Hello everyone and very welcome to this February update of the SEO update.

So we’re on Monday, which is typically another day than we’re normally at, but I see that there are already many of you joining live, so awesome to see you all there.

Please tell us where you’re from and say hello in the chat right here below.

So my name is Florie van Hummel and I’m your host for today.

Before we dive in, let’s cover a few things about Crowdcast.

That’s the platform we’re using.

So in case you don’t know this program, I see a lot of you have already found the chat here on my right side.

But if you do have a question, make sure to go to the ask a question section,

which you can recognize by that question mark over there at the right side as well.

And there you can also upvote questions and make sure that your question gets answered at the end.

So in terms of recordings and resources, we’ll make sure that everything’s available after this webinar.

And you’ll get an email where you can also find some resources.

After all our news is discussed, there’s a Q&A.

So definitely pop in those questions.

So now let’s get started with the real SEO news of the day.

Let me introduce you to the stars.

First off, we have Carolyn Shelby.

Carolyn has been in SEO since 1994, if my data is correct.

And she’s been crushing it ever since.

She’s our first female principal SEO at Yoast and an all-around powerhouse.

So you’re definitely in for some incredible insights with Carolyn.

Secondly, we have Alex Moss.

And Alex is another of our principal SEOs at Yoast.

He’s a multitasker and is known for getting things done.

And for bringing cookies to the office.

Yeah, Alex, I said it again.

So today, Carolyn and Alex will cover a lot of things.

They will talk about Google AI overviews,

OpenAI and the introduction of deep research,

and using AI to decode language from the bring.

So without further ado, let’s get started.

Thanks for the intro, Florie.

And hello, Carolyn.

Here we are again.

Oh, you’re on mute.

It’s still Monday.

It’s fine.

It’s fine.

Here we are.

I just had my coffee.

I’m so sorry.

It’s very early here.

So yeah, here we are again.

It’s, I mean, February feels like it went fast.

January felt like it was the longest month in the universe lately.

I don’t know where the time’s going,

but I’m eager to get started there.

It’s been kind of a light month as far as news goes.

So hopefully we’ll have extra time at the end to do some Q&A.

Let us go to the slides.

As always, feel free to ask questions.

There’s, if you ask a question in the chat, we might miss it.

So make sure that you put your question in the little Q&A area.

If you put it in there, there’s a high probability we’re going to get to it,

especially if everybody likes your question.

The ones with more likes tend to get answered faster.

So do that for me.

If you’re interested in learning more about today’s topics,

it would be, you’re welcome to go get more information.

Here’s the link.

I don’t even know how to say this.

It’s like yoa.st/update-feb-2025.

There’s always a recording available afterwards.

If you’d like to, we’re welcoming everyone to continue the conversation with us after the show.

Anytime you want, really.

We have a Facebook group that you’re all invited to join.

And we also have a subreddit called Yoast SEO that we would love to chat with you in.

I answer questions there.

I’m sure Alex does too.

So we’re available if you’d like to continue that conversation.

As always, if you are new to SEO, this might be a little bit more advanced than you’re needing.

If you need a how to start with SEO webinar, we have those every other week.

The next one is clearly not February 11th.

I will get the exact date for you though.

But you can always sign up for those and they are every other week on Tuesdays.

I know we have one scheduled for tomorrow, I think.

And if it’s not tomorrow, it’s next Tuesday.

But now I feel silly and I will have to check on that for you.

I’ll get back to everyone.

Let’s get into the SEO and AI news.

I think this is one I’m handling first.

So details have emerged about Project Stargate as Meta discloses a $60 billion AI investment.

So if you’ve heard about Project Stargate and you don’t know what it is, Project Stargate is just an agreement amongst

a few big tech firms like OpenAI, SoftBank, and Meta.

They’re going to be committed to investing a certain amount of money.

I think the total was $500 billion to build these big technology data centers all over the United States.

The goal here is to make the United States an AI leader in the world and especially make sure that the lead and the

thought leadership isn’t ceded to China.

So this is kind of a geopolitical, you know, three-dimensional chess kind of thing.

The interesting thing to note, though, is they’re building all of these data centers.

Part of what’s going to go into the data centers in addition to jobs is they’re going to be given permission to build

things like their own water treatment plants and their own power plants.

So they’re generating their own electricity and they’re not going to be a drain on the general grid that everyone else

uses to charge their cars and air condition their homes, things like that.

It’s a neat thing.

I guess it was expected they were going to have to do this eventually if we wanted to stay a leader.

But it should be interesting to see how that shakes out.

I think what this is going to translate to for small business owners is that the AI advancements for building websites,

managing websites, writing ads, all of the things that AI is starting to do now, there will be more capacity to do

those things in the near term.

In the future, not that far away.

So, very exciting.

Did you want to say that?

I mean, I would say the only thing I kind of assume from it is that whilst this is happening, we’re not going, as end

users, are going to see the fruits of this labor for some time, right?

This is a big project.

Well, I think, I feel like we’re starting to see the fruits of the laborers because just because they need more, more

places to do the, the thinking for the computers doesn’t mean they’re not doing stuff now.

I think this will just accelerate.

We’ve got growth happening now and this is just going to make it go faster, faster and hopefully better.

And maybe cheaper as well for the end user.

So, you don’t have to pay $200 a month for the OpenAI, things like that.

That’s ridiculous.

But that’s, I think that’s in another slide too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I think that’s a good takeaway.

I mean, the other takeaway, it’s nice to know that this isn’t a project about a wormhole or anything like that.

Like the film was in the nineties.

I know I got all excited and like, we’re going to get a Stargate.

No, it’s not.

Finally, those are evil guys in that other side of the wormhole.

I’m not, I’m not, I’m not messing around with that.

But back to reality.

The big thing about HubSpot.

Yeah.

Tell us, tell us about what’s going on with HubSpot.

Yeah.

So HubSpot around the end of Jan, just before our last update got not penalized.

Would you say it’s penalized?

Demoted.

A lot of their content was demoted.

And they lost a lot of rankings.

Yeah.

And it was especially around the blog.

So to note, this isn’t the whole domain.

All the other parts of the domain, not a problem.

But the blog and the content within it, they took a big hit on rankings and therefore traffic.

But what’s important to know here is that even though they lost their traffic, they kept their key rankings.

They kept the ones that mattered to the business and to them and the bottom line, more importantly, the most.

So whilst it’s a loss of visibility on the blog content, is it a loss from the business as a whole?

Maybe not.

There may be arguments against it.

But that leads us to the next slide, right?

And Rand Fishkin doing a little bit of research, not just into HubSpot and other businesses that have got the same demotion.

Yeah.

So this is, I think this is a trend going forward.

The organic traffic doesn’t cause and isn’t necessarily correlative to the revenue for your business

when your business model is not eyeballs.

So websites that are making money on AdSense, websites that their entire business model is selling, getting traffic

in so that you can advertise to them.

Organic traffic is what they live and die.

This would be a death mill for a company like that.

HubSpot doesn’t make their money on it.

So their monetization model is conversions to buy into their product, right?

So the moral of the story or the lesson that small business owners would need to pay attention to is it doesn’t

necessarily matter that 100 people walk past your store.

It matters that 10 people come in and buy something.

So if you only get 10 people going past the store but all of them buy, that is much preferable than having tons and

tons of foot traffic and very few buyers.

If your business model is one of those where you need organic traffic to make your money, you’re going to be in

for a rough road, I think.

Because with AI and AI overviews and the way that it’s siphoning traffic off from especially these content aggregators,

because you don’t need to go to these websites to find information.

You’re getting information more from the source, or at least the AI is taking it from the source.

I think you’re going to have to rethink your business model.

But most small businesses sell something.

Most small businesses have a service that they’re selling.

So for them, I don’t think the general depression of organic traffic is going to 100% correlate to a reduction in

revenues.

So thank you for coming to my TED business talk.

Well, it might have been too, there were a couple of mentions that it was, maybe we were talking too technically or

advanced.

So should we do the, let’s explain this in a simpler way.

It’s kind of a message we’ve been also always saying, don’t write content just for search engines, right?

Don’t spread too far away from what your core business or, like, your core business products or

services are offering.

If you’re selling trainers and all of a sudden you’re chatting about ladders because there’s some very

faint ideology between the way a soul can hit the step of a ladder.

You may be going a little bit too far to try and rank for something like shoes and ladders.

Like that, that may be digging at the bottom of the search visibility barrel.

And that’s what the messaging is.

Keep to what you’re good at, which is the shoes, not the ladders.

Just remember, Google likes a deep well of information and authority, not a cookie sheet.

So we’re going for deep well SEO, not cookie sheet SEO.

And just in case you don’t bake, a cookie sheet is flat.

So not deep at all.

So.

All right.

Is this one new or is this one me?

I forget.

It is.

It’s kind of, yeah, it’s mine, this one.

This is about Perplexity deploying Chinese DeepSeek’s AI model into their own model.

There’s stuff happening after that that we’ll cover, but I’m sure you heard about DeepSeek in the last month.

I feel like it’s gone.

I feel like it was like an NFT launch.

It was like, woof, and then woof, and no one talks about it anymore.

It’s already old news.

DeepSeek whilst open source and perplexity used that, that was a bit of something that people were

concerned about.

They did make sure that whilst it’s open source, all the data that was going to be collected was in data centers

based in the US and Europe.

And it wasn’t going to send any data to China, which is what some people are kind of worried about.

But I mean, DeepSeek itself.

I mean, I’ve got, again, in other slides, there’s questions on how good it is compared to all the others out there.

And maybe it was a way of China sending a message to the world that they can make stuff cheap and fast.

I feel like we kind of already knew that already with, you know, tangible products as well.

They’re very good at doing that.

But that was the message they got.

And whilst Perplexity has used it, there’s still been doubts about DeepSeek as an LLM itself.

Yeah, and I’ve heard similar things.

I haven’t tried it myself.

I feel like the people that got excited about DeepSeeek were the people that have, you know, little server farms in

their homes.

And they want to play with it themselves rather than rely on using Grok or OpenAI and ChatGPT because it’s not

really like self-hosted.

But that’s far beyond the technical requirements of the vast majority of people.

So I’m not super concerned.

The use of it, and I don’t know if this is cultural indoctrination or what, but in the U.S. at least, I think we’re

slightly suspicious of anything that’s being released by Chinese companies because we’ve sort of been told that

everything that comes out of China has back doors into the communist Chinese authorities there.

So there’s always that, like, I don’t know if I want to do this.

But it hasn’t been banned.

I’m sure if Perplexity is acknowledging that fear and reassuring people that that’s not happening, they’re not

lying to us.

So it would not be in their best interest to lie about something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they say it’s the uncensored version, which I guess they kind of bricked it in a way and made it so it can talk

about things like Tiananmen Square.

But I’m not sure.

I mean, look, as I said last month, if I’m going to do my research on the history of China, that maybe I shouldn’t use

a potentially subjective LLM, such as DeepSeek, to find out objective opinion.

But that’s for, again, another slide because DeepThought is on its way.

That’s true.

So Google AI Overviews is now found in 74% of problem-solving queries.

We knew this was going to happen and this is going to continue getting, I don’t know, worth is the right word

I want to use, but more pervasive.

Anytime the AI Overview can answer a question for you, it’s going to try.

You have to ask some pretty specific questions that cannot be answered or so vague that it doesn’t know what it’s

trying to tell you.

Why is this important?

It’s important because it is pushing the organic results down the list.

And if you were number one for some term and now you’re basically not only well below the fold, but near the

bottom of the page and you’re not one of the citations, people probably aren’t going to find it.

People are looking for, you know, they’re looking for quick answers.

And if they get that quick answer from the top of the page, they’re going to take it.

If I need to know how to substitute something for the 2% milk that I do not have in my refrigerator right now, I don’t

need to go to a bunch of websites.

I just need to ask the question and it will tell me.

What we want to do as small business owners or brand marketers, we need to be optimizing in a way that we’re

going to be a featured snippet.

We’re considered an authority on our topic.

And, we want to be included in those AI overview citations, because if we’re in a citation, then we’re

in a position to influence the narrative.

And we know that we’re being our information is being incorporated into that overall AI overview.

So we can we can make changes.

We can slightly massage the narrative if we want to do that.

But this is our new reality and it’s not going to go backwards.

Speaking of, you know, I think people are a little a little unnerved.

You found this on online, I think, Alex.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was interesting.

Some Michael Glavac.

I’m going to go with Glavac.

It could be Glavac.

He found that Google.

Well, he found that Google AI overview can in his research looked at 61 different sites,

not pages, sites in collecting.

Collecting information that was provided into an AI overview.

And I found that quite interesting because the race to page one now isn’t necessarily a race to page one.

It’s a race to be cited.

And that can mean that in the native SERPs of one to 10, 11 to 20 and so on.

You may be ranking on page four for something two years ago that you would never have got any exposure on.

But now, actually, with AI overviews coming in, all of a sudden, if what you’re saying is actually relevant and

important and authoritative, it’s going to be brought in as part of the research for the answer.

Which means that whilst you’re still in a list of 60 other sites, you’re in that list as it’s being done.

And if someone’s reading that part where you’re cited into the answer, then you can get that click off page zero.

And that, I think, is quite a cool thing to know.

And it doesn’t, and again, doesn’t devalue content production or SEO in general.

It actually makes it more valuable because it’s not just a race to be above the fold on page one anymore.

But it’s content that’s unique and adds value.

And I think that’s what everyone needs to really focus on.

It’s not that building content isn’t going to be helpful.

It’s that the content that you build needs to be helpful.

The content you build needs to be unique.

And you need to be adding something to the conversation.

Just rewriting stuff that everyone else has written is not going to cut it anymore.

You need to be doing some research.

You need to have some deep knowledge and expertise about the thing that you’re writing about.

So I don’t know that this is. It says, the quote is, it’s frightening for sites that rely on content to attract traffic.

And this is what I mentioned earlier.

If your business model is just getting people in to read the content so that you can advertise to them and get that

incremental revenue,

give serious thought to your business model.

We’ll just leave it there.

Yeah.

So DeepSeek, tell me about DeepSeek because I think you were into this a little bit more than I was.

Yeah, I feel like DeepSeek, like I was saying before, I feel like it got this really quick peak and trough very quickly.

I feel like this has been the weird time at the moment where things are there’s a lot of different LLMs and AI-based

search platforms that are coming out.

And you’ve got to use them all.

There’s another one that Pitta was using called Jina as well.

That’s a free deep thought-based free LLM out there that you don’t even need to sign up for.

But what I was finding with DeepSeek is that even if topped all the charts, and I’m sure that being in the news,

and President Trump mentioned it in a speech in passing when he was talking about, I think, Stargate, actually,

that that brought it to the forefront.

But then we found that after some research, it was failing in a lot of tests.

And I’m not just talking about Chinese history.

I was talking about generally the accuracy of the answers it was giving was failing a lot compared to all the others.

So, look, if you can make something cheap and fast, it doesn’t make sure it’s good, right?

It doesn’t mean that at all.

And this may be, even though it’s an early version, it was maybe spun out quickly, still isn’t enough that the mass

market are actually going to use it.

I have a feeling there’s probably been a mass uninstall rate in the last couple of weeks, especially, because people

just aren’t using it.

And the likes of OpenAI and Grok and Gemini are all going to be beating it and will continue to do so, unless China

really does something really special.

It seems special, but I feel like it was a lot of shouting without action.

It was a lot of shouting.

And I feel like the launch was unnecessarily antagonistic to a lot of the big players in the U.S. industry,

which made them disinclined to promote it or to endorse it.

So I think the lesson there is don’t burn bridges you don’t need to burn.

Don’t make enemies unnecessarily.

No.

And always, and also, I don’t like installing things at V1.

I don’t like using something too early.

I always do that with Apple.

I never get less than V3 of any Apple product.

Because V1 and V2 is beta testing for people who will buy every single version.

You have restraint, though, that I think a lot of people don’t also have.

That’s also true.

I have some curiosity, but I like to wait for others to be more curious than me.

Well, moving on.

Google says links matter less.

They looked at a million SERPs to see if it’s true.

And this is from the Ahrefs blog.

So they say links still matter for rankings, especially for high-volume local and informational queries.

External links have a stronger impact than internal links.

And branded searches tend to have more links.

Google’s reliance on links has slightly decreased.

But they’re still an important competitive and low signal areas.

So I feel like the title is slightly misleading.

I wouldn’t say that links…

Don’t take away from this that links don’t matter.

Don’t take away from this that you don’t need to build links.

And that you don’t need to do internal linking.

The internal linking might…

Let me…

I don’t want to do this.

The reason we love internal linking is because we can 100% control the anchor text.

And there’s no such thing as over-optimizing your internal link anchor text.

So if you want to point, cheap cell phone links at your cheap cell phone page, you can call them cheap cell

phones all you want internally.

Point it at that page and everything’s fine.

If you get hundreds of external backlinks with the optimized anchor text cheap cell phones, that will get

you penalized because that looks like you’re buying links.

And to be honest, you probably were.

What they’re saying now is that the optimization of internal links may not necessarily carry the same weight that

it used to.

But none of this means stop doing it.

You still need your external links to build your authority.

And when you’re an authority, you get cited in the AI overviews.

You still need the internal links to move the…

Not only move users, but help move the AIs around your site so that they’re getting that supplemental information.

In fact, it’s probably more important now than it used to be.

But it was really important in the beginning when the search engines were first built to treat your internal links like

you would in an academic paper where you’re making that word a link to more information about that topic.

You’re not trying to help the user get more information if they need it.

It used to be back in 1994 that if you had a paper and you wrote something about…

Let’s say you’re talking about cats, but then you mentioned how calico cats are almost always female.

I could make calico cats are almost always female a link to a page about why calico cats are almost always female.

We’re giving the user and in a lot of cases the AI opportunities to get deeper information about specific things that

are on our page.

Don’t stop linking.

Don’t stop getting links.

Don’t stop internally linking.

It’s still very important that you’re doing that.

Sorry, I didn’t mean…

I mean, I like the anchor text as well.

Yeah, I like the whole anchor text thing because what I liked about SEO at the very beginning when I first started,

which was a couple of years after you, was the…

I like the idea of getting rid of the read more as anchor text because sometimes I…

Oh, have you lost me?

Sorry.

Something happened.

Oh, I’m still gonna yap.

That’s fine.

So I remember seeing a load of read more and because back in the day it was a normal blue tech.

And then the bold underline blue itself for the link was always read more.

And I found it annoying that I had to read around the sentence to see what the read more was about

if I was skim reading.

So I actually like the idea of sculpting anchor text because it actually added context to where that link was going.

I get that there are use cases like read more if you do a little bit of a blog post, read more here or click here now.

Things like that.

But yeah, this is still very good in the way that things still kind of need to be sculpted, but again, not in a way

that it should be abused.

And it also helps the LLMs understand what context may be on the other side.

But yeah, it’s still, it’s like word of mouth, right?

It always goes by…

I always compare link building or link acquisition to word of mouth and a high street back in the day.

The more people talked about you and your brand or what you’re saying, then the more it would spread and the

more you would gain authority as that brand selling whatever you’re selling.

That does kind of tie into, I’ve seen a lot of chatter lately that brand mentions, even if there’s no link, are very

helpful now, which is great because it’s a lot easier to get a brand mention than it is to get a backline.

So yeah, I don’t think any of this matters less.

I think there’s a little bit more nuance maybe in how things are being incorporated.

But we should definitely not take away from this article that you don’t need links anymore and links don’t matter

because that is not true.

Yeah.

I mean, I go back to the old school days of link acquisition.

You used to go to the big, big publishers and they were very editorially cautious about linking out, right?

And I get that because I must have been one of a thousand emails that day.

But I know some agencies said, there’s no point if we don’t get a link and went away.

I know me as an agency owner, we kept on going.

But like, you mentioned somewhere, right?

And I’m now wondering that that non-link but mentioned from 10 years ago is now is more

important than just trying to get a link.

And I’m now thinking that the agencies who rejected even going for that publication.

And now we’ve got a brand mentioned that’s years, years old, which again adds to the authority.

So it’s all about the long game, isn’t it?

Earned media is definitely way more valuable than pay to play.

So anything you can do to get that little bit of publicity is going to help, especially with the AIs ingesting all of

that information.

It’s all going to go into coloring and filling out the narrative and the information base that they have about your

brand, which, you know, unless you’re a really, really bad person, it’s still fair to say that there’s no bad publicity.

Yeah.

Unless you’re really right.

So what else has happened?

OpenAI has introduced deep research, haven’t they?

I feel like this month is the deep research month of AI.

It is.

Everyone’s doing it.

Yeah.

Everyone’s doing it.

Well, I’ve been playing around with it because I’m doing a research article for one of the journals.

So deep research is basically it’s not only is it going out and getting more information, more information from more

places and more citations for whatever it is that you asked about.

It’s providing the citations to you.

So it’s.

It’s more of an academic quality research paper.

It’s not just going to answer your question.

Like, how do you know, how do I how do I make hot dogs in the microwave?

Doesn’t need you don’t need footnotes for that.

Yeah.

If you need footnotes, though, this is probably what you’re going to want to do.

Let’s say you are a student and you’re writing a paper, obviously you would not cheat and you would not

plagiarize anything.

But if you need to do research, this will make your research go much faster.

This is this is akin to spending your entire weekend in the library, you know, pulling pulling research from all over

the place and then keeping track of it and building out your own footnotes.

This will do these things much faster and for you.

I haven’t encountered anything yet where it is grossly mistaken.

And if it is grossly mistaken, it’s because there was a misunderstanding in the prompt or the question.

Prompt being the question that I asked.

And that’s another pet peeve of mine.

I’ve been getting very tired of people saying, oh, I’m a prompt engineer.

I feel like that’s sort of an insult to real engineers because prompt engineering is really just understanding how to

articulate your question.

Exactly.

So you’re basically a question asker.

That’s it.

That’s it.

I mean, I can I’m very good at asking questions.

Whilst I know that you can make better prompts, that’s something you learn naturally over time.

Right.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

So that’s the deep research thing.

Part of the thing.

And I also think that there’s less hallucinations as well, because the more it’s thinking, the more it’s validating

what the answer may be.

Right.

Well, and if you ask better questions, if you ask detailed questions like you’re giving it.

I don’t know who’s bouncing the screen around.

It’s very confusing.

I give I ask questions and I give I give up a tomes worth of background information and try to explain the nuance of

the of the answer that I’m trying to get.

I don’t just say, you know, tell me how to bake brownies because it’s there.

There’s things that it needs to know in order to answer the question, provide the answer that I’m looking for.

So I always tell people the more information, the more data points you can put into your initial prompt or

question, the better the result is going to be.

And that’s that’s true for all of the AIs all the time.

The more you get it, the more you give it, the more it can get the more accurate the answer is it’s going to

give back to you.

Yeah.

Although here it’s like it’s you have to have a pro account, right?

It’s two hundred dollars a month.

So, yeah.

And I know that was there Chip mentioned Super Grok as well.

The he’s using or he’s using, which is much cheaper.

And it didn’t make it into the news, but it was really Grok three was released in the last week, which also.

I’ve been playing with Grok 3.

The big difference between Grok and like ChatGPT that I don’t particularly like, Grok’s

memory of your conversation resets every day.

Grok’s not going to take a long term view of conversations you’ve had in the past or things that you don’t like or

things that it knows that you work on.

It’s not tailoring that those things to whatever the question is that you’ve asked.

And I’ve also found that by default, it’s got to.

Did you watch Star Trek Next Generation?

Do you know who Data is?

I wasn’t a Trekker, but I’m knowledgeable enough to call that person a Trekker, not a Trekkie.

I knew that.

OK, that’s pretty good, actually.

So Data was the android, right?

And Data is known for being very emotionless.

Data had a brother who was older, actually built first, named Lore.

And Lore is obnoxious and he’s kind of a jerk.

And he had emotions.

And the whole reason Data doesn’t have emotions is because Lore was a jerk.

And they decided that the emotions were bad and it was better to have a Data than a Lore.

The thing I don’t like about Grok is that out of the box, it’s Lore.

It’s just, it’s got this, it’s obnoxious.

I don’t know what the problem with it is, but they have this tone of obnoxiousness that I don’t like.

So I’ve been using the deep research on Grok.

I haven’t found any problems with it in itself, but the tone.

I’m constantly telling him, like, can you moderate your tone?

I do not like this.

It sounds like you described Elon Musk.

At the beginning you said, well, there’s a conversation that resets itself every day.

And then I don’t like the tone that’s being brought out.

I mean, it’s clearly, it’s clearly a tool that’s been made for Elon and others get to benefit from it too.

Whereas the other one may be able to put out.

I do like feeling that I’m talking to myself and I’ve kind of trained my ChatGPT to be a me.

So maybe Grok was made to mirror Elon and that’s the, because that’s really kind of the tone I get from it.

But yeah, so.

If you need the deep research, the deep research is available at a not $200 a month option if you go with Grok.

And it still works.

But just be prepared for the conversation levels.

So let’s move on.

Tell me about the AI overviews with detailed comparison mode.

Because I haven’t seen this yet.

I haven’t seen it as well.

But obviously it’s being written about.

It was put on Search Engine Roundtable.

I’ll quickly shove it in the chat as I speak.

But of course, the day’s coming where they’re trying to put monetization into AI overviews.

We knew it was going to happen because that’s the only option for it to continue for the likes of Google at the

very least.

I would say for everyone watching and listening here would be make sure if you’re an e-commerce

retailer, store owner of any kind, to make sure you’ve got everything optimized.

Like you would with the traditional SEO practices, populate everything, ensure that those keywords, I’d say, words

that are describing the product or service that it is, very much descriptive in there.

So that it can be, again, pulled up into an AI overview.

But yeah, this is the direction that we’re going.

If you start looking for, I mean, I did it the other month.

I wasn’t trying to buy a car.

I knew I was renting a car.

And there were two that were very similar prices.

And I hadn’t been in either of them.

And I started asking questions such as which one’s better for me in terms of not fuel economy, but it’s my

wife and my kids.

So I need to think of luggage and space more.

And it was very honest.

But now I’m thinking if I start to think of me buying a new car, what is it going to start doing?

Then where is it going to get the information from?

And where is it going to get the products from for, say, accessories and things like that?

And that’s going to be interesting.

Upsell, cross-sell in AI overviews is going to be a huge thing, I think, in the next.

Maybe the latter half of the year as this gets pumped out a little bit more.

So get your merchant feeds very correct and optimized.

Make sure your product schema, which is in our WooCommerce and Shopify apps.

Get all of that set up and make sure it’s present in some form.

And you will start getting mentioned, hopefully, in some of these questions.

The more niche it is, the more of a chance you’ve got.

There you go.

All right.

Rolling on.

ChatGPT Search is more open.

So they’ve expanded it to more people.

More people can use it without having, like, a paid account.

Google’s expanded Gemini 2.0.

And then Microsoft Think Deeper, which is effectively kind of their deep research, is now in Copilot.

And Copilot is available.

Generally, if you’re paying for use of, like, the Office suite on your computer, you’ve got access to Copilot in a lot

of your Microsoft products.

So Gemini 2.0 has new options like Flash Pro and Flashlight.

And I have no idea what any of those things do because I haven’t really played with it.

I do tend to play with the OpenAI stuff a little bit more.

And I’ve been poking around a bit at the Microsoft because I’ve got access to it.

I didn’t find the responses any more thoughtful than some of the other responses that I’ve gotten out of Copilot.

But they’re okay.

I guess you really have to kick the tires yourself to decide how you feel about it.

And then ChatGPT is now a free service with no account requirement.

The difference is with the no account, I’m not going to remember anything about you.

I personally really like the fact that I can teach it things about me so that I don’t have to keep reteaching

it and retraining it every day.

So your mileage may vary.

Have you played with anything besides, like, do you even use ChatGPT?

I do use ChatGPT.

But I’m finding that – I can’t describe when it’s not accurate in my opinion.

But sometimes I ask it something that’s perfect for what I need at that time.

And sometimes I’m – I don’t know.

And then I actually go to Gemini as my choice number two.

And I ask the same questions and see what it brings out.

And I am finding that Gemini – and I can’t explain or verbalize what Gemini, in my opinion, is better at answering

than ChatGPT.

But there’s definitely a pattern starts to emerge.

I think – I don’t know what it is.

And I’m trying to remember what the searches are that I’m doing.

It’s nothing technical or, you know, SEO-y or engineering-y or anything.

It’s like normal, everyday searches, not even product-related.

Solve knowledge stuff.

And sometimes Gemini has a little bit more thought process involved.

I’m using the basic, free, not changing any options, not trying to do anything deep or not using reasoning

or anything like that.

But I found that there’s – this is maybe the year that people choose their go-to, I think.

This is the shopping year of – like we said, there’s loads out at the moment.

And then I think the dust will settle, and there’ll be clear leaders.

And there’ll be – depending on who you are, just like you’re a Mac person or a Windows person, right?

There’ll be the top three, and people will use it that way.

I’m really interested to see how this shakes out because it’s kind of a fun Wild West sort of time right now.

Yeah.

But I definitely have clear favorites.

All right.

You were telling me about this.

I haven’t been able to get this next thing to work.

So using Search Console and GA4 data for SEO.

I use GA4 all the time.

I use Search Console all the time.

It’s this Looker Studio thing that I haven’t quite gotten to work quite right.

So Looker Studio is just like visualizing any form of data beyond.

You know, it can be GA.

It can be Search Console.

It can be all other kinds of things.

And it just visualizes it.

Now, Google – I’ll put the link in here to where this goes and explains that you can use as an SEO, you know,

a mixture, a combination of both Search Console data and GA data and visualize things that you want to do.

So Looker Studio, they made – which is also a Google product, by the way.

They’ve created a template for people that you can use and you can connect your two properties.

And then it gives you more informed data from both sources by combining them and enriching them both.

So I like Looker Studio, but I’m not good at creating reports or templates.

I’m good at receiving them from other people and then reading them.

But I only had a few minutes on this one.

I couldn’t get everything.

I couldn’t get my Search Console property to connect at the time before here.

So we don’t have a nice, you know, screenshot of what it looked like for Yoast.

But feel free for people to go in there and make their own studio.

But you can browse and it does give some nice data on, here’s a keyword that got certain impressions.

This is the page they landed on and then the continuing journey of GA that tells you other things about it as well

and how may that may convert CTR increases and higher conversion rates and stuff.

But it’s free.

It takes two minutes to configure.

Well, not even that 30 seconds to configure.

So everyone check it out.

All right.

All right.

Another thing that came out of Google Search Central is options for reducing the Google crawl rate.

I think especially if you’ve got a bigger site, sometimes your server can start reacting very slowly and you look at

your logs and it’s because one of the search engines is just hammering your site.

You’re like, oh, my gosh, how do I have to?

How can I how can I stop this because my server is going to collapse?

So Google can adjust crawl rates, but sometimes spikes happen.

And when the spikes happen, it used to be that you would just say Google stopped crawling my site.

That’s fine unless you’re one of those sites that needs it to crawl on a regular basis for like news

and get new updates.

Google is saying is you can change the status codes on some of the pages of your site in order to temporarily

reduce the crawl.

But in a way that signals to Google that this is, in fact, temporary.

Everything’s coming back anytime now.

Please don’t take me out of your index forever.

So there’s information and I could go into it, but we’re short on time.

If you go to search Google Search Central, read this article, it will explain when it’s appropriate to use these

different status codes for temporary crawl reductions.

You can request a rate reduction if you need to through GSC, but it doesn’t take effect immediately.

It’s going to be faster to change these status codes if you need to achieve something quickly.

So that’s something if you’ve got problems with the load on your server from the search engines, which is a nice

problem to have, but not something that affects everyone.

So if you are affected, I think we dropped the links right there.

That’s how you do it.

Cool.

All right.

Tell me about the minority report.

Yeah.

So I call this minority report because the news item here is that Meta AI have taken some of their $60 billion

investment that they’re pumping into AI in general.

They got some people.

They put wires and stuff on them and started seeing if they could predict what someone’s thinking and

output it from those neural messages before they get a chance to actually say it or type it.

And they did it with 80% accuracy.

And the reason why I call it minority report, for anyone who’s not seen it, it’s an old film now.

I feel like it’s still new, but it’s probably a good 20 years old.

It’s with Tom Cruise and Colin Farrell.

The first Colin Farrell film I saw, by the way, I didn’t even know he was Irish.

He was that good at doing an American accent.

But anyway, that’s not the point.

The point is that the story is that they could foresee murders happening.

And Tom Cruise and Colin Farrell, I don’t know who the characters were, there was basically an investigation into a

murder that was going to happen.

Now, the closer it got to the actual event, it was as though it was unfocused view and you couldn’t see who it

was or where it was or what was happening.

And the closer it got, the better and more predictable it became to know what was going to happen.

And then they could hopefully stop the murder.

How do, why do I feel as though this is phase one into making that happen?

Because if they can do the short-term future, how long can they push beyond the boundary of what those

possibilities could be in the future and then come back to the present and then figure those things out?

I’m very interested to see what their end goal is with this.

But it’s crazy that they’re even looking at it right now already.

Answer the accuracy.

That’s crazy.

And I was watching on X over the weekend, Elon Musk had a thread where he was talking about that we’re on

the event horizon of the singularity, which was like, wow.

Singularity, by the way, in this context is artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence and then being able

to just, like, the flood of advancements and innovations are just going to be nonstop.

And everything’s going to speed up and human life will change forever and it will no longer be the same.

So, very exciting stuff.

Yeah.

Long times to live in.

All right.

So, this is from Kevin Indig’s growth memo.

He did a study.

He was looking at transactional AI traffic.

He looked at 7 million sessions.

He found that AI chatbot traffic has longer sessions and more page views than traffic that comes from Google.

And chatbots will send more homepage traffic than Google does.

And they keep the users engaged.

I’m not sure which person he’s talking about there.

The Copilot and Perplexity’s page views grew at a much faster rate than Google’s over the past month, basically,

that he was looking at this.

So, what I’m taking away from this is that while it’s harder to get into the citations, when you are cited, the quality

of the traffic that you’re getting referred to you from the AI-driven search is going to be better quality traffic than

that random traffic that you’re getting from regular Google.

So, I think this is another…

We’re not going to be able to avoid having AI-driven search because everything’s going that way.

But it’s interesting that the answers the AIs are giving users are kind of priming them to be more interested

and more curious.

So, that when they do click through, they’re spending more time on your site and they’re spending…

They’re just more engaged users in general.

They’re not accidentally coming to your site and then bouncing off when they realize this isn’t what we want.

They already know this is what they want when they make that click.

So, I think that’s valuable information.

You know you’ve got people who are more invested in your product or your brand once they hit your page.

So, you’re not trying so hard to sell them initially.

Now, we’re trying to win them over more, I guess.

There’s a difference there, but it might be slight.

But I think it’s an important difference.

You’re not quite so much shotgunning, you’re shotgun blasting your information all over the place.

You’re really now courting users that have already expressed a little bit of interest.

Yeah.

I realize because Florie has said, get your Q&A because it’s nearly there.

I realize, as usual, we get into the media stuff.

Yeah.

Well, probably, yeah.

But these ones aren’t as long, I’d say.

This is predictable.

Google market share slips.

AI referrals and regional searches engines rise.

But it’s important to note that whatever that rise is, isn’t even a drop in the ocean.

It’s like a sliver of a drop in the ocean for Google.

Whilst it would still, I think, cause people inside Google’s buildings to still have a bit of cause for concern

that their monopoly is no longer as much of a monopoly.

They’ve still got a lot of monopoly, right?

I mean, there’s no denying that.

But I mean, tables could turn this year.

I think this year and next year is the year that Google needs to prove that they’re worthy of that monopoly.

Otherwise, it’s going to go downhill quite fast.

Absolutely.

Perplexity has also introduced a deep research.

So everybody’s doing the deep research now.

But I don’t think everybody in our market especially requires the deep research.

It’s just useful to know that they are offering that.

Or if you’re planning on going back to school.

If you used to have problems with your papers, maybe you won’t this time around.

Good to know.

And then also in the news, just a few more things to blow through.

Google confirms alt text is not primarily an SEO decision.

I would file this under, yeah, I knew that.

Alt text is there to translate for non-cited readers.

What’s in your picture?

Can you use it for SEO?

Yes.

Is it primarily for accessibility?

Also, yes.

Google expands site reputation abuse enforcement to German sites.

All good things.

Let’s see.

GBP is…

Except if you’re a penalized site in Germany.

Oh, well.

Yes, there’s that.

You shouldn’t have been doing naughty things in the first place then.

No.

Google business pages, which is GBP, now offers chat via WhatsApp and SMS.

No offense, but I do not want people in my WhatsApp.

So I’m just not going to make that connection because I don’t want my phone blowing up.

And then if you’re getting traffic from AI-generated images, you might get hammered soon.

Maybe that’s a good thing because why are you getting traffic for AI-generated images?

Yeah.

There’s more.

This was only half the news.

There’s more on the next slide.

Yes.

I’ll go through these.

Absolutely.

OpenAI created a roadmap.

They’re going to be doing some stuff this year.

That’s all you need to know.

And just hold tight for when they make random product releases.

He did that on X.

The next one, Google updates product markups to support member pricing and sales.

At the moment, I don’t think it’s something we’re looking into as a priority in Yoast’s

offering, but it’s definitely schema you can use.

In the meantime, if you want to, you can use a schema API on WordPress’s solutions as well.

We did include Musk announcing Grok 3, but it’s just also in the news.

But if you’re a fan of X and you’re a fan of Grok, then do use it.

I know that he said it’s a standalone app that’s available everywhere, but I can’t get it in the UK.

And lastly, Google local update drops organic listing when the local listing is present,

which I think is quite interesting.

So if you’re a local person and you’ve got like, I don’t know, a pizza place and you search for pizza

near me and you had an organic ranking, that’s no longer going to be there.

So not in every single case and don’t take my word from it.

It might actually change again in a month’s time and we’ll tell you something else next month.

But right now, if you are in the local listings, it removes you from the organic,

which I think is actually useful, but also not useful at the same time,

because you weren’t that place to be in organic.

But let’s see how that actually works or doesn’t work in the next month.

All right.

So real quick WordPress news.

The roadmap to WordPress 6.8 has been released.

They’re going to be adding zoom out editing, performance boosts, accessibility API updates,

and a new write and design mode to enhance the user experience.

If you’re interested in that, you can definitely go to WordPress and read about it,

but we’ve got to get to the Q&A.

Real quick, Yoast news.

We’ve got two new AI optimized assessments, sentence length and paragraph length.

Yoast SEO for Shopify has a redesigned Webmaster Tools verification page.

And Yoast SEO for Shopify also has some enhancements to the bulk import and export functionality.

If you’ve got a Shopify site, make sure that you update your product and check out all those new features

that we’ve released.

Upcoming events and appearances.

I will let you read these for yourself.

Because you can read it.

If you’re at any of these events, please come by and say hi.

We’d love to talk to you guys.

And the next SEO update by Yoast is going to be on March 25th, which is, again, going back to Tuesday.

Starts at 4 p.m. Central European time, 11 a.m. Eastern time in the U.S., which…

Okay, that…

Sorry, I’m in Central time, so that’s not my time zone.

This all looks correct.

And finally, we are celebrating our 15th anniversary.

So please, if you have not updated or if you have not upgraded to premium and you would like to do so,

or if you would like to get on Yoast Shopify, you can get a 15% discount by using seoupdate2402

or scanning that QR code and you will get a 15% discount to celebrate our 15th anniversary.

All right, now we’re at Q&A.

I know that that’s…

Yay!

There are so many questions and there’s so little time left.

But, well, I hope this was a very, very nice update for most people.

If I’m looking at the questions, I think it was.

Lots of activity in the chat as well.

So let’s get started with these.

So first one, lots of upvotes from Mary.

She says, we’re a non-profit, just trying to get eyeballs on the info we’re putting out there.

What do you recommend for us?

I actually have a lot of experience with not-for-profits.

I wish I could talk to you.

It depends on if you’re local or national or global.

If you’re local, you’re in a great position.

And what you need to do is you need to send out press releases to your local newspaper, to your local outlets,

and announce things.

So don’t just put up a blog post about it.

You want to make an announcement in a press style.

So you’re writing a news article, basically, giving it to the newspaper and letting them put their byline

on it and publish it.

But those types of citations are going to help you become an entity.

When you’re an entity and people ask questions about your area of expertise, you will then get recommended

in the AI overviews.

But that is going to be the quickest way for you to get eyeballs and traffic into your website.

Put up QR codes on your ads as they go out if you do any advertisements.

That way, people can go to your website.

But definitely do the PR outreach and get the citations and get the links back into your site.

And that’s what I would recommend.

Thank you, Carolyn.

I see that a lot of people also responded that they’re in a similar situation.

So I hope this answer was helpful for all of them.

The next question is from Andreas.

And he says, making my website score 100 in every core web vitals category on PageSpeed Insights,

will that achieve anything?

Is it worth the effort?

I’d say no.

Pick your battles.

Pick the ones that are actually…

Is there a reason why you need to spend four hours to change this bit of CSS from here to here?

Because it might get you up 0.1 of the score.

The answer is no.

However, do look at what it’s saying.

Because there might be something…

There might be two things that are bringing something down 7 points or percent, however you want to put it.

There might be one big image that you’ve just got there that someone uploaded that you didn’t know about

that happens to be 700 KB.

And it’s just bringing everything else down.

Of course, replace that.

And it’ll go up.

But if you’re there going, I’m on 97 and I can’t sleep until I get to 100, my advice is to get more sleep.

Don’t worry about it.

I found that for Web Vitals especially, you have to look at who you’re competing against.

Because this isn’t necessarily you have to have the highest score of the class.

This is you have to be faster than the next slowest guy, than the next slowest antelope, I think is the phrase

that we tend to use.

Which means the slowest guy is going to get eaten by the lion.

And if you’re just faster than him, you’re fine.

So I don’t think you need to be perfect.

You’re not going to get an extra bozo button for being perfect.

You’re going to get rewarded for being good.

Just be good enough.

Don’t let the enemy of done.

All right.

Thank you.

The next one is about AI overview.

So Callum asks, with AI overviews in Google becoming more prevalent, have you seen this effect click through

or SEO be affected?

And can we find more data on the effect of AI overviews, which that could have for our websites and SEO?

You’re asking the wrong question.

It’s not affecting SEO.

It’s affecting your organic traffic.

And there’s a difference.

Your SEO is optimizing your website so that the AI chatbots and the search engines can crawl you, which is

going to benefit your visibility.

Are AI overviews and things like that taking away organic clicks?

Yeah.

But that just means that you have to look at what you’re doing with the clicks you are getting.

And if you need to be cited more so that you’re more visible, so that people are aware of you

and then coming to your site,

the SEO is going to need to focus on making sure that you’re being cited as a reference rather than just

ranking high and hoping to get those clicks.

I know that that might be a subtle difference, but it is an important perspective change from the way you

originally asked the question.

Yeah.

And there’s a bit more information just to add to this that’s SEER Interactive.

I think that’s Will, isn’t it?

Will Reynolds.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think it was him who authored this and how AI overviews are impacting CTR.

And there’s some takeaways there for you as well.

Okay.

Thank you.

So I do want to skip to this question since we’re also offering our discount, of course.

So what does Yoast offer to help create content that can be picked up by AI overviews?

And since we’re on the topic of AI overviews, I thought this was a nice one.

And what’s the difference between what Yoast gives us now to what a tool like SurferSEO offers?

I don’t know that they’re offering anything that’s going to help any differently than ours will.

Because getting picked up by the AI overviews requires having unique content that’s adding value

to the overall conversation.

And it requires being a recognized entity that’s an expert in the field.

So those are things that you don’t necessarily need a tool to do.

I mean, Alex, do you have any other?

My memory of Surfer also, because I’ve not used it properly for quite some time, is it actually helps

produce all the content.

And it has that magic button of click to generate and here’s 750 words.

Whilst I’ve heard that it’s good on what it does produce, it’s still not something that I would tell someone to copy

and paste and don’t look at it.

Yoast SEO doesn’t do that.

And we’ve always said we don’t really want to do that, at least for now, until the machines are better than us.

But I’m not seeing that day coming anytime soon.

But yes, I would say if you are going to use Surfer, do it cautiously.

And make sure you’ve got, again, you’re the last decision maker.

And there’s human intervention and editorial going through with anything.

And just don’t do something super on scale either, I’d say.

If you’re using machines to write all your content, you’re not really adding anything to, you’re not adding

anything new because the machines are only repeating things that they’ve heard other people say.

They’re not necessarily innovating.

And that’s what the AIs are looking for.

They’re looking for innovation and they’re looking for unique.

And you’re not going to get that if you’re letting the machine write it for you.

Similarly, if you’re using a content mill before, no one would ever say, oh, yeah, that content mill traffic,

that’s good stuff.

People are going to cite that all day long.

No, they’re not.

They’re just not.

Yeah.

You still need to add something to the web.

Oh, I see we’re already over time.

So I’m guessing this is the end.

So I want to thank everyone for asking your questions, for being active in the chat.

A huge thanks to you, Alex and Carolyn, for again presenting this full hour, giving us a lot of information.

And let’s make sure that next time we have a little more time for Q&A.

Thank you, everyone.

Hello everyone, welcome to the first edition of the Yoast SEO update for 2025.

I hope that everyone can hear us.

We are very happy to welcome you.

And we’re broadcasting from the Yoast headquarters in the Netherlands.

I’m seeing in the chat that most of us can hear us.

That’s great.

My name is Marina.

I’m a researcher and developer here at Yoast.

And I’m very happy to be your host today.

Now, as you know, every update we go through the highlights in the SEO world for the last month.

But this update, we have also prepared something extra special.

Our experts, Alex and Carolyn will share with us their SEO predictions for 2025.

They’re going to tell us what it is that we don’t actually have to worry about, what it is that we really should pay attention to, and generally how to navigate these choppy waters nowadays where every day seems to bring new developments.

Now, a few quick notes for the newcomers.

The webinar is recorded, so you will be able to replay it later.

We will send you a link to the recording along with a script if you prefer to read it, plus all the resources and articles mentioned today.

Now, all that’s left for me to do is to introduce our experts.

Standing on the one side of the ring is Carolyn Shelby, Alex Moss, who has a vast experience in technical, especially structural SEO and all facets of digital marketing.

I’m leaving you in their good hands.

Enjoy.

And I’ll see you again for Q&A.

Thanks for having us.

And welcome.

First edition of the SEO update for 2025.

I know.

How are you feeling?

Excited.

I mean, ready to rock and roll.

Let’s see.

How do I?

There we go.

Let’s make this.

I’m being techie here.

You are.

I’ve moved us to the side.

Here we go.

You don’t want to see us.

You want to see what the hour’s up to.

That’s right.

All right.

So now that we’re ready to go, just wanted to remind everybody, because I know we get a lot of questions.

There is a recording.

You will get a copy of it afterwards.

So please don’t worry about that.

Today, we’re going to discuss the 2025 predictions.

We’re going to go over our SEO and AI news, which we always do.

A little bit of Yoast news.

And then hopefully, we’ll have extra time for Q&A today, because it feels like we might be able to make some good time.

We’ll have to see how that goes.

Again, if you have questions, check the right side of your screen.

There’s a tab for questions.

Ask your questions in there so they get recorded.

That way, we’ll know at the end who’s got questions, how many other people want to hear answers to those.

Helps us keep track of everything.

If you ask in the regular chat, high probability we won’t see the question.

So if you have a good question, put it in that tab, that will make everything better.

All right.

For more on today’s topics, or just to see what you might have missed in case you’re taking notes or something, you can go to yoa.st, which is basically yoast.com, update-jan-2025.

So that is that.

How to start with the SEO biweekly webinar.

The next one is February 11th, which feels like more than two weeks away, but I don’t think it is.

It’s at 9:00 PM European time, 3:00 PM New York time.

So plan accordingly.

This is a great place to go if you’re literally just starting from the ground floor and you need to get up to speed with the basics of SEO. perfect podcast for you to listen to.

So we hope you join.

All right, Alex, are you ready?

I am ready.

Let’s try and see what’s going to happen this year.

All right.

Alex and Carolyn’s predictions for 2025.

Here we go.

Yeah.

We decided to put them all in one slide at least for you.

So we thought we’d give you all of them at once and it might spur some questions in the Q and A as well for the end on if you have further questions on what we’re about to discuss.

But what’s about the first one, Carolyn?

Well, I was going to say brand building and reviews will be even more important for SEO.

Now, I did want to note that we didn’t list these in order of importance.

They are actually listed in order of how wide sentences.

So it doesn’t write over the tops of our heads.

So brand building though, brand building and brand building to me feels like old school marketing.

So it’s almost like what’s old is new again.

And that happens.

It happens in fashion.

It happens in a lot of aspects of life, but building that brand traffic, building that brand recognition is, it’s going to be very vital in helping, helping the AIs associate the value of the information that you’re providing with the entity that is your brand, help establishing your brand as an entity.

All of this is going to be playing into how search is evolving.

So it’s not going to be, it’s not going to be good enough to focus on non-brand keyword phrases because ranking for those non-branded keyword phrases is going to be difficult if you are not an established brand, hence the need for the brand building.

So it’s, it all ties together.

It’s not as cut and dry as it used to be.

The reviews though, you know, why don’t you, why don’t you share with the reviews because you’re a little bit more embedded in that.

Yeah.

Well reviews.

I mean, I’ve just shoved in the chat, I think it’s two years old nearly now, a blog post by Google talking about perspectives.

And I believe that was the beginning of them implying that maybe Reddit was going to come into the SERPs, but it also really emphasized how important third-party opinion is of someone’s brand.

Like, what do I feel about brand X, Y, and Z?

That, from another user’s perspective is actually respected more than what the brand thinks of themselves.

So whilst you do do the brand building that Carolyn just mentioned, that’s, that is kind of one part of the piece.

And the other piece is getting reviews out there.

And that doesn’t mean give me a one out of five star rating.

It actually means write something about it, which will gain context as to what you’re like as a product or service and as a brand.

That in turn is going to get interpreted by search engines and can I just call them AI search platforms at the moment?

Just call, let’s call them that for the, I keep saying LLMs, but I know it’s wider than search platforms.

Just don’t call it a GEO because I don’t know why, but I can’t get behind that acronym.

It’s not happening.

That to me is location, right?

It always will be.

Yeah, it’s location or it’s a car that they made like in the eighties.

It’s just, you know.

Exactly.

But yeah, this is going to be, I think this year, they’re going to really hit hard.

I know over 2024, they’ve been doing a bit of policing over, um, GM, GBP, um, and Google business profiles, by the way, that’s what that means.

Um, so anything local based and anything product based, those reviews are going to become really, really, really more important than they were the last few years as it collects perspectives from as many sources as possible.

Yep.

Um, where are we at now?

Oh, AI search figuring out how to monetize the, the SERPs.

I think if, or did I skip one?

You did.

AI powered search and personalized results.

Now I’ve kind of experienced this, but so I asked ChatGPT to tell me everything it knows about me.

Right.

And I was very interested because it started telling me things that I had definitely not put in the public sphere.

I was like, how did you know this?

Now what it did was I asked how it knew, and it told me that it actually went off my previous discussions with ChatGPT in my account.

So it was just taking the history of my, but I found it very interesting.

It was using that and then telling me what it knew based on what I was telling it about me in a more private settings.

That’s nice.

But I still, again, had to say, no, no, no, forget that.

I’m talking publicly available information.

And then it was kind of generic.

And then I realized that you had to really knuckle down.

Like, what do you know about me between 1996 and 2000?

And the answer is nothing.

But it was interesting that it does understand who you are based on the conversations you have.

I think it’s still relevant for the things that it knows about you in the private settings, because you do a lot of searches within those private settings.

And it’s going to tailor the results that it gives to you based on things that it knows you like and don’t like for particular angles or facets of that information that it knows that you’re interested in.

So like, at one point in time, I asked it to do a search and something related to SEO.

And it had given me really basic SEO information and recommended that I that I that I include that in whatever it was I was doing.

And I said, which do not cite the deep magic to me for there.

I was there when it was written.

And it said, okay, noted.

And it never brought up basic SEO to me again, because I told that I wasn’t interested in hearing it.

I there’s been other people where it’s it’s suggested experts that that I might I might like.

I’m like, No, I hate that person.

That person’s awful.

I’ll never mention that person again.

It was okay.

And then it just it just stopped.

So even in even in private settings.

So you know, I think it’s going to reduce, some of these new personalized filters, which I think is relevant to know because it’s reducing.

I think it’s going to reduce lightly, at least slightly for now, the reliability of traffic estimates.

So we’re not really going to be able to say, we know that there’s this many searches per month for this particular phrase, and that’s going to result in X amount of traffic, because that X amount of traffic is going to be reduced and divided based on all of these bazillion variables and personal preferences that we just you can’t account for those.

So I think that’s, I think it’s going to be interesting.

It’s going to get really, really personalized and really granular.

Oh, yeah.

And that, I guess, brings us on to the next one is my prediction is, and I don’t want it to happen, right?

But these platforms are going to be on a mission this year to make sure that they have some monetization.

They need some return back from all of these things.

And I’m surprised that Google haven’t sorted out ads in a way that they want to yet.

But the fact that they haven’t means that they’re working really hard in my belief to try and suss out a way to do that.

By doing that, I think there’ll be more injection of products.

And because at the moment, I think they’re really good at making solved knowledge, informational based intent content, that kind of thing.

But when it comes to making decisions, it’s going to be hard because of course, we know in the past perplexity, I’ve been putting affiliate links into some products and ignoring others.

But I think that’s gone away.

But I think this will be a more objective point of view where it might be that in the next six months, merchant central crop up is a really important thing, even more important than it is already, to then tie into other areas of Google.

And I believe that OpenAI or Bing will work together to make sure that their shopping feeds somehow tie into the answer engine of these platforms.

I think they’re going to have to figure out a way to monetize their service because, and I know we’ve got an article about it later, with DeepSeek coming out.

And the big disrupting factor with DeepSeek is that they are, they’ve developed what is being purported to be better than what OpenAI and Perplexity and Google have done on a tenth of the budget, one one hundredth of the budget, and in a shorter amount of time, which would spell, and I’m not saying this well, it’s a speculation.

It could mean that the venture capital and the investment in these American companies that say, oh, it’s going to take trillions of dollars to build this stuff.

That investment could start drying up.

If the investment starts drying up, they’re going to be, there’s going to be a lot of pressure on them to start turning profits and making money so that they can continue to support their infrastructure.

So, yeah, they’re, we’ve reached a point in time in their life cycle that they’re going to have to start making money.

They keep riding on all of this investment.

So, I agree with you on that.

Let’s talk about EEAT because it is definitely becoming more crucial.

I used to kind of be like, eh, EEAT, whatever, that’s not a thing.

But with the AI intelligence, I know that’s redundant, with the, with the, the new intelligence and the new decision making that goes into returning these results where the computer is, is basically evaluating how, how reliable a source is and if a source is trustworthy enough.

You have to work on your EEAT to make sure that when they’re picking sources to present to the users, that your site is one of the trustworthy sources.

Gone are the days where you can, you know, sit in your mom’s basement and just churn out content for the sake of churning out content and be relatively anonymous.

I don’t know.

It was a site called all about dogs.

It must know everything about dogs.

Now, people want to go to PetMD.

They want to go to a veterinary’s website.

They want something trustworthy.

They just don’t want some site that claims that it knows everything about dogs.

So, I, I think we really need to start paying more attention to, to that or at least get, get a lot more serious about your efforts to improve that.

Yeah.

And it is weird because I know some SEOs say EEAT isn’t a ranking factor or a signal.

So, what’s the point in working on it?

And my answer is twofold.

Why wouldn’t you?

I think it’s kind of a risk to omit EEAT from work, regardless of rank of ranking signals or factors.

And why wouldn’t you want to increase the authority of the people that represent your brand or the brand itself?

That to me, just, just to do SEO elsewhere, that to me is ordering on greater black hat by ignoring things that are there.

And I also think that is going to become important, even more important because Google, as we both know very well, they don’t just do things for no reason.

And, and you did say in a, in a, in a previous update, something about how you did it about secret sauce.

Like everyone knows kind of like what Big Mac sauce is, but no one knows the exact proportions of what is entailed and it might contain onions.

It may not contain onions.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t in the list for that reason.

They may decide in 20 years to add onions to that.

And that may change a bit of this sauce.

And that, I guess like here EEAT is the onion, right?

They may just decide under the platforms to bring that in as actual something to consider.

Well, or, or it’s, or it’s onion powder that’s in the sauce actually, but onions go into making the onion powder.

So you can say there’s no onions in it, but there is onion powder, which means you still need to work on the onions because the onions make the onion powder, which then goes into the secret sauce.

You know what I mean?

Basically there’s no peanuts in this product, but it may have been made in a building that had a peanut on the other side.

And therefore you have to tell them that there may be something for people with allergies.

That’s actually the opposite of what I said, but, but still kind of directionally in the right, in the right, in the right, the right way.

So moving on, Core Web Vitals.

If your site is not crawlable, if your site does not perform as well as another site with equal expertise and trustworthiness, then you will not get selected.

This is really a race to be the best and the best will get cited as a source and then have visibility in, in these engines.

I mean, it’s, we’re not going to get to a point where we don’t have to do that anymore.

I think it’s, is the crux of that.

Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

And that goes to schema really, which I would say is part of, well, I wouldn’t say it’s a performance enhancer, but it’s definitely a data enhancer.

Well, that is getting to the point where it, we may not have to do that anymore because the AIs are so good at extracting content, but where Schema right now is valuable.

If you can take data that might be kind of buried down in your page and not easy for the crawlers to extract and shove that into the head of the document with JSON-LD and that gets sent over in the initial request.

So that that’s data that’s going to be very easily adjustable by the crawlers and the engines.

And it, it just ensures that the important bits on your page are absolutely seen and absolutely seen right away.

But I think the, I think the value of all of the Schema that we have available to us is going to start having diminishing returns over the course of this year and going forward.

Yeah.

I would still think in the, I don’t know me, I cannot disagree with it, but I would still think that it’s still a big reliance.

And I don’t know, I keep, we keep going back to food.

I know, I know Taco and Lawrence are doing loads of food.

I’m really hungry.

I know I’m hungry now, but it is like, if you’re going to spoon feed someone, I guess at some point, yeah, they will be able to have soup with a fork.

But right now it’s a bit of a hassle.

Give, still give them that spoon, right?

It’s still easier to digest that information if you provide it in a nice way.

Whereas if you were to just not have any structured data, I believe it would maybe get more annoyed at trying to interpret every little thing without it being spoon fed.

Well, and to use the spoon analogy, if you had to choose between eating soup with a spoon and eating soup with a fork, what would you choose?

You’d obviously choose the spoon.

So it just helps you, it helps you be the spoon rather than forcing, forcing the search engines to use a fork to get your, to get your content.

Yes.

Yeah.

And Rebecca Campany, if that’s how you pronounce your last name, you do have a very valid point.

Schema does go beyond SEO.

Obviously we can only talk a certain amount because we’re doing an SEO update, right?

So whilst it may not be as crucial in this area, yes, it is crucial for things like, like feeds and data input and into interpreters.

It’s, it’s, it’s still vastly important.

It will be for some time.

Well, I wrote that article in search engine, search engine land in December, mid, mid to end December about which bits of Schema are still very important and which bits you can probably skip.

I think we have a slide about that, but I don’t recall.

If you’re curious, though, Search Engine Land, December, look for my name.

I have an article in there about that topic.

So the next thing, zero click searches.

I think that’s pretty obvious that that’s what can you say about that?

It’s gonna, yeah.

I mean, for informational based searches.

Yeah.

These platforms are going to steal your visits, right?

But then I would then say, well, if you know, that’s going to happen and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Then perhaps think about what your, what the intent of that content is for the user and for you and what you want them to do from it.

Is there an action?

Unique value proposition.

What is your unique value proposition?

What is your value add?

What are you providing that’s different and unique and useful to answer people’s questions?

You can’t just put out content and put out content.

It has to be unique and it has to be useful to somebody.

For some reason.

Yeah.

I mean, and if it is a real threat that zero clicks are taking away visits, you may need to now this year, because these shifts are happening is reevaluate is, is it is the only metric you want those visits and those clicks from a SERP?

Is it actually valuable?

Is it going to get you to the next step?

Do you, what’s the conversion from that?

What do you want them to do?

Once you think about that, then it may redefine the way in which you produce your content and may dictate on how you update that content to make it still helpful for zero clickers out there.

Should we do food analogy, the drive-through folk, you know, and get it right in their lap in the car, then, you know, finding out more and going inside the restaurant to find out what the menu is.

Yeah.

So, do you want to cover the local SEO?

I don’t do a lot of local, but I do know that I have seen a lot more of the augmented reality, which is what AR is, floating around where, especially with like the the metaglasses.

I’ve heard those are going to start doing like AR overlays in your vision.

Right now, it’s mostly audio and it can do camera stuff, but it doesn’t have like a heads-up display.

And I’ve heard that the next generation of those metaglasses is going to actually have heads-up display, which means there’s going to be there’s going to be an AR integration.

And you’re going to want to make sure that, especially for your local business, if somebody walks past and sees your sign, that that sign is somehow tied to your local business listing.

And there’s going to be that connection there so that you are, it’s returning data for that, that user, the guy who’s walking around with the heads-up display.

Yeah, which does make local SEO really important because the coordinates and locations are going to be even more important.

And I know, I don’t know, I’ve been in, I was in the NFT and Web3 World where I know that they were doing AR and MR, which is mixed reality, in headsets to really try and get incentive of membership and community.

Like you can get 20% off if you go in the store and you were able to like scan something on the wall that you can only see with your phone and certain apps.

And whilst that’s a bit, further down the line and not really an SEO organic thing from a local point of view, it’s something that once wearables are becoming increasingly usable in the mass market.

So we were ahead of the time with Google Glass, I won’t say ahead of the time, I mean, they were a bit too early.

Now it is becoming a place where the technology is catching up to what wearables can really do and actually be useful to the non-technical person.

But as well as that, if you go back to ChatGPT, now there are local based answers that you get, like what’s a hairdresser near me, for example, or a salon, sorry, in America.

And it will literally embed a map and it will show you plot points.

And whilst it’s not, in my opinion, as good as the traditional SERPs and local searches, it’s clear that it’s done a lot in such a short space of time, which brings us to the 2025 as a year, this time next year, local will be very important in all of these searches.

I mean, there’s more, right?

There’s more, but we could go on for another hour.

Yeah, I mean, I thought we’d try to cover the highlights.

I think it’ll be interesting to come back and revisit this next year, because I know when I was revisiting my predictions from last year, I feel like directionally I was right, but I honestly didn’t think, I didn’t see, I didn’t see the level and ferocity of the advancements coming the way they did.

Like, it just, it got, it went a lot further, a lot faster than I thought it was going to be.

So, meet you back here next year.

Let’s move on to the news that we can get rolling through that and then have plenty of time for Q&A.

So, here we go.

This one’s, I would file this one under “duh”.

Google’s disavowing toxic links is a billable waste of time, says John Mueller.

It’s kind of been like that for a while and there are agencies that will bill you for that time to do the disavowing.

And there are people that do disavowing wrong in that they’ll disavow just everything or they’ll disavow entire domains or their own domain.

I’ve seen people do that too.

If you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re not actively under a penalty, I absolutely would not touch this with a 10-foot goal.

No, I don’t think I’ve been anywhere near the disavow link in about two and a half, three years.

And that was only because I went to check that it was even still at the same URL.

But it’s also funny that people who tout disavowing links, I would then say are probably the same agencies that create the links that you would need to disavow in the first place.

So, ask them instead of the disavow how they can control the removal first and then you’ll find that they’re also good at doing that.

Interesting.

Do they call that a self-licking ice cream cone?

Something like that.

Yeah.

So, tell me about this.

Consumers now consider ChatGPT a Google alternative?

I mean, I know I do, but I’m glad I do.

I do.

And I think that, I don’t know, I mean, I talk to a lot of friends and family and stuff that are away from the SEO world or even the technical world.

And if I know that someone who calls me because they’ve got a problem with their printer is talking about ChatGPT, then that’s a problem for Google.

Like, the norm is, right?

If they’re starting to install the app and understand what it is and starting to do their searches on there, then that’s happening.

I also think it’s a problem if someone like me is starting to turn away from the traditional search, which is what we’ve been so used to in our jobs for a generation.

Now I’m using it for informational-based searches.

Like we were saying before with the products, they haven’t got it sorted out.

So I know what search intent is now for which platform.

And that’s what this year’s prediction’s about.

That’s going to get even murkier and will actually make this story even more valid.

And yeah, Google’s got a lot of work to it.

I’m not not envious of the people in DeepMind right now.

You know, I feel like they’ve become a bit spoiled, I think, with the, you know, enjoying their 90 plus percent market share domination.

They’ve certainly got, there’s room for them to lose and still be dominant.

I don’t think they’re going anywhere soon.

But I am, I do find myself preferring the ChatGPT search experience and I get more out of it.

You know, I don’t have to dig as hard or as long to find the information that I’m looking for.

And that’s valuable to me.

It’s really, it’s increased my productivity a bunch.

And I don’t think I would want to go back.

It’s one of those things.

It’s like heated seats in your car.

One day you’re just sitting there and you’re like, how did I live before this?

Like, how did you live in the UK?

I live that every day.

You know, I don’t actually turn it off.

You know, I mean, I think just Canadians in here will go, what are you talking about?

Why do you think you’re cold?

No, I do think I’m cold.

I think I’m colder than you half the time.

So we’ll save that argument for a different day.

All right.

Also in December, quality, faceted navigation.

I’m surprised that this is still a kind of an issue.

But it was written about on Google Search Central.

So Google thinks that people are still having problems with faceted navigation.

Faceted navigation is where you’ve got those mega menus where you can sort things by like the same t-shirt.

You’ll have the same t-shirt available in red, blue, and yellow.

And you’ll also have it available in four different sizes.

And if each one of those variations produces its own URL, that’s going to create a ton of weird, thin content that is going to be difficult for Google to consolidate and help users navigate.

So they’ve provided some guidance on how to use your canonical properly, when to use nofollow and when not to use nofollow, when to use that in conjunction with a canonical that doesn’t point at itself.

It’s nuanced guidance.

So I would recommend if you have questions about faceted navigation, do go to the Google Search Central blog and read that article.

Yeah.

And of course, Yoast products do do that already.

It does add the nofollow canonical.

It also does rel previous and next pagination as well.

Any signals you can send to help Google sort through that, I think is something you should look into.

You want to tell me about the core update?

I’m not sure there’s much to tell on it that it happened.

To be honest, I mean, this was a core update.

So you don’t call them HCU.

They’re all as one now.

And we’re just telling you it happened.

And if you found that there was a big drop off or change of some kind, because you could have had an uptick as well, of course, by maybe thinking if you did get an uptick, that may not be you having a positive, it might be a competitor getting a negative and you reaping the rewards.

But if you found that between the 12th and 18th of December, there was drop off and you haven’t come back since from where you were, other than seasonality, then maybe investigate it and see if there’s a correlation with the algorithm update, because then most likely was the core update.

Then that leads us to a week later, where the spam update started on the 19th of December and then completed on Boxing Day.

I don’t know what people were doing on Christmas Day, if they were testing or what and why it happened on Boxing Day, but whatever.

Releases should never happen on holidays.

I think it’s horrible and cruel to do that to people, because nothing is worse than finishing up your family dinner, having your phone start blowing up because something’s changed or crashed.

It kind of ruins the holiday.

So thanks, Google.

It does.

It does.

And I feel like Google do do that often.

They do a mid-December update quite a lot, but I guess it’s a game of chess, right?

With SEOs.

With some SEOs.

Possibly.

I mean, I have comments, but I will keep those to myself.

Next slide.

Next slide.

Maybe not.

Reddit went through, had like a dip, like a pretty precipitous drop off at the second week of January, I’d say.

So, well, end of the first week, January 7th.

There were charts on Semrush, charts on Sistrix.

Glenn Gabe reported on X that he was seeing drops across several tools, all for Reddit, indicating that they were branded queries.

He’s saying it could be a relevancy adjustment.

Could have been a lot of things, but that seems as plausible as anything else.

But then…

What then?

Was it 20 days later?

I mean, I would say it’s about two weeks based on the Sistrix graph here, but what happens with Reddit generally if there’s a dip?

It’s usually followed quite quickly after it’s, you know, it just comes back and then ends up going up even more.

So this graph’s from today.

So in a week’s time, that may be higher.

Maybe we’ll update it next month and see what the real change is.

Yeah, and it’s not quite up to the peak, the prior peak, but it’s right up here.

So, I mean, I feel like this was maybe a glitch and not anything worth panicking about.

It would be nice to think that maybe the reliance on Reddit wasn’t, you know, was slowing down a little.

But somebody asked if Reddit was still going to be so heavily focused on by Google.

All I want to say about that is, because my son was asking me, and I don’t remember why we were having this conversation, but I thought it was really in-depth and interesting conversation for a kid to ask.

So, Google invested a lot of money into Reddit.

If it’s an experiment for Google to use this information, they don’t want the information to become useless by going out of their way to not feature it.

So they’re going to promote it, and they’re going to make sure that it stays relevant so that the data they’re collecting stays valid and their investment remains good, if that makes sense.

We did some similar tests, like at some of the large corporate news jobs that I’ve had that involve large ears, where they were testing an AI-generated particular section of news, and the test failed because the editorial department wouldn’t allow that news to ever touch the homepage.

It was never allowed to appear in the recommended reading in the side rails, and it was not allowed to appear in the new site map.

So whether or not that content had any possibility of ranking for anything was mixed before it had the chance to start the test.

So what I’m saying is, there’s no point in investing the money to run tests or to try anything new if you’re going to shoot yourself in the foot and render that investment null.

That’s my complicated mind to talk about that.

Interesting.

Interesting.

Now I understand why my son just looked confused and walked away.

Cool.

So good.

Cool.

What else has happened?

We’ve still got a bit to go.

Google’s market share dropped below 90% for the first time in 10 years.

Well, nine and a bit years.

Probably related to what we said before about ChatGPT becoming a search engine of choice for normal people.

Yeah.

Well, it doesn’t…

Their market share is so huge.

And the quantity of queries that occur every day is mind-bogglingly vast.

That every percentage drop they experience is huge growth for these other companies that are picking up that drop.

So it doesn’t look like it’s hurting Google, but it’s…

And it made an entirely possible they don’t even feel this.

But these other companies that are picking up what Google’s losing, this is massive for the development of these other smaller search engines.

So I’m…

Personally, I kind of like to see this.

I feel like it’s a…

We’re not to the point where the playing field’s being evened, but we’re giving these other guys a chance to compete and to try.

And I like to see that.

Yeah.

A bit of healthy competition.

Absolutely.

Capitalism.

Yay.

We’re talking about competition and dominance.

The CMA, who is a part of the UK…

This is in the UK.

So on the gov.uk website, which I will put into the chat here, is basically an investigation that’s going to happen this year about dominance in the industry in the UK.

It’s kind of coming…

Not off the back of, but it’s related to the European version of the same thing that…

What is it called?

The Digital…

Something Act?

Digital…

DMA?

No.

Oh, the DCMA.

The Digital Copyright Millennium Act.

Something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Something like that.

And this is now going into the UK where it’s talking about why is there so much dominance?

And this might be one of those political games that is being played to eventually split out different companies, which has already been kind of a rumor.

But every country or continent or country or country that starts doing this will mean that there’s more and more leverage for it to actually happen.

So we’ve got to wait until October.

So maybe in October’s SEO update we’ll know a little bit more.

The Department of Justice in the U.S. has ordered as part of the Google Monopoly case that Alphabet be broken up into component pieces and specifically Chrome kind of be split off from everything else.

And it’s interesting that other countries are kind of following people.

I’m wondering if they think that if they all make the same demand and enforce it in all these different jurisdictions, if it is more likely to work.

Since Google is global.

And just saying in this one little spot you can’t be Google might not do anything.

They might be okay.

Maybe we just won’t work here anymore.

Very interesting.

Google inks deal with Associated Press to bring more real-time info to Gemini.

This was probably going to have to happen because they were scraping the news sites for data anyway.

And the newspapers all get their headlines from the AP.

Very little of the news that you see on newspaper websites is not originally an AP Newswire story.

So there’s a few organizations that are still writing their own stuff.

But even the stuff that they write goes out on the AP Newswire and then other places pick it up in syndication.

So rather than having individual newspapers with individual deals with Google, they just went straight to AP because AP kind of catches all of it.

I’m interested to know if the AP is going to disseminate that out to the newspapers that they partner with.

But they don’t really partner with newspapers so much as newspapers are allowed to subscribe to them.

So AP is making out like a bandit on this.

I don’t know what that’s going to do to individual news outlets, though.

And I’m interested to see how that plays out.

Yeah, definitely.

So next, this is what I kind of covered before in one of the trends.

But this is kind of a preamble to this is going to become important.

And again, Google say things for a reason.

They don’t just do things for the sake of doing things.

And here the recommendation is to attract people to actually write a review for you.

So not just to say, rate us out of five or out of ten, right?

Why?

And that is handy for a few reasons.

A, adds good context, which you can then use elsewhere in the site if you want to.

B, adds to the perspective of the third party, which is what we were chatting about was really important before.

Which C, in turn, helps search platforms get opinions as you as an entity, either as a person or a company or the service or product that you’re selling underneath that company.

But yeah, I would say do that.

Well, Google are saying do it with them.

So I would hear it’s mainly focused on product reviews through shopping and local reviews through GBP.

But of course, with that, I would say they’re also implying that you do that with third parties.

And I don’t know if it was asked as a question.

Someone asked in the chat, where should you get the reviews from?

SEO’s answer is it depends because it does depend on what you’re selling and where you are.

Because Trustpilot might be for some, but not for others.

Just like social, LinkedIn versus X are two different things, two totally different audiences and two different messages.

So that’s what they’re basically saying.

But that’s something I was kind of advising from the beginning.

Get as much, you know, get as much third party perspective as you can and reviews from other people.

Because that, you know, enhances EEAT as an entity, I would say.

It goes hand in hand with that.

I 100% agree with that.

So let’s see.

What else have we got?

Advancing.

There we go.

On January 17th, there was a big scare in the ranking volatility because all of the tools suddenly started reporting huge losses and really just erratic data.

And it turned out that Google was blocking these rank checking tools.

So the data that they were getting was spotty if they were getting any at all.

And they’re freaking out because their business model is built on collecting this rank checking data.

And people that use the rank checking data were freaking out because it looked like their sites were tanky.

When they weren’t, it was just bad data.

So what calmed everyone down was they would see that they’d lose all their rankings.

Then they’d go into their analytics tool and go, yeah, but traffic’s still okay.

So what’s wrong?

Turned out Google started requiring, what exactly was it?

It was they want to start requiring that all of these, the ranking tools have to be able to execute JavaScript.

Or what was that exactly?

Do you recall?

I can’t, I actually can’t remember now.

It was, it was something to do with JavaScript and, and crawl and crawling it.

And then that made it harder for it blocked out some of these third party platforms.

Now, some of it has kind of come back, but I would, if I would worked in those tool platforms, I would be saying danger will Robinson somewhere in a meeting and saying, oh, we need to, we need to make sure we support that.

Because one day they can just turn that on again and not turn it back off.

And what do you do?

Because that was just a few days and there was a few heavy SEOs that were having a few meltdowns there.

I’d have a meltdown if my entire business and some of these, some of these rank tracking companies are multimillion dollar businesses.

If my entire business model relied on that rank tracking, I’d have a heart attack.

I probably would have died to be honest.

All right.

Google simplifying visible URL on mobile search.

Yeah.

I thought I’d mention this very quickly.

Yeah.

I thought I mentioned this because a, there’s nothing for anyone to do.

Breadcrumb markup is still there.

It still works.

It still applies and it’s still going on desktop.

This, I was just adding this because I thought maybe someone here was checking rankings on mobile and notice that the second part of the breadcrumb, beyond the root, the root folder of the domain is now gone.

Don’t worry.

That’s not a problem.

This is something that they’ve actually actively done.

It tidies up a bit of mobile real estate.

That’s kind.

That’s all.

Start to improve the UX.

And that’s about it.

But lastly, I put this in because three weeks ago, I don’t think I’d even heard of DeepSeek.

Right.

And now it’s everywhere.

And there are a few reasons why.

The first one is that it’s open source, which is very interesting to a lot of people because people don’t always like the SaaS model or like OpenAI that do things like this.

And then there’s a lot more extending that can be done.

A lot more like, well, we know all about open source, right, and how useful and handy it is.

And it can run locally.

That’s also important for people who don’t like data collection from these companies.

And you can keep all of these things a bit more private and you can have a bit more confidentiality and therefore a bit more trust in the actual platform itself.

Like I was saying before, it knew things in ChatGPT that I had already shared with it, but then it used it, yes, to my advantage.

But what else is it going to use in a year when monetization comes in?

And then it remembers what I was doing a year ago and then brings it all back.

Is it going to be handy or is it going to freak out a bunch of privacy conscious people?

That I think is going to be quite an interesting…

People don’t care about our privacy anymore.

People give away all of their privacy so that we can get through the airport faster.

No one’s going to care about that if it makes your life easier.

They do.

Look, if I like chocolate and I talk about chocolate, send me adverts for chocolate.

I’ll buy it.

No problem.

But yeah, the other thing that’s a real big threat is that it was made for…

Well, they claim it was made for just under…

Well, it’s $5.6 million.

So I just put just under $5.

So I am incorrect by a mil there.

But comparing it to OpenAI’s $5 billion and they have supposedly now got…

I mean, Sam Altman’s even said in a tweet, I’ll put it there.

He’s actually considered it a proper competitor and says it’s interesting.

Now, if someone like Sam Altman says this is interesting and impressive, that probably means away from the screen, someone might be pooping themselves a little bit this year and that they have a lot of work to do.

And I would also think, well, if they did that now, they’ve got something else up their sleeve that’s going to blow whatever they’re going to do in six months in the water.

I feel like this is like the Drake and Kendrick Lamar thing.

Like someone drops a song and then 20 minutes later, someone drops a better song.

It’s crazy.

But they released their…

It’s open source too.

OpenAI is not actually open.

So it’s pretty groundbreaking.

Also, I’m not good with math.

So $5 million to $5 billion, that’s three orders of magnitude, isn’t it?

Yeah.

I mean, it’s a lot, right?

I mean, it’s enough for investors to go…

Well, an order of magnitude is huge.

What’s going on here?

You’re starting to get into that.

That’s like…

Exactly. …your mind can not comprehend.

And I think it even got into the BBC as it’s been the most downloaded app over the weekend on Apple, which is another big threat.

I mean, it’s so much of a threat here.

It’s hit US stock market, not just OpenAI, but NVIDIA stock went down 17%.

I think Bob, from Yoast, he mentioned it was $500 billion devaluation just for the existence and release of this other competitor.

Do you know why that was?

That was because of Davos.

I forget who the guy who was who said it, said that China built this with whatever the top-of-the-line NVIDIA chip is.

And they’ve got like 50,000 times more of these chips than they’re supposed to have because there’s all these sanctions and restrictions that are designed to prevent China from getting these top-of-the-line chips for this reason.

And yet they’ve got them all.

So sanctions aren’t working.

Somebody’s trading with someone they shouldn’t be trading with.

Like there’s all kinds of geopolitical implications here.

So it’s exciting times.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we’ve got our last bits of news also in the news.

I’m going to go through these quick because we’re already at 10-2.

ChatGPT is now available to…

Search GPT, sorry, is available to all free users.

It wasn’t a month ago.

Forbes has cut ties with freelance writers after the devastating advisor thing if you want to read more into that.

Yeah, read into that if you want to.

Google Search Console has hourly data if you are that anally retentive to data or your company is that big that they need results right now.

Bing are now hiding Google Search results because why not?

I guess so.

I mean, why would you?

And ChatGPT introduces operators on the same day that Perplexity introduces agents, which helps you around locally on your machine and stuff.

You need paid for stuff.

If you’ve got a paid for account with either of them, have a look.

I assume that the ChatGPT operators is with the $200 a month one.

It is.

I wanted to play with it.

And they’re like, yeah, you can play with it.

Just upgrade to the $200 a month account.

I’m like, whoa.

Yes.

Yes.

Crazy.

That’s crazy.

And that’s all the news we have on the goings-on, except we’ve got Yoast news, which was last month we implied that there was a new functionality being introduced, and it is now here.

On the 18th of December, we released Yoast dashboard, and it has nice insights and actionable stuff that you can get.

It’s available in free and Premium, and there is more stuff coming to the dashboard pretty soon, but I can’t talk about any of it.

But I can answer other questions with Carolyn now.

Oh, no.

No, we can’t.

We’re at events.

God, I’m even one step ahead, aren’t I?

Where are we?

If you’re planning in attending WordCamp Asia or SMX Munich or Brighton SEO in the UK, we’ll be there.

So make sure that you find us and say hi.

Now we can talk about the next SEO update, which is happening February 25th, so after Valentine’s Day, and we hope to see everybody then.

Now we can do the Q&A.

Hey.

Hello.

All right.

Just starting immediately with the questions.

The one that I think most of us are wondering about, how is SEO relevant anymore, given that AI becomes so much more popular every day?

I would say if SEO is dead, reverse everything that you’ve done and see what happens.

If SEO doesn’t matter, right?

You don’t need any of these things.

Get rid of your title tags.

Get rid of your meta descriptions.

Get rid of any schema.

Remove it all.

And I would love to see how it performs in the next six months.

If SEO isn’t relevant anymore, then noindex your site.

If there’s no visibility, then what is it?

If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there.

There’s no way to hear it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But yes, I would say very much so that SEO is important.

And we have the SEO is dead thing every year.

It went from, oh, no, as a threat when I first entered to, oh, this is quite funny, to now it’s, oh, right, okay, we’ll chat about this again next year.

SEO changes and evolves each year.

Our skill set has to go bigger and wider.

And we have historical knowledge of SEO as well as the fact that we have to keep up with these trends right now.

So I would counter argue that we’re even more valuable than we ever were.

And that, again, reverse everything.

Noindex your site.

And we’ll chat about the successes from it.

Yeah.

SEO is really, if you want to be mentioned in these AI overviews, if you want to be mentioned and be one of the cited resources for the AI answers, and in the narrative because they are going out and they’re pulling information from different places.

So the shift, like I said before, is going away from just targeting keywords and making sure that you’re providing valuable information that’s answering questions and that you, you as an entity or your brand as an entity is trusted enough to be considered the expert canonical source for the answer to that question, which is all still SEO.

It’s not SEO from 10 years ago.

Right.

A lot of people asked about EEAT and I’ve shared some links so you can check comments to your questions as well.

Now let’s move on to one question which is not related to AI because we can’t talk just about that.

Is Reddit still being prioritized by Google?

Well, I think I answered that before.

The answer is yes.

Google invested a lot of money, not a lot of money by Google standards, but a lot of money by Reddit standards in taking that information, having access to that information to help train their LLM, to help generate answers, to satisfy some questions.

They need a source for opinion and sentiment.

They can’t get, you can’t rely on brands to honestly answer what people really think about their products.

Reddit is a source where they’re going to get that from Reddit and Fora and other places.

But if Google had to pick one and they picked Reddit, they’re going to continue to prioritize that because that’s what they’ve invested in.

You know how we say if you want your videos to be seen and ranked on Google, put them on YouTube?

Because YouTube is part of Google and they keep it in the family.

Reddit, that Reddit data is now kind of part of the family.

And that’s why they’re going to prioritize it.

Right.

And another interesting question I think is more practical.

Are there any useful methods for adding or requesting backlinks from reputable sources?

Well, the best methods are always the oldest methods, like communicate well, try and connect with the person you’re emailing, be personal.

Don’t say hello, first name, you know, or do what I do sometimes, which is copy the last email and send it to someone else.

So I’ll email Carolyn and say, hi, Dave, how are you doing?

That’s my class.

That’s my classic mistake.

Even when you think you’re personalizing, you need to double check everything.

That’s also why I love the undo send button in Gmail.

Save my career many times.

Very, very well.

But yes, get an engaging subject that’s, again, relevant to them and give them something that they can actually, instead of saying, oh, here’s a link, you know, this is what we do.

Like be creative about it and try and connect with the person and try and read their previous stuff as well to try and see what their work is and connect that way as well.

But again, I’m not the best at actual outreach.

It was terrible.

I hate link building.

I’m just going to throw that out there now.

A while ago, I had an intern who was an engineering student, but he was in a fraternity.

You could tell he was a ladies’ man, liked the ladies.

We worked for a company that was producing medical content.

And a lot of the links that we were trying to get were at libraries.

So rather than having him email the librarian or the webmaster at the library to request links to our content, I had him call them.

Because librarians are usually women.

And he has a voice that women like to listen to.

And I had him do old school outreach in that fashion verbally because I was playing to his strengths.

So if I think the problem with email is email is very easy to mass produce and it’s very easy to it’s cold and it’s easy to delete it.

It’s very difficult to hang up on someone on the phone.

So I think if there’s any possibility of doing outreach in person or quasi in person where it’s more difficult for that person just to tell you no and hang up on you, I would try that.

That’s obviously going to take longer.

And the yields are going to be smaller, but I think the yields could be higher value.

Thank you.

Another one.

What can we do with zero click searches?

We kind of have to talk a little bit before.

Yeah.

Create.

Look at search intent.

Read about search intent.

I’m sure if Marina isn’t putting in a link, Taka will be there in a sec.

Adding a link in there.

Search intent is very important.

If it’s just informational, think of the second batch of intent there.

I would always couple that with commercial or transactional intent.

And when it comes to zero click, try and think of, well, if they’re asking a question, what’s the answer that I can entice someone into coming to my site to know more?

Or do an action as a result of learning that information?

That’s in the easiest in a nutshell way.

How would you phrase it, maybe?

You’re very good at making what I say more eloquent.

Well, I mean, I think with the zero click searches, I think it depends on what your business model is.

If your business model has been traditionally providing just aggregating information and then relying on eyeballs to monetize those visits, I don’t think that business model is going to be viable going forward.

I think if you’re a brand, though, and you sell a product or you have something other than just raw information that’s generic to offer people.

So you’re answering a question.

You can provide some kind of service to them.

In those situations, those zero click searches are important because you’re helping people develop a rapport and a reliance on your brand, which will then cause them to start speaking you out specifically.

And they form an emotional bond with you.

And people like to do business with people they like.

People like to give money to friends.

You know, it gives you a face.

It gives you a name.

And I think that’s the value of those zero click searches if you can be the citation.

And I don’t know if that was a translation of what you were doing or just my own thing, but.

It’ll have to do because this is 60 minutes, 61 minutes of SEO done.

Thank you very much, everyone, for joining.

Thank you for your questions and all the discussions in the chat.

It was a lot of fun.

We will see you at the next update in a month.

As we mentioned, it’s on February the 25th, again on Tuesday.

We’ll see you then.

Peace.

See you all there.

Bye, guys.

Welcome everyone to the all new SEO update by Yoast.

Let me get this starting screen out of the way because we’re ready for the last update of the year.

And I hope you are too.

We have a lot of people joining and I’m seeing all places from the whole wide world.

So welcome everybody to this stream and I won’t keep it very long as we have a lot of news to cover.

Although the last edition was only two weeks ago.

It doesn’t matter.

We want to go out with a big blast of news updates this year.

Before I go into some household notices, I am Nynke de Blaauw.

I work at Yoast as the Director of Partnerships.

I have been working here for four years and our principal SEOs, Carolyn and Alex, will take you through today’s news.

Before we get started, two things that are important if you’re maybe a first time joiner.

This edition will be recorded.

Everything you need to know about the news, all the resources and also the recording, you can find in the resources list.

And it should appear in a link below.

But otherwise, here’s the link in the chat as well.

Find all resources of this update right there.

And obviously, we will have room for questions at the end of this webinar or update.

So get your questions in the Q&A section.

You can upvote questions of other people if you find those interesting.

We know which questions to cover first during the Q&A.

We’ll try to make as much time as we can for Q&A.

But other than that, I think we’re good to go.

Okay, Alex and Carolyn, I’m inviting you on screen.

There they are.

Looking all Christmassy.

How awesome is that?

Yeah, you just need to show it a little bit better.

I’m on one of the standing desks, so there’s not much flexibility I have now.

I’m just making a suggestion.

Oh, Carolyn’s on mute.

Wait, I can unmute her.

Oh, sorry.

You have to stand up and show us it’s a turkey because all we can see is it’s brown and it looks like Mr.

Hankey.

It’s a turkey.

See you around?

I like that though.

I like the potential Mr.

Hankey though.

I mean, I’d wear a Mr.

Hankey jumper as well, but let’s not get into Mr.

Hankey though.

Okay, I’ll leave you two to it and I’ll be back in during Q&A.

Have fun, everyone.

Enjoy the last edition of the year.

All right.

So let’s see.

So when was our last one?

The 26th?

Yeah.

It felt like it was 10 minutes ago, honestly.

Let’s get the, we need to get the slides down in the, I can’t move them.

I can do that.

There we go.

Thank you.

All right.

So let’s get started, I guess.

This is me and Alex.

You guys know who we are.

What we’re going to discuss today, we’ve got some SEO and AI news.

We’ve got a little bit of Yoast news and we want to leave a lot of time for Q&A because I know we are notoriously bad about not doing so.

So the plan is we’re going to buzz through the news quickly and then we will have plenty of time for all of your questions and we’ll do a little extra Q&A for, as an early Christmas present for everybody.

Some housekeeping.

And I, Nynke already covered this, but please feel free to ask questions.

Vote other questions if you’d like to see them answered.

That’s how we know what you’re interested in hearing about and we do our best to meet those requirements.

If you’d like to learn more about today’s topics, as always, the entire recap and transcript are going to be available at the website that you see there.

The next how to start with SEO webinar is going to be December 18th, which is two days from now.

So if you’re here and you’re like, this is really a little bit more advanced than what I’m looking for and I need something a little bit more intro.

The how to start with SEO webinar is definitely the one that you want to catch.

It starts at 10 a.m.

Eastern time, 4 p.m. if you’re in Europe.

So hopefully you’ll be able to catch that before the Christmas holidays.

And I think we are probably ready to get started.

You ready to go, Alex?

I’m ready to go.

All right, let’s get this done.

Okay, so I will real quick talk about this one.

This looks complicated.

It’s not really as complicated as it looks.

C2PA metadata can appear in Google search.

If you skip down to that last bullet, honestly, all this means is that Google is going to be able to snip out if your image was made by AI because there’s metadata that appears in those AI images.

Don’t try to pass off AI generated images as legitimate, undoctored images because the metadata is going to give it away.

It’s going to get labeled as AI and you’re going to look like a liar.

So the TLDR is don’t do that.

The next thing that we’re going to cover is the first draft of the general purpose AI code of practice has been published by the European Commission.

It’s just the first draft.

It’s focusing on transparency, copyright, systemic risk management.

It sounds terribly interesting, but it’s a government body’s paper, so you have to kind of expect these things.

There’s four drafting rounds, and this is just the first one.

It’s not going to conclude until April.

The goal is to ensure that AI is trustworthy and it’s, you know, all of these rules are tailored in compliance with subject matter experts on, like, open source models and things like that.

I don’t think this is anything to panic about.

Like I said, there’s four more drafting, or there’s three more drafting rounds after this one.

We’ll know in April if there’s going to be any major impact to how we do business, but I don’t expect there to be.

So this is just something to kind of keep in mind.

If you are interested in reading what the first draft has to say, we’ll have a link for you in the recap.

Yeah, I guess so.

I mean, that’s law.

That takes ages, though.

You know, by the time the third draft is in, like, AI will be old school.

It’ll be like the cassette already, and there’ll be something else.

Probably creating its own laws for itself.

Our robot overlords will have already taken over, so it won’t matter.

Exactly.

It’s fine.

Everything’s fine.

I’m sure 2030 will be cool for everyone.

But until then, AI are, I think, in the game for taking on Chrome, which I think is quite interesting.

So they’re going into the browsing experience in general.

And whilst they talk about it going into ChatGPT and SearchGPT’s offering, this may become a new product that will create more mass adoption for ChatGPT and OpenAI as a whole.

And to go with that, a few days later, they announced that they’d hired a former Chrome architect from Google.

They’re hiring a Google Play, who’s going to go with that, and they’re hiring a Google Play Store.

Well, and OpenAI is an American company, so I don’t know that they’re going to put the European Commission’s preferences and desires at the forefront of their design strategy.

Yes.

Yes.

I forget that the Europe isn’t obviously the whole world.

And America is a whole different ballgame when it comes to that stuff.

I don’t know why that’s a good thing.

Well, we do tend to worry far less about what the Europeans think than what our own government thinks.

So it colors the way products are developed because those rules are secondary and the addressable market in Europe isn’t as large as the total addressable market in the U.S.

So companies, justifiably care more about the U.S. regulations than they do about what’s going to happen after the fact in Europe.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So let’s see what happens with the browser wars.

I am as well because I know that ARC have been doing stuff and then they kind of stopped, I think, doing ARC.

But now they’re going more into an AI-driven one.

And I know that ARC already has AI into it and some people use it.

And if you’re into AI browsing experiences, I suggest using ARC at least until OpenAI blatantly release one in Q3.

I’m going to go with Q3.

Is that your plan?

I reckon, yeah.

We’ll flag that and we’ll see how you’re up.

Flag it up in July.

Right.

The pre-holiday research that needs to be done or making sure that you need it for a holiday.

But up until that point, Google have added recommendations in GA about Merchant Center recommendations specifically to help fix product issues and way things to disapprove.

And it’s kind of connecting the two together, which I always find useful.

And, for the e-commerce store owners who are listening to this will find it extremely useful that they don’t have to just rely what’s going on in Merchant Center.

And they can be made aware elsewhere about things that they can optimize.

So I think it’s pretty cool.

Small gains, but every little helps, right?

Every little bit helps.

That’s for sure.

Apparently, Google Search has seen a UK decline.

Yeah.

I mean, we’re more open to testing things, right?

You think so?

Also, we think so.

Yes.

We think so.

I don’t know so, but I think so.

But I also…

Well, the second part of this title is very British, I think.

You know, we express low trust in AI.

Just change AI to anything new.

We will definitely question those things.

I don’t know.

As a Brit, I know that I’m stuck in my old ways with certain things.

We were even discussing earlier today how I’m only now doing more and more ChatGPT stuff.

And I felt like the Britishness in me was saying, no, I don’t like change.

I like my Google search bar.

And that’s where I’m sticking.

Not as an SEO, but as a Brit.

And now I open my mind to it.

And maybe I’m now contributing towards this UK decline that I’m seeing.

Because not just me, but other people.

Let’s just say that normal people I didn’t expect to hear about perplexity are talking about perplexity.

Complete technophones, in my opinion.

They don’t know what the hell’s going on with AI, but they know they use perplexity for things that they do in work.

And that, I would say, should worry Google.

A lot.

And then maybe this data is going to make someone stand up a bit more.

Unless they’re already on a standing desk.

I don’t know.

But if they would act a bit faster to what the audience wants and not what they think needs to happen in the next three years.

I think Google might be concerned about what’s going on.

I know in the last update, I reported that when Search GPT was made available to everyone, it popped up a thing and said, hey, install our Chrome plugin and it’ll help you.

So I installed the Chrome plugin and it effectively hijacked Chrome.

So every time I typed something into my Google search bar, it piped it through Search GPT and it shot me straight into ChatGPT.

So there was no, there was no, I could just type something in and go Google it.

Like just Googling things became very, very difficult for me.

So all of the searches that I had been doing in Google got shunted over to ChatGPT.

I’ve noticed that there’s been a couple updates to my Chrome and that functionality no longer exists.

I didn’t install anything, but I think Google went, hey, hey, no.

And shipped some, and I don’t have proof of this.

All I know is suddenly, suddenly that isn’t working anymore.

And I’m able to do Google searches again, just by going to that search bar.

So I think, I think Google is concerned.

Interesting.

I like also, by the way, as we go to the next slide, how we’re talking about AI and new platforms.

There’s a bunch of people having nostalgia of old platforms like AltaVista and Webcrawler.

I love that.

It also shows our age, right?

Shh.

We didn’t talk about that.

No, no, no, no.

No, Chromium.

What are they up to with Chrome in general?

Since we’re talking about that, there was a report done about how Chrome site engagement metrics are used.

So there’s scores, 0 to 100, as one does.

They measure user interaction and enhance, or to enhance the browser experience.

And the scores decay, which means if you score 100 today, but you make no changes over the course of the next six months, that score is going to get less because you’re not doing anything to improve the user experience.

So what they’re saying is there’s no possibility of being perfect and then just staying there.

You can’t just rest on your laurels.

They’re engineering it so you have to consistently and regularly make updates to improve that user experience.

It helps them allocate resources, enable features, and sort sites based on user engagement.

So if users are engaged in the beginning and then they kind of fall off, that’s going to make you less desirable.

If users stay consistently engaged, they will consistently rank you higher and help you attract more users because it’s going to help with your rankings.

The scores are device specific.

They are isolated and incognito and erased with history or inactivity.

So it’s things that kind of, it’s a score that exists within a specific portion of Chrome and Chromium.

And it’s not something that is reported to, I think, the mothership or added to your permanent record type of thing.

It’s very user-end specific, which I think is interesting to know.

So it’s not something you’re going to be able to fix necessarily.

Let me rephrase that.

In the past, sometimes things would break for a certain device or for a certain browser.

And as SEOs, we would look at that and say, I don’t care much about the people that are dumb enough to keep using that thing.

The way this works is because all of those things are scored, a bad score in one of those areas could affect things negatively everywhere.

So you do have to be concerned about the user experience of everyone, not just this is the browser I use, so this is the browser I care about kind of thing.

Which is, I mean, it’s a subtle difference, but I think it’s interesting to know.

Yeah, yeah.

I added what you can type into Chrome or, sorry, a Chromium-based browser.

So if you’re using Brave, et cetera, you can use it there.

You just type that Chrome colon, blah in there, and then you’ll be able to see everything you need to see.

Oh, yeah.

Excellent.

And I’ve also added in Dejan’s blog post that goes into highly technical detail if you want to geek out and see everything that it looks at.

He can be very, very technical.

So this would be a fun thing for you to test your favorite AI tool on.

Feed his blog post into it and say, can you explain this to me like I’m a five-year-old?

Because I use that phrase all the time.

It’s very helpful, especially when you’re trying to interpret something that is really outside of your field of expertise and you need some help digesting it.

So this would be a great opportunity to test that functionality.

Tell us about BlueSky, Alex.

Have you moved over to BlueSky?

No, I mean, I bought myself, I secured my usernames as best as I could because I’ve not got the most unique name.

But other than that, I mean, I think I’m the classic.

I installed it once, browsed through it once, twice maybe, and then never went back.

And maybe this is why I was skeptical about including this as a news item because right now, I’m sure that the data will say that three times as much engagement is happening on BlueSky.

But two things.

First of all, like, what are those numbers?

What’s that three times as much as what?

What set of data?

Is it a big set of data?

That’s one thing.

The other thing is that maybe this is a trend.

And I think that I use Threads as an example when in the first two weeks you would hear lots of stories about its supersonic growth and how many people have opened a cat.

And then, if you were to look at the same article three months later, you know, that trend has gone way down.

And it was just that FOMO of opening a new account on a new social platform where I found, at least with Threads, I think 95% of the updates were people telling me that they’d left X to go there.

But I don’t need to know that.

I don’t need to know that people have arrived somewhere or leaving.

I think someone actually said on X, like, you’re not an airport.

You don’t need to declare if you’re leaving or arriving on a social platform.

And I get that, but it’s okay.

But I would say for people listening and watching now, is BlueSky actually a place where you’re going to find out?

What’s the high value for you for what you’re selling as a product or a service?

Is your audience there engaging?

Because if they’re not, then there’s no point.

Just like some businesses and products aren’t going to go on to, LinkedIn to sell their stuff because it’s not the most appropriate social network to be on.

I think what’s going to happen, so this migration to BlueSky is very similar to the migration to Parler before Parler was shut down.

It’s in the opposite direction.

And it’s the users self-segregating.

And it becomes a little echo chamber.

And if it has staying power, it’s going to be interesting for businesses because you’re going to have to decide, are you going to invest in having a presence in the old place where everyone hung out and the new place where half of the people are hanging out?

Because now it’s just polarizing and self-segregating by political affiliation, really.

So businesses are going to have to make those decisions.

Who’s our audience and where are we going to invest our money?

And are we trying to please everyone, so we have to invest and be in all the places where all the people are?

It’s interesting to see, but everyone getting excited about 3x engagement.

Their engagement was pretty low to begin with.

And now it’s skyrocketed.

But 3x of 5 is 15, whereas 3x of 5 million is 15 million.

So there’s differences.

When you give percentages, it’s less impressive than if you were giving hard numbers and the hard numbers were impressive.

It is.

It is.

But again, that’s not to say don’t use it.

Look, again, I’m seeing in the chat that this guy is really working for people.

And like you said, maybe half the audience is there.

But the other question is, which half?

Like, is it the more valuable half?

Because if that’s the case, then the 50% on the other one, you’re shouting to half into a void, essentially.

So whilst I’m skeptical on some stuff like this and say, is it a trend or is it something that’s going to stick in the long term, like Mastodon joins the conversation as well, then I’m all for it, right?

I’m all for, you know, different social networks being around for different audiences.

There are, otherwise, there’d just be one, right?

I am vaguely curious if a company tries to have a foot in both camps, basically, where they’re advertising to the people, let’s say the people on the right that stayed on X and then the people on the left that all went over to BlueSky, assuming that that’s how it breaks down, if it breaks down cleanly.

If you’re trying to reach both of those, do you tailor your message for each?

And then if someone shares a screenshot of your ad there on the other place and goes, look, they’re lying to you.

And like, oh, yeah, no, they’re lying to you.

And then what does that do to your marketing campaigns?

It’s an interesting conundrum.

I don’t know if it’s terribly, it’s necessarily SEO related, but it’s interesting in terms of how you’re going to divide up your marketing budget.

Fun things to worry about over Christmas.

Yeah, yeah.

All right.

So how do people use Google?

SparkToro did an analysis, looking at 332 million queries over 21 months about how people are using Google.

They found that Google does still hold over 90% of the market share and drive 60% of referral traffic, which is not unexpected.

I think we all kind of knew that.

A third of the searches being navigational and over half are informational.

I think that’s interesting because I think Google would like it to be a lot more commercial.

They make money on those commercial queries.

So I think it’s interesting that there are still so many that are navigational and so many that are informational.

Navigational is like when your mom types in AOL.com into the Google search when she means to go to AOL.com, but she accidentally types it in as a query.

That’s what they mean by navigational.

So there are still clearly.

I think we could extrapolate.

There are a lot of old people that are still using the Google to get around and don’t quite understand how modern browsers work, which is, you know, it’s cute.

Branded search queries are nearly half of the searches.

A small set of top queries drive all of the demand.

Everything else is long tail, but the long tail is minimal in comparison to those brand queries and the head terms that we call them.

Google is increasingly using zero-click answers and the AI overviews to provide, well, not just provide, but like dominate these major categories like arts and entertainment and finance.

Any question you ask about a movie, Google is going to be able to provide an AI overview for, you know, give you a synopsis, tell you where it’s playing, all kinds of fun stuff like that, which is changing the way we use Google.

And it’s changing the results.

It’s changing how we optimize.

So those are interesting things to worry about.

Then they also found that search is a post-discovery tool now with brand discovery shifting to social media and other platforms.

And then Google being a secondary place where you go to get more information.

So you see an ad on Facebook.

You see an ad on X.

You see an ad on BlueSky.

If they do ads, I don’t think they really do ads.

TikTok, Instagram.

You see something.

You remember the name because it’s interesting.

You can’t remember how to get there.

So then you go to Google and type in the brand name and anything you remember about the ad.

And it tells you then how to get to it.

So it’s not used to help you learn new things.

It’s there to help you find more information about things that you discovered somewhere else.

That’s another big shift that we, I don’t know that anyone really expected to happen in the big way that it is happening.

So, you know, I think the most interesting part of all of that was the half is informational, which is a trouble to some site owners because with the zero adding to the zero clicks.

So again, we were chatting before about how I’m using chat GPT more.

And the example I used is Venom.

There’s a new film.

And I wanted to know a summary of the last two because I’ve kind of half forgotten.

And I added to the search contextually.

And I realized that for that kind of search, I’m never, not never, I’m not going to be going to Google to make that search for some time because ChatGPT gave me a much more concise answer.

Not that ads play a part in the decision making.

If you’re going to make an ad for like, I don’t know, Venom on DVD or whatever the streaming thing is, that’s fine.

But I’ve now realized that, especially with the wider and mass market, Google are now in a danger territory where they’re one bad search away from churn for that person.

Just one.

Right.

And it takes 20 years of effort, a generational effort to get everyone.

They’ve got a verb for searching.

Right.

But now people don’t search anymore.

They discover.

So now that even the name Google, Googling something is becoming a little bit redundant.

And information gathering is done much differently.

AIO is not as good as the others, in my opinion, at giving the user what they want.

So I’m really interested to see, again, what they’re doing, especially looking at this kind of data to show that brand marketing and informational driven searches are booming in a place where they don’t want that.

They don’t want that to happen.

I think part of the problem is that because things like ChatGPT make it easy, they’ll do that research for you.

They’ll find answers for you and prevent you from having to spend an hour going to five different websites and reading through those papers and the documents and trying to find the answer or synthesize the answer yourself.

It’s doing all that work for you very quickly.

Google’s answers just aren’t as helpful.

The AIO interface isn’t as helpful as having a conversation with ChatGPT or Perplexity or whichever AI tool you’re using, having that conversation with it to get to the answer that you want faster.

I couldn’t have asked Google which red wine I should use because these are the ones I have on hand in this recipe.

Because Google wouldn’t know the recipe right away.

There’s not enough room in that chat box for me to adequately fully explain and articulate what I’m trying to get at.

Whereas I can do that with ChatGPT.

It’ll rework all of my recipes and say, yeah, that Shiraz is fine.

I’m like, okay, cool.

Change everything else on the menu to accommodate for the fact that I’m using the Shiraz instead of the cab.

And away you go.

And then it does it.

Google just doesn’t do that right now.

Which makes it, yeah, that one bad experience where it’s just so much easier to do this other thing and not go to Google for that.

All righty.

Alex, I heard the core of day November finally finished just in time for the December one to start.

Yes.

Yes.

It finished rolling out.

There wasn’t too much of a massive disturbance in the force of SERPs that has been noted.

There’s been no one who’s been disappearing off the radar that maybe wasn’t already in previous core HCU.

There may be additional nails in a coffin that’s already been made kind of scenario, which is, again, a shame.

Because no one’s seeing huge benefits still from HCU.

But the other thing that they were doing, as well as the fact that they’ve already started another rollout, that I think happened last Friday, maybe?

Thursday or Friday.

That’s always mean.

And they say that’s mean.

But I’m sure from memory they do do this a lot.

They do a lot of core or important updates just before Christmas to keep SEOs on their toes.

Because I think it’s probably some sadist who’s working there who does it each year and with an evil laugh.

But again, it’s not been the most volatile.

It also came with an update.

And I don’t know.

It wasn’t in its own slide where in the last week someone from Google mentioned that there’s going to be more core updates.

They’re going to be happening more and more often.

So you might see that this time in a year we’ll have talked about a core update happening every single month.

You don’t know.

But I’m going to assume that that’s going to start happening now, especially the catch-up that they have to keep playing now with these serious players.

Yeah.

And I think now that they’ve got AI tweaking the algorithm now.

So everything is just happening so much faster.

They don’t have to wait for QA and for all of these other things that they would normally have had to put through different cycles and phases at work.

So everything is like every timeline is just compressing.

And it’s I think we’re just racing towards a singularity.

That’s just.

Just the lighthearted stuff you want at the end of the year, right?

Just inside the Christmas movies.

Pretty much.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

So other fun stuff that happened is OpenAI released ChatGPT-o1, which is the world’s smartest language model.

Their words, not ours.

It’s $200 a month.

I’m sorry.

I don’t use it that often to justify that kind of expense.

But, hey, if you can afford it, then go for it and let me know how it works because I will not be investing in that.

I’m sure there’ll be micro-influencers who have invested to, A, get status and, B, get a lot of engagement so that they’ll get a return on that $200 maybe by going on X, saying, here’s what I found, that kind of stuff.

Well, the micro-influencers probably got financed by OpenAI to try it out and then promote it.

I very much doubt they’re spending that kind of money on their own.

True.

Well, these are the kind of people that buy Lamborghinis recreationally, so what do I know?

Exactly.

Exactly.

I just don’t think that the normal person needs all of this, at least right now, on the level that you would need to – you would actually want to pay $200.

My prediction, in six months, this will probably be part of your $20 a month package and that the $200 will have something else that none of us even know about yet or even heard of.

I’ve been real happy with the 4.0.

I haven’t had a need to use anything beyond that.

So, I don’t know.

It would have to be really amazing and, like, clean my house, too, for $200 a month.

Exactly.

Exactly.

As well as that, again, I don’t know if it was also in the news, which I know is the next slide, but I do know that it wasn’t in the slide.

In this slide, so it didn’t get into a slide by now, but Sora has now gone on general release, which is the OpenAI video service that people can now go and check out.

So, that’s another thing to check out.

So, what else happened in the news?

So, I did mention that OpenAI hires the former Chrome engineer, so that’s already been covered.

Google Business Profile targets age-restricted products if you sell adult material and tobacco, things like that.

Then you can now have more specific stuff on your profile.

There’s a new Google Analytics feature that helps hidden product listings, which I think…

Oh, no, we covered that in the slide.

I think it got into both, so it’s very important for e-commerce that we needed to mention it twice.

Bing Webmaster Tools shows data for Bing and Yahoo, but not ChatGPT, although in GA4, there are ways of finding…

It’s not open on my other tab at the moment, but there is a way, and I did mention it in the last one, of how you can navigate to see how many people are coming into the site through ChatGPT.

And no, it doesn’t tell you what the prompts were that made them get there.

Google Search CTR reveals shifting industry trends.

That’s quite a long read, so if you’re into industry trends, I suggest you go in there and check it out.

That was on the Search Engine Journal.

And lastly, Google uses about 40 signals to determine canonical URLs.

So what did you say, Carolyn?

Don’t mess them up.

Well, it’s relatively easy to not screw it up.

So just don’t screw it up.

Provide a canonical for a piece of content and don’t send mixed messages because it’s looking at a lot of things.

It uses the things that it looks at to pick the correct canonical if it believes that the canonical you provided is bad.

So don’t give it a bad canonical and it won’t look for reasons to replace it.

Just don’t screw it up and you’ll be fine.

Yeah.

And I think that’s all of our news.

I think the only thing that wasn’t newsworthy maybe is the one bit of WordPress news is that Automatic acquired WPAI, which is a service that would bring AI capabilities into WordPress.

It’s probably not going to be newsworthy now other than me saying it, but I reckon in about three months, we’ll be chatting about this for about five minutes about what they’ve done with that acquisition.

Probably.

And the curious thing, though, is like everybody, all the WordPress plugins are incorporating AI into, like we did, everybody else is doing it too.

How are they, is what they’re doing going to step on what everyone else has been doing?

Are they going to work together?

I just, I’m curious to know what the plan is with this.

Aren’t we all?

2025 is going to be interesting for AI and SEO and WordPress.

It’s going to be very, these are going to have to be 90 minutes, I reckon, by April.

Probably.

Well, so we’re almost done.

We have one more slide before we go into the Q&A.

For the Yoast news, we wanted to share some stuff, but it wasn’t, the announcement isn’t happening until later this week.

So we just want to tease everyone with, there’s an announcement coming, you know, some new product features.

We’re not allowed to talk about them.

I’ve been given a list of words that I’m not even allowed to say.

So I’m just going to say, stay tuned.

There will be, there will be something before, before you take your Christmas break.

And we’re all very excited about it.

So the back end of WordPress on Thursday and hope that there’s an update to a new version and make sure you hit it.

That’s all we’re saying.

Yeah.

Real quick.

I mean, a lot of the upcoming events and appearances aren’t happening until February.

So you’ve got plenty of time to plan your travel for that.

The next SEO update is going to be January 28th, which feels like 100 years from now, but it’s like six weeks.

So six week gap.

We should have a ton of new news for you.

Looking forward to that.

And now, now we’re ready for our QA.

Hey, and we’ve got loads.

We’ve got, actually, we’ve got time.

Oh my God, we’ve gotten another 10.

I’m so proud of you.

I was like, we’re just thinking, once a year you’ll get this.

That’s it.

Exactly.

You all had to wait till the end of the year to get all this space.

I will move the slides away and move us to the big screen.

So everybody, well, that was already arranged.

Really nice.

Yeah, let’s start.

So for everyone joining the stream, you can go through all the asked questions right now and upload the ones so we can actually have an updated list of the questions.

But let’s start with the most uploaded question at this moment.

Shauna posted it and it’s about AI in Photoshop and images.

The question is, I use AI in Photoshop to expand images to fit the dimensions needed.

For example, change a square into a rectangular one or by extending background trees.

Will these images on the website now get banned or will there be a penalty for SEO?

And eight upvotes, so I guess a lot of people are questioning this.

That’s a good question.

I actually don’t know.

I think what’s going to…

So if it’s a real image in the beginning and you’re just using AI to expand it, the question is, is Photoshop going to add that metadata that triggers Google to label it as AI?

So there’s that.

Are you going to get penalized?

I don’t see why you would get penalized.

There’s no penalty there unless it’s identical to what somebody else has done, which it’s not.

And even then, it’s not a penalty.

That’s just duplicate content.

So I would say, is there a penalty?

No.

Is it going to trigger a label that depends on Photoshop?

I hope that helps Shana and the other…

Oh, nine people now.

Thanks, Carolyn.

So there’s another question posted by Torren.

I’ll pop it on the screen.

In terms of best practice for search engine rankings and the appearance slash consistency of results in search engines, would you advise using the SEO variables in a website’s page settings, like title or page title, or typing the web page’s desired appearance manually?

It depends.

And it does depend.

I mean, here I’m going to assume he’s talking about the title tag of a title.

I don’t know if…

Is it Torren who’s here?

Maybe he’ll say something in the chat.

Go on, Carolyn.

No, I think I see what he’s asking.

So you can define those variables in the Yoast settings.

Yep.

And that’s great.

That’s perfect for the default behavior.

But Yoast already allows you to override on a per page basis what that title, page title, etc. appears like for the search engines on each page as desired.

So I think the best practice is you define the default behavior in the settings using the variables.

And when you feel the need to manually override it, you do so on the page.

I mean, I don’t know that there’s…

You have to do what’s best for the situation, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

Meanwhile…

Thanks, Carolyn.

I saw Don’s question coming in.

And Don, I have moved your question to the Q&A.

So if other people want to know about that too, please upvote Don’s question.

My Q&A is reloading right now.

Okay.

An AI question.

Votes coming in as we’re talking about it.

Votes are coming in, yeah.

The numbers coming in, yeah.

This question was posted by Meg.

And the question is, as AI continues to impact search and Google continues to roll out updates, what are the core things we should focus on as a foundational SEO strategy?

Is it keyword research and content?

Is it technical SEO?

What should be the main priority in 2025?

I’d say yes to all the above.

And I know it sounds weird, but like, I, at the beginning, when I first started SEO, I kind of had to explain to people who weren’t in my team that they had to, the more they thought about SEO, the worse it may get for them.

And the less they think about SEO, the more natural they will become.

This is from a content creative point of view, keyword point of view, such as back in keyword stuffing days, how many times, what’s the, what’s the proportion in the whole piece of content that I should say this keyword.

And the answer is as naturally as you should.

That’s what it should have always been.

And I guess it’s the same now.

And just kind of ignore the fact that AI is around.

You need to adapt to it.

And weirdly, in the next year, my belief is that AI is going to adapt more to, you know, what we’ve been doing all this time.

And there may be new things we have to do, some of which will be covered inside our plugin, some of which will be covered in the updates and methods that we’ll have to do in blog updates.

But the basics of what you’re all doing now, I would say, just keep on being helpful, honest, transparent, and white hat.

And the internet in general will respect you back.

I would say there, we’ve, we’ve published several articles in our, in our SEO blog that talk about how to, how to deal with and kind of massage the, the AI narratives that are being presented about any given topic that, that the AIs are asking about.

The, the goal going forward is less to just rank and more to be one of the citations or sources that the AIs are using for these answers.

And how are they deciding what to use as the source?

They’re looking for consensus.

So if there’s a consensus answer, are you one of the consensus answers?

Are you providing robust information?

Are you an authority on that subject?

So this is all about the EEAT.

Are you doing, are you doing all the things that are going to elevate you to an entity that is recognized for having expertise in whatever particular field you have expertise in?

And I think the EEAT portion is what you’re going to need to be focusing on.

That being said, I can think of three or four articles that we recently wrote in our blog.

So if you want to go check there, there’s a lot of information on how you should be prioritizing your tasks going forward.

Cool.

Meanwhile, I’ll read the next question.

And Carolyn, maybe if you can quickly put up those, or at least one of those posts.

I’m not sure if you, I’ll give you some time.

I’ll just pick a really long question to read out.

Okay.

Let me refresh for a bit.

I think this ties into…

I’m going with the 10 vote.

What?

Have we got to go with the 10 vote?

Or are we going with the long question?

No, I’m going with the 10 vote because I think that’s a really important question in the age of all the AI search.

Okay.

Derek asked the following question.

How important are websites going to continue to be as a definite source of info and content for businesses, especially in the age of no-click discovery?

There’s the word discovery already.

Alex, you did a great job.

I know.

I know.

I think they’re going to be very important.

They’re going to be as vital as they were before.

If there is no information to discover, there’s nothing to not click.

Like, I would say we should still be contributing towards the web and its content.

And doing so, we will still get cited in some way in the future.

So long as there’s got to be something to discover, right?

Otherwise, there’s nothing there.

And without the site, Google can’t source this.

Think of the search engine.

They’re just middlemen, right?

Middle people, middle machines.

I don’t know what they are.

They’re the messenger.

They’re the messenger between what you want and the answer.

And if they don’t have the answer, they can’t be the messenger.

So they need the creators more than the creators need them, even though the power play doesn’t seem that way at the moment.

Like, weirdly, if all web creators now just stop typing, right?

Google will have serious issues.

Serious, serious issues.

So, like, they’re playing with fire, I think.

Because these small publishers, that’s going to have a knock-on effect.

Because now, if I was 18, 19, and I had an interest, 10 years ago, I’d be all about making this niche website.

Today, I’d read three things.

I’d be like, why would I do that?

Why would I spend my time?

And in four years, like that, all my visibility is gone.

Why would I spend all of that and build a company that could mean nothing if my one reliance is on the messenger, you know?

True.

But that’s for another week, probably, that rant.

So, for businesses in particular, it is still important to have a website.

Because if you ask your favorite AI for information, let’s talk about Yoast as an example.

If you asked a question about the features of the product or the features of free versus premium, where’s it getting that information from?

Yoast is the authoritative entity on Yoast.

So, it’s going to go look at the Yoast website and read all the information about the product features and then do a comparison for you.

So, if we don’t keep that updated and we don’t take time to promote and prioritize the things that we think are important, then the AIs aren’t going to know that to repeat it to the users.

If we’re not owning our expertise and then taking advantage of the platform that it’s provided us, then we’ve then wasted this opportunity to deliver the information to the AIs.

Even though there were no clicks involved, somebody’s got to go get that content from somewhere and they rely on the authority to provide that.

So, it might be in the Yoast case, us to provide that info than other people providing that info about you, right?

So, that’s the thing you want to own, whether or not the search engine landscape is changing.

Yeah.

And I also get big boy travel’s issue.

Like, you don’t care as much as being cited as an AI answer.

We want to retain our traffic.

So, the problem there is the only reason you feel, okay, I don’t know your specifics, but I’m going to make some assumptions.

If you need that traffic because you make your money on traffic and not on conversions, then that’s a problem with the business model.

And I think that the business models that make their money solely on traffic are going to probably be in a position where they have to evolve because I see that traffic source drying up.

That’s one, and it’s one channel.

Remember that, like, spread the channel.

It’s like any business will say don’t, well, any service-led business won’t say, well, make sure that less than 30% of your turnover isn’t with one client, you know, one supplier because then that’s an issue.

Here, all these small publishers are effectively saying that 98% of their turnover is with one client, the search provider being the client.

And if that’s cut out, it goes.

So, spread as much as possible and attract as many as possible in different areas, in the maybe BlueSky.

And just real quick to provide my English-to-English translation for the Americans, when Alex says turnover, he means revenue.

None.

Yes, sorry.

Not people quitting.

Because when we say turnover, people quitting.

A glossary.

I’m sure all the AI platforms are telling me that it should say that, but us Brits, we don’t like going on to the new things, do we?

We said that.

I just know that when I hear it, I get confused, and my brain has to go, thank you.

Okay, Rob.

He means Rob.

It’s nice you take our American-based audience into account.

Okay, next one.

Oh, we have a tie between two nine times upvoted questions.

I’ll just start with the top one from Johnny.

I want to add videos to my product pages, which is good, I think.

In terms of SEO, are there any important considerations, any specific settings maybe in Yoast to optimize for on-page videos?

Well, I think we have a whole Yoast video add-on that you can get that is designed specifically for videos.

And there are SEO considerations for videos, which you can definitely set, I think, within the tool.

There’s a separate video site map that you can get.

There’s a lot of different video things you can do, but I would definitely say if you have videos to add to your product, pages, then please do.

Anything that helps your engagement and provides more information to the user is going to be helpful.

And the clear as possible.

So Carolyn was thinking about it from a technical SEO point of view.

I was picturing it from a content point of view.

Make sure they’re helpful, of course, and it might sound obvious, but sometimes it’s not.

Make a use case out of, so let’s say it’s a product or a service, find the solution and benefit, find the use case of it.

If it’s a product, especially get it in its surroundings.

In situ, if that’s, I don’t know if Americans know in situ as well, as a term, like as an example of when it would be used.

And that will be then interpreted by all of these platforms, which are getting more and more sophisticated.

So in a year, it’ll be able to read the content of those videos, and it’ll really complement the text around it.

And again, it’ll figure out the context between the video and the text and the page that it’s on and where it is on the site.

So yeah, all very important.

All ties in together.

In the meantime, I was searching for a few blog articles about this.

So Johnny, if you just search the Yoast website, you’ll find a lot of blog articles about this, but I’ll share one that I think is maybe the starting place for you to discover this.

So I hope this helps.

Yeah, and Phil Nottingham.

Phil Nottingham knows everything there is to know about video.

And also, just annoy him on X or whatever he’s active on.

He’ll just have to answer for his personal brand.

We don’t want him to get too distracted, Alex.

But I get it.

I get it.

Okay.

Then there’s…

Oh, we still have time.

It’s amazing.

I really have to get used to this.

It’s really nice.

There’s another question by Leigh, if I pronounce this right.

Aside from working on all the standard stuff to rank UX, off-site SEO and on-site SEO optimization, producing quality content that meets the EAT, standards, keyword research, organic backlinks, etc.

What can be done to get Google to understand your website is worth ranking well again?

After the helpful content update, I have yet to recover, and I’m pulling my hair out.

Oh, don’t do that.

Trying to understand what I’m getting wrong when it seems I’m doing everything I should and am a true expert in my field.

Thanks.

So there are…

The HCU is a different thing.

It’s a classifier.

And once you get…

So there’s two buckets.

There’s helpful and there’s not helpful.

And there are…

It taught the machine to identify the characteristics of unhelpful by giving it an example and saying, if it looks like this example, it’s not helpful.

And then push everything that’s not helpful into this bucket.

And you are stamped with the unhelpful…

You’ve got the embroidered unhelpful on your chest now.

And there’s not a lot you can do to undo that without getting rid of the…

The appearances of unhelpfulness.

And the problem…

This is a long answer that’s going to be difficult to do in this thing.

To give you a quick…

Without knowing your situation, this might work for you.

You could try moving everything to a subdomain and 301ing your main site to the subdomain.

However, you would need to get rid of whatever elements of your site are betraying or causing it to think that you’re unhelpful.

And when you’re like, but I’m not doing anything that other places aren’t doing.

That’s a matter of interpretation.

And the problem is that Google’s looking for ducks.

And even though you are not a real duck, you’re apparently wearing feathers and have a bill and, you know, and occasionally quack.

So Google thinks you’re a duck.

We need to figure out whatever it is that’s making you look like a duck and take just enough off so that you stop triggering the, oh my God, it’s a duck alarm.

Because we want to unduck your site.

If that makes sense.

It’s a long answer.

The way you said unduck your site, I was like, you so used the right animal and word to go with that.

I know.

You did it on purpose.

That was the plan.

See, she did a keyword research as well before she even answered the question.

So maybe, maybe you send us an email because it is a long answer.

And I would, I would love to help you with that.

But I, because it’s a classifier and not an algorithm thing, I think once you, once you’ve got the, you know, the black mark on your, on your record, it’s going to not take you out of that bucket until we figure out what’s putting you over the edge or tipping you over into the, the ducked bucket.

We do wish you luck.

We do wish you luck.

Yeah.

We do.

It can be done.

Other sites have done it.

So, so we just, we just need to figure it out.

We have another question from Don.

I think it’s the same Don.

I didn’t remember the last name.

I’m sorry about that.

Can you speak to schema markup and how important schema is to the future of SEO and AI?

That’s a huge question in a few words.

I’ll be honest.

I’ll be honest.

I don’t know.

I actually don’t know because I am quite subjective about this.

I’m a huge lover of schema.

I think it’s really important.

It’s clearly a foundation of our products as well.

And it’s been a foundation of structured data for a long, long time.

And some people are skeptical.

Oh, well, we’re not going to need this structured data because AI is going to be able to structure all the data we have.

But I would also like to think that over these years, structured data is there.

Not because Google and search engines couldn’t read that.

And it can do everything that people are saying, skeptics are saying already.

It can do all of that.

But it’s handing a bigger spoon to the messenger, right?

They’re handing a bigger spoon.

It’s making it easier to do their job.

So if you put yourself in the search engine shoes, like if you’ve got a choice of two and one has given you everything in a nice little platter and another site has given you unstructured crap, essentially.

It’s like giving you a book with no punctuation, no paragraphing.

It’s just one big block of text.

The more that that happens, the bigger the job is going to be for the messenger.

And they’ll maybe not look at you as fondly as a site or a page that is giving you structured data.

So maybe because I say I don’t know, maybe I should change it to I can’t predict how search platforms are going to interpret them because there’s unpredictable stuff that’s been happening in our vertical in general that I like to hope that schema isn’t going away anywhere soon.

But I don’t also want to eat my words in 12 months and say that maybe something’s been figured out.

But things like Merchant Center, feeds, feeds are just essentially structured data, you know, that they all help.

And especially in e-commerce where I don’t see unstructured data not helping.

You know, when we dig into stuff like products and product variants, right?

If there’s no structured data, I don’t even know how a search platform would even deal with unstructured versions of a shoe that has different sizes, different colors, different prices.

Some are on sale.

Some have different returns and refund policies.

It can’t do all of that without structured data and therefore schema.

So maybe that wasn’t a short answer.

But I’d like to hope that it is in short.

It was a big question.

So we didn’t expect a short answer.

Yeah.

What do you think, Carolyn?

I don’t know if you have.

We have two minutes left.

Do you want to add to this or do we go to a last question?

I think schema right now is still, if it’s easy for you to implement, implement it.

I think I actually, oh, it’s not published yet.

I just wrote an article about that for Search Engine Land and it’s not come out yet.

But I have advice on which schema is important and which schema is not important.

And I don’t have time to tell you about it.

Another teaser, Carolyn.

We’ll talk about it.

We’ll probably be able to talk about it at our next update.

We’re done with this one.

Let’s see if we have time.

One, two.

We have one from David that has the most upvotes right now.

Can you give an overview of the current state of play for GEO when people search through AI bots, as in ChatGPT, rather than through a search engine?

Or the messenger, as we now call it, and is you offering any training for this?

So we have answered a few questions that were directly related to this and just phrased a little bit differently earlier.

So GEO is generative engine optimization, which isn’t really what I call it.

I just tended to call it, you know, optimizing for the AI narratives, which is long and not easy to remember.

Point is, we do have some blog posts that were written to help you understand how the AIs are making decisions on what to include, which you can then extrapolate into, this is how I should optimize for that.

So we’ve got a few blog posts.

I’ve got some talks that I recently did that I think maybe we should turn into blog posts, and that can provide some training.

But is there a specific, you know, this is exactly what you do.

What you do is improve your EAT, and you make yourself an expert in the field, which makes you desirable to be cited.

So the short answer is, be an entity that is an expert in that field, and then provide answers that the users are looking for.

And then you’re improving the odds that you will be a cited source.

Once you’re a regularly cited source, you will be a cited source for all manner of things that are related to that topic, and you can exploit that to your heart’s content.

Yeah, to add to that, because now we really have to close the stream, I’ve just popped in one more resource, which is our AI for SEO training, part of the academy, that comes with any of our premium tool.

So just take a look there, if that might be helpful for you next to all the blogs and the stuff on the internet.

Alex, the same.

Yes, I would like to say there’s a few people who said they’ve had upvoted questions that haven’t been answered.

So one of two things, either they’re being liked a lot in the chat and they didn’t go into the Q&A part, or something’s up.

Can you please connect with us?

Connect with me or Carolyn.

I don’t care if it’s X or LinkedIn or through the website.

Find us and we’ll get back to you.

Wait, wait, wait.

I almost forgot.

Before we close everything out.

Wait.

So a couple things.

Number one, Ask Yoasie is back up.

So if you go to the website, we can answer the questions that didn’t get answered in Ask Yossi.

So it’s yoast.com/ask-yoasie/.

Y-O-A-S-I-E is how you spell that.

So we’ll be answering questions that didn’t get answered there.

Also, just we have a subreddit now.

If any of you are Redditors and you’re interested in discussing the podcast or asking additional questions or discussing that, I’m in there frequently.

So the subreddit is r/yoastseo.

Obviously, you can spell that.

And hopefully, we’ll see you guys there.

But that was all I had.

So Ask Yoasie and then the Reddit, Yoast SEO.

Cool.

Or annoying social.

See you on Reddit.

See you on Yoast.com.

Or see you in the next SEO update.

Thanks for joining, everyone.

I think this was a wonderful way to close the year.

We’ve covered a lot of news.

We’ve covered, I think, most questions ever during one of these updates.

So thanks all for joining us throughout 2024.

And we’re super excited to start the new year all with you at the end of January.

For everyone that’s celebrating holidays, happy holidays.

Make it a good one.

And see you in 2025.

Happy holidays, everyone.

You’re welcome.

Bye.

Thank you.

Hello everyone, and it’s very great to see everyone already joining me here.

I am Florie van Hummel and I am your host for today, and welcome to another edition of the SEO update by Yoast.

So before we dive in, let’s cover a couple of things about Crowdcast, the platform that we’re using today.

So in case you don’t know this program, on the right side, you already see that you can leave stuff in the chat.

So for example, where you’re coming from, but also other comments you just want to make about the news or awesome SEOs that will present the news to you today.

If you do have any questions, please make sure to use our Q&A section.

That’s also on the right side, the box with the question mark.

Afterwards, you will be sending the recording and also the resources.

So no need to worry to remember everything at the first time you’re listening to this.

So let me introduce today’s stars.

First up is Carolyn Shelby.

Carolyn has been crushing in SEO since 1994.

And she has done everything from news to e-commerce.

She’s Yoast’s first female principal SEO and an all-around powerhouse.

So you’re ready for some incredible insights today.

Next up is Alex Moss.

Alex is our other principal SEO at Yoast, and he runs a UK-based agency.

He’s a multitasker with a talent of making things happen.

And he brings delicious cookies to the office every time he visits.

So without further ado, give it up for both of our SEOs and enjoy today.

Thanks for having us, Florie.

Nice to see you again, Carolyn.

It’s been about six weeks since we’ve presented one of these, and a few things have happened since then, haven’t we?

It has been a few weeks.

There’s been a ton of stuff going on.

We’re going to discuss today our usual range of things.

We have combined the SEO and AI news into a single category, because honestly, it didn’t make sense anymore to keep it separate.

So instead of having SEO and then AI broken out, everything’s kind of all mashed together.

But I think it’ll flow a lot better.

A little bit of WordPress news, a little bit of Yoast news.

And then we’re going to leave extra time for the Q&A, because it has been so long since we saw everyone last.

We kind of anticipated there will be more questions than usual.

We want to make sure that we can answer more than just a couple.

So if it does seem like we’re breezing through some of the slides quickly, it’s because we are, because we want to have enough time for everyone at the end.

The housekeeping, as Florie said, there’s questions in the little question box that has the question mark on it.

Ask your questions there.

Read the other people’s questions.

Vote them up.

The ones with the most upvotes are most likely to get asked and answered.

So pay attention to that.

Today’s topics.

If you want to read more about today’s topics or get a transcript, that’s going to be available at Yoast.com, which is yoa.st/update-november-2024 The recording will be available shortly, not immediately.

We’ve got to clean it up, make sure everything’s perfect for you.

So the only other thing to mention is that if you are interested in our how to start with SEO webinars, they are held biweekly.

So every other week, the next one is next Tuesday on December 3rd from 9 p.m.

Central European time, which is 3 p.m.

Eastern Daylight Savings time.

So 3 p.m. if you’re in New York, 9 p.m. if you’re in Amsterdam, you can do the math from there, I think.

I think that’s everything.

You ready to go, Alex?

No, I’m ready.

I’m ready.

Let’s go.

All right.

Let’s start it off.

I believe this is me.

So Google has revamped their entire crawler documentation.

This is probably only interesting if you read crawler documentation.

But if you do, they’ve split it into three focused pages for better navigation.

It’s technical updates, content encoding, user agent details.

Again, this is probably only of interest to you if crawler documentation has ever been of interest to you.

So you can read that if you like.

We dropped the link in the recap so you can find that when you’re ready to.

This would be Alex.

Yeah.

So AI overviews have been dominating in the last few months and they’ve been spreading more and more into all the SERPs.

And I’m sure that everyone globally is now starting to see them and not just a few people in the US and places in Europe.

But what we’re finding from, albeit this data does represent one day in search, which I know is quite isolated, but it still is consistent with a lot of trends.

I think it was on a normal day and not a special day of any kind.

But looking at it, informational based links are now becoming more prevalent.

So if you were to go into ChatGPT or even Google AIO and as well as that in Bing, all of them are now starting to use a consistent citation based link system, which are mostly coming from informational based intent of search.

And why is that?

And that’s because informational based intent is usually served on the search result page or it can be done so.

Whilst that takes away from some of the traffic that your site may get, I would only think of this as a position zero.

This is essentially bringing your information into the SERP.

But the good thing to note is that when you’re doing it through things like AIO and other AI based search platforms, it’s looking at a multitude of different citations before bringing back the answer to you.

So it’s even more important that you’re doing your normal optimizations, which we’ll discuss more in other parts of the story.

But it does show that transactional is still a bit lacking and e-commerce hasn’t really been hooked up properly to all of these platforms, but it will very soon.

I don’t know about that.

Google ratcheted back the transactional and navigational results because they can’t make money on that.

And there’s no way that they can.

Because of the way that the AI synthesizes a bunch of information and presents you a single answer, how do you promote specific transactions?

When someone is specifically looking for an item of clothing at Nordstrom or that item of clothing at a different store, they don’t want a bunch of synthesized data.

They want a link to go get that piece of clothing at that store.

So I think part of it is it doesn’t make sense to do some of these transactional or navigational results with the AI overview.

And some of it is Google doesn’t have the ability to monetize that behavior.

And they’re going to stick to and promote the things that allow them to continue to make money, especially in light of the fact that they’re about to lose money when the government comes in and breaks them up.

Yeah.

And other platforms have been testing this stuff out as well.

And like you say, everything’s led by consumer behavior at this point.

And looking at that, is it trustworthy when you’re given one product as an answer?

Because where has that come from?

Perplexity have been accused or it’s been observed that they would only put links to certain products if there was some kind of underlying affiliate deal with perplexity in there.

I think that’s been a closed gap, but still really interesting that from a consumer point of view, trust may not be there to say, well, you should make that decision.

You’re really good at researching stuff and giving me back informational stuff.

But right now, where we are with the consumer adoption is that maybe we’re not quite there yet or not trustworthy enough.

In the same way that, you know, the older folk, when the internet first came out, we’re extremely distrusting of entering credit cards into a website.

But now it’s normal place.

And I know we’ll talk about like ChatGPT and SearchGPT later.

I know that when I get sucked into ChatGPT because of that Chrome extension I have, and I’m looking for a product, I get mad because I don’t like, I don’t want it to tell me where else I can get that product.

I know exactly what product I want.

I don’t want them to recommend alternatives.

I want the product I want, and I want to know where I can buy it.

And that experience, that preferential, my preferential experience is still with Google in the traditional, traditional format.

Yeah.

So talking about trust.

Speaking of trust, there’s been a couple hit pieces put out and then some follow-up pieces.

This particular thing I think was sort of a hit piece.

CNN and USA Today have fake websites.

I believe Forbes Marketplace runs them.

Now, Lars Lofgren did this big piece on how USA Today and CNN have these, they’re parasite SEO sites.

It’s where you’re paying to have your news presented in a format that looks like it’s real news, attached to a real news site.

So that you can arguably or plausibly argue that this was covered in the news when in fact it was pay to play.

So it is entirely possible that the company that runs Forbes Marketplace is now running the pay to play section of CNN and USA Today.

When I was in the newspaper business, they were separate companies running them, but they were 100% fake native marketing or content marketing.

You pay, we run it, we don’t even write it, the editorial team refuses to look at it kind of stuff.

If it is the same company, I guess good for them.

I’m not sure.

I’m not sure why people still give credit and, and.

I’m not sure why people still believe the stuff that is in these sections, because it is clear that they are not in the primary section of the site.

If it’s not in the primary section of the site, if it’s not on the, the, the root subdomain.

So it’s not on dot, dot, dot.

If it’s on. imoney or.

Something else dot.

CNN.com or something else dot.

Forbes.com.

Then the editorial team is not touching that.

If your editorial team is not touching that.

It’s marketing.

And if it’s marketing, you can’t, you can’t assign any value to it because you don’t know who wrote it.

There’s, there’s bias.

Not that there’s bias in real news, but that’s another, that’s another conversation.

It’s just.

It’s probably true at this point in time.

And everybody’s all up in arms, which leads us into the next update, which happened.

Let’s see, about a month later.

Yeah.

Google went.

Yeah.

Go ahead.

So it’s interesting that just after that hit piece about a month later, coincidentally, Forbes and CNN and lots of Forbes marketplace.

Have that have affiliate based platforms and scale sites all get hit.

So it’s, it’s very interesting because then it creates the, it creates the questions of, was this manual or algorithmic?

We believe it’s manual.

Does it also hit, are the classifiers being hit?

Or is this Google is looking at hit pieces just like this?

And then maybe using them as an example.

There’s lots of different theories that are out there, especially on X about what thoughts are about what Google’s up to and what lessons they’re trying to teach smaller companies.

What would you think to that?

I think the classifiers that they use to define something as not helpful versus helpful were frequently fooled by these parasite sites association with these big respected brands that had bajillions of backlinks and tons of authority.

So, not only were they not getting hit, but they were easy to get out of that trap by changing the subdomain or changing the folder that the bad content lived in.

And because so many people were now calling that out and saying, Google, you know, what’s your issue?

Partially, I think because that HCU update was so bad and it destroyed so many businesses.

I would not be surprised if people are gearing up to sue Google.

So Google has to make a good faith effort to fix the problem and show that it was an accident and not something they did on purpose.

And also something that they’re actively trying to fix and their, their way of fixing it is if we can’t fix this algorithmically, we’re going to fix it manually.

And we’re just going to start slapping people, whether maybe they didn’t necessarily deserve it.

But this is one of those cases that if, if we think that you’re probably guilty of something, we just don’t know what you’re guilty of.

We’re going to slap you anyway.

And I think that’s what they’re doing.

They’re, they’re, they’re destroying businesses.

They are destroying small businesses, which is, which is bad.

And this can be made an example of.

Well, they’re going to destroy the affiliate business for the newspapers.

Oh yeah, not for them themselves.

Yeah.

Newspapers are on, newspapers are on the verge of a huge existential event.

And, I don’t know what they’re going to look like when they come out of it, but I guarantee you, they’re not going to look the same.

Interesting.

It’s also interesting that they’re showing a lesson, but then after that, another update happens, which is what a week ago now.

And they update documentation on Google site reputation, which of course covers all of the Forbes marketplace stuff now, of course, but it widens the interpretation of what site reputation abuse is.

And hopefully this is a lesson where it’s not going to be abused more in the future or heavier penalties will happen for that abuse.

They’re going to have to, because this has honestly been a problem for 10 years and I’m amazed that it took them this long to, to deal with it.

But this behavior is the only way some of these companies can monetize because ad revenues have been plummeting and the users don’t like experiences that are 90% ads.

So how else are they going to make money?

Because they can’t run print ads anymore.

The print product is dead effectively.

They’ve got to have some means of monetizing and this is what they came up with.

But then Google doesn’t like that because it lets them cheat the algorithm.

And it lets a lot of companies cheat the algorithm because now you can buy your way into getting those, those really sweet backlinks, which then boost up your other sites.

And it’s probably sites that are cheating in the first place that are using this cheat to cheat further.

It’s a lot of cheating.

But that’s what they’re doing.

And they’re just making the opportunity.

They’re trying to close the opportunity to do that now with this, well, with this update that happened last week.

But if you go to the next slide, not just this update, back in September, the end of September, which just cut off, I think this was the day of our last SEO update.

They’ve widened the definition of spam in general, spam policies in general, not just site reputation abuse, because this was written at the end of September and the slide before is only a week old.

But even then, and this is pre-core update that’s rolling out, they’ve updated all of this.

And this is, to me, reactive content from hearing from people, sites who’ve got decimated.

Yet, I feel like they’re widening the definition so that they can include the people who did get decimated when some of them shouldn’t have been, but still cornering another set of people who were abusing the situation and didn’t get decimated from HCU.

Obviously, it was a very complex update, this one, that made a lot of people upset in different ways.

And the more complex the update, the greater the likelihood that there’s going to be unintended consequences that are going to be unpleasant.

So, it’s, they’re clearly in defensive cleanup mode, and we’re all clearly in the what are you doing stop mode, especially this close to Christmas.

Some of the other updates they’re doing, let’s see.

Well, yeah, this is something that the audience can actually do something about.

So, all the other spam policy stuff and the site reputation abuse, we hope that no one in this audience is going through that because they’re not adopting that kind of strategy.

This is cool because one thing that has actually been bugging me for ages is that in Search Console, if you, for example, it just defaults to the last three months, right, of Search Appearance.

I always like looking at a year and then 16 months and winding it out.

And then when you go back and you go through Search Console, it forgets the choice that you’ve made.

This is, in short, making it remember what that choice is.

If you want to look at 12 months of data, it will stay that way until your session is complete.

So, have fun with that in Search Console.

What’s the next thing?

Oh, they’ve done something else, which is more breaking news.

I put related 12th of November, but we didn’t have time because this happened in the last 12 hours.

Search Console recommendations have been rolling out for some sites, larger sites.

We were able to see it.

But now, overnight, in Europe anyway, or this morning for you, Carolyn, they’re now rolled that out everywhere.

So, if you’ve got Search Console access, you should now be able to access this screenshot that I’m seeing here, which gives you, you know, actionable tips on how to improve content and tech on the site via Google’s messaging.

Very cool.

Google’s also doing a thing where they’re announcing to retailers that Google is effectively replacing your category pages by being the category page.

They’re really expanding the transactional e-commerce types of queries in the user experience, probably because they almost need to justify their continued existence.

But I don’t want to get too far into that.

The point is, they’re prioritizing, like, product grids, faceted search.

They’re reducing, basically, the category page visibility on your site in favor of keeping people within Google.

This is good because it could get some more of your products in front of people.

It’s bad because it’s getting your products in front of people next to that product on someone else’s site.

So it’s, I think the moral of the story here is understand that your category pages may not be getting the level of visibility they used to.

Your category pages are still very important to your business because the crawlers are using them to discover and verify the existence of various products and to understand how those products fit into your product offering.

So don’t not have category pages and don’t ignore them.

So don’t have them.

Just understand that they’re not going to drive a ton of traffic.

It is very important you make sure your product schema is buttoned up, that you’ve got your shopping feed, your product feed buttoned up.

The e-commerce things that you’ve been doing, you still need to do.

This is a shift in priority and understanding about the purpose of what your category pages are now.

And the devil’s in the detail of the products, right?

Oh, yeah.

100%.

If you’re not filling out your product pages and you’re not filling out your schema and you don’t have a product feed, you’re probably not even going to get into these Google category pages.

So you have to make sure that you’re doing all of those things if you’re going to stay competitive.

Some more news on October 2nd, Bing generative search experience rolled out, which is very similar to, like, Search GPT, where you ask it a more natural language type of question.

And it does a bunch of searches and it figures out what’s the right information, what’s the consensus answer.

Then it synthesizes all of the information it gets from those various sources and presents you with a narrative, a story that answers your question, hopefully in excellent detail.

The selling point of this is presumably that their AI is better than everybody else’s AI, which is what everybody’s saying at this point in time.

So I suggest that if you’re interested, go check it out, see what it knows, ask it some questions.

Just remember to ask it detailed natural language questions.

We can’t search with AI the way we’ve been searching with Google.

It’s not puppies.

It’s, I have an active lifestyle and I’m not home much.

What’s the best kind of puppy for me?

You have to ask it specific questions if you want to get good answers.

If you give it a keyword, it’s not going to know what your intent is and what kind of answer you want.

You have to be specific and communicate with the AI like you would ask a question of a person because people aren’t mind readers and neither is that machine.

Yeah, within 24 hours of Bing saying something, wouldn’t you know, Google says that they’re doing something quite similar.

So they’re rolling out AI organized search results pages, which is kind of in a weird way trying to conquer the challenge you just said about just taking a keyword, but having instead of natural language, they’re trying to combine or bridge those two by organizing answers in that way.

But unfortunately for Google, they’re gambling more so with this is one answer to the question that you’re asking.

Whereas I feel the other platforms like you ChatGPT, SearchGPT and Bing go away and create more of a consensus.

You called it before when we were chatting rather than a, well, we’re going to make that decision for you.

That was, that was something I found quite interesting, but I feel for everyone in the audience, everyone should be searching, not just testing out their own sites and where they are visible, but using it as an end user.

And then you’ll, you’ll probably find after a month or two, you’ll understand that there you’ll naturally form a different way of behaving and experiencing SearchGPT than you would with Google.

I always say you might Google a bit of length and give it a break and, and use something else and see how it changes the way you operate as a searcher.

Um, but that was interesting to see, cause I’m seeing a lot of AI organized search results now.

It’s interesting that they started with recipes and meal searches, because I feel like those are, everyone’s a little bit different and they have different flavors and different, you know, there’s just differences about them that make them not the same.

So how do you choose the one that’s the best because especially with a recipe taste is a matter of taste.

How do you say this one is definitely better than the others?

I mean, unless they’re talking about putting glue on things, which obviously was not a good idea.

Yeah.

Well, I remember about 18 months ago, I was a guest on a previous SEO update with Jono and we were talking about, you know, all the upcoming AI technology.

And I interestingly use the recipe as an example of a problem that these LLMs face.

Cause I said, if I’m searching for spaghetti bolognese, weirdly, I prefer Google’s 10 native search links.

Cause I’ll probably look at all 10 and I will make the decision on which recipe I want personalized to me.

Whereas on AI models, it’s going to say, this is the recipe based on everything I’ve searched with.

But how do you know that I like carrots?

Like now that 18 months have passed, you should know how to behave going., I want a spaghetti bolognese recipe, but remember that I really like carrots.

And adding that, like you’re saying, as much detail as you can to the prompt.

It’s like a super long tail search, essentially.

But I find it has been answering those questions and it has been dealing with the problems, but you’re right.

It still won’t know which spaghetti bolognese is for me and which ones for you.

Cause they are going to be different.

Yeah.

Like I will, I I’ve gotten in the habit now saying things like I want, I’m looking for a, I’m looking for a wine to go with this, but I really prefer dry wines.

Or I’m looking for, I’m looking for a wine to go with X, Y, or Z and don’t forget, I don’t like this brand.

So it’s, I’m, I’m training, I’ve been conditioning myself to give very specific questions and very specific answers or criteria for how I’m searching because I want it to be very specific in the responses that it gives to me.

But I don’t know that everybody is quite there yet.

So that’s an interesting thing.

About the same time they announced that they were going to do the AI organized search results page.

They Google, they Google officially launched ads now in the AI overview.

So this is like October 3rd.

So, you know, six weeks ago or so.

It’s interesting, you know, getting the ads, the AI, the AI overviews feels a little, not sure how I feel about.

Yeah, it does feel a bit dirty, but like you were just saying before, is you want a more specific answer.

Then it is more appropriate for Google to then, not appropriate, relevant to then display an ad or serve some sort of ad in context to what you’re searching for.

But that’s going to, I think it’s going to still be a while and it’s going to be quite difficult for them to still generate the revenue that they are in the native SERP right now.

Which is going to be quite interesting, which I guess leads us on to the next story of Google doing their blog, which I’ll put in the chat here, offering a couple of updates on the new ways of searching.

So , they’re like advertising how you should change the way that you search from their own model that’s been that we’ve all been used to for a generation, including looking at pictures and videos, which, leads to products, which, of course, is through ads and everything.

So you can see that the direction they’re leading us through.

But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t useful.

I mean, I’m now using Google Lens quite a few times a week now, and it’s not just about what product is that.

I’m either looking for a manual for an old product or seeing if something apart’s for sale or looking at where something is.

But I’m also using it to circle around a screenshot and then use that to bring out text to do something else.

So it does have a lot of uses.

What it’s going to do with all that data is really more interesting.

What it’s going to do with this in the next year.

Yeah, I know we’ve used it looking for major big appliances where we used to have to stand there and try to type in the code, the really, really long code for that specific appliance to try to find more information or comparison shop prices.

Now you can just take a picture of it and it reads it and it goes, oh, okay, these are all the places you can get and this place is on sale.

So it’s really interesting and a little scary because you hook this up to, like, your metaglasses that can take pictures of things and talk in your ear.

And you can just start real-time doxing people.

Like, it’ll identify faces and go, oh, I know who this guy is and tells you exactly this is where he lives and this is what his mom had for breakfast.

It’s all very scary.

It’s very, very scary.

I mean, I’ve got the metaglasses and in the UK you can’t do that yet.

So there are some GDPR laws that are layered over the product themselves.

I don’t know what you can do in the US.

You can do it.

Interesting.

It is very interesting.

That creates legal issues, right?

But Google’s got health legal issues, don’t they?

Tell me.

Google’s got a lot of legal problems going on right now.

So I don’t know if anybody remembers, but there was an open AI.

Well, no.

Google was being sued for being a monopoly.

So it was an antitrust lawsuit.

I was confusing my lawsuits there.

They’ve got a lot going on.

Because basically they’re a monopoly and they use their position in the marketplace to stifle competition and to prevent other people from even getting a toehold in the marketplace.

So it’s, you know, all Google all the time.

The government came in and said, yeah, you can’t do that.

We’re going to break you up.

So if you remember from that article I wrote a couple months ago, there were two different ways that the remedy, which is the punishment, could go.

They could do like they did with Microsoft, where they didn’t break Microsoft up into constituent parts.

They broke it or they applied restrictions and rules about how Microsoft could do business, which really effectively hamstrung them in the marketplace.

But they didn’t break them up.

Or Google is going to get the AT&T treatment, where AT&T, which was Atlantic Telegram and Telephone, I think that’s what it was, basically ran all of the telecommunications in the United States.

And the government came in and said, you have too much power and you are preventing other people from not only coming in and trying to run businesses that compete with you, but you’re preventing other people from innovating and making this technology better.

We had the same T1 lines from the 1920s, basically.

From when my grandpa started working at the phone company 70 years ago until the 90s, when they finally started doing digital lines.

It was a long time before things changed.

So AT&T got broken up into different parts and the company was really never quite the same, but it did allow for a lot of innovation, which was great.

A lot more companies, a lot more competition that kept prices down.

So, you know, there’s good and there’s bad, depending on which end of the punishment you’re on.

Anyway, the DOJ has decided that it wants to break up Google.

They want to make them spin off Chrome, Google’s like, oh, we don’t make any money on Chrome anyway.

No, you don’t make any money on Chrome.

You give it away and you give it away because you get a lot of click data from that.

You get a lot of information that you then use to make other business decisions.

So this is really going to disrupt their information chain and make it so that they don’t have this chokehold on all of the data that they’re using to make search better, make decisions about product development.

They have so much data about everything that we do.

It makes it so that they can run their business and without exclusive access to that data, it’s going to really radically change how they do business.

The other things that they wanted to do is making it impossible for them to do exclusive licensing with, like, cell phone providers, because there are cell phone providers that have licensed Chrome or licensed, you know, the Google stuff.

And they can only have the Google stuff on their phone.

It is a violation of that license for them to put Safari on the phone or to ship it with Opera installed.

They just can’t do it.

And the government saying you can’t you can’t force people to choose you or somebody else.

You know, you’ve got to be you can license it to them, but you can’t tell them that they have to be exclusive.

It’s like it’s like trying to date and immediately go in with the we’re going to go on a first date.

But by the way, we’re already married and you can’t date anybody else.

That’s that’s not how it works.

So now that the proposed remedy has been issued, now Google can appeal.

They couldn’t file an appeal until the remedy has been issued.

So I don’t expect.

And they will.

It’s going to be this is going to have to go through the courts.

There’s going to be a lot of appeals.

I wouldn’t expect any of this to take immediate effect.

We’ve got a new administration.

Yeah, you got Elon Musk coming in with with the DOGE.

And who knows how that’s going to affect what the Department of Justice is doing.

We don’t know what Trump thinks.

We don’t we don’t know any of these things.

There’s a lot of factors at play.

So it’s interesting.

However, I don’t think it’s going to change anything in the next six months.

I would expect at least a year before there’s any any reasonable outcome to this.

Okay, well, what else has happened because there’s still I think we’re not even halfway through, are we?

And we’ve got we’ve we’ve got to go through time.

So let’s crack on ChatGPT rolled out Search in the US.

So do we need to explain much of this?

This is the search version of ChatGPT.

It’s more behavior around the trying to introduce you through keywords.

So when I got first access to it, it just said, here’s a few examples.

It just said Jeremy Clarkson.

And it gave not a search result page, but all the information that I needed to know about Jeremy Clarkson.

And that’s fine.

But it’s a good interface, again, more informational, in my opinion, more useful for informational intent.

And then now for everyone else’s attention on the 31st of October, they opened up from just the wait list and, you know, journos and stuff like that to everyone.

So if you have a ChatGPT Pro account, you can now access Search by going to chatgpt.com.

And then there’s a little globe icon where the search bar is instead of the magnifying glass icon.

So, yeah, go and give it a crack.

It’s fun.

If you have a paid account, it showed me a message and said, hey, we’ve got a Chrome extension.

Would you like to install the Chrome extension?

Like a dumb gum.

I said, OK.

And now it’s completely hijacked Chrome.

So where I used to be able to search for Google, search Google from the address bar at the top of Chrome.

Now it goes into SearchGPT instead, which is frustrating for me because sometimes I actually do want to search Google.

But it’s it’s really modified how it’s modified my search behavior, what I type into it.

And it’s also interesting because as you do those searches, you can pop open the citation sidebar and see what sites it’s taking the information from.

That will be useful for SEOs because rather than just trying to get into be number one for a certain term.

You want to see what data it’s taking from which sites and figure out why are they more authoritative than I am?

Why are why is this particular site talking about this company when I would really prefer that they talk about me?

And then you can reverse engineer how you can get your citations included in that rather than, you know, your competitors or someone that you don’t feel is as knowledgeable on that subject as you are.

So it’s going to be good for SEOs.

And I think if you’re I think you should probably, you know, test it out.

I wouldn’t ignore it.

Definitely do not ignore it.

I would say like a car brand, test them all out.

You know, there’s quite a few out there.

They all work in different ways and one will be personal to you.

But back in non-AI land, because there are stories in the non-AI world that happen now and again now, Google Merchant Center lets you name your shipping policies.

So this will apply to maybe a small set of e-commerce site owners who have multiple brands that have different shipping policies.

Maybe you sell a T-shirt with a 30-day refund policy and different shipping policy because it comes from a different place.

And as well as that, you’ll have, I don’t know, furniture that will have a completely different shipping because it’s, you know, different weights and all of those different things that go into it.

But now Merchant Center has been nice to expand all of that so you can really scale what you need to rather than have a flat refund policy and shipping policy.

I keep getting mixed up because they are interchangeable refund and shipping, but they kind of have the same issues and hurdles when it comes to interacting.

What else has happened?

Back to AI.

Yeah, so Google changed around a little bit of their team.

This is just an announcement about that.

I don’t know how interesting this is for or how this affects most of our lives, but it’s worth a mention that the guy who was there, whose name I would say, but I’m pretty sure I would butcher it.

And I don’t want to do that.

And I don’t want to do that.

But it has been replaced by Nick Fox, who I don’t really know much of what he, much of what his plans are, but apparently he’s really good with AI.

And that’s why they’re pivoting to him because they’re really going all in on the AI as they should, as everyone is at this point in time.

Google’s also changed the site links box.

Did you even use that, Alex?

Because I don’t think I did.

I never did.

I would.

I don’t know.

Again, maybe it’s just me.

I don’t know if I, because I do, I think differently as an SEO because I like, I can’t look at a website like a normal person, for example.

And like this, I don’t think I can see a search result like a normal person and therefore interact with one like a normal person, even though I know what a normal person would want to do.

Me personally, I never used that site link search box.

I just did the, is it raining near you?

I clicked the link.

I went into the site.

And then I searched from there where I needed to be because I felt like that was the most relevant place.

And like you were saying, this is essentially the site colon search operator for people who don’t know how to use search operators with type and with commands.

So I don’t think it will be missed.

I don’t think, I don’t think anyone in the chat here is going to go, oh no, it’s, it’s gone.

Whatever, whatever am I going to do with my business?

What’s not, well, it is going to change some of the reporting, I guess, on search console.

So if you’re, if you’re accustomed to looking for that and you like it, it’s not going to be there anymore.

But I wouldn’t, I don’t think this is going to be a big deal changer.

Yeah.

Deal rucker.

Google’s also updating the Google trends documentation has been updated.

They’ve got, they’re analyzing term popularity and trends over time.

The trending now tool is getting a little bit of an update.

If you’ve been using Google trends and you’re curious about the documentation, documentation has been dually updated.

Please check if you are inclined, if you don’t care, that’s cool too.

I do like Google trends.

I do tell a lot of people who aren’t SEOs, like editorial journalist type people, take a look at Google trends.

Good for that stuff, especially good for things that don’t have historical search data.

So if you’re looking for keyword volumes, all those keyword volume tools are using historical data.

Google trends is using current data.

So if it’s a thing that didn’t exist before, there will be no search data, volume data for it in a lot of these tools.

But Google trends will have data.

And that’s one of the things that’s very nice.

Oh, let’s see.

Oh, this is me too.

Core Web Vitals, also documentation updated.

INP is something that they’re talking about now, which is Interaction to Next Paint.

It’s the latency for user interactions.

This is what replaced the First Input Delay or FID.

So if you were, again, accustomed to using FID as a metric, it’s gone.

It’s replaced with INP.

This has been coming for a while.

But if you need to tune up or refresh your memory on how it works, this documentation is a great place to check.

And I’ve added both the documentation links into the chat there.

Oh, cool.

Thank you.

Yeah, ChatGPT Search powered by Bing’s index.

So people have been noticing that a lot of the ChatGPT information is all powered via Bing, which is great.

And obviously, why not?

Because it’s all kind of owned by the same group and so on.

But what’s important for everyone here to notice is that maybe people should, if they’re not focusing on Bing Webmaster Tools thus far, you should look at it a bit more.

Because Bing doesn’t just follow what Google does, they have their own tweaks and quirks and things that work.

And getting more visibility out in ChatGPT, you would want to do as much right in Bing Webmaster Tools as you need to.

So I would say get involved in that as well.

And also good to note that Yoast SEO Premium has indexnow included and enabled by default, which helps the indexing of a page now, doesn’t it?

It helps quicker indexation of indexing of a page that’s been modified or has been created very recently.

Yeah, immediately.

Yeah, and it’s only in Bing.

Well, it’s in Bing and some other, and the index and things that aren’t in the U.S.

But Google doesn’t use indexnow.

So it is great to know that if you’ve got Premium, not only is it already installed and turned on, it’s already configured.

So there’s literally nothing you need to do to take advantage of that.

If you’re using free and you do not yet have Premium, then I hear there’s a Black Friday sale coming up in just a couple days that you might want to take advantage of.

That’s what I hear.

Interesting.

So Google AI overviews are doing another thing that may or may not be cool.

It’s got a highlight feature, which I can only describe as search inception.

You do a search for one thing.

It gives you a partial part of an answer.

It may recommend something.

You can then highlight that thing, and then you’re searching in there.

But there’s two things to think about here.

A, that’s quite cool that it does a search within a search.

But importantly, it knows your intent and your original search or the first search in the chain.

So the deeper down you go, it’s starting to understand where you’re trying to end up based on the highlight that you’re doing and the net search that you’re performing.

But as an SEO and site owners out there, the more information, the more honed down someone’s getting in their search result, the more your site may be visible in that search and in that context.

Because every single search you have to do, it kind of, the LLM has to go out and find that consensus again.

So it’s kind of, if you’re searching three times, it’s kind of doing, it’s looking potentially at 30 sites to bring back this one answer to you with a consensus bit of information.

So it’s really cool that.

I like that and haven’t used it yet, but I have a feeling I will.

One of the interesting things that I think is happening.

So there was this OpenAI on Reddit and Ask Me Anything where they were specifically answering questions about SEO for ChatGPT search.

The information that came out of it was probably somewhat expected in that they rely primarily on Bing.

They’ve got some other sources.

They focus on natural language queries.

It’s an ad-free experience.

These are mostly things that a lot of us knew already.

They’re trying very hard to reduce hallucinations and introduce personalization within dynamic web pages.

Also good to know.

The hallucinations, we knew they were going to try to reduce because everyone complained about them.

So that’s not terribly surprising.

Aligning Bing with natural language queries.

That the middleman of the AI is taking, it’s using your natural language and it’s picking out the important things to search for.

Because if you watch it, if you ask it a question and then watch it search because it’ll flash what it’s searching for very quickly.

You can see that it is still taking keywords, but it’s picking out keywords from what you just said based on what it thinks will get the best results for what you’re searching for.

You no longer have to think, okay, I want to ask about this and I want to ask about this and this and this and this.

And you don’t have to formulate your query anymore because the AI is processing your language, your natural speech patterns to determine what your intent is.

So unless you’re one of those people who cannot articulate what you want, which to be fair, people like that exist.

It should be very good at answering those questions.

Now, in addition to reading this, if you’re curious about it, this is available in search engine journal and we’ll have the link available to you later.

If you have ChatGPT, consider asking it for information about how it searches for things and be specific when you ask your questions and ask probing iterative questions.

So, okay, if you do this, then what happens when this occurs?

How do you handle that?

So don’t give it two open-ended questions, but give it like scenarios and tell it what you understand.

Ask it if you have that correct.

You know, have a conversation with it like you have conversation with a smart person that you’re trying to get information out of.

You know, and that is going to help you optimize better for these new AI interfaces.

Cool.

So what else has happened?

Because we’ve got 11 slides in four minutes.

Oh, okay.

Google rolled out the November 2024 core algorithm update.

There’s not a whole lot we can say about that except buckle up, kids.

It’s going to get bumpy.

Yeah, it was at the beginning of the month, so I imagine it will take about another week, maybe something like that within the next week to roll out.

Just a time for last Friday, because why not, right?

Exactly, exactly.

Something to discuss in December or January’s update once we see data.

What else has happened?

Google updated their ML courses.

ML, of course, is machine learning to help users build SEO understanding.

If you want to learn how Google wants you to look at ML and large language models, automated machine learning, and then responsible AI, you can go take these modules and you will be Google trained on how Google wants you to think about these things.

Do you want to know, you know, do you want to be a Google robot?

You know, it depends on how you look at it.

It’s useful to understand what Google wants us to think, and then look at what the other places are saying to you, and, you know, do my own synthesizing of the data and processing that, just so that you have a really, I think, well-rounded view of what the different companies are doing and what their different perspectives are.

Which is interesting, because Microsoft also did the exact same thing, and they’re giving AI-based SEO tips.

So I’ve added all the links here, because we shouldn’t be going into them too heavily.

From an SEO perspective, it’s kind of the, you know, the same messaging that we’ve been giving out before all of these platforms existed.

Look at user intent.

Look at search intent.

Use natural language.

Just do all of those things that you’ll actually be doing.

Don’t abuse it.

Yeah.

Be helpful.

Answer the questions.

And improve that EEAT.

This is kind of a throwback to what we were talking about before, where the DOJ wants to force Google to sell Chrome and unbundle Android, and I feel like we already beat this one to death.

The new thing here is that Google has responded, and they criticized the proposal as a radical overreach beyond the case’s legal issues.

Government, Google complaining about government overreach makes me chuckle.

That’s a long story, but we’ll leave that one there.

Let’s see.

And Google has since as of the 20th, which was just last week, has issued a statement saying that they do both site-wide and page-level ranking signals.

So you can’t say that, you know, specific pages are affecting the whole site with certainty.

Is it possible?

Yes.

Is it for sure?

For sure?

No.

Because they do have different levels.

They’ll do, and they have them both on the same site.

They could have special pages on your site that they like, but they hate the rest of your site, or they love the rest of your site, and there’s specific pages that they hate.

They’re not going to treat everything as just a collection of single pages or just a whole site kind of grade.

There’s definitely a combination there, so you’re going to have to figure out what it is you’re suffering from.

Cool.

And that’s pretty much it.

But before we leave SEO and AI news, there’s been other stuff like Google adding two best practices per product markup, which is fine because that’s all in Yoast SEO for WooCommerce or Yoast SEO for Shopify already.

Google’s now recommending high-resolution favicons, which I’ve always kind of recommended anyway.

It’s always nice to not just have a 16×16 pixel, but also have the 48x48s and so on, just so you can think of things like iPad bookmarks.

That’s when I first started remembering it and when everything became an icon for itself.

So that’s another thing.

Even though AI usage and advertising is harder in AI platforms, Microsoft and I think Google as well have both shown that revenue has been up something about 18%, at least for Microsoft.

I think Google was a good 15 to 20 as well.

And lastly, Google is retiring the Search Console page experience report, which no one was using anyway.

So.

Well, I mean, I was, and I’m very upset about this, but I suspect I’ll live.

I was using it.

I like it.

Yeah, yeah.

It was nice to look at, especially when it was a good report, right?

But what’s happened in the WordPress world in the last six weeks?

A couple of things.

Oh, fun.

So I think a lot of people have heard there’s been some legal wranglings between Automatic and the guy who founded WordPress and a company called WP Engine.

And we’re, you know, we’re neither interested in nor in a position to comment on the merits of those legal cases.

But I know that I’ve heard feedback at conferences where businesses are concerned that this is somehow going to cause WordPress to become unstable or collapse as a platform.

I don’t think that’s at all.

That’s not on the table.

So if you’re thinking, we’re going to have to move off of WordPress and move to Drupal or something similar and replatform our entire site, I would catch a bubble, take a break.

This is not that.

So while it’s interesting to follow, if you’re into that stuff, I don’t think this is going to be an existential crisis for WordPress itself.

And I would like everyone to feel reassured.

Yeah, chill.

Everything, the product itself is fine and just as concrete as it was before.

But talking about the product itself, WordPress release 6.7 called Rollins, it debuted 2025, which is the new theme.

And it did lots of other cool stuff in there.

I know that Repository, which I’m just going to paste in here, did a nice little rundown of things that’s introduced in there.

I would say most of it is either performance related or theme related.

So unless you’re using a full site editor at the moment, which probably a lot of you aren’t, it’s not too much of a huge thing.

So just think of the performance enhancements and speed enhancements.

So with that, there’s one main bit of Yoast news.

And that is that our AI generate function is live.

So if you are interested, I should have made that stop dancing.

If you have Premium, you can use AI generate to help you come up with meta titles, meta descriptions, headlines, I think.

So it should be helpful if you’re stuck.

Sometimes when you’re writing about the same thing over and over and over and over again, you run out of different ways to write the same headline over and over and over again.

And that’s where this AI can be super helpful.

So I hope that if you have premium, you’ve tested it out and you’re interested in trying it.

This is the Shopify.

It’s live.

It would help if I…

So many products.

So many products.

So little time.

I’m not yet halfway through my second coffee.

So I blame my caffeination levels.

But if you’ve got Shopify…

Play it out.

Honestly, for Shopify, it’s even more important.

Because how many times do you have products that are really similar and you’re struggling to come up with different headlines and different descriptions for them?

Because they are so similar.

So for Shopify especially, I think this is a great option.

All right.

We’re at two events.

WordCamp Netherlands.

If you’re more near the Netherlands.

And WordCamp Asia, which is in the Philippines, I believe.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you’re there or nearby, please go along.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We’ll have scans.

We’ll have games and stuff like that up for grabs.

So be sure to meet some of us there.

And lastly, there’s a Black Friday sale.

I don’t know if any of you are aware that there’s an event once a year called Black Friday.

And usually it’s when people out there do sales for their products and services.

We have one.

And it’s starting on Thursday until the end of Monday, I believe.

So I’m going to real quick jump to our next webinar is Monday, December 16th, which is pretty close.

But we need to get it in before Christmas.

And now we’re going to jump to the Q&A because I said we were going to go fast and we didn’t.

So.

Yeah.

I wasn’t really waiting because there’s so many questions.

So we need to, well, get this in.

Yes.

All right.

The first question for both of you is with the rise of the AI-driven search models like SearchGPT, do you feel link building becomes different for SEO?

Who wants to jump in on that?

I can do it real quick because we’ll answer this.

So link building, you’re using your link building to build up your expertise and your, the EEAT, right?

So you’re looking for links and not necessarily fully qualified links, but citations from expert websites that are authoritative in your topic.

So just, just the cheap links are not good enough.

They’re not going to help you focus on high quality citations.

Even if they don’t link to you, you want them to mention your brand, build your brand.

That’s what the links need to focus on is building the authority, the authoritativeness of your brand.

Yeah.

And weirdly, anchor based text links for targets are maybe become a thing of the past because everything’s going so sophisticated that it knows things like not just intent, but entities.

Branded search is always, this is going back to marketing 101, which is what all of these platforms have to base themselves around though.

Link building may change over the years, but PR and digital PR in this sense and branded citations, branded visibility is always the way to go because it all trickles from that.

Yeah.

Next question, Julian.

Next.

All right.

The next question is from Robert.

Robert.

And he asks what specific SEO components or plans need to be built or refined and executed within our e-commerce sites to maximize our search results to display an AI?

I would say product details.

What would you say?

Product details.

So the AIs are very good at extracting text from the page.

They’re not necessarily looking at your schema like Google traditionally does.

So I would focus on the text and the descriptions on the page to make sure that you’ve got things well articulated.

Don’t rely on the users to look at the images and make those connections in their head.

This does go back a little bit to like really old school SEO where we’re making sure we’re saying the things that we want to rank for.

Let’s still do that.

Make sure you’re articulating exactly the messages that you want the AIs to pick up on.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Thanks.

There we go.

Around AI.

Because our next one is also around AI.

Isabel is asking how to measure brand appearance in AI search models like SearchGPT and Perplexity.

There isn’t anything by Google quite yet.

But I would say that I know that Semrush are doing a lot in AI overview visibility.

I know that in terms of visibility that’s different.

I know that in terms of visits you can actually see some of this stuff in Google Analytics.

I think there was another question in the chat asked about that.

Whilst we were in this update I went into analytics just to make sure.

If you go into acquisition and then traffic acquisition session stroke medium you can go in there.

You can make your own part of the customized part of the report.

But if you just search for like chat in there or GPT it’ll come up.

So I’m seeing that live right now.

And I also tested with Perplexity and stuff.

So there are ways of measuring it.

At least at the moment before Google Analytics probably takes all that away and says not provided again.

But let’s see what happens at the time.

All right.

Thanks.

Okay.

Then we’ve got another question in our last minute coming in by Johnny.

Should you have a blog section on an e-commerce site that is regularly updated?

Are there any benefits of doing that?

Yeah.

It can attract links from places that have good expertise.

So ideally what you want.

The reason you’ve got the blog is because you’re you control your message and hopefully you’re providing good information to other places.

So a lot of the news stories that we cite in this webinar are news stories that were on like Search Engine Journal or Search Engine Land.

One of those industry publications.

Right.

They’re frequently writing stories based on information they’re getting from the blogs at Google or the blogs at these companies or the blog that somebody did a case study on.

So what you’re doing is you’re writing this stuff on your blog with the hope of attracting these great links because you want other people to write about what you’ve written and link to you, which is going to help your authority.

It’s going to help your visibility.

It’s going to provide backlinks to your site and it’s going to basically boost your brand.

That’s what the function of these blogs is supposed to be.

All right.

Well, thanks a lot for that answer.

I was speechless because I covered it all.

You did.

If I’m not saying anything, you know, Carolyn has done a spot on answer.

And I actually see that with that answer, we are exactly at 5 p.m. my time, at least.

I know everyone’s visiting from all over the world, so it’s not everywhere 5 p.m.

But at least we’re at the end of this hour.

So thanks, everyone that attended.

It was great seeing all the interactions in the chats, the questions coming in.

And also a huge thank you to you, Alex and Carolyn.

It was, again, a lot of news that we had to cover.

So I’m happy that we have our first SEO update already in a couple of weeks.

So no six-week wait this time.

And indeed, make sure to watch our Black Friday deals because they are coming up.

And hope to see you all next time.

Bye-bye.