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SEO updates you need to know
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Search with Candour podcast
SEO, design and brand in the age of AI
Season 4: Episode 84
Candour’s Principal SEO Consultant, Brendan Bennett and Design Lead Mark Salisbury join Search with Candour to discuss the growing overlap between SEO, design, UX, and brand, and how AI/LLMs and emerging agentic experiences affect the way we build and use websites.
The Candour trio also explore what brand means beyond just a logo, how third-party signals like reviews, Reddit, and search results shape perception, and how SEOs measure brand through metrics such as brand search volume, sentiment, and frameworks like Google’s HEART.
The conversation covers trust signals, page clarity, semantic HTML, the tension between brand-led copy and keyword-focused headings, and the risk of AI-generated “slop” versus human differentiation.
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Search Evolution Summit - Ticket giveaway
Apply for a FREE Search Evolution Summit ticket
Mark Williams-Cook is speaking at Search Evolution Summit in Romania on 3 September 2026 and is giving away a free ticket for the main conference.
So, if you've seen the amazing line up of speakers and want to visit Romania in September, now is your chance to apply.
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Last week's SEO tips
Every click you make
If you're giving recommendations to expand content, such as trying to cover other search terms it has impressions for, it is always a good idea to run a cannibalisation check first ☝️
While some tools offer this, it is possible to setup tooling using the Google Search Console API to dig into this data, which is more accurate.
One of the many internal tools Candour has (which we chain into other tools, such as content audits), allows you to automate this process.
While there are a few different ways to go about it, here is a rough outline of what you would need to do to automate this:
1/ Authorise against Search Console with OAuth, webmasters.readonly scope, tokens stored server-side and refreshed.
2/ Match the URL to a property via sites.list().
Set the window: last 90 days, ending 2 days ago, dataState: "final", type: "web".
3/ Get the page's queries: searchanalytics.query(), dimensions: ["query"], filter page equals
4/ For each of those queries, get its pages: dimensions: ["page"], filter query equals
5/ Normalise URLs before comparing: strip protocol, www., trailing slash and fragment. Keep query strings.
6/ Flag a conflict where a query returns more than one of your URLs.
7/ Filter the noise: a competing URL needs ≥10 impressions and average position ≤50. Never apply those thresholds to the URL being analysed, or it filters itself out.
8/ Score closeness: 100 - |position difference|. Near-identical positions mean the pages are genuinely interchangeable; a wide gap doesn't.
9/ Rank by what's at stake: competing impressions × closeness. Volume alone puts trivial conflicts at the top.
10/ Output a side-by-side of clicks, impressions, CTR and average position per URL, plus CSV.
Caveat: those positions are impression-weighted averages, so a close gap is evidence the pages compete, not proof they appeared on the same SERP simultaneously.
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Message in an exploit
The Google exploit we discovered showed Google stores the "last_significant_update" in epoch time (Unix time, a system for tracking time in computers) of the page, this means ⤵️
Just updating your "last modified" date on a page without making substantial changes will make you run into problems with Google
Gary Illyes from Google later confirmed they have a "binary" trust signal as to whether or not they listen to this hint from webmasters.
Keep changing that lastmod without significantly updating the page? Google stops listening to you, much how you would stop listening to someone that proves they lie often...
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Don't crawl so close to me
It is estimated that the Common Crawl dataset provides ~75% of the tokens that major models ingest during training. Being in training data is a huge lever for visiblity with AI search.
I saw Michael Curtis post about Common Crawl Checker, a tool which allows you to check the lastest Common Crawl dataset for a specific domain to see if you're in it.
At the moment, I am strongly recommending clients not to Disallow CCBot, as it is the backbone that RAG is happening against.
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Walking on the cloud(flare)
If you're using Cloudflare, you can "Register your interest" for their new "AEO" tools under "Agent Readiness". This is something I am watching closely.
Cloudflare has a really good chunk of the web; they can tie together crawl logs and referral data at a scale few other companies can. While I don't necessarily agree with some of their "land grab" type standards they are adding a lot of shine to, the AEO tracking does look very interesting.
Here is the full article which is also a great primer to their AI Gateway, which is super useful if you haven't discovered it yet.
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Every little query she does is magic
It's become clear that AI mode/follow up prompts are appearing in Google Search Console query data, you need to segment that noise for more signal ⤵️
Luckily for you, Glenn Gabe has already posted a nice workflow using the Search Console API, Analytics Edge, and Claude Cowork 🎉
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