📊

​Traffic from SEO is only down -2.5% YoY and AIOs stealing clicks is a 'myth' according to a study based on Graphite and Similarweb data that analysed over 40,000 of the largest sites in the US.

🛑

​eBay bans AI agents and LLM-driven bots from its platform. This is the first move from a major ecommerce site in banning unauthorised AI agents. eBay also updated its robots.txt to restrict AI crawlers.

💬

​Google adds GoogleMessages, a new crawler to its crawler documentation. According to the User-Agent information, GoogleMessages is used to generate link previews for URLs sent in chat messages.

🛒

​Shopify president discusses how UCP and AI agents work with Shopify. The Shopify president said that even if you're not on Shopify, you can use the UCP to get your products syndicated and indexed via their agentic plan.

🔍

​Perplexity describes AI search as "no longer a zero sum game" and that "traditional SEO best practices still apply". The Perplexity representative also described why ChatGPT is essentially "4 Bing searches in a trenchcoat".

💰

​OpenAI reportedly calculates ads on an impression-based model rather than click-based model. Many have speculated that this would be the case for advertising in AI search and, while not official, this seems to be very likely.

📄

​Google confirms that it falls back to featured snippets if it's unable to generate an AI Overview. Google also confirmed that this experience isn't as clear as it should be and they aim to improve it in the future.

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Moving to a new site isn’t just a design change; it’s a data change. One wrong move with your front-end code, redirects or site architecture, and you don’t just lose traffic – you lose revenue. You can wipe out years of Google trust overnight.

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If you want a site that ranks as good as it looks – and keeps your hard-earned traffic safe – go to withcandour.co.uk.

Most great websites don’t get found. Ours do.

Links are a human construct

Is all link building ‘manipulative’? I had a great debate on this last week, and I certainly don’t think so and I would like to outline the case for this 👩‍⚖️

🎩 Before we start, some helpful definitions. I would define ‘blackhat’ SEO as anything listed or inferred by Google’s guidelines (Search Essentials). These are things that Google defines as manipulative and could penalise you for if they detect. Generally, I would define ‘greyhat’ as things that are not directly stated in those guidelines and/or are harder for Google to detect.

🎯 Context is important. I give SEO advice to brands/organisations that want to succeed on the web for multiple years. There is no moral judgement on tactics, if you have your own assets like affiliate sites, blackhat SEO can make you a lot of money; the goal is different to the advice I am giving.

🔗 Google has a pretty long list of things it classes as ‘link spam’, but it boils down to one core concept: editorial decision. If you are trying to ‘buy’ this link (for money, for a free product, as part of a contract), then it should be marked as nofollow.

📰 This is one of the reasons digital PR is so popular and effective. Yes, your story can get coverage on big sites like The Guardian, but you can’t buy that link, the best you can do is provide a story/resource and hope they deem it worthwhile for their users to link to.

💡 To avoid any doubt on whether it is ‘allowed’, Google has specifically said digital PR is probably more important than tech SEO in many cases, and it is a shame it gets mixed up with spammy link building.

📈 Of course as an SEO you are interested in getting those links, and there is nothing wrong with trying to improve your chances; e.g. providing the journalist with data/charts/resources that need citing or linking back to, or using CC licenses to get attribution. This is how the algorithm is meant to work!

To use a more human analogy to explain it, think about these links as votes in an election:

✅ It is not ‘manipulative’ for politicians to campaign, and show voters what their policies and values are. The decision of who to vote for is still purely based on the voter. (Like digital PR for instance)

❎ It is manipulative for a politician to say “I will pay you £1000” to vote for me (paid links), or “we will vote for your other candidate if you vote for me” (3-way link exchanges), or even “let’s make some fake citizens to get votes” (PBN).

I think it’s a hugely interesting topic, and we need to be aware of Google’s motivations, but also understand while we are playing in their sandbox, it is their judgement that affects our businesses.

Good luck out there! 🫡

Down and down, the snippet descended

Sometimes Google does something silly like using your footer for a meta description, you can use the data-nosnippet attribute to prevent certain parts of the page from being shown in the snippet. 🛑
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This can be a useful tool to control what is shown by meta descriptions, without specifying them (if you are a fan of more traffic). 📈
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🎨 mspaint.exe art provided to relieve AI fatigue.

​Here's what Google says about data-nosnippet tag.

How do you know you're out of AIO?

If your URL is cited in an AI Overview, and the same URL is listed in the classic '10 blue links', is that 1 or 2 impressions in Google Search Console? ⤵️
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The answer is 1. This was a brilliant question Jamie Indigo asked me yesterday, and my original thinking was it may well be 2, knowing that things like the old 'tweet box' would count as an impression.
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We briefly discussed ways we could test this (which is actually quite hard when you think about it), then Jamie enacted the "no dumb questions" protocol and John Mueller kindly just told us the answer, because he is nice and helpful like that 🫶
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I thought I would share it, as it was not obvious to me, so I am sure to at least one other person out there, the answer is not obvious either!

All we're offering is a chance to be ranked

I ran an extensive test lasting a whole year to try and figure out if the rumours about Google using real user's Chrome sessions to capture rendered sites was true or not ✍
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I tried cloaking with unique fingerprints of content that were only shown to user browsers, or even Google trying to fake a 'real' browser. I delivered thousands of real visitors and monitored the indexed pages daily to see if any of the fingerprints ever slipped into the index. Nothing. I found no evidence that Google is doing this.
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HOWEVER, don't forget the kinda big news that went through quietly: The newer Google/DOJ documents released showed, (for first time to my knowledge) saying Google uses Chrome data in a popularity signal for ranking. 👀
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That is the first time we've had a primary source specifically stating that as far as I know, despite it being speculated for a long time. I remember when Semrush were lambasted in a study where they put "direct traffic" as a #1 ranking factor - although the study was that of correlation, and I don't think it's anywhere near a #1 factor - maybe more consideration should have been given to this at the time. 🤔

Now the traffic, it comes

One of the easiest metrics for "is the link good?", is simply how much referral traffic it generates. If the link is on a popular site, the content is relevant to you, and the link is obvious, it should generate traffic.

You don't need DA/DR/TF for that.
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Bonus points UX metrics for when users land on how engaged they are (did they find what they expected from the click?).

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