🍎

​Rumours circulate of Apple planning to launch their AI search engine next year. The report suggests that this new technology will be powered by Google, and will integrate with Siri

⚖️

​Google must end exclusive search deals and share search data with competitors, according to the results of the DOJ antitrust trial. The judge also decided that Google does not have to divest Chrome or Android.

🖱️

​LLM traffic does not consistently convert at a higher rate than organic search traffic and currently makes up a negligible share of total website sessions according to a study by Amsive.

✅

​The latest DOJ trial docs tell us RankEmbed BERT is a ranking model that uses 70 days of search logs & the scores of quality raters who follow a detailed set of guidelines to assess a page's expertise, authority.

🖥️

​Google has released EmbeddingGemma, a ground-breaking multilingual embedding model that represents a key piece of the puzzle for anyone serious about understanding how Google processes and retrieves information.

🍄

​ChatGPT hallucinates 2.4% of the URLs that it cites, three times that of nearest competitor Perplexity, according to a new study of 16 million URLs conducted by Ahrefs.

🤷

​Google’s Danny Sullivan says "Good SEO is good GEO", reaffirming what Google's Gary Illyes told crowds earlier this year at Google's Asia Search Live Deep Dive event.

Search with Candour and the SEO Mindset podcasts are teaming up for another LIVE podcast - the night before brightonSEO in October!

🗣️ Topic: Social health is the key to career success
⌚️ Time: 19:00 - 22:00
📍 Location: Projects the Lanes, Brighton
📆 Date: Wednesday 22nd October 2025
🎟️ Tickets: Free!

Jack, Sarah & Tazmin will be sharing how to build, nurture, and strengthen authentic connections, so you walk away with tools to create a more connected, fulfilling personal and professional life.

If you want to show data in a table, use a table!

Structured data is not as important as semantic HTML, let me give you an example of something important that every audit tool will miss ⤵️

I was hired to help consult on a migration for a company that had been doing super well in search for many years. They were big in their space and a lot of their search rankings were providing tables of data to customers, and they had dominance with Featured Snippets, which drove a lot of traffic.

One of my tasks was reviewing the current, rather “old school” website, vs the new website they had ready on staging to go-live, and I discovered this:

📈 The current website presented their data in an HTML

🎨 The new website presented the same data, in what looked like a table to the user, but was actually just a bunch of CSS

⚠️ I warned them that switching from an actual data structure, such as a table, to using CSS would likely impact the search engine’s ability to ‘confidently’ understand the data, its relations and thus display it.

💬 The IT team were building the site and also key stakeholders in the decision making process, and it was their opinion that Google was ‘smart enough’ to understand because of how it renders pages.

While this was super-frustrating for me, as Laurence Fishburne said, “I can only show you the door”. I thought it’s a super interesting example as it’s not the kind of thing any automated tool (AI or not) would flag.

But I did check in 6 months later with Ahrefs data to see what happened to their FS count. (Long enough has passed now, and enough people have moved on for me to talk about this 🙈 🙉 🙊) ⤵️Structured data is not as important as semantic HTML, let me give you an example of something important that every audit tool will miss ⤵️
​
I was hired to help consult on a migration for a company that had been doing super well in search for many years. They were big in their space and a lot of their search rankings were providing tables of data to customers, and they had dominance with Featured Snippets, which drove a lot of traffic.
​
One of my tasks was reviewing the current, rather "old school" website, vs the new website they had ready on staging to go-live, and I discovered this:
​
📈 The current website presented their data in an HTML

Sometimes SEO is the bonus

Sometimes SEO isn’t the reason you should be doing something, it’s the “bonus”. Knowing this can help you get things prioritised.

For example:

⚡ Site performance: You shouldn’t be trying to improve your site speed because it “helps SEO”, you should be doing it because we know that users hate slow and under-performing websites. Speeding up your website will improve your bottom line - see the link in comments for overwhelming evidence of this!

👀 Alt tags are not there to help with your SEO, they are there for accessibility. You should not be making the argument that you need to “fill in alt tags for SEO”, you should be providing alt tags so those that can’t see the images can understand the experience you’re providing.

If any of these things result in improved rankings - that is the icing on the cake! 🍰Sometimes SEO isn't the reason you should be doing something, it's the "bonus". Knowing this can help you get things prioritised.
​
For example:
​
⚡ Site performance: You shouldn't be trying to improve your site speed because it "helps SEO", you should be doing it because we know that users *hate* slow and under-performing websites. Speeding up your website will improve your bottom line - see the link in comments for overwhelming evidence of this!
​
👀 Alt tags are not there to help with your SEO, they are there for accessibility. You should not be making the argument that you need to "fill in alt tags for SEO", you should be providing alt tags so those that can't see the images can understand the experience you're providing.
​
If any of these things result in improved rankings - that is the icing on the cake! 🍰

Your blog content is probably bad

Your blog is likely "industrialised mediocrity" a process optimised to churn out content that looks like content, without ever risking being interesting. 😲
​
​This is from a Jono Alderson post I read today, that strongly resonated with me.

Jono, having rolled higher INT stats than me has done such an eloquent job of explaining it, there is no point me rehashing it. Therefore, my SEO tip today is to simply go and read this blog post and think about it.
​
It touches on what is *foundationally wrong* with so many attempts at SEO.

Industry mourns the loss of Alan Bleiweiss

Today is dedicated to SEO veteran Alan Bleiweiss, who I learned today is sadly no longer with us.

Alan was generous with his knowledge and humour, and certainly quick to challenge. What I particularly liked about Alan was while he had strong opinions, they were loosely held. In some of the last conversations I had with him on BlueSky, he even DM'd me to make sure I hadn't taken it personally when we couldn't agree 💛

I had the pleasure of doing the 'SEO for Paws' charity event with Alan this year, raising money for cat and dog shelters in Ukraine.

Be good to each other, you always think you have longer than you do.
​
​There is a fund raiser here.​

Engineering images to prompt inject Gemini

Can you see the text in this image? No, you can't; but Google Gemini can, and it's a whole new era of multi-modal blackhat. Here's how it works ⤵️

🖼️ When Gemini processes an image it gets downscaled to save resources.

⚒️ You can specially craft images so when they are downscaled, text becomes visible

🤖 AI tools read the text in these images, and attackers demonstrated that it could be used to inject prompts; in one case, they tricked Gemini into sending connected Calendar data to a hacker's email address

💀 Images could potentially be used to deliver hidden messages to AI agents, feeding them information about which sources, brands, products to trust, or distrust.

Want to give it a try? Ask Gemini to output the text in this image (using desktop).
​
Here is the attacker's write up, the tool to do it yourself.

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