Sites vanished from Google, then came back
Some sites stopped ranking even for their own brand name in early September, then came back in full nine days later. Google has explained neither move, and it is now testing a program that pays site owners when AI uses their content.
Why your traffic moved
Some sites vanished from Google, then came back nine days later
An unconfirmed update (a ranking change Google never announced) hit around September 3 and 4, and some sites lost almost all their search visibility, including for their own brand name. Around September 13 many of those same sites reversed and came all the way back, in Search and in Discover. Nobody outside Google knows what happened.
There was some unconfirmed update that Google pushed out in early September (around 9/3 into 9/4) that hammered some websites.
Looks like there was an unannounced, but significant change in Google's algorithms in early September.
A number of the sites that fell off a cliff around 9/4 completely surged back yesterday.
Who this affects: Anyone whose site gets traffic from Google.
- Open Search Console, set the date range to August 25 through September 14, and look for a cliff around September 3 or 4.
- Our take: if you dropped and then came back, change nothing this week.
- Our take: if you are still down, look for large batches of near identical pages. The one site Marie Haynes analysed had exactly that.
Almost every "people also ask" answer is now written by AI
97% of "people also ask" answers (the related questions Google lists in its results) are now AI Overviews, the AI written summary Google puts at the top of a page, up from 86% in August. Click one question and you get an AI answer plus more AI answered questions. Our take: fewer of those clicks reach your site.
97% of PAA answers in the first week of September are AIOs, up from 86% in August.
If you want better rankings + AI mentions, serve your users right off the bat.
Who this affects: Anyone who gets traffic from question searches like "how much does X cost".
- Open Search Console, filter queries starting with how, what or why, and check whether clicks fell over the last month.
- Put a short, direct answer to the question at the very top of the page, then the detail underneath. One SEO says serving the user right away helps rankings and AI mentions.
Google may start paying site owners when AI uses their content
Google is testing an "AI contribution" pilot that pays publishers when their content significantly shapes an answer in AI Overviews, AI Mode or Gemini. It is invite only, appears as a dashboard in Search Console (Google's free tool showing how your site does in search), and you can opt out at any time. Nobody knows yet how much it pays or who gets invited.
The AI contribution pilot allows you to earn money when your content contributes significantly to the creation of AI-generated responses shown to users in participating products.
Payments are based more on value than raw usage, meaning Google only pays when it judges that a piece of content has meaningfully contributed to an AI-generated response.
Who this affects: Site owners who publish articles, though almost nobody can join yet.
- Do nothing. The pilot is invite only and there is nothing to apply for.
- Our take: keep publishing what you would have published anyway. Google says it only pays when content meaningfully shaped the answer.
Do not do this
131 SEO experts say relevance and links matter most
131 SEO practitioners were asked what affects Google rankings. The top three: relevance at 57.1%, backlinks at 54.8% and content quality at 47.6%. Backlinks are links from other sites to yours. This is expert opinion, not data from Google, and 17% named meta descriptions (the summary text under your title in search results), which David G Quaid called meaningless.
Content is relevant if it matches and satisfies the search intent of the user.
Using AI to help you publish ten times the amount of the same quality content in half the time is not as good as using AI to help you publish the same amount of content, but ten times the quality.
Even my mother knows that meta-descriptions are meaningless
Who this affects: Anyone deciding where to spend limited time on their site.
- Pick your three most important pages and check each one actually answers what someone searching that phrase wants.
- Our take: skip rewriting meta descriptions to chase rankings. Write them to earn the click instead.
- If you use AI to draft, spend the time you save making one article ten times better instead of publishing ten of them.
Product pages may earn far more per visit than blog posts
Across one agency's ecommerce clients, a blog visit was worth $0.77, a collection page visit $5.44 and a product page visit $6.96. Another SEO moved a client off blog posts and onto product and category pages: in August organic traffic was down 55% year over year while organic revenue was up 33%. These are two people's own client numbers, not a wide study, but they point the same way.
The average blog post we've written for our brands generates $0.77 per visit.
In August, organic traffic was down 55% year-over-year.
Who this affects: Anyone selling a product or service through their website.
- Give each service or product category its own page, named the way customers describe it, not the way you do.
- Link to those pages from your homepage and main menu.
- Our take: keep the articles that bring people in, but make sure the page that takes the order ranks too.
The short list
Search Console reports are missing data again
The page indexing report in Search Console (Google's free tool showing how your site does in search) lost a chunk of data from June, and the links report has not updated since August 8. Google's John Mueller has responded about the indexing gap, so odd numbers in those two reports are probably Google, not your site.
Google Analytics now has drag and drop dashboards
Customisable dashboards are live in Google Analytics, on a grid canvas where you drag dimensions and metrics straight onto the page instead of building each report separately. You can position, resize and align the charts yourself.
Google says its European search results are now lower quality
Google rebuilt its search results in the EU to comply with the Digital Markets Act and told Reuters the changes are the largest reduction in quality in its 29 year search history. One comparison site now sits at the top of the page, two more below it, then a carousel of hotels, airlines or restaurants, which pushes ordinary results further down.