🔁

​The March 2025 core update completed on 27 March 2025. This roll out took 14 days and is likely the first of many Google updates this year. This update seemed relatively calm, if the discussion online is to go by.

🙅

​Google has removed the 'AI while browsing' feature. This very controversial feature was announced in 2023 and worked as a type of overlay that could summarise webpages and link to Google SERPs.

📈

​The frequency of AI Overviews has risen sharply in the UK. The prevalence of AIOs in the UK has grown to 18% from 4% before March 2025. AI Overviews are also now available in 21 countries.

💀

​AIOs appear almost 80% of the time for logged-in users in the US performing informational type queries, according to an analysis of 155,000 search terms by Ziptie and AlsoAsked.

🛍️

​Perplexity is working to make it easier for brands to sell good directly through Perplexity's shopping results. This could make the AI-based search a direct challenger to Google Shopping.

📝

​Google is rolling out Gemini 2.5 Pro for all users. This update is currently in its experimental phase and was previously announced for Gemini Advanced users. It will now be available for all free Gemini users.

🤖

​You can use site: searches to access pages on sites that block LLMs in their robots.txt. This work around lets you find information on sites that are blocked including internal search pages.

📊

​AI crawlers are causing performance issues and increased server loads. The "aggressive" crawling from LLMs has also created false ad impressions so can potentially affect analytics if they're not identified and filtered.

🦹

​An unnamed former Googler describes "giving traffic to publisher sites" as "a necessary evil". Google's motto seems to have evolved from "Don't be evil" to "giving traffic is a necessary evil."

🌴

​AI Overviews can now give travel ideas and guided tours via Google Lens. This travel update also allows adding screenshots to Google Maps and tracking of hotel prices.

🎟️

​Google has rolled out 5 new rich results for Events including 'add to calendar' and 'similar events'. This update also includes nearby food & drinks and venue details directly on the SERP.

April 28 - May 1, 2025 in New York City

Get tickets for SEO Week, a new Search conference produced by Mike King and iPullRank.

Join top industry experts, including Lily Ray, Rand Fishkin, Aleyda Solis, Wil Reynolds, Dawn Anderson, and more, for four days of cutting-edge SEO insights, networking, and exclusive events.

Attend the full event or buy tickets for one of the four themed days:
the Science, the Psychology, the Ecosystem, and the Future of Search
(check out the full agenda).

Control your webinar pages

If you're promoting a webinar or similar, do so on a URL that you control on your domain and redirect to the signup page.

That way, once the webinar is done, you can remove the redirect to retain the link equity and relevance around the subject of the webinar and use this page (maybe to host a recording of the webinar or transcript). 🎙️

Not all links are created equal

All links on a page are not equal. Google uses a "reasonable surfer" model, which essentially means if a link is big and obvious, it will pass more equity than if you have a tiny link hidden at the bottom of the page. 🏄

👉 The logic is simple: The most important, related pages will very likely be linked to with the most obvious internal links.

😊 This is a very efficient and scalable way for Google to add another useful dimension to the link graph which represents user behaviour.

🧪 This differs from the original PageRank model which was a "random surfer" - assuming any link on a page has an equal chance of being clicked.

Search intent shifts over time

Did you know that many searches around remote working are now asking about the legalities of working from home? 🧳

This is a super example of intent shift - now many people are being forced back into the office, the types of questions associated with remote work have shifted.

2 years ago, many searches were around what exactly remote working is, but now people are researching if they really HAVE to go back to the office!

Understanding this is the key to making the best possible content, get those clicks and user signals to show search engines you know what it’s about 😎

This is the main reason we built AlsoAsked!

Intent volume > search volume

Reposting becuase I saw multiple people on Lily's post saying it isn't worth targeting terms with "zero volume" ⤵️

​

With longtail search terms it is important to think about 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐦𝐞 not search query volume. ⬇

​

One of the reasons why queries in People Also Ask data are regularly "zero" volume is because they tend to be longer queries with more words. When a query is 7-8 words long, it naturally means there are many ways to reconstruct that same query intent in another way. For instance:

​

❓ Best earplugs for someone with tinnitus

❓ Which earplugs are best for someone with tinnitus

❓ Best earplugs for tinnitus

❓ What are the best earplugs for tinnitus

❓ I have tinnitus what are the best earplugs

❓ Best earplugs for person with tinnitus

❓ Which earplugs are best for people with tinnitus

❓ etc...

​

7 search terms: 1 search intent

​

It would be easy to rewrite this query in 30 different ways, so even if each question only got 10 searches per month (which would likely report "0"), this one question would have a monthly search volume of 300 searches.

AI Overviews appear even more frequently

AI Overviews appear far more regularly than you may think. I partnered with the incredible Tomek Rudzki from ZipTie.dev to analyse 155,000 searches from AlsoAsked data that were classified into one of Google’s 8 “semantic query classes” to see how often AI Overviews appear and the results were pretty shocking 😮‍💨

🤖 AI Overviews appear vastly more common for logged-in Google users, I am assuming to avoid the cost of serving them to all of the bots scraping Google, which are generally logged out.

🔥 We’ve got some big other data reveals coming, but I thought this was incredible: Almost 80% of the 155,000 queries we put through Google returned an AIO!

Sample size info for queries: 👉 What: 42,560 queries 👉 How: 37,248 queries 👉 Which: 25,613 queries 👉 Who: 28,791 queries 👉 When: 20,895 queries

Total sample size: 155,107 queries

ZipTie.dev is by far the best tool I’ve seen for this kind of AIO monitoring. Check it!

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