✨ Core Updates: Brand query filers in GSC and Cloudflare outages [24 November]


SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-Cook
Search with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward

SEO updates you need to know


Brand query filters added to Google Search Console. Brand and branded traffic has been a particularly hot topic in SEO recently so this is a very welcome addition to GSC.

☁️

Cloudflare outage causes server errors across the internet. In case you somehow missed the Cloudflare outages, you may notice the server error reports in Google Search Console.

✈️

Google launches Canvas and other AI-powered travel features. Canvas helps users create itineraries with a single prompt and Flight Deals now uses AI to understand natural language searches.

📍

Google Maps adds new features including trending businesses and reviewer nicknames. These new additions also include an easier way to find EV chargers and specific 'know before you go' tips for businesses.

🤖

AI Mode is now powered by Gemini 3. Google adds their latest AI model to their Search features on launch day, adding "more complex reasoning and new dynamic experiences" to AI Mode.

💲

Adobe acquires Semrush for $1.9bn. With Semrush's recent launch of new enterprise features, this acquisition could drive further expansion into enterprise SEO.

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Search with Candour podcast

SEO strategies that make money

Season 4: Episode 46

In this episode of Search with Candour, Ben Goodey, founder of Spicy Margarita, joins Jack to discuss how to create revenue-driven SEO strategies.

The discussion explores how effective audience research impacts conversion rates, differentiating between top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel content, and the evolving role of SEO in the age of AI.

Ben shares his insights on creating revenue-driving strategies and the importance of client communication in achieving long-term success.

This week's solicited tips:

Filters and facets, kid. Filters and facets.

If you're running an e-commerce site, it's a good idea to have a clear idea which filters and facets you want to be able to index, and ones you don't.

⭐ If you have a sub-category or filter that has good search volume and is something there is search intent for, it is good practise to make sure this page is accessible by 'standard' links, and has its own, distinct URL.

⭐ This means avoiding ways of filtering like check boxes or updating the page contents without changing the URL.

⭐ If it is just a filter that is helpful for the user but does not significantly change what is on the page, it can be good practise to do the opposite; to make the activation of that filter very difficult for searches engines to perform and use a canonical attribute to point back to the page you want to rank. This stops you having to do 'band aid' type solutions like robots dot txt or noindex.

If you want good AI visibility, you've got to get out of the library

If you want to know how easy it might be to improve AI visibility in your topic area, a great way to get an overview is calculating the percentage of queries that are being grounded. 💡

You can do this cheaply with the Gemini Grounding API, or you run queries yourself on ChatGPT and hoover up the console data as to if they are doing web searches. I did a long-winded explanation of this in the AirOps webinar with Josh Spilker.

I also saw Lily Ray noted Profound has a metric for how many queries produced a web search too!

This is really helpful information to set expectations on how quickly and where you can move the needle and get ROI (as Mordy was posting about too).

GenAI...why did it have to be GenAI?

When you see people telling you to ditch SEO tools, content teams, or build business-critical workflows with GenAI, consider this:

OpenAI’s flagship model, one of the most advanced on the planet, only last week got the “ability” to not use em-dashes after you’ve specifically told it not to. 🤦‍♂️

This is the same model that was touted as “PhD-level knowledge in any subject”.

Let that sink in. This is what you’re going to trust?

I don't know. I'm making this up as I go!

This is traffic from a one-page experiment website just highlighting when it took off a bit. Do you want to know the ranking secret that took it from 800 to 9,000 clicks a month? 🙃

After seeing a niche I thought might work, I wrote 1 page of content, I secured 3-4 links and then...

Nothing. I waited for 6 months 🦗🦗🦗

A component of SEO is time. ⏳

A good way to think about some of Google systems is rolling averages, so consistently is key. If you keep chopping and changing things, you can sometimes shoot yourself in the foot.

It's not the Tweets, honey, it's the impressions

Anytime your URL is shown in Google, even in a tweet, it will be counted as Impressions in Google Search Console.

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Core Updates SEO Newsletter

The Core Updates newsletter is written by Mark Williams-Cook, a veteran SEO who is Digital Marketing Director at Candour, Founder of AlsoAsked and organiser of SearchNorwich. Over 40,000 SEOs follow Mark's 'Unsolicited #SEO tips' on LinkedIn, which has now been wrapped up into the Core Updates newsletter, along with an overview of weekly news and the current episode of the Search with Candour episode, hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward.

Read more from Core Updates SEO Newsletter

SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 🛍️ AI Mode expands shopping features to include conversational queries and agentic checkouts. With agentic checkout, users can create alerts to buy a product once it drops within their specified budget. 🏷️ Google Search Console annotations may finally be rolling out. This much-requested feature was tested back in May and now users are reporting a wider rollout. Fingers...

SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 📉 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...

SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 📊 Google announces Query Groups for Google Search Console. This new feature can group queries by different similar search intent, highest click volume, and trending up or down. Yes, it's basically regex filters. 🗣️ Google expands Gemini to Home assistant. This adds new LLM and search functionality to Google Home devices. That's right, the era of voice search is finally...