🚨

​Google begins rolling out the June 2025 core update. Many were predicting that we were overdue for a core update so lo and behold, a new core update began on 30 June 2025. Rollout may take up to 3 weeks to complete.

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​Cloudflare now blocks all AI crawlers for new websites by default. This impactful update includes verification requirements for crawlers, one-click crawler blocking and even a 'pay per crawl' programme on new setups.

📊

​Search Console Insights is now integrated into the main GSC interface. Insights is moving from a standalone feature to full integration and will be rolling out in the next few weeks for all users.

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​Over 12% of People Also Ask answers are AI Overviews. The presence of AI Overviews continues to grow, even within SERP features, and PAAs are now including AI Overviews on a regular basis.

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​Google is now rendering pages with noindex tags. To be clear, these pages are still not indexed but the possibility of crawl resources being "wasted" on these rendering pages could have implications for large sites.

🧑‍⚖️

​Google faces another EU antitrust complaint from independent publishers. The Independent Publishers Alliance describes the lack of an opt out for AIOs being a key factor in publisher traffic being affected so heavily.

📉

​CTR is reduced by 37-40% when AI Overviews are present. This data set includes multiple studies from different SEO tools and spans from January 2024 - May 2025.

▶️

​YouTube updates the viewer segmentation in their analytics. The new viewer categories are 'new', 'casual' and 'regular', based on user engagement and how often users view content from your YouTube channel.

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​The top 10 domains referenced in AI Mode include a significant crossover with traditional search. Interestingly, some domains such as Fandom, Yelp & Quora rank significantly higher in AI Mode than traditional search.

🔗

​80.9% of SEOs believe that unlinked brand mentions affect organic rankings. From this study, 91% of SEOs are convinced their competitors are buying links and over 78% think that nofollow links impact rankings.

Fast-loading, accessible, conversion-friendly builds backed by research, real strategy, and a bit of healthy scepticism.

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We’re here to design and build websites that impress your users—and quietly get results.

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No ego. No fluff. No gold statuettes.

Just clear, confident design and build—done properly.

Some SEOs just want to watch the FAQs burn

Most people are using PAA (People Also Ask) data wrong, by simply adding FAQs onto their website 🤦‍♂️

🧠 The data given by Google’s People Also Ask boxes is fantastic and tells you what the user’s next most likely question will be.

🏠 Looking at the example below, which explores the search term “What is meant by remote working”, Google knows people are likely to ask about the difference between home and remote work and look for examples of remote working.

📈 Intent is multi-layered, and if Google can see that your page has the best probability of fulfilling a user’s search intent, then you’ll be rewarded with better rankings.

✍ This means the way to produce the best possible content is to make sure that you understand and answer these queries within your content, not just tacked onto the end as an FAQ!

This is the main reason we built AlsoAsked!

Every article can be a force for good

Does Google seem to favour single-intent content articles or multi-intent fulfilling articles? Was a brilliant question Jeremy Rivera asked yesterday on my post about FAQs ⤵️
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It's also one of the most common live chat questions for AlsoAsked; "Should I make separate pages for questions, or combine them into a single page?"
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Rather than just cop out with "it depends", I've made a video with some specific examples (and puppies 🐕‍🦺).
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The key concept I keep in mind is this:
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👉 What will reduce the "time to result" for the user to answer the "full intent"?
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🤷‍♂️ What do I mean by "full intent"? I mean the mission they set out to achieve, not the individual query.
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To give another example,
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If I search for "how to change a car battery"
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Things that AlsoAsked flags that will likely be part of that intent journey (and should be on the same page):
❓ Can I replace my car battery myself?
❓ Which terminal do you take off a battery first?
❓ How to change a car battery without losing computer settings?
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Things that are related, but likely on a different intent journey (and should be on a different page):
❓ How long should a car battery last?
❓ Should I replace a 7 year old car battery?
❓ What shortens car battery life?
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Common-sense clustering, your brain is automatically good at this! 🤓

I hope this doesn't put you off crawling

This is significant. Cloudflare’s default settings for new setups will be to block all AI crawlers 🤖 🛑

Blocking AI crawlers will of course mean limiting your website’s visibility on interfaces such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and the like. 📉

The change is part of the “Content Independence Day” move by Cloudflare, which is trying to make AI crawlers pay for creator’s content.

While I agree that should happen, I’m not sure that many organisations will want to risk traffic for the “greater good”. It’s a discussion you need to be having with your clients.

You can control this setting in (Log in → Security → Bots → “Block AI Bots”)

No one care for meta descriptions until we removed them

This will get some people’s backs up, but we don’t recommend writing meta descriptions anymore, and that’s based on data and testing. 🧪

📈 We have consistently found a small, usually around 3%, but statistically significant uplift to organic traffic on groups of pages with no meta descriptions vs test groups of pages with meta descriptions via SEOTesting

🙅‍♂️ I’ve come to the conclusion if you’re writing meta descriptions manually, you’re wasting time. If you’re using AI to do it, you’re probably wasting a small amount of time.

🚫 For this reason, we have stopped recommending clients spend time writing them, and before I get the usual “well it is worth it because anecdotally, I wrote this one that increased CTR”, it’s worth thinking about a few things:

1️⃣ Around 80% of the time, Google will replace the meta description you have written. It is arguable if you write a “good” meta description, this is less likely to happen, but this is missing the point.

2️⃣ The point is that the “best” meta description is query dependent. That means, if you could hypothetically see the search term people used, you would get an idea for the precise information they are after, and so you could customise a meta description for that bit of the content - this is what Google is doing that you can’t do! If you write a meta description, you only ever have the option to write one to try and suit all queries.

3️⃣ So why am I against “just write really good ones”? Because what I believe our testing is showing is that not providing a meta description lowers the threshold for when Google will make a dynamic replacement and on average, these dynamic replacements will outperform your hard-written meta description. Yes, it won’t outperform all of them, so you can always show an ancedotal example, but the point is, on average, those dynamic meta descriptions will outperform manual ones.

🖱️ I would like to give a shout out to SearchPilot for doing a study that showed with ~90% confidence that removing the meta description so it was blank actually resulted in more traffic. That was one of the reasons we started doing the tests.

🏁 This was backed up by Ryan Jones giving conclusions of 131 SEO at SEOTesting that indicated tests on meta descriptions were overwhelmingly a “fail”. They resulted in no traffic change.

With these initial studies, we pushed these tests out to many clients, and we’ve almost always seen positive results, traffic has never got worse from removing meta descriptions.

👏 Spend 👏 your 👏 time 👏 elsewhere 👏

In 2025 there are so many things you can be doing to significantly make your businesses and websites more visible, and twiddling with meta descriptions isn’t the one.

It's not just your website, it's your MCP that defines you

Learn about MCP.

Websites are just one "window" into your business online; which is essentially a database with a frontend. 🪟
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SEO is about connecting your business to people performing searches, and a website is only one surface of this.
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Fundamentally, I think you could consider many websites to be "consumer hostile", in that the deck is stacked to try and pressure the user to spend as much money as possible (RyanAir are masters of this).
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Over the next few years, I can absolutely see a future where website traffic steadily declines as brands fire up their own Model Context Protocols to allow agents to easily interact and allow the user to talk to their database.
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​AlsoAsked's official MCP will be out this month; so you can directly talk to AlsoAsked data from Claude and ChatGPT.
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Put MCP on your mid-term SEO radar.

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