🗣️

​Google launches Search Live. Search Live allows users to ask questions in AI Mode, via the Google app, using voice input. Search Live can run in the background and continue to work while using other apps.

📊

​Google Search Console now includes clicks, impressions & position from AI Mode. Google has updated its documentation to confirm that data from AI Mode will now be included in GSC.

🔍

​Firefox tests Perplexity as built-in search engine. Firefox is the 4th most popular browser globally, and seeing other browsers experimenting with AI search engines could be a threat to Google's search monopoly.

🔗

​Google updates URL structure documentation. There are no significant changes, but the page has been reorganised and includes more examples of URL structure best practices.

📝

​Google tests AI Mode as a replacement for People Also Ask. This appears to be a very limited test but may be a sign of Google's plan to integrate AI Mode into more search features in the near future.

🤖

​OpenAI updates ChatGPT search with "improved quality" and "instruction following". This update claims to handle longer conversational contexts and the ability to run multiple searches for complex questions.

🛑

​Yoast SEO fixes issue that inserts AI-related HTML when copying & pasting. The issue appeared when copying text from web pages and Word documents into the WordPress editor.

☁️

​Cloudflare makes two tools, use-mcp & AI Playground, open source. Both tools allow users to connect to and deploy remote MCP servers. AI Playground is Cloudflare's AI chatbot that provides support and guidance.

🔁

​Google tests swapping the website name and URL in SERPs. Call us old fashioned but this looks very strange and doesn't seem to improve the user experience in any particular way.

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LLMs are not like any other machine

As LLMs become more relevant in content discovery, it's worth considering the minimum acceptable standard when technical auditing.

​Jono Alderson wrote a short post about this and said:

"These systems do not crawl the web like Google. They are not rendering your pages or executing your scripts. In most cases, they are simply fetching the raw HTML from your server and moving on."

​https://www.jonoalderson.com/misc/llms-arent-playing-by-googles-rules/​

I've seen queries you people wouldn't believe

Did you know you can see the queries that ChatGPT is making to Bing when you ask it a question and it decides it needs to use a web search?

Open dev tools -> Filter to Fetch/XHR -> Click on "conversation" and check out the "Response" (see screenshot)

It actually shows a bunch of other interesting information, like some of ChatGPT's "reasoning", the URLs and titles of websites it chooses and some other bits.

This informational is useful as it gives you great insight into what you actually need to rank for (with "classic" SEO) to appear for these RAG queries. ("But mah GEO!" 😱)

This was actually going to be a surprise in my semKRK presentation tomorrow in Krakow under the "data mining" section (it's similar to how we found the Google exploit back in March), but I saw Jérôme Salomon already posted about it, so I wanted to share it too. 🤝

Love that other people are poking around as well!

Hey Natalia Witczyk cameo 👀

I need you, robots.txt. This is a bad one, the worst yet.

Some LLMs can be incredibly aggressive with their crawling and cause issues with websites. While the 'optimal' solution is having a website that can handle these requests, it is not always possible 🔥

I would strongly recommend SEOs become involved in "bot control", as many times I've seen developers take unilateral action and do something along the lines of "x y z bot is causing an issue, so we blocked it"; I've seen sites accidentally block Googlebot and all sorts! ☠️

Some bots may need rate limiting, others can be blocked by robots[dot]txt, and it seems some bots won't even respect that!

Cloudflare has also been working on some creative solutions for stopping aggressive AI bots which are really worth checking out: https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/concepts/bot/​

You tiny thing. Your only thought is to outrank it.

Are your competitors much bigger than you with x10 the SEO budget?

It doesn't mean that you still can't roast them 🔥

​

👨‍💻 Big companies tend to have long dev queues. This means you can beat them to the punch on new features; whether it's web stories or schema, to give you the edge.

😱 Big companies tend to be very risk-averse. You should be experimenting liberally, the downside of failure is small, and the upside of being able to double-down on success is a huge advantage.

🏇 Big companies are normally very slow to make decisions with multiple stakeholders that need to be convinced. This means, you can get a headstart, especially when it comes to new innovations such as AI.

​

Don't try and battle them on their terms, focus in areas that are frustrating for them and carve your place there! 👏

Would Gemini help the tortoise stuck on its back?

Unfortunately, you can't just ask Gemini which queries it uses for grounding or for query fan out.

​Dan Petrovic did some nice experiments and caught the model [lying/bullshitting/hallunicating] (take your pick), so this isn't a viable way to do research that is good enough to act on.

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