📊

​Google Search Console rolls out filters for grouping data from multiple countries. These new filters allow users to select multiple countries at once to group the search traffic for those countries and view them in a single report.

🤝

​Google launches the UGC Fresh Data Program to highlight high-quality UGC. This program is a data pipeline, separate from Google's indexing API, that aims to highlight fresh, trending user-generated content.

📅

​The September 2026 spam update completes its rollout on 8th October. This spam update began on 24th September, meaning it took 2 weeks to roll out. That is significantly longer than the other spam updates in 2026.

📰

​Google tells site owners how many people have selected their site as a preferred source. This email notification also included a survey for site owners to influence how preferred sources data is presented in the future.

🌏

​Google opens Search Profile feature to India and Canada. Search Profiles have previously only been available in the US and Google has confirmed the plan to expand into more countries in the near future.

▶️

​Google adds new YouTube playlists for search fundamentals and technical SEO. If you're planning to brush up on some SEO fundamentals, these new playlists compile years of videos from the Google Search Central channel.

🔍

​OpenAI rolls out GPT-6 with Intelligent UI. This new model provides a multimodal experience by combining text, visuals, charts, forms, and interactive tools directly in the results.

Account manager vacancy at Candour

We're looking for an experienced Account Manager to join our team, leading client partnerships across a range of SEO, digital PR and design and build projects.

If you have a strong background in client management and are looking for a new opportunity with a Great Place To Work Certified™ agency, we’d love to hear from you.

Here are the key details:

• £35k - £39k salary + profit share
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Heart-shaped brand

Core Updates today covered the massive increase in AIOs for branded terms. Lily Ray rightly points out this is likely going to be seen in AI Visibility reporting; so be cautious of the next few weeks of anyone claiming large visibility increases!

Smells like LLM citations

Claim: “We made an AI instructions page and we saw an uplift in LLM citations!” 🤔
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Reality:
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They finally and somewhat ironically created some of the best content on the site that clearly and succinctly answers questions real people are asking.
​
RAG heavily favours fresh content, I regularly see any new content popping up in AIOs particularly.
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They are also unstable. It is highly likely the claimed ‘win’ will be gone in several weeks, replaced by newer pages.
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It isn’t about “AI instructions”.

Search as you are

First-mover advantage is huge in search and Frank van Dijk 📈 shared a great tip from brightonSEO:
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"By the time a keyword has search volume, you’re too late. Scrape the subreddits where your audience talks, count mentions of a topic per week against its own baseline, and publish on the fastest risers before the volume exists."

You know you're EEAT

The best sources of thought leadership and EEAT are the conversations already happening in your company. You can use simple automations and AI to capture, organise, and turn them into unique, original content at scale.
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​Christian Rigg shared this tip at brightonSEO along with a GitHub repo with everything necessary to do that, which people can sign up for here.

Something in the gap

From neuroscientist Giulia Panozzo at brightonSEO:

"Complement the traditional SEO metrics with Decision Distance, the estimated gap between what drives your audience’s choices and what your brand communicates across the customer journey: a greater gap creates friction to act on a choice users are already evaluating, making a conversion less likely, so align your messaging with your audience's functional, emotional and social needs to make sure you are not only visible, but actually chosen."
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Love seeing these cross-discipline insights.

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