🍝

​AI-organised search results have expanded to restaurant recommendations. This is the same format Google launched for recipes in October 2024. It includes AI-generated categories based on your specific search.

🏷️

​Google has revived Tag Assistant and merged its two previous versions. Google has reversed its previous decision to remove the Google Tag Manager Chrome extension. The update combines both Legacy and Companion.

✨

​Google warns that AI crawlers don't render JavaScript. In 2024's final episode of Search Off the Record, Martin Splitt explained the growth of the web's reliance on JS and why this could become a problem for AI search engines.

✅

​The December 2024 spam update completed its rollout on 26 Dec 2024. The final gift from Google in 2024 lasted 7 days. This appeared to be a relatively quiet update.

📍

​Google is testing 'Places people are talking about' for local searches. This feature highlights social media videos about nearby restaurants in a carousel. Once again, Google appears to be emphasising UGC for local search.

🔍

​AI Overviews take up more pixel height than ever before. According to BrightEdge's ongoing study, the average AIO size has increased from 600px to 800px. This continues to push the 'ten blue links' further down the SERP.

☁️

​Cloudflare introduces a new feature to allow site owners better control over AI crawlers accessing their site. This AI Audit Dashboard includes requests per bot, which AI services accept robots.txt and filtering of specific crawlers.

Understanding users beyond 'keywords' with live data and intent clustering by Google

AlsoAsked allows you to quickly mine live "People Also Ask" data, the freshest source of consumer intent data, for understanding what users are searching about beyond 'keywords' and what you should be writing about.

Get 90 searches per month with no account creation, for free.

Here is where the SEO tips usually go

Okay, look, I had some rest over the holiday period so there were no unsolicited #SEO tips last week.

Hopefully you can forgive me this transgression and instead accept my heartfelt wish that whether 2024 was good, bad, or somewhere in between for you, that 2025 is even better.

Usual SEO tips service resumes this week for 2025. For me, in terms of SEO, the hype of 'AI' (specifically LLMs) was quite a challenge for me, so in 2025 I will be focusing a lot of tips on understanding AI, LLMs, RAG and in general how it affects and impacts the industry.

Best wishes and lots of love from Mark and Jack 💙

Top Core Updates referrer leaderboard

A big thank you to our top referrers, who have signed up over 10 people to the Core Updates newsletter, go follow them!

🥇 MJ Cachón Yáñez (LinkedIn / X)

🥈 Nikki Pilkington (LinkedIn / X)

🥉 Lidia Infante (LinkedIn / X)