📊 Core Updates: AI Overviews in Google Discover & AIO ads expansion [20 October]


SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-Cook
Search with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward

SEO updates you need to know


📊

Google rolls out a new AI-generated trending topics feature for Google Discover. This had been spotted in the wild by a few users but has now been officially announced and rolled out in the US, India & South Korea.

🤑

Google expands ads in AI Overviews beyond the US. This announcement from Google Access confirms expansion to other English-speaking markets by the end of 2025. While this is PPC news, this is still important for SEO!

Google announces a "What's new" Search feature for sports news. This will provide a feed of trending news and articles when users look up players or teams. This will begin rolling out in the US in the next few weeks.

🛑

Bing now allows the use of the data-nosnippet HTML attribute. Bing has caught up with Google and now allows users to exclude content from being included in snippets and AI-generated answers.

🛒

Walmart partners with OpenAI to create AI-powered shopping experiences. This partnership uses the previously announced Instant Checkout feature to allow users to shop directly in ChatGPT.

📈

AI Overviews' appearance in People Also Ask results doubles in three months. New data from AlsoAsked shows an increase from 18% to 38% from July to September 2025.

📲

Google sends push notifications linking to AI Mode. This is clearly Google encouraging users to use AI Mode, especially for news and trending topics. I wonder how this would be tracked in analytics...

🗺️

Google Business Profile now allows sharing updates across multiple GBPs. This is a great bit of time-saving news for anyone who manages multiple profiles for the same business.

🔍

Reddit expands its AI-powered search to 5 new languages. The new search feature was launched in English at the end of 2024 and is now available in French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.

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Search with Candour podcast

Build your brand or get left behind with Yordan Dimitrov

Season 4: Episode 41

Jack Chambers-Ward dives into the evolving world of SEO, AI, and branding with guest Yordan Dimitrov, SEO Manager at Reflect Digital.

Together they discuss the importance of brand consistency, the role of LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT in shaping user experiences, and the pivotal strategies for maintaining visibility and relevance in an ever-changing digital landscape.

If you're curious about how AI is impacting SEO or want tips on optimising your brand’s digital presence, this episode is packed with valuable insights and recommendations.

Don't miss out on Yordan's upcoming talk at Brighton SEO and the exciting discussions around these crucial topics!

This week's solicited tips:

Now I know y'all be lovin' this Vis right here

You can use Google's CrUX Vis to see historic performance data for most big websites.

This is super handy, as it will also tell you if the performance is improving/regressing over time.

Good shout out by Gerry White at Search 'n Stuff

All the internal links filling up the world today

You should internally link to pages that are the most likely candidates to help the user on that journey.

I'm sorry to say this, but cosine similarity between vectorised pages does not necessarily reflect that, and could well cost you money.

Both an unpopular and unsolicited SEO tip 😂

Lately, I've been strategic, silent when I would used to speak

"SEO expertise alone won’t cut it at enterprise level. You need to understand people, politics, and processes in order to be able to coordinate, scale and strategise." ~🌈 Petra Kis-Herczegh

This is true, and possibly why before I had a bigger and better team at Candour, I struggled with some of the politics of getting things done with enterprise.

Jo Furnival has done a nice little write up of some of the common enterprise SEO issues and there is a *free* Enterprise SEO course from Sitebulb.

It's just one of those days, where you don't want to rebrand

If you rebrand and you have a lot of old customers who are used to the old name and still search for it, it's likely that Google will take a while to "catch up" with this.

This means, despite the rebrand and migration, Google may choose to overwrite your title tags!

More from Google's Gary Illyes.

You think you're seasonal, you do

If you want to outrank everyone for seasonal terms, then *keep the same URL* 🫷

💻 For instance, if you want to rank for "best christmas laptop deals 2025", then opt with a URL where you can just update the content early, so something like /best-christmas-laptop-deals/ and not /best-christmas-laptop-deals-2025/

♻️ If you have content or lists that you do wish to keep (maybe there is some interest in historic pages/lists, maybe something like old football team line ups), then when the time comes you move *that* content to a new URL e.g. /best-christmas-laptop-deals-2024/ to use our first example if you had a rationale for keeping that (although I don't see why).

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Core Updates SEO Newsletter

The Core Updates newsletter is written by Mark Williams-Cook, a veteran SEO who is Digital Marketing Director at Candour, Founder of AlsoAsked and organiser of SearchNorwich. Over 40,000 SEOs follow Mark's 'Unsolicited #SEO tips' on LinkedIn, which has now been wrapped up into the Core Updates newsletter, along with an overview of weekly news and the current episode of the Search with Candour episode, hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward.

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