📉

​CTR drops by 61% when AI Overviews are present and 41% even when AIOs aren't present. This study by Seer Interactive demonstrates the continuing effects that AIOs are having on both organic and paid CTRs.

📊

​GA4 adds new date ranges; 'last month', 'this month' and 'quarter to date' for reports. GA4 has added some helpful new reporting features and these specific date ranges have been requested for a long time!

🕵️

​Google tests new agentic features for AI Mode in Labs. We've seen a version of the event ticket booking previously; these new features have expanded to include making beauty & wellness appointments.

❓

​Google announces deprecation of 'Practice problem (Quiz)' structured data. This is the latest structured data losing support because of Google's ongoing 'simplifying search results' project.

📰

​The VP of Product for Google Search recommends digital PR for AI search. Robby Stein stated that AI "thinks a lot like a person" and that getting mentioned in high-quality article is "useful for the AI to find".

😵

​Google's Preferred Sources tool is full of spammy sites. This relatively new feature is supposed to highlight high-quality sites so users can easily find them again, but it appears to be full of spam sites instead.

🤖

​ChatGPT's agent mode used Bing API for results 92% of the time and selected the top result 63% of the time, with 46% of visits beginning in reading mode, using a text-based browser, according to a new study.

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I feel the conflation in you, the conflict

The searches LLMs do for grounding are not the same thing as "query fan out", so don't conflate them 🙂
​
🎯 Grounding are searches specifically aimed at verifying or gathering information specifically around the query (prompt), and are usually limited to a few searches.
​
🪭 Query fan out is used in 'deep research' type modes and triggers sometimes dozens of searches to explore a whole topic, and related questions to build a more comprehensive answer using multiple methods.

This is the way of searches...the way of intent.

​Natalie Slater posted this interesting PAA result yesterday, and Mikaela Generoso how would I structure a content piece with these questions? ⤵️
​
I wanted to highlight that you should think about the questions you can get from AlsoAsked (and PAAs) as *intent* rather than keywords you need to write for.
​
❌ In this case, I would not be creating an article listing these questions
​
✅ What I would be doing is talking to the product and social teams, and asking them; "Do we have women models over 40 on our product pages? Are they highlighted on our socials?" These are multi-modal ways to communicate "we are for you, you belong".
​
✅ Doc Martens is involved in Pride, people want to know this. Is it clearly signposted on their site (they have some news articles). Is it present in their 'About' type pages?
​
Don't approach intent in a 1-dimensional way 🫶

We've got to get some kind of verification on that provider

This is all John Mueller and is really great advice about using cloud providers for assets (embarrassingly, not something I had thought about before). Verbatim from his BlueSky:
​
"If you're using a cloud provider to host images/videos/other content, you can and should verify the host in Search Console, so that you're aware of potential issues that affect Google's crawling & indexing, & Safe Browsing. Use a DNS CNAME to the bucket, then verify with DNS.
​
Using your own hostname (something like content.your-site.com) means you can verify it in Google Search Console to get crawl errors and malware alerts. You can verify using DNS verification (link in comments to video) or just verifying your main domain.
​
To do this, set up a CNAME entry for your domain name and point at your cloud provider's bucket, eg "content.your-site.com" uses a CNAME for "https://lnkd.in/eyXWWU_d" (or "buckets.clodstorage.com"). Also, you will have to update all links in your site (ugh, I know).
​
You need to update all the links within your site so that users only find your content with your new hostname. For bigger sites, this is a hassle, I know. Search & replace, then double-check by crawling the main sections of your site (all templates, all important URLs).
​
Caveat: if you need to do this for images, and you care about Image search traffic, know that this will cause fluctuations in Google Images (images are often recrawled slower than web pages and need to be "re-processed" with the new URLs). It'll settle down though.
​
Bonus: if you use something like "content.your-site.com", you can just verify the main domain with DNS in Search Console, and get all data for your website + the content hosted there in a single property in Search Console.
​
AND THAT'S NOT ALL. IF YOU ORDER NOW, YOU ALSO RECEIVE the ability to migrate to another cloud storage provider without breaking a sweat. Map the CNAME to the new bucket (if the file URLs remain the same), use redirects (it's your hostname). It's not really your site unless it's on your domain name."

An search term's strength flows from the intent

I still get asked about "search volume" for AI queries, for PAAs and all manner of things. I don't care about it. 👹
​
With longtail search terms it is important to think about 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐦𝐞 not search query volume. ⬇
​
One of the reasons why queries in People Also Ask data are regularly "zero" volume is because they tend to be longer queries with more words. When a query is 7-8 words long, it naturally means there are many ways to reconstruct that same query intent in another way. For instance:
​
❓ Best earplugs for someone with tinnitus
❓ Which earplugs are best for someone with tinnitus
❓ Best earplugs for tinnitus
❓ What are the best earplugs for tinnitus
❓ I have tinnitus what are the best earplugs
❓ Best earplugs for person with tinnitus
❓ Which earplugs are best for people with tinnitus
❓ etc...
​
7 search terms: 1 search intent
​
It would be easy to rewrite this query in 30 different ways, so even if each question only got 10 searches per month (which would likely report "0"), this one question would have a monthly search volume of 300 searches

I've got a bad feeling about Bing...

Web searches performed by LLMs via the Bing API are not included in the Bing Webmaster Tools data.

Sorry 💫

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