🛍️

​OpenAI adds shopping research features to ChatGPT. These new features help users build buying guides and comparison tables for products with higher accuracy than previous models.

📍

​Google Posts can now be scheduled and published across multiple locations. These are two features local SEOs have been asking for a long time and will make keeping your Google Business Profiles updated easier than ever.

🧑‍⚖️

​The European Commission proposes revisions for GDPR, the AI Act and cookie regulations. The Digital Omnibus proposes a number of changes, including the requirements for consent banners for analytics cookies.

🏷️

​Google Search Console annotations can now be added for today and future dates. Previously, annotations could only be added once data had been processed on GSC so this is a very handy update.

📊

​Google Search Console's page indexing report is currently experiencing a two-week delay. To clarify, this doesn't affect the indexing of pages or sites, just the reporting on GSC.

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AI visibility is tracking junk and watching rubbish

"I can't tell my boss that" is the shade that bullshit grows in. Sometimes honest answers aren't satisfactory, but they are key to stable growth. ⬆️
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I've seen the impact of this behaviour throughout my career. A junior polishes their report for their manager to look good, the manager gives some creative interpretation to their senior team to paint a better picture, then the senior team cherry picks parts to ensure their bonuses. The result is the end data is irresponsibly far from the actual truth and the subsequent decisions are made from it lead to rot, not growth... "How did we fail? We followed the data!"
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I am seeing the same with AI visibility tracking now. Yes, bad metrics used properly can be helpful, but there is far too much 'ostrich' behaviour. Burying heads in the sand and ignoring the shortfalls and presenting reports without appropriate caveats and setting up performance metrics that are going to make lives very hard. 🤠
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I was very happy some of my colleagues on the SEOFOMO panels were brave enough to give real answers to the audience there, and not just convenient half-truths 🤝

Keep the visibility, ya filthy animal

If you could freeze your Google visibility from last year, then your clicks/sessions this year are likely to be significantly lower. You should be bringing this to stakeholder's attention. 📉
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Depending on your business model it doesn't necessarily mean that revenue is lower, it just means that the research is being done elsewhere. While it's possible to get some visibility of this, good attribution is still pretty much impossible in my opinion.
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We'll get more data over the next 12 months that may be able to tie these metrics together so something sensible can come from it 🍝

You can be too old for a lot of things, but you're never too old for a good site visualisation.

I'm a fan of using Sitebulb visualisations while auditing to give me an overview of site structure.

For instance, the long "trails" are paginated page sets, and hovering over the highlighted nodes shows the URLs of content pages that are only accessible via these pages.
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This immediately shows me:

1. There is evergreen content that is hard for users to find
2. There is content we want to rank that has poor internal linking and thus the pages are not seen as important by search engines

SEOs, go easy on the categories

An overview of category-level searches vs current performance is a simple way to help map your SEO strategy. 🗺️
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Comparing the sum of category-level searches versus your current impressions and clicks can quickly highlight areas where there is an opportunity, maybe where you're not performing, or where you don't have existing content.

A lovely YMYL page, just for me

"YMYL pages with absolutely no website information... should be rated Lowest." Google QRG 2014 - This is what Google's algorithms are being trained on.
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Great highlight from Shaun Anderson​

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