AI answers now appear on brand-name searches
One SEO tested a batch of big brands and found AI Overviews on 93% of them, including Reddit, Amazon and Adobe. Searching a company name now gets you an AI answer first.
Why your traffic moved
Copy-paste location pages are getting hit again
Another site has been hit by Google's spam update (a ranking change aimed at sites breaking its spam rules), this time over 143 near-identical service pages split by county.
History repeats itself
Who this affects: Sites with many similar pages for different towns or services.
- List your location pages and check any two read differently.
- Our take: merge near-duplicates into one genuinely useful page.
Getting into AI answers
AI answers are now showing up on brand name searches
Google has started showing AI Overviews (the AI written answer at the top of results) when people search brand names. Chris Long says 93% of the brands he tested now show one, including Reddit, Salesforce, Amazon and Adobe.
Google is starting to show AI Overviews for a ton of branded queries
Who this affects: Anyone whose customers search for their business by name.
- Search your own business name and see what the AI says.
- Our take: fix wrong facts on your own site first.
Do not do this
Google's pay-for-content test pays almost nothing
Details came out on Google's pilot that pays publishers when its AI uses their content, and the money is tiny for most. Barry Schwartz reports about 100 publishers are in it, paid less than one tenth of 1% of their ad revenue.
Google appears to be testing a new deal in which it uses publishers’ content and decides for itself what that content is worth.
Who this affects: Anyone hoping Google will start paying for content its AI uses.
- Our take: do not plan revenue around this, payouts are tiny.