🤖

​Google fixes AI Mode tracking issues. Google has removed the noreferrer tag that was causing AI Mode traffic to be attributed as Direct on GA4. Referral traffic from AI Mode is now landing in the Organic Search channel.

🕵️

​Reddit launches Reddit Pro Trends, a free tool to track keywords and brand mentions. Pro Trends allows users to see real-time search trend data and which Subreddits are talking about their brand/keyword.

🗃️

​Leaked documents explain how Claude's search function works. Some SEO-relevant details include what conditions are met for citations (called "link worthiness") and how the model handles queries with direct answers.

🗺️

​AI Overviews are translating and ranking English content in international SERPs. These Google-translated results of high-authority English-language sites are regularly outranking content in the user's native language.

▶️

​Google Lens is now usable in YouTube Shorts. Through the YouTube app users can translate, highlight and search any content in the video including captions.

🎙️

​Google CEO believes AI "will be bigger than the internet". In this interview, Sundar Pichai also claims that referral traffic from AI Overviews is increasing and that Google is now sending traffic to a broader range of sites.

📊

​Perplexity Labs launches for Pro subscribers, allowing users to create apps, write code and more. This expansion aligns Perplexity's features with competitors such as ChatGPT and Gemini's research tools.

📅

​AI Overviews are still confused what year and what day it is. This highlights how, despite the push towards AI Mode and how powerful this technology can be, sometimes it still gets very basic information wrong. Stay cautious!

🚦

​Gary Illyes warns that a flood of AI crawlers could create "web congestion". With AI agents and "everyone and my grandmother" creating a crawler, Gary worries about potential issues for the infrastructure of the web.

Oh no!

With AI Mode, how will it be possible to find the next most likely intent search from a super longtail query in their search fan out?!?

Add annotations to your analytics

I saw this nice simple tip and reminder from Aleyda last week that I immediately forwarded to our team to make sure it had happened. 💡

It was simply a reminder to add a notation to your analytics platform so you can start measuring the impact of AI Mode launching in the US, especially as we currently have “noreferrer” on their links and no GSC data.

1. Add an annotation to the release date (May 20, 2025) in your analytics platform
2. Start comparing your before/after in organic search traffic (look for negative shifts)
3. Compare your before/after in “direct” traffic (look for increasing shifts)

Aleyda also runs SEOFOMO (https://seofomo.co/) - hugely comprehensive newsletter that also includes articles from people in the SEO community and a community-driven news site at https://news.seofomo.co/​

Check them out ⬆️

How to get access to AI Mode outside of the US

As usual, with any new technology, there is a tidal wave of panic, misinformation, knee-jerk reactions, and people taking advantage to grift. (Comment for my n8n workflow worth $55,000!) 😏

So for the next few days, I am going to post some grounded, helpful advice on how to think about AI Mode going forward with your marketing, whether it's focused on SEO, content, digital PR, or something else 🧘‍♂️

If you haven't already, the first step is to have a play around with AI Mode, which you can actually do if you're outside of the US. Here is what you need to do:

1. Have an individual Google account (not an organisation one)
2. Use a proxy service (I use ProtonVPN) to route your connection through the US
3. Sign up to the "AI Mode" Labs experiment here: https://lnkd.in/ens99x3d
4. When you're signed in on your personal account, connected via the US, you should now be able to play with AI Mode and see what the fuss is about!

How important are entities for AI Mode?

In my opinion, many professionals are vastly overstating the value of entities and grounding when it comes to AI Mode.

This is so apparent in this example from Tom Haczewski:

Google has business data in a structured format directly from Google My Business, marking a business as "Permanently Closed."

When asked, Google's own AI Overview insists that the business is not permanently closed.

It's just repeating what it has seen on a website that Google trusts.

At the moment, from what I have seen of AI Mode / AIOs, answers are still heavily skewed to some of Google's website metrics.

How important is digital PR for AI Mode?

In amongst the "sack your entire marketing and dev team for an AI that only hallucinates a bit", I've seen some people questioning the role of Digital PR in an AI Mode future . Here's my thoughts ⤵️

I think Digital PR is going to be most of the most important and sought after services in the future of SEO and with the rise of LLMs/AI Mode.

1. You know all those link metrics we refer to in SEO: DA, DR, TF? Well, it turns out that LLM companies are buying up link graph data from these companies - no doubt to give them some guidance with their training data; who should we be paying attention to? The link graph is still the basis for the web, and it's a method that has served search engines well for over two decades - you simply can't treat all sources equally.
2. If you get coverage in top-tier publications, there is a waterfall effect where other publications pick it up and then this goes onto drive conversation and disource around the web in places like Reddit. These mentions and relevant conversations featuring your brand appearing all over the web are the basics of how LLM models are built, and will raise your likelihood of being surfaced.
3. While how people use the web (the internet, really) is always evolving, Ofcom and Press Gazette report that, in the UK, mainstream news brands are still the most likely source cited by social media users. Being present and visible in these publications is what sets the agenda for the conversation, and makes sure you have a seat at the table.
4. The other side of AI tooling is that journalists are getting flooded with fake "AI experts", we've seen it recently where it turns out cited "experts" did not even exist. One of the themes at the Digital PR Summit this year was that more reporters want to speak to sources on the phone to verify them. The space is noisy, and having genuine stories, data, experts, and people will be more important than ever in a sea of misinformation.

How does referral traffic from AI search work?

Tracking AI-Search at the moment is challenging, not just in terms of visibility, but even traffic within your analytics.

Patrick Stox has done the leg work of looking at which generative engines are passing referral data.

Very handy to be aware of what is going on - you can get the full story here.

Google patents are related to AI Mode

If you want to learn a little bit more about how AI Mode generates responses, this week's SEO Patent Podcast covers the Google patent "Query Response Using A Custom Corpus", which does exactly that.

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