📊

​Google Search Console's AI-powered configuration is now live for all users. The test of this new AI-powered GSC was reported on a few weeks ago and now every user can use prompts to create comparisons and filters.

🔗

​Groups of links now appear in a pop-up on hover in AI Overviews and AI Mode. This new pop-up shows more descriptive and prominent link icons and should, in theory, increase CTR for these featured links.

🗙

​Using Markdown doesn't drive more AI traffic. This study from Profound tested the claim that Markdown would drive more AI search traffic than HTML and found no significance between the two formats.

🖥️

​Google and Bing describe Markdown as "messy" and "likely to cause more crawl load". This reaffirms that Markdown is not the solution for optimising for AI search and may actually cause issues for your content.

📖

​Microsoft releases the AI Marketer's Guide, a guide to AI search, including advice on content strategies and how to write clear, structured content for visibility in AI search.

🛡️

​Microsoft reports widespread prompt injection in 'Summarize with AI' buttons. Microsoft describes this as "AI recommendation poisoning", when sites hide prompt instructions within a website button labelled as 'Summarize with AI'.

🌐

​Google's AI Mode expands to 53 new languages. AI Mode now works with just under 100 languages and this expansion adds over 1 billion new users globally.

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Googlebot cannot pass

If you're setting up automated crawling of your site as Googlebot, it is beneficial to make the origin of these crawls the US.

Googlebot is normally crawling from US-located IP addresses, so also crawling from this location can catch edge cases, such as automatic geo-IP redirects (which you hopefully don't have).

I wish the migration had never come to me.

Here are some of the most common mistakes I have seen doing >100 website migrations:
​
📉 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
📉 and of course - going live with "noindex" still on
​
What would you add to this list?

One does not simply trust a news source

Did you know for news, Google has a patent describing "Source Rank" that aims to asses how trustworthy and important a news source is?
​
📰 It looks as basics such as how many articles a source publishes, how long those articles they are - they even look at writing style, spelling and grammar errors.
​
🎙️ If you're interested in knowing more, The SEO Patent Podcast covers the patent: "Systems and Methods for Improving the Ranking of News Articles".​
​
🤖 If you haven't heard the podcast before, it's a podcast I use personally to learn, that generates conversations based on source patent PDFs. It's an easy way to get a basic understanding of patents to decide if they are worth taking a deeper read into.

It's a pity I didn't change the title when I had the chance

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. ✨

I don't know half of AI half as well as I should like

How do I know whether it is okay to use AI to write my content end to end? I have one simple rule of thumb for that ⤵️
​
Would your user be disappointed to know what they are reading was written by AI?

If yes, then it is one of the strongest signals not to use AI in this way. Two examples:
​
😒 "Expert-written" guide to SEO. I would stop reading if I knew it was written by AI (I could also just ask AI myself!). This would be an example of when not to use AI.
​
😁 A summary of 2,600 reviews for a product. Perfect! I don't mind that AI produced this, it's a great use case, and it is helpful to me to see on average what people like/dislike about a product. I'm not bothered a human didn't write it.

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