🔍

​SearchGPT is rolling out to a small group of users. A new search icon appeared in the ChatGPT app for iOS in the US. This is likely a test for the rumoured SearchGPT full rollout later this year.

🧑‍⚖️

​DOJ is considering 'breaking up' Google after the recent antitrust trial. Possible changes include ending revenue-sharing partnerships (i.e. Reddit), limiting exclusive distribution deals (i.e. Apple) and sharing of Google's index.

🏪

​Google are expanding Store ratings to more countries. After an apparent successful test in the US, Store ratings have been added to searches in the UK, Australia, Canada and India.

⛓️‍💥

​AI Overviews are unlikely to link to sites affected by the HCU. Despite some recovery for the affected sites and, in some cases, ranking well, these sites don't appear to be cited in AI Overviews even for branded searches.

🛒

​Google may use the 'add-to-cart' function of your site to verify product prices. This is an indicator that you shouldn't simply disable your add-to-cart buttons to stop your customers from purchasing products.

💭

​AI Overviews are particularly common for 'how to' and what is' queries. From manual checks, AI Overviews appeared in over 55% of these examples which is higher than reported by tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush.

📈

​Traffic from Perplexity has increased, even for sites that block it. Despite sites such as Forbes and The New York Times blocking Perplexity, many publishers are reporting significant increases in traffic from the AI-powered citations.

🤖

​Google has clarified that unsupported fields will be ignored in robots.txt. Only user-agent, allow, disallow and sitemap are accepted fields. Yes, this means that Google still ignores crawl-delay in your robots.txt.

⬇️

​Bing is testing a new carousel labelled 'Best-of lists of [topic]'. This carousel highlights listicles that focus on the "best-of" for a topic. Google tested a similar function in 2017 and it wasn't received well.

📊

​GA4 launches a new Realtime pages report. Similar to previous real-time report in Universal Analytics, this report shows the total Views, total Active users and the pages visited during the last 30 minutes.

Understanding users beyond 'keywords' with live data and intent clustering by Google

AlsoAsked allows you to quickly mine live "People Also Ask" data, the freshest source of consumer intent data, for understanding what users are searching about beyond 'keywords' and what you should be writing about.

Get 90 searches per month with no account creation, for free.

Don't worry about UTMs in your backlinks

It doesn't matter if your backlinks have UTM parameters in them, it won't put you at risk or penalty and Google won't stop counting those links. This is some unfortunate advice I have seen in circulation recently! 😣
​
Some things to consider:
​
🔗 You should have canonical tags on your UTM URLs that let search engines know what the correct 'root' version of the URL is.
​
🛑 You don't want to use UTM links internally, not only do they break sessions in Analytics, they may cause canonical confusion.
​
💡 While they are used sometimes for 'campaigns' - which is where the misinformation that they are treated as 'paid links' comes from, many platforms generate them with links automatically. For instance, I use Kit (formerly ConvertKit) for my newsletter, and if I choose to link to your website in my newsletter, it will automatically tag it with UTM parameters when it is published on the web. It's a legitimate link that needs to be counted!
​
💰 Paid for links should be marked with rel="sponsored" - see the link in comments for best practise on this.
​
📜 There is no evidence Google discounts UTM links. No Googler has ever said this. There is no patent. There is no data. It's a rumour because someone thought it made sense.
​
👑 As Daniel Foley Carter pointed out - social media is awash with bad information like this, so try and flag it for others!

Free machine learning templates and resources

Machine learning is an accessible technology now for everyone and there's no reason you can't be using it to help improve both the output and efficiency of jobs such as content audits.

A great place to start is Lazarina Stoy's MLforSEO website, which includes free templates and resources to get you started 🤖
​
​Here's a link to these resources​

Keep track of search intent - it's not static

Search intent is not static. Sometimes people mistake the reason for something slowly losing ranking is that the content is simply “old”, which isn’t always the case. While freshness can be important (certainly in some verticals), it’s not uncommon either for what people mean by a query on average to change over time.

There are loads of examples such as:

🤳 Technology: Features becoming more or less important over time - and new features existing

😷 Health: New medicines, or understanding - such as during the pandemic changing, and searches moving with it

🕴 Business: New laws, e.g. freelancers and IR35 stuff in the UK

There are many ways to keep your finger on the pulse here, but it’s what we built the Timeline feature of AlsoAsked for, so you can get an easy overview of how a topic has morphed over time.

Keep that stuff updated! ✅

​Here's a video of me showing you how to track search intent.​

Use separate sitemaps to speed up indexing

​Search 'n Stuff edition!

​Judith Lewis: if you’re struggling to get specific pages indexed on a big site, putting them into a separate sitemap is the way to go.

John Mueller isn't good at unsolicited SEO tips

​Search 'n Stuff edition!

​Lazarina Stoy: Don't use ChatGPT for entity analysis, it sucks. We have tools like Google's Natural Language API which are built for these kinds of tasks.

​There is even a free Google Sheets template you can use.​

Top Core Updates referrer leaderboard

A big thank you to our top referrers, who have signed up over 10 people to the Core Updates newsletter, go follow them!

🥇 MJ Cachón Yáñez (LinkedIn / X)

🥈 Nikki Pilkington (LinkedIn / X)

🥉 Lidia Infante (LinkedIn / X)

We'd love to hear from you

If you've got any thoughts about what you like, what you dislike, or what you think we should add/change to the newsletter, then hit reply!

We really do read every bit of feedback!

~ Mark and Jack