▶️

​Google is testing AI Overviews on YouTube. Video carousels featuring AI highlight clips may appear for product searches and even some local searches. This continues Google's expansion of AIOs into every corner of Search.

🤳

​Users can now review their video verification recordings for Google Business Profile. Video verification can be difficult to get right the first time so these 'Video Previews' should help users get it right in fewer tries.

💻

​Potential buyers for Google Chrome include OpenAI, Perplexity and Yahoo. Chrome is currently used by 4 billion people, accounting for 2/3 of browser market share so it's unsurprising that companies are lining up to purchase it.

🤑

​ChatGPT may introduce ads for free users in 2026. OpenAI executives have previously said that they 'have no active plans to pursue advertising' but with so much potential revenue, we'll probably see this sooner rather than later.

📊

​GA4 has added pre-built report snapshot templates. These templates including metrics such as 'User behaviour' and 'Sales and revenue' and should save users time from manually creating custom reports.

🌏

​Google reports that AI Overviews now reach over 1.5 billion monthly users. Google's expansion of AI Overviews is based on 'really positive feedback from users' and is planned to reach to new countries and queries in the near future.

🎸

​Google adds an AI-generated 'Behind the music' section to Knowledge Panel. These AI Overviews can appear when users search for a specific song and yes, they do provide links to publishers too.

🔍

​Google says to not use Google-Extended to remove content from search. Google clarified that, Google-Extended, a token that manages whether Gemini crawls a site for training, should not be used to remove content from Search.

🖼️

​Google confirms that image streaming is not optimal for inclusion in search. Image streaming is a method of embedding images on a site, rather than hosting them directly on the page.

🎟️

​Google will stop support for SpecialAnnouncement in July 2025. This structured data was introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic for important health and safety announcements.

📝

​Microsoft launches the Copilot Merchant Program. Businesses can join the program and allow price alerts, product suggestions and direct checkout features within the Copilot app.

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Use multiple GSC properties for international SEO

If you're running multiple locales over sub-folders, it's really helpful to setup separate properties within Google Search Console. This gives you a super quick way to get insights into that locale, without having to worry about filtering data - huge time saver! 🌏

Expired domain abuse still works...for now

Expired domain abuse, buying a old and trusted domain to repurpose it and rank quickly is against Google's Spam guidelines - but people are getting around it ☠️
​
Ironically, the spam guidelines specifically give the example of "Casino-related content on a former elementary school site" - and yet there examples of exactly this happening - a former school website being used to host casino content - as Martin McGarry discovered.
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How is this achieved?

One of the tricks used is to keep the majority of the site the same. In this example, only the homepage was changed and the other ~500 pages were left untouched as "school" pages. This means when Google is doing its assessment, the site is still 99.5% a "school" website, which is one of the ways you can skirt around this protection. 🥷
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Of course, like all of these tricks - it works until it doesn't - but it's interesting! 👀

Analysing big brands isn't as easy as you think

I've got subscriptions to most major SEO tools, and I find each are valuable in their own way and have their own strengths and weaknesses. Most recently, in the post-HCU "big brand" world, I've found myself having to do more SEO analysis of big sites like Amazon, Quora, and Reddit. ⤵️
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If you're trying to do this kind of work, my current recommendation would be Semrush - while like any platform, the numbers are estimates, the data has been helpful for the kind of comparative analysis I've been doing.
​
Unfortunately, I initially tried Ahrefs for this task and found out it's completely incapable of giving data at the moment. I popped onto Ahrefs live chat support to see if it was a temporary issue and got this answer:
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"This is a known issue for big sites like Amazon, Facebook, Quora that have millions of pages and extensive keyword data. For these report what matters is the number of positions and links we've seen historically. Since the site in question is very big, we record more and more positions and links every day. But with the current database arrangement it can't work after some. We're working on the new database schema and the rebuild to make it work. Our devs have already made good progress and are focused on fixing this aspect asap"
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Hope you get it going soon, Ahrefs! ☺️ 🙏
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​Disclosure: Nobody has paid me for these posts and I pay full price for both tools. I just share what I think is helpful advice on strengths/weaknesses to save people time and money. I use both regularly ✌️

Google has a site_quality score?!

Did you know Google has a site_quality score for every site (subdomain)?

This site_quality score determines things like if your site is eligible for certain rich results!

​Here is a snippet of my conclusions about site_quality after reviewing the data, doing correlation studies with Ahrefs link metrics, looking at traffic levels, patents, and the types of sites that score well.

Looking forward to joining some excellent SEOs at my first Tech SEO Summit next week to share more thoughts!

The 'date intent classifier' isn't as simple as you think

The Google exploit we found shows not only that Google classifies queries as to if they have date intent, but with further examination, would interestingly suggest that this classification is not only made from the words used in the query. ⤵️
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For instance, Google classifies the query "is trash free denver" as having date intent. Fortunately, an American told me that this is because there are certain days where trash collection in denver is free. 🗑️
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At the surface, I don't think it is possible without context, based on the words used to determine that "is trash free denver" has date intent. My conclusion would be that Google is also determining this query intent based on either the type of things users are clicking on, or simply the content on the documents that rank for this. 🖱️
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How is this useful? It makes me more wary about trusting third-party tools that are classifying queries for us, as they are likely not using the same methods and Google, so we have to be careful if we are changing action based on them ☝

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