❇️

​Gemini in Chrome begins worldwide rollout. This integrates Google's AI directly into the browsing experience, including encouraging users with an 'Ask Gemini' button added to the top right of Chrome.

🕴️

​Google creates guidance for building agent-friendly websites. This new guide explains that agents use three primary methods: screenshots, HTML and the accessibility tree, to view and understand websites.

📰

​Google's Preferred Sources expands globally and for multiple languages. The Preferred Sources documentation has been updated to confirm that this feature is available for all languages supported by Google Search.

⭐

​Google now shows how many reviews have been deleted on Google Business Profile. At present, this is live in Germany and is specifically related to reviews that violate a German defamation law, rather than Google guidelines.

🍪

​UK websites can now set certain analytics cookies without prior consent. These cookies must be used for site performance and optimisation rather than tracking or remarketing.

🥸

​AI search engines can still be manipulated by fake brands. This study from SE Ranking shows that Perplexity was the fastest to surface new content while Gemini most commonly misidentified the brand.

🏷️

​Google Discover tests 'You asked to see' label This label can apply to different content formats and is based on the content you choose from the 'Tailor Your Feed' feature​.

🪦

​RIP to Ask Jeeves, Ask.com closes after 25 years. If you were online before the Millennium, you probably remember Ask Jeeves, a search engine that competed with Yahoo and AltaVista before Google dominated the market.

Only 22.5% of teams have fully integrated SEO and AI search workflows. Is yours one of them?

Most brands are already losing in AI search without knowing it. And most marketing leaders can't pinpoint where.

Semrush published two new playbooks to solve this, giving marketers the foundation to understand the landscape, secure internal buy-in, and start building toward execution.

Brands that treat SEO and AI visibility as separate workstreams are building on a fault line. The ones pulling ahead are making visibility an enterprise operating model.

What's the matter, are you pushing too many API calls?

⚠️ Free tool: Find intent gaps in your content automatically! I’ve made an accessible, no API key, no login, no payment required demo of the content improvement workflow I wrote a guide for at intentgaps.com​

What does this tool do?

🖥️ Enter a URL and the tool will scrape that page, read the main content and try and determine the overall page topic by the title/h1. It uses OpenAI to do this, so it isn’t perfect, you have the opportunity to edit it if you think it is slightly off.

🔄 Next, the tool will use the AlsoAsked API to fetch the nearest proximity intent questions to your topic. Why? Because the data shows* that sites that answer these questions most thoroughly tend to rank higher.

🤖 Next, we pass your main page content and the AlsoAsked questions to AI to ensure the provided questions are relevant, and then we score the page based on if those questions are fully, partially, or not answered at all.

🚦 You then get a scorecard to give you some easy pointers on where you might be able to improve your content.

I posted a guide** of how to do this at scale on the Search Engine Land in 2024 with Screaming Frog, AlsoAsked and OpenAI, but of course it requires paid software, and paid API keys. This tool is designed as an easy access version to show you what is possible with AlsoAsked data!

In the few cases where there is no PAA tree generated by Google for your topic, I have used OpenAI to generate what it thinks to be some helpful questions to keep things moving.

I built this over the weekend, so I am sure something will break or be wonky, and I welcome your feedback! ⤵️

The website came alive

We passed up 5 figures of build work today because the recommendations were based on an 'LLM visibility audit' the client received that I could see would make absolutely no difference to them.

This brand scored 'zero' on the provided LLM accessibility/crawlability audit, yet the major LLMs I tested could clearly read their live pages, and when you asked for recommendations they were featured in generated answers. 🤡

Please, please, please be critical about these things and get them checked before you invest in them. Some of the suggested 'optimisations' were even things that had been deprecated or not used by most major search engines 🤦‍♂️

Some fool accused you of optimising the best

An overview of category-level searches vs current performance is a simple way to help map where to focus your search strategy. 🗺️

Comparing the sum of category-level searches versus your current impressions and clicks can quickly highlight areas where there is an opportunity, maybe where you're not performing, or where you don't have existing content.

I ain't got time for tools

​Emina Demiri talking about mining public data such as Reddit and Trustpilot to understand how your audience are talking about your topic, the sentiment and how recalibrating your content around this data has immediate impact. 🎯
​
Hopefully she will drop some links in comments to tools 🥲

There's emotion out there, waiting for us

Neuroscientist Giulia Panozzo recommends understanding the underlying emotional context of search queries
​
E.g:
​
🗺️”near me, now, today” = urgency
💰”cheap, free, coupon code” = loss aversion
⚒️ “easy, quick fix, how to” = stress/anxiety
​
Identifying these allows you to hook into the emotional state of the user and make your content and result a lot more impactful.

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