Lily Ray
Every SEO Weekly story that cites Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc), newest first. 35 stories since September 2026.
On X: SEO by day | DJ by night
- Google may penalize sites where users can publish pages
Updated spam guidance warns platform owners to watch what their users get indexed.
- Lists that rank your own product first may vanish from AI answers
Florian S. Kluge says his self-ranked lists lost AI Overview citations in October while their normal rankings stayed put.
- Your About page may be your best page for AI answers
One SEO found a plain, human-written company history beating every other page in Google's AI results.
- Some sites vanished from Google, then came back a week later
Glenn Gabe confirmed the drops with both site owners and says the cause sits on Google's end.
- Google adds more links to its AI answers, again
Nick Fox of Google laid out five changes to how AI answers link out, including a new section at the top for the one or two pages that finish the job.
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One email a day. Under three minutes. You will hear about a Google change before it shows up in your traffic.
- Google is unlikely to ever label its AI traffic for you
Two SEOs say the fix would be easy, and that is exactly why they expect it never to arrive.
- ChatGPT traffic has now disappeared from analytics
The tracking tags that told your analytics a visitor came from ChatGPT are now gone from every link, one SEO reports.
- Google wants your user content, with no traffic promised
A new Google program takes reviews, comments and forum posts straight from sites, and two SEOs say the payoff for those sites is unclear.
- Claude now bans using it to fake AI search answers
The penalty for breaking the new rule is losing access to Claude altogether.
- ChatGPT is reading the forgotten corners of your site
One SEO says help centers, docs and even staging sites can end up in ChatGPT answers, and suggests taking inventory.
- Google penalties are now hitting ordinary businesses
Several SEOs say the wave of hand-issued Google penalties is landing on normal companies, not just obvious spam sites.
- More sites are getting hand-issued Google penalties
One well known SEO says the penalties are landing on ordinary businesses, not just obvious spam sites.
- AI answers now appear on 93% of brand name searches
Four SEOs now say Google's AI answer box has spread across searches for company names, and it can point to other companies.
- Google calls hand-checking AI writing "critical"
Three well known SEOs have now pointed at the same line in Google's refreshed AI content guidance.
- Top SEOs expect a big Google update very soon
Three well known search experts read the same signals in Google's documentation edits and came to the same conclusion.
- Google plans more spam crackdowns, staff say
Google is adding new spam thresholds as it deals with what staff call a growing flood of AI slop.
- Made-up authors now count as deception to Google
Google updated its helpful content document with new language on fabricated creator profiles.
- AI answers on brand searches sit below the normal results
Two more SEOs checked the finding that Google now writes AI answers when people search a company by name.
- Ranking yourself first in your own "best of" list is backfiring
New numbers across about 100 queries suggest these pages now help competitors more than the brand that wrote them.
- Copy-paste location pages are getting hit again
One site lost visibility after building the same service page 143 times, one county at a time.
- Your rank tracker may be showing a crash that never happened
Three well known SEOs reported wrong rank tracking data on the same day, with Ahrefs named most often.
- Spam update looks like it is hitting template-built pages
One well known SEO is seeing early hits on sites that spin up a near-identical page for every phone number or area code.
- Google's AI answers now link out in over a quarter of cases
Google keeps adding outbound links to its AI answers, and SEOs disagree about whether that helps your site.
- Google built a new detector for AI written spam
Glenn Gabe says the system predates both the August and September spam updates.
- SEOs pile on after research says AI answers cut clicks
Lily Ray says the findings confirm what people in search have been saying all along.
- Google is testing payments for content used in AI answers
The pilot runs through Search Console, and Barry Schwartz says it was first spotted back in April.
- Publishing 200 pages a day tends to catch up with sites
Older domains can hold up for a while, but two well known SEOs say bulk AI pages still land badly.
- Google says bulk pages are judged on quality, not method
Notes from a Google talk say template pages and AI writing are fine, thin output is not.
- Google is testing ads that look like normal links in AI answers
Sponsored links written as plain text inside AI Mode answers blend in with the rest of the answer.
- Sites that vanished from Google came back nine days later
Glenn Gabe says sites that lost nearly all search visibility around September 4 have fully recovered, and nobody outside Google knows why.
- Traffic estimates from popular SEO tools may be wrong now
Several well known SEOs say the numbers in Ahrefs and Semrush do not match Google's own click data right now.
- AI answers may skip brands that plant their own praise
One SEO watched ChatGPT drop his brand from a citation after it spotted a self-recommendation.
- Buying cheap backlinks can quietly sink your site
A new marketplace sells links for pennies, and several well known SEOs say the sites buying them will pay for it later.
- Google's AI search briefly stopped linking to websites
A new Gemini model went live in AI Mode with almost no citations, and Google called it a bug.
- Google can lose faith in a site for months over bulk pages
Three SEOs are now showing sites that dropped after publishing pages at scale, and Google has put the reason in writing.
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