📊

​Google Search Console adds an AI-powered configuration to Performance report. This feature allows users to create filters and comparisons using natural language. LLMs may hallucinate so don't blindly trust these insights!

🌐

​Google's Year in Search shares the most searched terms of 2025. Top global searches include AI tools such as Gemini and DeepSeek and the AI-generated trends include 'AI action figure' and even 'Ghibli'.

☁️

​Cloudflare experiences its second major outage in a month. The outage occurred on 5th December and was resolved on 7th December. This may have caused some 5xx errors for you, so don't forget to double-check your reports!

🔍

​The Google app adds AI Mode features. These features include "Summarize", "Ask a follow up" and "Dive deeper" to learn more about the current page. This also works for Google Discover as it's part of the Google app.

😵

​Google added, and then removed, an LLMs.txt file to their Developers subdomain. LLMs.txt has been a misunderstood and controversial topic recently and it seems like Google have been swept up in it too.

📈

​Some sites are still feeling the results of Google removing the num=100 parameter. This has manifested as an increase in average impressions for many sites. Once again, double-check your reports, folks!

⬆️

​Google's 'upload a file' search feature leads directly to AI Mode. This feels like another step towards Google integrating AI Mode as part of the main search function.

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Warehousing your GA data!

One of the first things I check with new clients is that they are warehousing their GA4/GSC data. It's more important than ever as other data quality and sources evaporate.

One page or two?

Wondering if you should create a new page for a keyword or combine it with an existing page? One of the best places to get the answer to this is... Google! Keyword Insights has a free SERP Similarity Tool that does this quickly and visually for you!

By comparing both queries, you can see how Google considers them as close enough intent that it shows roughly the same set of results or if they are considered different enough for a unique set of search results.

For instance, if you see two terms and 8/10 of the pages in shown in the top ten results are the same, this is a strong indication that you should cover both key phrases on the same URL.

The title you see isn't always what Google gets

While Google may modify what it displays in the SERP, they still use the provided title element for ranking purposes. This has been confirmed by Google.

Sometimes intent does not shift

One of the first tips I ever posted was not to add new content simply because you think Google likes your site to be "fresh". Danny from Google has also confirmed the opposite, that you shouldn't delete content simply because it is "old". To summarise all of this:

✅ Some queries will want 'fresh' results - like news stories, on other queries it won't matter at all

✅ Updating content where information has changed or new information is available is a good thing

✅ All of this is better thought about as "is this helpful?" rather than "is this old/new?"

Size isn't everything

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! 👏

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