🗺️

​Google launches Ask Maps, a new AI-powered interface for Google Maps.This near feature uses Gemini to allow the user to prompt Google Maps about local businesses, get recommendations and make travel plans.

📊

​Google Search Console's branded query filter expands to all eligible sites. This feature was announced in November and allows easier filtering for branded and unbranded queries.

🔗

​Google is the most cited source in AI Mode. These self-referential citations are links to Google search pages and have been common in AI Overviews since last year. These citations have now increased in AI Mode as well.

🛍️

​Google launches Merchant Center for Agencies. This new hub brings all of the Merchant Center accounts under one interface. The dashboard also highlights diagnostics and warnings across all the active accounts.

🛑

​Amazon blocks Perplexity's AI agent. A US federal judge concluded that Perplexity's AI agent gained unauthorised access to Amazon systems. This could be the first in a series of legal battles between retailers and AI agent.

📰

​News publications accounts for 14% of AI citations. This study also showed that syndication, newswires and local news make very little impact for AI visibility.

❇️

​Google releases Gemini Embedding 2, a multimodal embedding model. This model can process multiple inputs at once including video, audio, documents and images in a single request.

The LIVE SEO podcast event is back and it's bigger than ever🎉

Search with Candour & The SEO Mindset Podcast are collaborating once again for the best pre-brightonSEO tradition.
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🗣️ The Efficiency Paradox: Why Al Doesn't Make your Life Easier
📅 Wednesday 29th April
🕕 Doors at 18:00 and the podcast starts at 19:30
🎟️ Tickets are free
📍 Ironworks Studios Brighton

Remember, JavaScript is your best muscle

The best optimisation tip for JavaScript is, if you don’t need to use JS, then don’t 🙂 via Martin Splitt at last year’s Tech SEO Summit​

All I wanna do is crawl the distance

Trying to explain how engines crawl, crawl traps, and crawl budget to a non-technical person? Here's an analogy ⬇
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Imagine you're showing people around a house that you're trying to sell. You would want to show them all of the important rooms, the living room, kitchen, and bedrooms - you want them to have the optimal journey and spend the maximum time looking at these rooms.
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Unfortunately for you, the house has been built in such a way that you have long corridors with hundreds of doors that all appear to lead back to the same tiny bathroom. This means that the people viewing your house used up all of their 30-minute viewing time getting stuck opening doors to bathrooms and didn't get to even see the living room! No sale!
​
This is essentially what can happen when Google sends robots to check out your website. With a poor technical setup, it's possible for Google to get "lost" in deep trees of faceted and filtered navigation, and use all of its resources looking at pages you don't care about!

You and AI, we don't even have a choice

Yes, AI systems are choosing passages on pages.

Yes, it helps having your information organised to succinctly solve specific intent problems. GEO? No.

I've been begging you to do this for years with AlsoAsked my friends 🥲

Why do we do SEO? Because we can't sing or dance

To quote Will Critchlow:

"We're doing business, not science".

If you're running SEO experiments, you don't the exacting science-level thresholds on statistical certainty before you proceed.
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You absolutely need to pay atttention when your test has a confidence level so low it could be chance, but especially if your test "makes sense" (it is likely to provide additional value), then even confidence levels as low as 90% are acceptable to continue to push in my opinion*
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*yes, it depends, if you're rolling out super high risk/impact things you may want more!

SEO's not getting killed, it's getting mad!

When you hear a GEO person saying the SEO is dead, and it is all about being mentioned in AI, ask them where the AI gets those URLs from and watch them do this.

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