🔍

​ChatGPT Search performs better than Google for time-sensitive queries. However, ChatGPT Search performed badly for most local search queries and still lacks many of the visual features of the established search engines.

💬

​Conversational search is being tested in the Google app. This interface seems to be Google's reaction to ChatGPT's similar UI. Is this what people meant when they said "voice search is the future" every year for the last 10 years?

❓

​OpenAI execs answer questions about ChatGPT Search on Reddit. They gave a few insights into the strengths of ChatGPT Search, such as long complex queries, as well as future plans for improving the new search engine.

📑

​AI appears in the People Also Ask feature. Many PAA answers have been included as featured snippets in the past so this appears to be an evolution into a relationship between PAA and AI Overviews.

🔗

​AI Overviews are testing blue hyperlinks in the body text. These are additional to the citation links at the end of each sentence and appear to link to sites that are not directly cited in the 'Learn more' sidebar.

🐛

​A new Chrome feature allows you to debug CLS in directly your browser. This addition to Chrome version 132 shows you the direct results and elements affected by a page's cumulative layout shift without using a secondary tool.

📝

​Google is testing a 'highlight' button for AI Overviews. This allows users to select text within an AI Overview and trigger a second search using the highlighted text. This second search opens another AI Overview in a sidebar.

📰

​Publishers continue to express frustration about AI Overviews. This relates to Google using and summarising content in AIOs without a licensing agreement while OpenAI offers licensing agreements and revenue share.

🖼️

​AI Overviews use images without citation or credit to the creators. In this example, the AIO shows a photo pulled from one of the top ranking results but doesn't credit or cite it in the AI Overview itself.

📈

​22% of sites affected by 2023's HCU have seen 20%+ traffic recovery. While this is nowhere close to a "full recovery", these increases appear to occur after the August 2024 core update.

🚢

​Google proposes 'richer' shipping data schema. This includes a new schema type, ShippingService, that groups shipping options such as shipping locations, delivery cost and delivery speed.

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Sitebulb now parses tables for your 'old fashioned' sites

If ever you build any kind of crawler, you'll find out just how much of the web is 'broken'. Fortunately, our friends at Sitebulb are helping us account for these quirks with some new crawling options ⬇
​
Some websites in 2024, still use tables for layouts (rather than data), and historically Sitebulb would not parse HTML inside tables.
​
As of version 8.6 there is now an option called "Parse tables" (pictured below) which will allow for these... "old fashioned" designs to be parsed correctly.
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Fun note: I believe Ryan Jones is going through the "broken internet" pain currently with his new SERPrecon tool! 😤

Think about how you do SEO, not why

In most cases*, SEO should be ~how~ you do things, rather than ~why~ you do them. I keep thinking about this data from Tom Capper I showed at SERPConf which shows that sites most adversely affected by HCU were ones with high 'SEO metrics' (links) and much lower brand authority metrics. 📊
​
🔗 Think about it this way: How does it make sense if your site is consistently getting links from small/mid websites, but nobody is actually searching for your brand?
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📈 If websites were naturally linking to you, it makes sense as your online link graph grows, there should be more people knowing about you and more people searching for and talking about you.
​
📉 I used to apply similar thinking when I used to focus on link acquisition a decade ago: If a huge site links to you, it makes 'sense' that 100 smaller sites would hear about you from that source and link to you. Without that initial exposure, it looks very suspicious that 100 small, 'independent' sites all suddenly decide to link to you within a week.
​
🎂 Hammering individual SEO metrics is asking for trouble. It would be like baking a cake and knowing sugar makes cakes taste nice, so deciding the "optimal" thing to do is put 5kg of sugar into your cake 🤮

Three questions to ask about potential ranking factors

"Is it a ranking factor"? I have 3 simple questions that I need a "yes" answer to, if I want to start considering whether Google is doing something:
​
1️⃣ "Does it make sense?" - How would Google use this metric? What what they use it for? What would be a "good" and "bad" signal? e.g. with GA bounce rate, it makes no sense because as a webmaster you can control your bounce rate and set it to any value you like. There are also good arguments why a high/low bounce rate might be good.
​
2️⃣ "Does it scale?" - Can Google measure this on all websites to use in ranking? e.g. with GA bounce rate, while there are millions of pages that don't use GA tracking, there is likely enough data that Google could build a good prediction model - so ~maybe~!
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3️⃣ "Any evidence?" - What supports this theory? Is it mentioned in documentation? Has a Googler said they do/don't do this? Are there hints within patents? Supporting big data from SEO SaaS tools? Any experiments you can run? e.g. with GA bounce rate, Googlers have said it is not something they use in ranking, and it isn't mentioned in any patents or documentation.
​
tl;dr GA bounce rate isn't a ranking factor - but lots of things aren't, be careful what theories you buy into!

Keep an eye out for Storebot-Google

Google has a specific bot for e-commerce websites called Storebot-Google that focuses on product pages and checkout processes 🛍
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This crawler will try and complete your checkout process (without making a purchase) to verify data such as:
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🛒 Shipping price
🛒 Product price
🛒 Shipping price Taxes
🛒 Online / local availability
🛒 Shipping time
🛒 Shipping countries
🛒 Payment methods
🛒 ...and more!
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Explicit information you provide via structured data or via Merchant Centre will take precedence over what Storebot-Google discovers!

Technical audits have long-term pay off

Want to save 10% on all content investments you make on your website, forever? That’s how to think about the value of technical SEO audits - as amplifiers of your efforts.

This means:

🐜 If you’re currently not getting much traffic, an SEO audit is unlikely* to produce any immediate value. You’re amplifying very small numbers.

🐘 On larger sites with more traffic, there is a higher probability that you’ll get some immediate payoff as solving issues and unlocking opportunities translate into more traffic.

📈 The big win is the compounding return on improved efficiency. If your technical audit means you squeeze just 10% more out of your efforts, you’re effectively getting 10% more value out of every single piece of content you write, forever 🤩

*On very rare occasions there may be same huge blocker than unlocks traffic, but these situations are very rare!

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