🤑

​Google tests paying publishers when content is included in AI search. Google is testing a program through Google Search Console that aims to reward content that contributes to the "freshness and factuality" in AI Mode and AIOs.

🛍️

​Google removes free product listings from EEA search results. This is part of the changes Google is making because of the Digital Markets Act. These listings have been replaced by price comparison services.

🗺️

​Google adds local knowledge panel data into AI Overviews. This new integration also adds a 'Show more' button which takes you to an AI Mode chat.

🏷️

​Bing tests new labels in product carousels. These new labels include Top Picks, Price Drop, Sale and the number of views on a product. This is another reason to keep your product feeds up-to-date with the latest information.

🛒

​Google UCP adds cart transfer and expanded checkout features. Using the Merchant Center hub, US retailers can soon enable these new features, as well as new AI performance insights.

🔞

​Google requires labelling of adult products in Shopping feeds. This labelling can be done by using the adult attribute or with hasAdultConsideration structured data.

🔍

​Google tests a new 'Dive deeper' feature in Discover. This new feature shows additional information such as related stories and community reactions. This test begins with video content and may expand to articles in the future.

When the stakes are high, AI citation patterns change

In everyday or commercial queries, brand-owned content earns citations. But when users ask AI about their health or finances, the rules change. Government and official sources dominate, Citation Cores shrink, and brand content struggles to cut through.

Semrush's latest YMYL Mini Study maps the trends in AI sources when the stakes are highest, across 22 topics, four platforms, and millions of prompts.

If your brand operates in finance, health, or any high-trust category, this changes how you need to approach your AI visibility.

A new moral low chunk

"AI search is CHUNKING your page!". Every week someone discovers passage-level retrieval, rebrands it as an existential threat, and sells a framework for it. ⤵️

Google has been doing this since 2020, when they decided a 3,000 page document wasn't necessarily the best way to do things, their documentation says:

"Passage ranking is an AI system we use to identify individual sections or 'passages' of a web page to better understand how relevant a page is to a search."

The patent even describes some really neat things like this example on annotations:

A sentence that matches "treatment metabolic acidosis" while containing none of those three words, because it inherits them from the page title and the heading above it.

Your H2s have been doing retrieval work since before "GEO" was a LinkedIn job title.

(Also don't forget every single LLM is built on transformer neural network architecture, which was also created by Google in 2017).

Don't stress about "chunking", it's been a thing in this context for years

Holy headers

Header tags hardly matter at all in terms of ranking in Google, I can guarantee that you have more urgent issues. There are so many myths about this. ⤵️

1. Does the order of your header tags matter for SEO? No, it doesn't. The SEO Starter Guide says: "Having your headings in semantic order is fantastic for screen readers, but from Google Search perspective, it doesn't matter if you're using them out of order."
2. Is it bad for rankings to have multiple h1s? No, it doesn't matter. To quote John Mueller: "You can use h1 tags as often as you want on a page. There's no limit. Neither upper nor lower bound... Your site can do perfectly fine with no h1 tags or with five h1 tags" .... "It's not necessary or critical to have a h1 element on a page."
3. But why is this? Why does Google not seem to care? Would it not be a *great* signal to use? No, it wouldn't. The answer is also in their docs: "The web in general is not valid HTML, so Google Search can rarely depend on semantic meanings hidden in the HTML specification".
4. Gary Illyes confirmed this on the Search Off The Record podcast saying: "I know that some people like to think that HTML structure matters all so much for rankings, but in fact, it doesn't matter that much"
5. Back in 'ye olde SEO days', people used to try and trick Google by using h1/h2s on keywords, but using CSS to style them to look like regular text. If you put an h1 styled like normal text on a page, and a regular paragraph, but styled it has big title text; Google would actually treat the large (non-header) text with more prominence. They talk bout this in their docs: "we are making use of text that humans can visually see when they arrive at a web page... content that's large and prominent through the use of style treatments.

I'm not saying don't bother doing them properly, I am just telling you that having a great user experience (including clear headers, whether they are strictly

etc or not) is more important; and don't except any massive improvement in your visibility through changing header tags. 🕊️

These colours don't rank

A 'ranking factor' is not the same as 'something that affects how your site ranks'. 😵‍💫 Confused? Let me help you (it's important) ⤵️

I believe understanding the difference between these two things also helps you decode what Google is telling us when they talk about 'ranking factors'.

Since 'Something that affects how your site ranks' isn't very catchy, we are going to refer to this as ✨ re-ranking ✨

Here is roughly how I would define the two:

🎯 A ranking factor: A score that is directly applied to your site for something it is, has, or how it does it. You change that thing, the score changes.
Examples: Link signals, spam scores, site_quality_score.

😵‍💫 Re-ranking: Applied after first ordering, adjusting positions without scoring your site against itself. It's contextual or comparative: your page can move without anything on it changing.
Examples: CTR, freshness boosts, SERP feature displacement.
​
Here are two ways to think about them:

1. Ranking factors answer = "how good is this page for this query?"
2. Re-ranking factors answer = "given these candidates, what should this specific SERP look like for this specific user right now?"

🤔 Why is this important to know and consider?

An example was yesterday's conversations about header tags vs text that looks like a header tag for the user (but isn't one).

You could (correctly) make the argument: "Proper header tags improve accessibility, which improves UX for those users, which improves satisfaction, which can give signals for better ranking" - This is true!

There is also nuance that you can change something *that is not a ranking factor* which will then modify people's behaviour to influence something that *is* involved in ranking or re-ranking.

These things sometimes mistakenly get labelled as ranking factors, let's have a silly example of how that can play out to faulty thinking:

📃 We compete on a SERP for daytime activities, and all our activities are outdoors, most of our competitors are indoors.

🌞 There is a heatwave, the schools close, people are Googling activities in droves and they are *all* clicking on our OUTDOOR listings because they are great to do in the sun, everyone is having a great time.

🖱️ So many clicks are landing on our SERP listing, that Google re-ranks and boosts us to the top of the page.

All of this SERP shift we see is driven by.....Sunshine. 🌞

However, it does not make sunshine 'a ranking factor'

A report made in heaven

When it comes to reporting, a turning point for me many years ago was appreciating the difference between "accurate" and "precise". ⤵️
​
Making decisions with false precision is painting yourself strategically into a corner, and I read a fantastic article on this called "When Attribution Looks More Precise Than The Data Behind It" on Search Engine Journal by Bengü Sarıca Dinçer.
​
The lessons in this article will help you make better decisions, which is the key for long-term profitability of search, regardless of algorithm and system shifts.

​Here's the article in full.

Every last crawl

"Crawl budget is a time-based metric, not a number of pages. It is how long Google will spend trying to crawl your website" ~Barry Adams at Belgrade SEO Conference.

Barry says to get maximum exposure in Google Discover, then site speed is a key factor. Google Discover is part of the news ecosystem, and you need to get your pages found as quickly and easily as possible.

Top Core Updates referrer leaderboard

A big thank you to our top referrers, who have signed up over 10 people to the Core Updates newsletter, go follow them!

🥇 MJ Cachón Yáñez (LinkedIn / Bluesky)

🏅 Nikki Pilkington (LinkedIn / Bluesky)

🏅 Lidia Infante (LinkedIn / Bluesky)

🏅 Saijo George (LinkedIn / Bluesky)

🏅 Alice Rowan (LinkedIn)

🏅 Martijn Jeurissen (LinkedIn)

🏅 Chester Beard (LinkedIn)