Stories
- Google says put the answer at the top of the page
New wording in Google's helpful content document tells site owners to stop burying the thing people came for.
- Google says more spam updates are coming
Staff said the spam team is now using AI to catch more of the flood of cheap pages.
- Rivals can show up when people search your brand name
AI answers on brand name searches are spreading, and the links inside them are not always the brand's own pages.
- Google now calls fake author bios deception
Invented writer profiles are now named in Google's own content guidance as a signal of a low-quality page.
- Reddit deleted four subreddits built to game AI answers
A 60-day experiment that used bots to farm AI mentions ended with every post, link and citation wiped.
- Google now says bulk AI pages count as low effort
Google's own documentation now spells out what its human reviewers treat as real work on a page.
- 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.
- Spam update hit a second time on September 30
Sites that came through the first wave untouched are now reporting sudden drops.
- 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.
- Google's pay-for-content test pays almost nothing
Small sites in Google's AI payment pilot are earning less than one tenth of 1% of their ad revenue.
- 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.
- Google can now watch a topic and ping people about it
Anyone can now tell Google's chat style search to keep an eye on a subject, and Google will send a phone notification when something new shows up.
- 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.
- Strangers can change your Google listing in four days
Google gives you a short window to reject a suggested edit before it may go live on its own.
- Spam update hit hardest over the weekend
Friday looked quiet, then rankings moved sharply across several countries.
- Search Console now shows visits from photo searches
A new filter separates people who searched with a camera or a screenshot from people who typed words.
- Nearly half of ChatGPT quotes come from a page's top
Where you put your best sentence looks like it changes whether a chatbot quotes it.
- Google is testing buying inside AI answers in India
One SEO spotted a Flipkart tie-up that lets shoppers check out without leaving Google's AI.
- OpenAI staff say people won't click links in AI answers
The line was found buried in 92 pages of the New York Times case against OpenAI.
- Google built a new detector for AI written spam
Glenn Gabe says the system predates both the August and September spam updates.
- A new Search Console report shows if AI answers use your pages
The rollout is widening, but the numbers are impressions only, not clicks.
- ChatGPT is citing YouTube 91% less than in August
Big domains are showing up far less often in the sources ChatGPT lists under its answers.