architecture laid the foundations for today’s GPTs, which are now part of our daily work in SEO and digital marketing. Search engines have used machine learning for decades, but …
What does it say about the economics of content when the most visible site on the web loses significant traffic? A status report by Wikipedia shows a significant decline in human page views over the last few months as a result of generative AI, “especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers” [1]. Image Credit: …
Search is literally evolving faster than ever. Is your SEO strategy keeping up? Are you struggling to stay visible in AI-powered search results? Does your visibility seem to vanish with each algorithm update or SERP overhaul? Worried that AI Overviews are cutting into your traffic, but unsure how to adapt? Discover 5 proven tactics to …
OPenAI announced that it is upgrading all ChatGPT accounts to be eligible for the project sharing feature, which enables users to share a ChatGPT project with others who can then participate and make changes. The feature was previously available only to users on OpenAI’s Business, Enterprise, and Edu plans. The new feature is available to …
This post was sponsored by Campaign Monitor. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. Does it seem like fewer emails are getting delivered? Are bounce rates and spam numbers too high for your liking? Your well-crafted campaigns are at risk. They are at risk of missing the mark if deliverability isn’t a …
Reddit sued Perplexity and three data-scraping firms in New York federal court, alleging the companies bypassed access controls to obtain Reddit content at scale, including by scraping Google search results. Perplexity posted a public response, saying it summarizes Reddit discussions with citations and doesn’t train AI models on Reddit content. The position is consistent with …
We’re looking for a powerhouse project manager to keep our marketing team inspired and on track. This is a Philippines-based, fully-remote position working on U.S.-adjacent hours (8 p.m. – 4 a.m. PHT) to be my partner in crime execution on some exciting projects. We do things a little differently here, and we’ve learned that culture …
If you manage PPC campaigns, you’ve seen it. Platforms are making more decisions without asking you first. Campaign types keep consolidating into AI-first formats like Performance Max and Demand Gen. The granular controls you used to rely on keep disappearing or moving behind automation. A year ago, Performance Max still felt experimental. Now it’s often …
I just got back from San Diego and Toronto, where I spoke at Ahrefs Evolve and SEO IRL – both of which were fantastic. A lot of people I met subscribed to the Growth Memo. Thank you all for coming out! Image Credit: Kevin Indig I also had the pleasure of facilitating a 3h mastermind with leaders …
SEO and marketing are driven by the choices that you make, and those choices should be guided by clear, trustworthy data. Having a range of sources that you track on a regular basis helps you to stay informed and to speak with authority in meetings with C-suite and clients. Enable your strategies with real-world insights …
1. How AI Overviews and AI Mode Are Disrupting Local Search Visibility “Our data showed a noticeable drop in organic traffic where AI overviews are displacing maps. For local businesses, this means you could still be the best option nearby but never appear unless the query is explicitly local. ‘Best near me’ triggers maps, but …
Buffer’s analysis of 11.4 million TikTok posts from over 150,000 accounts reveals that posting 2-5 times per week delivers the steepest per-post view increase. The study challenges the usual recommendation to post multiple times daily by demonstrating that the benefits decrease after the initial increase in posting frequency. Data scientist Julian Winternheimer employed fixed-effects regression …
1) The “Great Decoupling”: Impressions Up, Clicks Down “The big story of this year… is the so‑called great decoupling in Google search… there’s a downwards blue line—that’s clicks—and there’s an upwards pink line—and that’s impressions… a lot of people are seeing that their impressions go up and their clicks go down. And this is primarily …
Search has never stood still. Every few years, a new layer gets added to how people find and evaluate information. Generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Copilot Search, and Perplexity haven’t replaced Google or Bing. They’ve added a new surface where discovery happens earlier, and where your visibility may never show up in analytics. Call it …
Last week, I shared the largest usability study of AI Mode, and it revealed how users interact with the new search surface: They focus on the AI Mode text first 88% of the time, ignore link icons, and rarely click out. This week, for Part 2, I’m covering what’s measurable, what’s guesswork, and what’s possibly …
Google is rolling out a change to how ads appear in Search, and this time it’s focused on clarity and user control. Text ads will now be grouped under a single “Sponsored results” label that stays visible as you scroll. In addition, a new “Hide sponsored results” option lets users collapse the entire ad block …
AI provides many ways to augment and assist how SEOs work. From analyzing SERP intent, to brainstorming content strategy for new pages, to running competitive analysis, to producing stakeholder-ready presentations, the possibilities are endless. More and more marketers are experimenting with AI prompts to use AI tools as an assistant where an effective prompt can …
Google has released Lighthouse 13 with a broad audit consolidation that aligns Lighthouse reports with Chrome DevTools’ newer insight model. The update is available now via npm and Chrome Canary. It will roll into PageSpeed Insights within about a week and is slated for Chrome’s stable channel with version 143. Google says the update doesn’t …
Google has quietly updated its list of user-triggered fetchers with new documentation for Google NotebookLM. The importance of this seemingly minor change is that it’s clear that Google NotebookLM will not obey robots.txt. Google NotebookLM NotebookLM is an AI research and writing tool that enables users to add a web page URL, which will process …
YouTube is piloting a policy change that allows some previously terminated creators to request a new channel after a one-year waiting period. The program will roll out to eligible creators over the coming weeks and months, according to YouTube’s official announcement. How The Second Chances Pilot Works Eligible creators will start seeing an option in …
What I’m about to say will feel uncomfortable to a lot of SEOs, and maybe even some CEOs. I’m not writing this to be sensational, and I know some of my peers will still look sideways at me for it. That’s fine. I’m sharing what the data suggests to me, and I want you to …
If you’ve read “From Line Item to Leverage” or “Who Owns Web Performance?,” you know I’ve argued that enterprise SEO failures are rarely due to incompetence or lack of effort. The playbook is known. The teams are capable. The opportunity is massive. Yet results often stall or underdeliver. Why? Because the real problem isn’t only …
Our new usability study of 37 participants across seven specific search tasks clearly shows that people: Read AI Mode Rarely click out, and Only leave when they are ready to transact. From what we know, there isn’t another independent usability study that has explored AI Mode to this depth. In May, I published an extensive two-part …
Builderius WordPress website builder announced the ability to develop sites using GraphQL together with AI. The new functionality enables developers to use the power of GraphQL with the assistance of AI. Why GraphQL GraphQL can be a more efficient way to fetch data than traditional approaches in WordPress, using visual query builders, PHP, or REST …
Google reports a data center issue is causing a partial Search disruption, affecting some pages in certain locales. Google confirms a data center issue causing a partial Search disruption. Check the official Search Status Dashboard for updates. Avoid reactive site changes. Source link
AI-driven search is rewriting the rules of discovery. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews are changing how customers find brands. Traditional rankings no longer guarantee visibility. Are you appearing where it matters most? Discover proven strategies to boost your AI mentions and citations. What You’ll Learn in This Session Pat Reinhart, VP of Services & …
The State of SEO and AI Search Confusion in the space: multiple terms (GEO, LMO, AO, ASEO, etc.) “I just wanted to acknowledge how confusing this space has become. I want to say that SEO space or AI search space, whatever this space is called, became truly a notion of confusion with so many different …
Artificial intelligence is transforming how people search, discover, and act on information. For chief marketing officers and senior leaders, this is not a question of whether SEO is “dead” but of how to adapt to a new era where visibility spans AI-driven assistants, multimodal tools, and fragmented user journeys. Two forces drive this disruption: rapid …
Before we jump in: I hate to brag, but I will say I’m extremely proud to have placed 4th in the G50 SEO World Championships this past week. I’m speaking at NESS, the global News & Editorial SEO Summit, on October 22. Growth Memo readers get 20% off when code “kevin2025” Boost your skills with Growth …
Google announced that AI Mode now supports visual search, letting you use images and natural language together in the same conversation. The update is rolling out this week in English in the U.S. What’s New Visual Search Gets Conversational Google’s update to AI Mode aims to address the challenge of searching for something that’s hard …
Google rolled out AI Overviews to all U.S. users in May 2024. Since then, publishers have reported significant traffic losses, with some seeing click-through rates drop by as much as 89%. The question isn’t whether AI Overviews impact traffic, but how much damage they’re doing to specific content types. Search (including Google Discover and traditional …
Pinterest has introduced new ad products focused on visual search, highlighted by ‘Top of Search’ ads. Currently in beta across all monetized markets, these ads can appear within the first ten search results and in Related Pins, targeting users as they begin discovering products. Why This Matters For Search Marketers Pinterest is a search platform …
YouTube released a video to clarify how its recent update to advertiser-friendly guidelines affects creators. The company acknowledged communication gaps and outlined what it has already done for previously affected uploads. What Changed? YouTube relaxed its rules about strong language at the beginning of videos, making it easier for creators to monetize their content. The …
The How AI Search Can Drive Sales & Boost Conversions webinar, presented recently by Bartosz Góralewicz, touched on something that I think every marketer needs to understand about how people actually make decisions today. This isn’t just about Reddit anymore; we’re talking about the future of how brands actually connect with customers when they’re making …
Why Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Matters Now Search is becoming chaotic and untrackable through traditional SEO “800 million people right now actively use ChatGPT every week. It’s massive. And your customers are probably asking AI for recommendations right now. So if you’re not showing up there, your competitors are and you’re probably missing out on …
Despite years of digital transformation talk, too many CEOs and CFOs still treat the corporate website as a necessary marketing expense, a sunk cost with limited upside. I have far too many CEO’s of billion-dollar companies who view it simply as an expensive interactive brochure, setting the tone for the company and dooming the web …
Here’s what I’m covering this week: How to get the most out of personas in your day-to-day work across SEO, content, and the broader org. Because in the AI-search era, personas built from organic queries and prompts have value for every touchpoint: ad copy, sales scripts, support docs, product messaging. They carry the unfiltered language of …
For years, the SEO equation appeared to be a fixed and unchanging landscape: optimizing for Googlebot on one side, and creating content for human users on the other. This outdated binary vision is now a thing of the past. In the current business environment, a new generation of actors is causing significant changes to the …
Google returns to court on Monday for the remedies phase of the Department of Justice’s ad-tech antitrust case, where the government is asking the judge to order a divestiture of Google Ad Manager. The remedies trial follows a ruling that found Google illegally monopolized the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets, while rejecting claims …
An internal dispute within the WordPress core contributor team spilled into the open, causing major confusion among people outside the organization. The friction began with a post from more than a week ago and culminated in a remarkable outburst, exposing latent tensions within the core contributor community. Mary Hubbard Announcement Triggers Conflict The incident seemingly …
The next SEO For Paws will be held on Sept. 25, 2025. The live stream features a stellar speaker list that includes some of the industry’s best SEO professionals and personalities, including Andrey Lipattsev, David Carrasco, Judith Lewis, and Jamie Indigo. SEO for Paws, is a live-streamed fundraiser founded by Anton Shulke, an expert at …
Before we dig in, some context. What follows is hypothetical. I don’t engage in black-hat tactics, I’m not a hacker, and this isn’t a guide for anyone to try. I’ve spent enough time with search, domain, and legal teams at Microsoft to know bad actors exist and to see how they operate. My goal here isn’t …
Brand marketing is often the silent driver behind successful digital campaigns. People are far more likely to read, watch, click, and ultimately buy from a brand they already know and trust. That’s why doing the harder, slower work of building a strong brand pays dividends when it comes to performance marketing efforts like SEO and …
Boost your skills with Growth Memo’s weekly expert insights. Subscribe for free! Here’s what I’m covering this week: How to build user personas for SEO from data you already have on hand. You can’t treat personas as a “brand exercise” anymore. In the AI-search era, prompts don’t just tell you what users want; they reveal …
Google appears to have disabled or is testing the removal of the &num=100 URL parameter that shows 100 results per page. Reports of the change began around September 10, and quickly spread through the SEO community as rank-tracking tools showed disruptions. Google hasn’t yet issued a public statement. What’s Happening The &num=100 parameter has long …
The Core Web Vitals Technology Report by the open source HTTPArchive community ranks content management systems by how well they perform on Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV). The July update shows that every major platform has improved since June, but not all gains were equal. Joomla posted the largest month-over-month increase, while Duda ranked first …
Google published a new edition of its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. The update clarifies that the Your Money Your Life (YMYL) category now covers election and voting information, along with other government and civics topics that affect people’s lives. What’s New The YMYL framework now uses the label “YMYL Government, Civics & Society,” with the …
One of the strengths of WordPress is its extensibility. You can run everything from e-shops and booking systems to massive WordPress multisites from one instance of WordPress. Another is that it’s a database and robust PHP-based programming language, which means that running a bunch of updates on a site is remarkably straightforward. In this post, …
Bias in search isn’t always negative. It’s easy to frame it as something sinister, but bias shows up for structural reasons, behavioral reasons, and sometimes as a deliberate choice. The real task for marketers and communicators is recognizing when it’s happening, and what that means for visibility, perception, and control. Two recent pieces got me …
I’ve been extremely antsy to publish this study. Consider it the AIO Usability study 1.5, with new insights. You also want to stay tuned for our first AI Mode usability study! It’s coming in a few weeks (make sure to subscribe not to miss it). Boost your skills with Growth Memo’s weekly expert insights. Subscribe …
The way people find and consume information has shifted. We, as marketers, must think about visibility across AI platforms and Google. The challenge is that we don’t have the same ability to control and measure success as we do with Google and Microsoft, so it feels like we’re flying blind. Earlier this year, Google, Microsoft, …
When Judge Amit P. Mehta issued his long-awaited remedies decision in the Google search antitrust case, the industry exhaled a collective sigh of relief. There would be no breakup of Google, no forced divestiture of Chrome or Android, and no user-facing “choice screen” like the one that reshaped Microsoft’s browser market two decades ago. But …
New research examining 16 million URLs aligns with Google’s predictions that hallucinated links will become an issue across AI platforms. An Ahrefs study shows that AI assistants send users to broken web pages nearly three times more often than Google Search. The data arrives six months after Google’s John Mueller raised awareness about this issue. …
Google’s Search Relations team says generic login pages can confuse indexing and hurt rankings. When many private URLs all show the same bare login form, Google may treat them as duplicates and show the login page in search. In a recent “Search Off the Record” episode, John Mueller and Martin Splitt explained how this happens …
There’s a lot that goes into SEO. And, now, more broadly into being found online and online visibility overall, whether we’re talking about an organic result in a search engine, an AI Overview, or through a large language model (LLM). With SEO being a discipline that often takes a long time (compared to ads and …
Ask a question in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Copilot, and the answer appears in seconds. It feels effortless. But under the hood, there’s no magic. There’s a fight happening. This is the part of the pipeline where your content is in a knife fight with every other candidate. Every passage in the index wants to …
Some of the critical questions that are top of mind for both SEOs and CMOs as we head into a multi-search world are: Where is search going to develop? Is ChatGPT a threat or an opportunity? Is optimizing for large language models (LLMs) the same as optimizing for search engines? In this two-part interview series, …
Let’s reminisce for a moment. Do you remember how, back in 2020, we all obsessed over “link juice” and PageRank flow as far as internal links are concerned? In 2025, what matters more is how your internal links define the entities and relationships on your site. Internal linking is no longer just about distributing authority. It’s about: …
“Stop trying to make GEO happen. It’s not going to happen.” With apologies to Gretchen Wieners and the writers of “Mean Girls,” the line feels like the only way to start this conversation about a buzzword making the rounds: GEO (which is now, allegedly, supposed to mean Generative Engine Optimization). This article grew out of …
A vulnerability in the TablePress WordPress plugin enables attackers to inject malicious scripts that run when someone visits a compromised page. It affects all versions up to and including version 3.2. TablePress WordPress plugin The TablePress plugin is used on more than 700,000 websites. It enables users to create and manage tables with interactive features …
Google is apparently having trouble identifying paywalled content due to a standard way paywalled content is handled by publishers like news sites. It’s asking that publishers with paywalled content change the way they block content so as to help Google out. Search Related JavaScript Problems Google updated their guidelines with a call for publishers to …
WordPress is still the most popular open-source content management system (CMS) – by far – powering 43.5 % of all websites on the web, and still in my opinion the most adaptable CMS to work with. However, WordPress isn’t just a plug-and-play CMS. If you’re in the marketing team or the CMO, you may find …
For as long as I’ve been in this industry, there’s been debate about whether SEO is strategic or tactical. Most SEOs would like to believe their work is strategic. Many executives see it as tactical. The truth is somewhere in between, and the arrival of generative AI is forcing a new level of clarity. This …
Rankings don’t guarantee traffic anymore. Here’s how to optimize for AI visibility and brand mentions in a zero-click world. The post What To Do When the Click Disappears: Surviving SEO In The AI-Driven SERP appeared first on Search Engine Journal. Source link
Boost your skills with Growth Memo’s weekly expert insights. Subscribe for free! More data shows ChatGPT isn’t taking market share away from Google. Instead, it’s expanding the range of use cases and blurring the line between searching for information and performing tasks. I looked at Similarweb data to understand how this affects four different stages …
Many agencies and marketers believe that success in paid media is primarily down to the quality of your ads or the specificity of your landing pages. While those elements are important, they’re meaningless unless they sit on a foundation of alignment with client needs. The cleanest account structure and flawless creatives may hit every platform …
Google just announced a new unifying identity for its Local Services Ads (LSAs) verification badges. Called Google Verified, the badge will replace several different trust signals that advertisers and consumers have been seeing over the years. This includes the Google Guaranteed, Google Screened, License Verified by Google, and the Money Back Guarantee program. Starting in …
In a recent episode of Google’s Search Off the Record podcast, Martin Splitt and John Mueller discussed when lazy loading helps and when it can slow pages. Splitt used a real-world example on developers.google.com to illustrate a common pattern: making every image lazy by default can delay Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) if it includes above-the-fold …
Paid search professionals constantly debate the merits of running paid search campaigns bidding on competitor brand names. Questions such as the following may arise: Is bidding on your competitors ethical? Are the high costs-per-click (CPCs) worth spending the budget on? Are you actually reaching people with buying intent? In this article, I’ll talk through answers …
Google is adding agentic booking features to AI Mode in Search, beginning with restaurant reservations for U.S. Google AI Ultra subscribers enrolled in Labs. What’s New Booking Reservations AI Mode can interpret a detailed request, check real-time availability across reservation sites, and link you to the booking page to complete the task. For businesses, that …
In B2B SEO, typically, the ultimate goal is to attract high-intent searchers who convert into qualified leads. But, not all high-intent visibility translates to sales-ready traffic, especially in long sales cycles or complex buying journeys. As we get deeper into an era of diminishing importance of keywords that translate directly into attributable clicks, a focus …
Google’s AI-generated results reshape how people search, and Google has said that websites should expect traffic fluctuations and that prior success in organic Search does not guarantee future success in the new ecosystem. This is a big claim, and it’s been debated whether “Hidden Gems” are getting more visibility in modern Search and I’m doing …
If you lead a marketing team, chances are you’ve had this conversation: “How are the campaigns doing?” “Well, our ROAS is 4:1.” The room breathes a collective sigh of relief. The good news: the marketing budget is justified (for the time being). But here’s the problem: that number might not actually tell you anything useful. …
Someone posted details of a novel negative SEO attack that they said appeared to be a Core Web Vitals performance poisoning attack. Google’s John Mueller and Chrome’s Barry Pollard assisted in figuring out what was going on. The person posted on Bluesky, tagging Google’s John Mueller and Rick Viscomi, the latter a DevRel Engineer at …
A new Yext analysis of 8.7 million Google search results suggests many common local SEO tactics don’t perform the same across industries and regions. The dataset, drawn from the company’s Scout Index, focuses on what correlates with visibility in Google’s Local Pack, not just overall map presence. What Yext Found Review Management Emerges As The …
Using outdated and traditional SEO tactics centered around keywords and backlinks is not moving the needle anymore, as Google shifts toward AI-driven answers. Organic clicks are going down as a result of Google AI Overviews and the rise of zero-click searches, where users get answers directly on Google’s search results page without clicking through to …
For years, marketers built their strategies around a clear and visible funnel: awareness, consideration, conversion. It worked well in a web where behaviors were traceable, people clicked links, visited pages, signed up, bought a product, or bounced. We were able to track almost all of it, and we had attribution models that helped show return …
Since the turn of the Millennium, marketers have mastered the science of search engine optimization. We learned the “rules” of ranking, the art of the backlink, and the rhythm of the algorithm. But, the ground has shifted to generative engine optimization (GEO). The era of the 10 blue links is giving way to the age …
This week’s Ask an SEO question comes from Zahara: “What metrics should small businesses actually care about when measuring content strategy success? Everyone talks about different KPIs, but I need to know which ones truly matter for growth.” The metrics to measure for growth with a content strategy change by company and industry, and the …
For decades, the digital world has been defined by hyperlinks, a simple, powerful way to connect documents across a vast, unstructured library. Yet, the foundational vision for the web was always more ambitious. It was a vision of a Semantic Web, a web where the relationships between concepts are as important as the links between …
Google’s John Mueller says small businesses may be hurting their search visibility by choosing generic keyword domains instead of building distinctive brand names. Speaking on a recent episode of Search Off the Record, Mueller and fellow Search Advocate Martin Splitt discussed common challenges for photography websites. During the conversation, Mueller noted that many small business …
Content marketers’ patience and performance are being tested as AI infiltrates every tech stack, which has been both a blessing and a curse. Creating content has never been simpler, given the rise of AI, upending content creation, distribution, and discovery. At the same time, writing original content has never been more paramount, given the vast …
Are your Instagram posts struggling to gain traction? With over 2 billion monthly active users, standing out on the platform requires strategy and content planning. A content plan is an essential blueprint to help you keep your posts aligned with your strategy and your overall marketing goals. Posting without a plan can just be a …
There’s nothing worse than watching your own products compete against each other. When your paid media strategy starts pitting your product lines against one another, you’re not just inflating costs; you’re undercutting your own chances at conversion. That’s the question this month’s “Ask A PPC” will tackle: “I work for a company that has three …
Global companies today face a paradox. Search is more important than ever, yet how it’s managed across markets is often inconsistent, inefficient, and misaligned with broader digital goals. Too often, SEO is seen as a localized effort, tactically delegated to regional teams or outsourced agencies. While local knowledge is critical, international SEO success demands structure, …
This week’s question comes from Xaris, who asks: “Why, even though I have correctly composed and linked the sitemap to a client’s website, and I have checked everything, am I having indexing problems with some articles, not all of them, even after repeated requests to Google and Google Search Console. What could be the problem? …
You’ve probably seen the headlines like: “AI will kill SEO,” “AI will replace marketing roles,” or the latest panic: “Is your digital marketing job safe?” Well, maybe not those exact headlines, but you get the idea, and I’m sure you have seen something similar. Let’s clear something up: AI is not making SEO irrelevant. It’s …
Google’s Gary Illyes answered questions during the recent Search Central Live Deep Dive in Asia about whether or not they use the new Multi‑Vector Retrieval via Fixed‑Dimensional Encodings (MUVERA) retrieval method and also if they’re using Graph Foundation Models. MUVERA Google recently announced MUVERA in a blog post and a research paper: a method that …
Google announced that they will continue to support some links created by the deprecated goo.gl URL shortening service, saying that 99% of the shortened URLs receive no traffic. They were previously going to end support entirely, but after receiving feedback, they decided to continue support for a limited group of shortened URLs. Google URL Shortener …
New AI platforms, powered by generative technologies like Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, Grok, and countless specialized chatbots, are rapidly becoming the front door for digital discovery. We’ve entered an era of machine-led discovery, where AI systems aggregate, summarize, and contextualize content across multiple platforms. Users today no longer follow a linear journey from keyword to …
How users are starting to interact with the internet has changed and soon will be unrecognizable from the internet we’ve grown comfortable with. With Google integrating AI-powered features into Search, and the rise of third-party large language models (LLMs), it’s a different search experience. Over the past few months, many CMOs I’ve spoken with, as …
A few weeks ago, I fell down a rabbit hole of cottagecore TikTok and Japanese jazz-funk from the ’70s. I didn’t search for it. I didn’t ask for it. But, somehow, my For You Page and Spotify knew. They knew before I did. That’s the power of what I call B2Me, from broad strokes to …
This week’s Ask An SEO question comes from an ecommerce business that followed best practices, but still lost traffic after migrating to a new platform. “We recently migrated our ecommerce store to a new platform, and despite following all the recommended SEO practices, our organic traffic dropped by 30%. What recovery strategies should we prioritize, …
You’ve heard the predictions: AI will replace SEO, generative search will eliminate organic traffic, and marketers should start updating their resumes. With 73% of marketing teams using generative AI, it’s easy to assume we’re witnessing SEO’s funeral. Here’s what’s actually happening: AI isn’t replacing SEO. It’s expanding SEO into new territories with bigger opportunities. While …
A new SEO plugin called SureRank, by Brainstorm Force, makers of the popular Astra theme, is rapidly growing in popularity. In beta for a few months, it was announced in July and has amassed over twenty thousand installations. That’s a pretty good start for an SEO plugin that has only been out of beta for …
A company founder shared their experience with programmatic SEO, which they credited for initial success until it was deindexed by Google, calling it a big mistake they won’t repeat. The post, shared on LinkedIn, received scores of supportive comments. The website didn’t receive a manual action, Google deindexed the web pages due to poor content …
Too often in our content and messaging, we default to listing features in a succession of brief, disconnected claims rather than showing readers how those features will make a genuine difference in their lives. As a result, they are left to fill in the gaps themselves, often choosing to skim and move on rather than …
If you spend time in SEO circles lately, you’ve probably heard query fan-out used in the same breath as semantic SEO, AI content, and vector-based retrieval. It sounds new, but it’s really an evolution of an old idea: a structured way to expand a root topic into the many angles your audience (and an AI) might explore. …
In a recent SEO Office Hours video, Google addressed whether businesses can show different product prices to users in different U.S. states, and what that means for search visibility. The key point: Google only indexes one version of a product page, even if users in different locations see different prices. Google Search Advocate John Mueller …
WP Engine announced the release of its AI Toolkit, a way to easily integrate advanced AI search and product recommendations into WordPress websites, plus a Managed Vector Database that enables developers to easily integrate AI features directly into websites. Smart Search AI WP Engine’s AI Toolkit helps WordPress site owners improve search and content visibility …
There was a post on social media about so-called hustle bros, and one on Reddit about an SEO who lost a prospective client to a digital marketer whose pitch included a song and dance about AI search visibility. Both discussions highlight a trend in which potential customers want to be assured of positive outcomes and …
There are many businesses relatively new to SEO that eventually face the decision to build or buy links because they are told that links are important, which, of course, links are important. But the need to buy links presupposes that buying them is the only way to acquire them. Links are important, but less important …
Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt discussed making changes to a web page, observing the SEO effect, and the importance of tracking those changes. There has been long-standing hesitation around making too many SEO changes because of a patent filed years ago about monitoring frequent SEO updates to catch attempts to manipulate search results, so …
Google’s June 2025 Core Update just finished. What’s notable is that while some say it was a big update, it didn’t feel disruptive, indicating that the changes may have been more subtle than game changing. Here are some clues that may explain what happened with this update. Two Search Ranking Related Breakthroughs Although a lot …
Average position has been a cornerstone metric in SEO reporting for years. It provides a simple, at-a-glance sense of where a site typically ranks in Google’s search results. That sense is growing increasingly misleading as Google layers generative AI features, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode, on top of traditional blue link results. Search …
I was asked recently to take a closer look at the data for a website in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). This was for “Measurement Queen” Katie Delahaye Paine, a pioneer with over 30 years of experience in communications research and measurement, who now feels like she is flying blind. From looking at her data in …
Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt discussed the question of whether AI will replace the need for SEO. Mueller expressed a common-sense opinion about the reality of the web ecosystem and AI chatbots as they exist today. Context Of Discussion The context of the discussion was about SEO basics that a business needs to know. …
WordPress security company Patchstack published an advisory about a serious vulnerability in Gravity Forms caused by a supply chain attack. Gravity Forms responded immediately and released an update to fix the issue. Supply Chain Attack Patchstack has been monitoring an attack on a WordPress plugin in which the attackers uploaded an infected version of the …
WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world, arguably because of its ability to become virtually any kind of website users want it to be. This flexibility is made possible by thousands of third-party plugins that add the features needed to turn ideas into functioning businesses and platforms. The WordPress plugin community …
Google’s Search Off The Record podcast discussed when a business should hire an SEO consultant and what metrics of success should look like. They also talked about a red flag to watch for when considering a search marketer. Hire An SEO When It Becomes Time Consuming Martin Splitt started the conversation off by asking at …
Google’s martin Splitt and John Mueller discussed how long it takes for SEO to have an effect. Google’s John Mueller explained that there are different levels of optimization and that some have a more immediate effect than other more complex changes. Visible Changes From SEO Some SEOs like to make blanket statements that SEO is …
Credible rumors are circulating that OpenAI is developing a browser. However, the timing of the anonymous tip is curious, because Perplexity coincidentally announced they are releasing a browser named Comet. It’s a longstanding tradition in Silicon Valley for competitors to try to overshadow competitor announcements with competing announcements of their own, and the timing of …
For all the noise around keywords, content strategy, and AI-generated summaries, technical SEO still determines whether your content gets seen in the first place. You can have the most brilliant blog post or perfectly phrased product page, but if your site architecture looks like an episode of “Hoarders” or your crawl budget is wasted on …
A large-scale analysis by Ahrefs of 600,000 webpages finds that Google neither rewards nor penalizes AI-generated content. The report, authored by Si Quan Ong and Xibeijia Guan, provides a data-driven examination of AI’s role in search visibility. It challenges ongoing speculation that using generative tools could hurt rankings. How the Study Was Conducted Ahrefs pulled …
The Movement For An Open Web and other organizations filed a legal challenge against Google, alleging harm to UK news publishers. The crux of the legal filing is the allegation that Google’s AI Overviews product is using news content as part of its summaries and for grounding AI answers, but not allowing publishers to opt …
No ranking data. No impression data. So, how do you measure success when AI-generated answers appear and disappear, prompt by prompt? With these significant changes to how we optimize for search, many brands are seeking to understand how to achieve SEO success. Some Brands Are Winning in Search. Others? Invisible. If your content isn’t appearing …
Paid media is often treated like a checklist item in a marketing plan: launch a few search ads, run a Meta campaign, maybe test YouTube if there’s budget left. But not all paid media is created equal, and treating every channel the same is a fast way to burn through budget with little to show …
An SEO shared on social media that his SEO tests proved that not using a meta description resulted in a lift in traffic. Coincidentally, another well-known SEO published an article that claims that SEO tests misunderstand how Google and the internet actually work and lead to the deprioritization of meaningful changes. Who is right? SEO …
WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world, arguably because of its ability to become virtually any kind of website users want it to be. This flexibility is made possible by thousands of third-party plugins that add the features needed to turn ideas into functioning businesses and platforms. The WordPress plugin community …
A discussion on LinkedIn about LLM visibility and the tools for tracking it explored how SEOs are approaching optimization for LLM-based search. The answers provided suggest that tools for LLM-focused SEO are gaining maturity, though there is some disagreement about what exactly should be tracked. Joe Hall (LinkedIn profile) raised a series of questions on …
Google long ago filed a patent for ranking search results by trust. The groundbreaking idea behind the patent is that user behavior can be used as a starting point for developing a ranking signal. The big idea behind the patent is that the Internet is full of websites all linking to and commenting about each …
YouTube is rolling out two AI-driven features designed to enhance content discovery and deepen user engagement. The experimental tools include an AI-powered search results carousel for Premium users and a conversational AI assistant now expanding to some non-Premium accounts in the U.S. AI Search Results Carousel (Premium Only) Premium subscribers in the U.S. can now …
Paid media offers one of the fastest ways to promote a business event and get the right people to take action. Event campaigns are not just regular ads with a date added. They need a dedicated strategy, setup, budget, and audience targeting to succeed. From webinars and product launches to open houses and local promotions, …
Google announced a new multi-vector retrieval algorithm called MUVERA that speeds up retrieval and ranking, and improves accuracy. The algorithm can be used for search, recommender systems (like YouTube), and for natural language processing (NLP). Although the announcement did not explicitly say that it is being used in search, the research paper makes it clear …
Google is testing a new feature that allows you to customize the Top Stories section in search results by selecting preferred news sources. Currently available through Search Labs in the U.S. and India, the experiment gives people more influence over which publishers appear in their news-related queries. How It Works Those who opt into the …
To my fellow marketers, I first wrote this title in the summer of 2020, back when I thought, “Wow, surely things couldn’t get worse.” Needless to say, I was wrong. Here’s the actual quote I started with last time: “If you’re reading this, then it is early July, you’ve made it this far in the …
AI is being rapidly implemented, but that doesn’t mean it’s being used effectively. The current lack of clear benchmarks and data about AI usage has meant that everyone has been operating in the dark. This led us to create our first State Of AI In Marketing report, so that chief marketing officers and marketing decision-makers …
This post was sponsored by InMotion Hosting. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. We’ve all felt it, that sinking feeling in your stomach when your site starts crawling instead of sprinting. Page speed reports start flashing red. Search Console is flooding your inbox with errors. You know it’s time for better …
Marketers and business owners are spoiled for choice when it comes to the many social media platforms available for growing an online audience. From BlueSky to TikTok, LinkedIn to Patreon, social media marketing has never been more robust, or, arguably, time-consuming. But it doesn’t have to be. Fortunately, you don’t have to be everywhere at …
If your brand doesn’t resonate on a deep level with your target audience, then pouring time and energy into aesthetics and clever messaging is a waste of resources. Real brand power is based on your brand’s identity: knowing who you are as a company, and how your ideal customer experiences life in relation to your offering. …
Google’s Martin Splitt and Gary Illyes recently addressed a common question in search marketing: how technical do SEO professionals need to be? In a Search Off the Record podcast, they offered guidance on which technical skills are helpful in SEO and discussed the long-standing friction between developers and SEO professionals. Splitt noted: “I think in …
TikTok will remain operational in the U.S. through September 17, as negotiations over a potential ownership deal continue. President Donald Trump issued a third executive order delaying enforcement of the TikTok ban, giving the Chinese-owned platform another 90 days to operate in the U.S. The move was confirmed in a White House briefing and TikTok’s …
Keeping up-to-date on industry Google Ads benchmarks is crucial to help answer questions you might get from clients or exec such as: “Is this a good CTR?” “Why is our CPA so high?” “What’s a good conversion rate, anyway?” Questions like these come up all the time, especially when budgets are tight and performance dips …
Yoast announced the addition of llms.txt capability to both the premium and free versions of their SEO plugin. Users can now add llms.txt files to their sites to future-proof them for AI search engines. LLMS.Txt llms.txt is a proposal for a new standard that will enable large language models (LLMs) to access a publisher’s content …
Google has updated its Search Console documentation, confirming it includes AI Mode data in Performance reports. This is a change to note when reviewing your metrics, as it may impact traffic reporting patterns. Understanding AI Mode and What’s Changed AI Mode is Google’s interactive AI-powered search experience, which builds on AI Overviews to provide more …
Keywords that contain recipe intent are triggering Google AI Overviews; however, keyword phrases that expressly ask for recipes are triggering the normal recipe rich results. SEOs on social media are reporting that recipe-related queries are triggering AI Overviews, so it may very well be that these are now officially rolled out. Tom Critchlow (LinkedIn profile) …
Marketers and business owners are spoiled for choice when it comes to the many social media platforms available for growing an online audience. From BlueSky to TikTok, LinkedIn to Patreon, social media marketing has never been more robust, or, arguably, time-consuming. But it doesn’t have to be. Fortunately, you don’t have to be everywhere at …
Google has launched Audio Overviews, a new test feature in Search Labs. It creates audio summaries of search results using Google’s latest Gemini AI models. How Audio Overviews Work Audio Overviews turn Google Search results into audio content. When Google thinks an audio overview might help, you’ll see an option to create a short audio …
Google retires seven structured data features including Book Actions, Course Info, and Claim Review to streamline search results. Rankings unaffected. Google is removing seven structured data features from search results. This change will not affecting rankings. There’s no immediate action needed. Source link
This post was sponsored by Cloudways. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. Have you ever woken up to a 3 AM client website panic? Did your client’s ecommerce site crash during a flash sale? Has another client asked why their site is slow, “even though we’re paying for premium hosting.” This …
Google is offering voluntary buyouts to employees across several of its core U.S.-based teams, including Search, Ads, engineering, marketing, and research. The offer provides eligible employees with at least 14 weeks of severance and is available through July 1, according to reporting from The Verge and The Information. The buyouts are limited to employees in …
Google’s John Mueller answered a question about a site that received millions of Googlebot requests for pages that don’t exist, with one non-existent URL receiving over two million hits, essentially DDoS-level page requests. The publisher’s concerns about crawl budget and rankings seemingly were realized, as the site subsequently experienced a drop in search visibility. NoIndex …
Every tweet, direct message, and comment holds weight. Social media has long been a connectivity platform, where users engage with friends, colleagues, and family. In recent years, it’s also evolved to become a feedback mechanism for businesses. In many industries, customers are communicating with a business on social media. It’s a key customer service channel, …
BrightEdge Enterprise SEO platform released new data showing distinctive patterns across major AI search and chatbot platforms and also called attention to potential disruption from Apple if it breaks with Google as the default search engine in Safari. Desktop AI Traffic Dominance One of the key findings in the BrightEdge data is that traffic to …
Google updated the Recipe Schema.org structured data documentation to reflect more precise guidance on what the image structured data property affects and where to find additional information about ranking recipe images in the regular organic search results. Schema.org Structured Data And Rich Results The SEO and publisher community refers to the text results as the …
Google has started rolling out interactive charts in AI Mode through Labs. You can now ask complex financial questions and get both visual charts and detailed explanations. The system builds these responses specifically for each user’s question. Visual Analytics Come AI Mode Soufi Esmaeilzadeh, Director of Product Management for Search at Google, explained that you …
Microsoft Clarity announced their new Model Context Protocol (MCP) server which enables developers, AI users and SEOs to query Clarity Analytics data with natural language prompts via AI. The announcement listed the following ways users can access and interact with the data using MCP: Query analytics data with natural prompts Filter by dimensions like Browser, …
Is AI Changing How Local Customers Find You? If your clients rely on local search to drive business, the landscape is shifting faster than ever. AI-driven updates are changing how users see results, how trust is built online, and how businesses get chosen in 2025. The real question is, will your local SEO strategy keep …
WordPress announced the formation of an AI Team that will focus on coordinating the development and integration of AI within the WordPress core. The team is to function similarly to the Performance Team, focusing on developing canonical plugins that users can install to test new functionality before a decision is made about whether or how …
Reddit Karma has evolved far beyond a simple upvote tally. It plays a central role in how content spreads, how trust is earned, and how visibility is gained, especially for brands. With Reddit’s monetization programs and algorithmic surfacing now tightly tied to karma, it has become a built-in vetting system that shapes who gets seen, …