✅

​The June 2025 Core Update completed its rollout on 17 July 2025. This appears to have been a relatively quiet core update compared to some of the more volatile recent changes.

🕵️

​OpenAI launches ChatGPT agent. This is one of the first major demonstrations of the "agentic web" future that many experts are predicting. ChatGPT was able to browse, compare and order a roast dinner from a single prompt.

🔘

​Google adds an AI Mode button to their homepage. This is important as it shows Google is taking steps towards integrating AI Mode more directly into their main search function, rather than a separate, optional tab.

📑

​Google Discover adds AI summaries. Discover has been a way for some publishers to continue receiving clicks despite the seeming omnipresence of AI Overviews on the main Google SERPs. Those days may be ending soon...

🔍

​AI Mode adds new Deep Search and agentic search features. These functions, powered by Gemini 2.5 Pro, had been previously announced by Google and are now available for Pro & Ultra subscribers

🤑

​OpenAI plans to take a cut of revenue made from sales via ChatGPT. This type of monetisation strategy may mean that ChatGPT won't have to rely on paid search as its primary revenue source, like Google currently does.

🪱

​Hacked sites and expired domains are still cited by ChatGPT. While traditional SEO results can be exploited, the problem seems to be far worse with AI Search Results, showing increasing levels of spam every week.

🗺️

​Google updates its local ranking documentation. I just want to save you some time here: Despite a significant number of changes to the page, there are no significant changes to local search ranking factors and best practices.

📊

​GSC introduces a comparison feature for 24-hour view. Following on from the addition of the 24-hour view, users can now compare the last 24 hours to the previous 24 hours in the GSC performance report.

Hey there, we’re fatjoe. 👋

You might not have heard of us, even though we’ve been around since 2012 - and there’s a good reason for that.

We’re a completely white label solution for SEO agencies, marketing teams and freelancers.

No contracts, no minimums.
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Need a bit of extra capacity? Or just looking to offer new services? We’ve got over 20 products across:

• Link Building
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Redirects that are faster than a speeding bullet

Thanks to Daniel Emery, you can massively speed up migrations by automating your redirect mapping with an easy to use tool (that doesn't rely on flakey LLMs)!
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1️⃣ Upload your origin/destination crawls from either Screaming Frog or Sitebulb​
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2️⃣ Choose embedding model
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3️⃣ Select which attributes you want to map
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🎉 Enjoy super-fast mapped redirects!

You can read about the original version of this tool here: https://searchengineland.com/site-migrations-ai-powered-redirect-mapping-437793​
​
The new version is at: https://automated-url-redirect-matcher.streamlit.app/​

On Reddit, your brand rarely means hope

“Posting on Reddit” is not an SEO strategy. It is SEOs chasing the bus down the road and shouting through the window to be part of the conversation. At best, it’s a temporary hack, at worst it’s a time sink that could backfire.

Look, I understand why you want to do it. It seems some AI search engines regularly cite places like Reddit and you want to be a part of it; but here’s why it’s a bad idea:

⚠️ There us a good chance the community could see your posting as “astroturfing” - (there is a whole /r/hailcorporate about this). This can end horribly for your brand.

⚠️ This is a tactic, not a strategy. You are not achieving any wider business aim than doing posts and hoping people see them and join in. It’s back of cereal box stuff.

⚠️ The goal of search engines (both AI and traditional) is to try and highlight geniune opinion and conversations. This will mostly not be what you are creating, so will likely get filtered out with algorithm improvements.

⚠️ If and when your audience moves to a new platform, you’ve lost everything and need to build back up in a new place.

So what should you be doing?

👯 Build a community! Have a strategy to foster a group of people that will advocate for you, will talk about you, start conversations about you, and will post on whatever the platform-du-jour is.

✅ This scales ✅ This builds equity and value that lasts ✅ This is what AI search is looking for

and most important this answers ‘yes’ to the question of:

🏆 “Would I be doing this if search engines didn’t exist?”

Where to get started? You’re in luck, as Areej AbuAli has a whole book about building communities.​

It's not as bad as it seems

Have you seen a sudden drop in the number of URLs in your Google Search Console Core Web Vitals field data report? Don't worry about it 😎
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If you're working on one site and panicking, be assured I've tracked this same change over every one of dozens of sites I've checked that we have access to. It's a Google thing, not you. Nothing to worry about.
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Carry on with your day 🌞

Indexing doesn't end at the borders of your redirects

The URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console will always report the status of the ~final~ URL in a chain (and not tell you).
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⚠️ This has caught me out before where I have had:
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URL A ➡️ 301 redirect ➡️ URL B
URL B is blocked in robots.txt 🛑 but redirects ➡️ to URL C
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I was struggling to see why URL C was not being indexed.
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✅ When I checked it in GSC it said it was indexable.
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✅ When I checked URL A (the known redirect) it also said it was indexable (as it was reporting on URL C).
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There was a sneaky redirect in the middle which was blocking crawling that GSC Inspection Tool does not report on!
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🧠 This also means if you setup even a redirect from URL A to URL B, if you check URL A in GSC, it will report "200" not "301".
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Sneaky!

Give Google an ideal snippet to strive towards

If Google is doing something silly like using your footer for a meta description, you can use the data-nosnippet attribute to prevent certain parts of the page from being shown in the snippet. 🛑
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This can be a useful tool to control what is shown by meta descriptions, without specifying them (if you are a fan of more traffic). 📈
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​More detail on data-nosnippet ⤵️​

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)

🏅 Nikki Pilkington (LinkedIn / Bluesky)

🏅 Lidia Infante (LinkedIn / Bluesky)

🏅 Saijo George (LinkedIn / Bluesky)

🏅Alice Rowan (LinkedIn)

🏅Martijn Jeurissen (LinkedIn)