🛍️

​AI Mode expands shopping features to include conversational queries and agentic checkouts. With agentic checkout, users can create alerts to buy a product once it drops within their specified budget.

🏷️

​Google Search Console annotations may finally be rolling out. This much-requested feature was tested back in May and now users are reporting a wider rollout. Fingers crossed for an official launch very soon!

📊

​AI Overviews appear for 21% of all keywords and change every 2.15 days. This Ahrefs study analysed over 146 million SERPs and found some pretty startling insights about how and when AIOs are triggered.

🧑‍⚖️

​The European Commission investigates Google for possible breach of the Digital Markets Act. If Google is found to have violated the fairness defined by the DMA, it could be fined up to 10% of its global turnover.

😵

​Google works on a fix for the ongoing Google Discover spam issue. The recent flood of spam in Google Discover has clearly caught Google's attention as their team are "actively working on a fix" for this issue.

🚚

​Google introduces new ways to configure returns & shipping policies in Search Console. This allows users to setup and share these policies without the requirement of a Merchant Center account.

📉

​Tracking clicks from AI Overviews is even more complicated than expected. The order of citations can change when users expand the AIOs so tracking the positions within an AIO in Search Console could be nearly impossible.

📑

​Microsoft's Copilot expands with more citations and a dedicated search interface. Microsoft has also made citations more prominent and "clickable", seemingly to encourage users to click through more frequently.

Site Intelligence helps teams build high-performing sites together.

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Someone's got to look out for the PLPs, right?

If you're working in e-commerce, Rishi Lakhani has made this incredible, interactive template with explanations for PLPs. 🤩

​Here's a link.​

Sometimes, to use PAA data right, we have to be steady

If you're thinking about optimising for AI/LLMs, then People Also Ask (AlsoAsked) data has a very specific place in that process ⬇️
​
Most people I see are focusing only on the initial prompt, but the truth is, we are not seeing "one shot" type searches as we do with traditional search engines.
​
We use PAA data to map where the conversation is likely to go, what other questions are going to be asked in that conversation.
​
If we know the starting point, we have maybe 1 out of 10 of the prompts that will be used in the conversation.
​
Google PAA data is an induction loop they use internally to understand the intent of queries. It's always shifting, it's always fresh, and it gives a great guide to "what is coming next".

That's all it is, folks. A use of Trends.

You can save yourself (or clients) huge amounts of money by using Google Trends to explore how people in different geographies search. 💡
​
While different countries may even share languages, the specific words they use can vary massively.

One example is in the UK, "skylights" and "rooflights" are used interchangeably (there is a slight nuance here), but if an international site followed the US example (where they are just 'skylights'), you could potentially lose a lot of traffic.

With great resources, comes great JavaScript

Terrified of Javascript? You're not alone, so many SEOs reach out for guidance on all sorts of topics from hydration to auditing to LLMs. Need a great resource? ⤵️
​
You're in luck! Will Kennard has put together a great website with examples, checklists, and guides at js-seo.org.

Oh and Will is a great speaker too, here he is speaking at International Search Summit.​

Anyone can use AI search. Even you.

If you want to impact answers in AI Search platforms, I've talked about understanding the web searches that are happening in the background.
​
I saw today that Profound launched a database of the web searches that are happening behind the prompts. It's super interesting, because as Chris Green has noted, the triggered web searches do seem to be unstable.

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