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​AI Overviews can reduce CTR for organic results by over 70%. When AI Overviews are present organic CTR drops from 2.94% to 0.84%. In contrast, CTR increases from 0.6% to 1.08% when cited in AI Overviews.

🖼️

​Sites using AI-generated images are reportedly losing significant Image traffic. This may be a update to Google's image rankings to reduce the prominence of AI-generated imagery in SERPs.

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​Less than 0.17% of an average website's traffic come from AI search. This figure isn't as straightforward as it seems because correctly attributing traffic from LLMs is still difficult using the common tools such as GA4.

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​"People use Search more with AI Overviews" according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Pichai also highlighted how AI Overviews and Circle to Search are popular features for younger users.

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​Google local reviews have been disappearing over the past week. Google has not officially commented on this seemingly widespread issue so this may be a crackdown on non-compliant reviews or simply a bug.

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​Google is testing a new "AI mode" that offers a place for open-ended and exploratory questions that are "not well served" by today's search results. This comes after Google saying it wants to be more of an "AI assistant" in 2025.

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​Cloudflare is launching a new dedicated “AI Insights” page on Cloudflare Radar that expands the AI bot & crawler traffic report with additional metrics to understand AI-related trends from multiple perspectives:

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​Health is the industry sector showing the most AI Overviews, despite it being a YMYL sector. This is from new research by seoClarity, that names the top 20 industries that are most visible in AIOs.

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Test your robots.txt for free

If you need to experiment with robots.txt rules, Max Prin made one of my favourite (and free) online tools where you can simulate rules on made-up URLs.

Just select "Editor" mode instead of live and you can enter any made up URL to quickly test how your rulesets will work! 🥳

No, seriously...

If you're saying "SEO content" you may well be doing it wrong 🙃

Google is focusing on originality

"Originality is something we're going to be focusing on this year. That's going to be important" is what Gary Illyes said, in what I thought felt like were some very ernest panel answers at Aleyda's SEOFOMO panel in London.

It's worth thinking about, especially for those of you using GenAI for content. 🤔

What do you think "originality" means?

Hreflangs aren't a replacement for cross-site links

If you're working on international websites, make sure you have links to the different versions! 🌍 🔗 🌏

This may sound simple, but I've seen some sites completely relying on hreflang, which isn't enough! Cross-linking in almost all cases resulted in measurable improvement! 📈

New Chrome extension for GSC

​Dave Smart has created a Chrome extension that allows you to match weekday for weekday in Google Search Console traffic comparisons. Massively helpful as patterns can be different on weekdays vs weekends.

​Here is a link to the extension and it's also worth following Dave, definitely one of the best technical SEOs out there in my opinion!

Top Core Updates referrer leaderboard

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