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​AI Overviews appear for 82.5% of branded searches in the US. This study also found that brand searches with high search volume trigger fewer AIOs and that AI Overviews only cite homepages 36.8% for these branded searches.

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​Google Business Profiles test new Advanced Performance Reports. This new report appears to be a significant expansion on the existing GBP report. The charts and data now look more aligned with GA4 than ever before.

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​AI Overviews appear for over 90% of "review" searches. AI Overviews have increased for multiple commercial searches, including appearing for 86% of "brand vs brand" comparison searches.

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​Google launches closed beta for Google Business Home. This new hub brings together Google Business Profile, Merchant Center, YouTube and Google Ads in one place.

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​Google tests AI-generated summaries in AI Overviews citation cards. The citation cards that link to cited sites are typically pulled directly from the cited source's content. This is AI summarising content for AI...

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​Clear on-page content structure increases the chances of citation in AI search. This study found that on-page elements such as tables of contents, Article schema and clear H2 structure had the most impact when optimising for AI.

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​Google updates documentation about controlling what you share with Google Search. This update includes information about the robots meta tag, data-nosnippet and X-Robots-Tag.

Account manager vacancy at Candour

We're looking for an experienced Account Manager to join our team, leading client partnerships across a range of SEO, digital PR and design and build projects.

If you have a strong background in client management and are looking for a new opportunity with a Great Place To Work Certified™ agency, we’d love to hear from you.

Here are the key details:

• £35k - £39k salary + profit share
• Private health insurance
• 18-month fixed-term contract (initially)
• Norwich office / Hybrid working

Anchorstruck

Anchor text is still hugely important for SEO (and users!) and there's loads to know about it! Here are some of the key points:

• Anchor text is the clickable text a user can see within a link.
• It's what is read out by screen readers used for people with a visual impairment.
• It helps all users understand what the next page is about.
• It's used heavily by search engines to 'label' what the linked page may be about.
• You should use descriptive anchor text wherever possible and avoid terms like "click here" and "read more".

You clicked me all night long

Successful SEO is the compounding of multiple efforts, not any one "trick" or type of work. While many people are showing click declines, this doesn't have to be the case. ⤵️
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This chart is from the first 7 months on 18 pieces of content we either updated or published within a specific topic cluster on a client website.
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What we achieved:

• An additional ~1,000,000 monthly impressions in search of their content
• An additional ~15,000 monthly clicks to their website

Source: GSC
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How we did it:

• Consistent digital PR to get them links, coverage and brand engagement so Google knows to take them seriously, they're the real deal.
• Using tools like AlsoAsked, and our internal tools such as IntentGaps and our GSC research tooling to find content gaps where there was still intent to be served.
• Mapping out the topic space in terms of entities, competitors and areas that had not yet been covered
• Following our process to get the content on-brand, baked in with their expertise and data.

The above is what you would broadly refer to as EEAT, and for clarity; incoming links are definitely a part of this.
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I'm posting this because I see lots of people asking questions like "should I do digital PR or work on the content?", it's a bit like saying "I want to race this car, should I put air in the tyres or fuel in the tank?" You need all these things coming together to get compounding success.
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The regular situation is Candour is booked up, but we do have space for a new digital PR client if you want this to be you. 📣

Pipeline to Hell

Google's news pipeline isn't rendering Javascript before inclusion. That pipeline involves Google Discover. If your content is requiring JS, you're putting yourself at a massive disadvantage in a first-to-punch environment.
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I learned this from Barry Adams who might have something else clever to say.

It's a long way to the top (if you wanna rank 'n' roll)

Top content rankings are correlated to how completely you answer the People Also Asked tree connected to the topic. This correlation was discovered by Chris Green with an independent study he completed using AlsoAsked data.

Read the study here: https://alsoasked.com/insights/paa-ranking-correlation​

Dirty JEV, don't dirt cheap

Beware! ⚠️

If you're starting to use JEV in your SEO/LLM workflows, there are a lot of websites posing as TypeSafe AI's JEV using exact match domains, which Google happily ranks.

The screenshot is a website posing as the 'official' JEV site to get API keys, but will charge you x10 what it costs if you go direct to the TypeSafe AI website.

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 / Bluesky)

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🏅 Alice Rowan (LinkedIn)

🏅 Martijn Jeurissen (LinkedIn)

🏅 Chester Beard (LinkedIn)