Dedication to the memory of Nick Wilsdon

I was very sad to learn last week that Nick Wilsdon passed away. I had last seen Nick in person at SEO event, where he spent some time one-on-one with me, educating me on some of the work he had done with ebay with edge optimisations. Always a fascinating person to speak to, I had conversations with Nick spanning well over a decade on social media about SEO, and he was always generous with his time, ideas, and support.

Seeing the outpouring from the community this week, it is clear that we lost a precious person, as this is who Nick was.

All our love to Nick's family, friends, and colleagues at Torque.

Here is Nick in 1998 in Kashmir, Afghanistan, to quote him, "before he was obsessed with Akamai, policies and edge workers"

📜

​Claude has updated its terms of service to include language specifically targeting the now classic GEO/AEO tactics of astroturfing and posting disingenuous content

🦠

​Rank Math has disclosed that some copies of Rank Math SEO PRO version 3.0.123 contained malware. According to Rank Math, the affected version was downloaded between October 15-16.

❇️

​Google updates AI Mode to include more inline links and prominent carousels. Google also adds more prominent links to related articles, more links to specific pages and video results that link directly to Search Profiles.

🛒

​Google launches Universal Cart in the US. This allows users to save products from multiple retailers while also tracking prices and discounts. Users can then check out using Google Pay or directly on the merchants' website.

☠️

​Google may be "poisoning" SERPs with misleading data to disrupt scrapers. This study suggests that Google is purposefully serving requests to scrapers with normal-looking SERPs full of fake results.

📊

​Bing adds Topics Portfolio to AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools. This new feature groups the grounding queries into thematic clusters. The data in this report includes the topic size and how many sites are also cited.

🔗

​The ChatGPT bug that appears to add more direct links into SERPs is now fixed. The percentage of direct links from 8-10% to 42% was reported last week, but has now been confirmed as a bug that has been resolved.

📈

​Follow-up questions asked in AI Mode are increasing in Google Search Console. These "AI-shaped queries" are still a small percentage, less than 1%, but have increased by 21 times in the last 16 months.

🛍️

​AI search engines cite between 2.9 and 10.4 pages per answer. This study also found that over 55% of AI answers cited the web directly and that over 34% of cited listicles are considered "self-promotional."

AI Visibility Index: Compare the US & UK Leaders

Seven months of both US and UK data across 22 industries show which brands AI platforms mention and cite most, as well as why a strategy built for one location won’t directly carry over to the other.

Discover the Universal Core brands that made the top 100 on all four platforms every month, then get a practical plan for building your AI visibility market by market.

Seventh Tab of a Seventh Tab

Every time you use a website like Google or ChatGPT, your browser and a collection of backend services have a long and surprisingly candid conversation about what you asked for. That conversation sits in plain sight in the Network tab of Chrome DevTools, a single F12 away, and most people never look at it. I have spent an unreasonable amount of my time staring at this data, and want to share what I’ve learned with you.
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​I've written a long guide on how you can use browser network data to analyse how systems like Google and ChatGPT are working in the background. It includes real examples of multiple things I've found, and how I've extracted value from them. Everything from the Google exploit to finding out how ChatGPT is working.

Run to the Models

It's a great idea to use AI to speed up various parts of your SEO workflow, but it's worth remembering that online AI models get deprecated, costs change and output can radically shift.

One way to mitigate this risk is run models locally with a system like Ollama. This allows you to download and 'own' the model. No forced sunsetting, no sudden cost increase, no output change. We use local models at Candour for a bunch of things.

Can I Play with Minds?

Marketing is about influence. If you're counting clicks and citations in AI as your success metric, you're missing the point.

No Image Left Behind

When you're doing a website migration, if you're getting image traffic you should ideally migrate and redirect all of your images too - but what happens if you're redoing all of your images? I had this situation and found a solution that worked really well. ⬇

This was an e-commerce client getting approximately 80,000 clicks from their product imagery, but they were redoing it all during the site rebuild and migration. It became hugely complex trying to map redirects for old product images to new ones, so we ended up doing something else: We simply copied the asset directory with images over to the new site so they were accessible on the same URLs. What was the result of this?

✅ The images stayed ranking and if a user clicked to visit the source, they followed the normal URL redirect and ended up on the correct page

✅ Many of the new images started to rank for similar terms - so in some instances, we had double images leading to even more traffic!

The best solution is sometimes the least complex 😊

Rime of the Ancient Anchor

Anchor text is still hugely important for SEO (and users!) and there's loads to know about it! Here are some of the key points:

🔗 Anchor text is the clickable text a user can see within a link

🔗 It's what is read out by screen readers used for people with a visual impairment

🔗 It helps all users understand what the next page is about

🔗 It's used heavily by search engines to 'label' what the linked page may be about.

🔗 You should use descriptive anchor text wherever possible and avoid terms like "click here" and "read more"

Top Core Updates referrer leaderboard

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🥇 MJ Cachón Yáñez (LinkedIn / Bluesky)

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