SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 📊 Google Search Console's AI reports now available globally. These reports, as well as the search generative AI controls, have been rolling out for a few months and Google confirmed that all sites now have access. 📈 Google Trends adds new category filters. On the Explore page, Google Trends now allows users to filter trends by category, even if the user doesn't include a...
11 days ago • 4 min read
SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 🔁 Google rolls out google.com/goto, a new passthrough URL in SERPs. These redirecting URLs are likely to prevent third-party scrapers like SerpAPI, whom Google are currently battling in court. 😵💫 Google replaces site reputation abuse penalties in Europe. Google will no longer issue manual actions for site reputation abuse in Europe. These pages may be separated so that...
18 days ago • 6 min read
SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 📊 Google's generative UI expands from AI Mode into AI Overviews. This generative UI introduces interactive tools, visualisations and simulations directly into the search results page. ✅ Google's August 2026 spam update began and was completed. The rollout lasted a little more than 2 days, similar to the previous spam update in June 2026. It's still early days but this...
25 days ago • 6 min read
SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 🏷️ Claude adds watermarks to AI-generated content. This new transparency will be added to all content including text, code and images and is driven by the EU AI Act's Article 50. 🤖 Microsoft Clarity adds a new scrape-to-referral ratio metric. This metric compares the scraping activity from AI crawlers with the referral traffic received from those crawlers. 📈 AI traffic to...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 📊 Microsoft Clarity introduces branded and non-branded AI query data. Queries will be labelled and can be filtered by branded or non-branded. Share of Authority can also be broken down by branded and non-branded queries. ☁️ Cloudflare adds AEO visibility dashboard to its AEO suite. This new dashboard joins the existing Agent Readiness tool and includes metrics such as...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 🏷️ AI-generated content must be labelled clearly according to new EU guidelines. The EU is pushing digital transparency that expands outside of just images and includes published text that doesn't receive human review. 📊 Social media properties rollout globally for Google Search Console. These new platform properties were announced a few weeks ago, and users can now...
about 2 months ago • 7 min read
SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know ✍️ 5.3% of top-ranking pages are AI-generated. This study dispels some of the beliefs that 100% AI-generated content can't rank on Google. AI-generated content was present in every ranking position across 331k analysed pages. 📊 More than 40% of US searches trigger AI Overviews.This study from Similarweb also shows that Google search length has increased by 5.4% since AI...
about 2 months ago • 8 min read
SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 💰 Ads now appear in nearly 30% of AI Mode queries. Interestingly, CPC appears to be the strongest determining factor, with ad presence increasing to 53.56% with a CPC of $10 or higher. 🥈 Google is now the second-most cited domain in AI Mode. This increase in the last few months is primarily driven by Google Business Profiles in local searches and Product Knowledge Panels...
2 months ago • 5 min read
SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 📊 Google Search Console adds search tracking for social media with new properties. These properties help creators understand which search terms lead users to their content across Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube. ⚙️ The generative AI controls in Google Search Console appear to be expanding outside of the UK. The controls were first launched earlier this month in the UK,...
2 months ago • 4 min read