🗓️

​The March 2026 core update completed its rollout on 8 April. This core update has been reported as relatively quiet, especially compared to the previous core update from December 2025.

🔍

​Google tests integrating AI Mode into the main 'All' search tab. This continues Google's experiments of making AI Mode part of the central search experience, rather than a separate option for users.

🥗

​Google adds agentic restaurant bookings to AI Mode. Restaurant bookings can now be made directly in AI Mode, across multiple partnered platforms such as OpenTable.

📉

​ChatGPT's latest model gives 20% fewer citations than the previous model. The average number of unique domains per response dropped from 19 to 15 and the number of unique URLs per response dropped from 24 to 19.

🛍️

​Analysis of Google's shopping classifier confirms how commerce pages are identified. Each page receives a score based on the first 400-450 words and this determines if the page receives rich results and features from Google.

🖥️

​Google released Gemma 4 under Apache 2.0 for the first time. Four open-weight multimodal models supporting 140+ languages. The 31B dense model ranks third on Arena AI

📊

​Google changes Looker Studio name back to Data Studio. Yes, it used to be called Data Studio before the rebrand in 2022. Yes, Data Studio is a more appropriate name. No, people won't care which name you use.

Win a free ticket to Croatia SEO Summit!

Croatia SEO Summit is giving away 10 White Hat tickets for the conference in Šibenik on June 11-12, 2026.

The raffle is simple: fill out the form, accept the terms, and wait for the draw.
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The White Hat ticket includes access to talks in two tracks on 12 June, entry to the party, free lunch, the AI networking app, and a goodie bag.

It is essentially a full second‑day conference experience at no cost.
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This year’s lineup brings international SEO experts such as Lily Ray, Craig Campbell, Brodie Clark, Barry Adams, Gus Pelogia, Ryan Robinson, and more, covering SEO, AI, and revenue‑driven content strategy.

Come and enjoy some great talks and cocktails at the beach!

Sites, uh, find a way

Here are some of the most common mistakes I have seen doing >100 website migrations:
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📉 Not setting up redirects for non-canonical URLs with backlinks (e.g. with marketing parameters)
📉 Not realising URLs are case sensitive and making broken redirects
📉 Migrating a global website to a ccTLD instead of gTLD
📉 Not migrating images
📉 Not migrating or redirecting assets with links (e.g. PDFs)
📉 Moving high-traffic pages 'down' in link structure on new website
📉 Removing 'non-commercial' URLs that have great links and letting them 404
📉 Breaking structured information (e.g. tables into CSS)
📉 and of course - going live with "noindex" still on

After careful consideration, I've decided not to endorse your question

More unrevealed info from last year's Google exploit: Google calculates a "question_fringe_score" when processing user searches. What does it mean? ⤵️
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I can't find any direct mention of this in Google patents or docs, however my guess would be it is likely a score estimating how far a query (especially a question) sits on the 'fringe' of Google’s known entity/knowledge space and how atypical or long‑tail it is.
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There is an associated BOOL of is_question_fringe (true/false), which is likely determined by a threshold of this score.
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If a question is identified as fringe, this would help decide when to lean on semantic generalisation (e.g., RankBrain‑style) versus exact signals. We have been previously told RankBrain is used for "previously unseen" queries where Google doesn't have much data on how to act, so this makes a lot of sense to me.
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This means it is leaning on other types of metrics and computing to calculate ranking vs a lot of the user engagement metrics we talk about regularly.
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Source: We reported a Google exploit that revealed thousands of parameters used in Google ranking, including their actual scores. Google deemed this bug as high severity/high impact and paid the max bug bounty of $13,337 (which Candour gave to charity 😎 )

What have you got in there? GEO?

While the fundamentals of SEO and 'GEO' (shudder) are the same, there are some important nuances you need to know. For instance, if you analyse the fan out queries on ChatGPT for 'best seo agency uk', you can clearly see that ChatGPT is heavily reliant on 'awards' type websites.
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This means if you want to appear as a recommendation for 'best seo agency uk', you need to be listed and have case studies on these award-type websites... 🏆
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Great news for the award event businesses 😂

I'm always on the lookout for a future ex-top SEO expert

Appearing in the answers for AI surfaces is not so much a matter of optimising your own site as that of multiple other sites.

Last year, several 'SEO friends' all posted the same/very similar "top SEO experts" list, and it comes up again and again when I see people use AI to generate these lists.
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Explore the fanout/web searches that happen in the background, get on those sites, and your visibility in AI answers will be much more stable than just trying to get a page on your site to be cited.

That is one big pile of fan out...

A few people were asking about the tool I screenshot yesterday for exploring ChatGPT query fan outs, so I have popped it onto Cloudflare Pages for free for you at QueryFan.com 🤓
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This tool shows you the fan outs and web searches that are happening for any prompt, so you can get an idea of where you need to be visible to appear in retrieval-generated AI answers.
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I have a bigger tool coming to the same domain soon, but this should be fun for now, enjoy!

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