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SEO updates you need to know
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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. |
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Google Images gets a discovery-driven redesign. This new UI includes a 'For You' page, the ability to create collections and real-time updates. It looks a lot like Pinterest and will be rolling out to US desktop users in the coming weeks. |
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Google loses DMCA claims against SerpApi. The claims alleged that SerpApi bypassed Google's SearchGuard anti-bot system to scrape copyrighted content, while SerpApi says that public search data should be accessible. |
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Search with Candour podcast
SEO news from June 2026
Season 4: Episode 81
Jack Chambers-Ward recaps the biggest SEO news from June 2026 on Search With Candour.
Jack covers Google’s “Preferred Sources” expanding from Discover into AI Mode and AI Overviews, the new Search Console generative AI performance reporting and contrasts it with Bing Webmaster Tools’ expanded AI visibility reporting.
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SearchNorwichXL ticket ballot
Apply for a FREE SearchNorwichXL ticket
We're giving away some free tickets for our upcoming conference, SearchNorwichXL.
So, if you've seen the amazing line up of speakers and want to visit Norwich in September, now is your chance to apply!
Fill out the form below with your details and we'll be announcing the winners in August.
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Last week's SEO tips
You put hard times on GEO and the SEO family.
The biggest mistake I see in SEO/GEO at the moment is making a whole strategy out of a platform technical shortcoming. About 50% of our leads at the moment are 'plz halp, traffic down' because of this.
This is an example of the type of thing that happens when you decide a programmatic listicle-type content approach is a whole strategy.
✅ Yes, listicles work(ed) really well.
✅ Yes, AI platforms love(d) listicles.
🤔 Do you think that is how they want it to work? No, of course not.
📉 So what happens when this is fixed and you've built your business on top of it?
"It's in his interest to say this," some GEO bros say, pointing out I run an agency. Well, as Charlie Whitworth said this morning, from an agency perspective it's actually great for me; my clients are having competitors self-own, and we get more leads for help than ever; more than I could possibly ever work with.
I'm posting because, like always, I would rather businesses didn't get burned by SEO/GEO and the industry tried to self-police its sometimes rather shady reputation.
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You don't know what Clarity is.
This is super cool: Microsoft Clarity launched Topic Insights, which is a free AI visibility tool that shows how often your content is actually cited in AI-generated answers, how much it influences those answers, and which competitors are being cited alongside (or instead of) you.
Rather than just measuring visibility, it gives you prioritised content gaps and actions to close the distance.
Take note, Google!
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Hard times are when your GA4 doesn't work.
"Yes, we have GA set up," I get told by the client, still full of youthful hope. Unfortunately, they lack the most important thing to give them useful information ⤵️
A measurement plan 🗺️
For years at Candour, one of our first steps has been to create a measurement plan before we touch Google Analytics. This process involves defining success, what on-site actions contribute to it, and, importantly, what doesn't matter (just because you can doesn't mean you should).
So I'm delighted to see that Bengü Sarıca Dinçer has published another great piece of analytics and measurement on Search Engine Journal talking about measurement plans!
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"Hey, an LLM took your place." That's hard times.
This is not good SEO. You cannot just 'tell Claude' to do these things and expect results. I see posts like this all the time and want to break down why:
🔥Pull your top 10 pages from GSC:
Obviously this isn't an SEO action, you're just using AI to pull a basic report, but I would suggest it still isn't a great idea. Apart from paying for tokens for a task that takes a few seconds, using AI in this step introduces the risk of hallucinations appearing in your data. There is no point adding that risk when there is no benefit.
❓Add 3 contextual internal links to each
I guess "why?" is the question here. If this is an 'optimisation', at what point does it stop becoming an optimisation? Should I run it again and add 3 more? Any page can always have 3 more?
Obviously, our key pages should be linked prominently. We should be linking users to where they are likely to need to go in their journey.
From a PageRank perspective, adding additional links can reduce importance of existing links (reasonable surfer model).
🤡 Match the meta title to the exact target keyword
You're taking one of your TOP TEN performing pages, and then changing probably the most important on-page ranking factor you can control. This is a high-risk decision to be so cavalier about, and it doesn't even really reflect how SEO works in 2026 (Google gonna rewrite your titles, bae).
🤖Add an FAQ block at the bottom
Let's be generous and assume it makes sense to add FAQs and the fact AI could literally produce incorrect answers; you're simply producing what Google defines as "commodity content". Doing this continually is going to grow your risk profile of being labelled a poor quality site, and getting traffic loss. Bad idea.
😬 Update the publish date and refresh outdated stats/examples
Being charitable again and assuming they mean date modified (not date published), this should only be done if there have been "significant" changes. Doing this at scale (just updating modified), will make Google stop trusting these signals from you (this is bad).
We're also suggesting "refreshing stats" with AI. The *entire point* of "stats" is to provide factual/grounded evidence for claims/analysis. If you're just churning them out with AI, there is a wildly high risk they are going to be wrong/fabricated without significant checking. It is usually faster just to add them yourself. Again, you're putting your reputation at risk with both customers and search engines.
To clarify: I am pro-AI. I use it for all kinds of things. This is not a good use of AI.
Please beware these kinds of posts that can damage your business.
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And we've all had new PR tools together.
This is an example of a good use of local LLMs which I built a year ago to help Candour's Digital PR clients win links. It automatically monitors thousands of news stories everyday for relevance to our clients. 😎
Here is how ⤵️
📄 The team have a Google Sheet, which they list their client and a description of the kind of news they are interested in. E.g. "Candour | Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and anything to do with major search engines like Google or Bing".
📰 There is also a tab on this sheet for RSS feeds where the team can add specific publications (or parts of publications) they wish to monitor. Each feed contains dozens, or hundreds of stories.
🐍 A Python script runs, which iterates through every headline title in every one of these feeds, and for each headline in each feed, it also iterates through every description of story our team are interested in.
🤖 These story titles and descriptions are passed to a local LLM (Ollama/Gemma) and it is asked to give a binary response as to if it believes the story is relevant to the description - it is SO good at this, it's what LLMs were born to do :D
💬 If the news item is deemed relevant by the LLM, the story and URL is automatically posted in our team Slack channel for the Digital PR team to check out.
All of this = more client time spent on actions that result in rankings, traffic and revenue 📈
I was thinking about tidying this up and putting it out for free, but I'm not sure what the interest would be, so let me know in comments if that is something you're interested in 🛠️
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