👨‍⚖️

​Google sues SerpApi over unlawful scraping of search results. Google accuse SerpApi of using tactics like cloaking and dynamic crawler names to escape security measures and reselling the scraped content to users.

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​8 million users' AI conversations sold by Chrome extensions. These extensions harvested AI conversations via script injections and sold user data, despite being verified by the Chrome Web Store.

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​Google tests new much longer AI-generated snippets on SERPs. These snippets appear for Reddit and forum results and are often twice as long as than the standard 3 lines with a 'More' button snippet structure.

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​Google Discover tests a 'Tailor your feed' feature. This feature allows users to use natural language prompts to specify the news, topics and sources they want to see in their Discover feed.

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​More AI-powered sports features are appearing on SERPs. These features allow users to easily access other sports articles from the same publishers and information for similar players and teams.

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​Google updates its JavaScript documentation about canonical URLs. The update explains how to avoid mismatched canonicals being picked up from the HTML crawl and JavaScript rendering process.

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​You can now verify Google AI-generated images and videos in the Gemini app. Just upload an image or video file and ask, "Was this generated using Google AI?" and SynthID will detect hidden watermarks.

✨

​ChatGPT made a significant change to how fanout queries are generated between October and November, the queries are now more than twice as long. They are sometimes are more distant from the original prompt.

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There are some rules that you've got to follow

Built in to the Screaming Frog CustomJS library is "(AlsoAsked+ChatGPT) Find unanswered questions". This allows you to track intent shift and find content gaps at scale with the AlsoAsked and ChatGPT APIs.
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The result: You get Screaming Frog output that lists questions your content doesn't answer.

​Here's the full guide I wrote for Search Engine Land.​

Keep your CustomJS library out of the light

I've seen so many great SEO campaigns lose internal support and funding simply because of measurement and reporting. Working in SEO, you have an intrinsic understanding of the gap between impressions, clicks and organic revenue. Unfortunately, this isn't the case for a lot of stakeholders.
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Setting up tracking to reveal the real value generated after the click can make opportunities that weren’t visible before suddenly obvious
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​Bengu Sarica Dincer has written a great guide on Search Engine Journal about setting up user journey tracking in GA4, with everything from funnel explorations to creating custom events which can really save your life. 💀

Don't give your SEO campaign any water

The data I have seen so far would indicate that the background searches/fan out that LLMs trigger from prompts are not deterministic and vary.

It is worthwhile to monitor and store them over time.

Never feed your LLMs after midnight

If you're using an LLM to track visibility, it is likely not reflective of what users are seeing.

​Hugely interesting research from Jakub Sadowski that I discovered via Gianluca Fiorelli.

The differences are pretty staggering, from answer length to sources and brands mentioned.

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