Marina
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, dear esteemed guests to the March edition of the SEO update by Yoast, the update that lets you know what is hot and what is not in the SEO world. We’re going to talk about search engines, mostly Google. We’re going to talk about AI, and most of the time we’ll talk about Google and AI at the same time. And we won’t forget to mention what all of this news means for people who own websites and are doing their best to gain or preserve visibility. My name is Marina. I’m a researcher and developer at Yoast. Behind me, you can also see what the office of Yoast looks like. But today I’m just the butler. So if you hand me your coats and jackets, I will introduce you to the SEO experts in the house. We shall begin with the lady. Carolyn Shelby will make us feel at home with her extensive experience in news, SEO, technical and enterprise SEO. And she welcomes you along with Alex Moss, a gentleman with a deep knowledge in structural SEO and all digital marketing SEO. I leave you in their hands. And I’m going to pop back up at the end for dessert and Q&A.

Alex
All right. All right. What a great intro Marina did just then.

Carolyn
Absolutely. Welcome, everybody. I’m looking for the slides. So this is the March edition of the SEO update. I am doing this on the road. So you notice I do not have my normal background in the not yet sunny San Diego, California. Alex is coming to us live from probably never sunny.

Alex
There’s a bit today, but my office is downstairs. So I kind of ignore the bad weather and also try to ignore any good weather that happens because I don’t really want to know about. I want to be outside when it’s nice. Right.

Carolyn
Absolutely. All right. So I’m looking for the slides. Do you see the slides?

Alex
No, they’re not in the thing. You’ll have to reshare the screen again.

Carolyn
Huh.

Alex
But whilst Carolyn’s finding that, I can do at least the first slide before it gets shared again, which is feeling free to ask questions. So I don’t know which way I’m pointing, if I’m pointing in the right direction or that direction. But one direction, there’s a little icon where the chat is, there’s a question mark, and you can ask questions inside there. And anything that you do ask can be upvoted. And the most upvotes will answer first.

Carolyn
That’s right. Alex, can you share the slides from your computer?

Alex
Yeah, sure. Hold on. Cool. Here we go.

Carolyn
Awesome. Thank you. All right. So let’s, in case you’re concerned, because a lot of people are concerned, that you will be able to get a recording of this after the fact. So if you miss it, if you have to bail early, we’re going to send this to you. You can access it at this URL, which is, I always want to try to say it, but there’s no way to say it. It’s yoa.st/update-march-2025. So that is where you’re going to find those. I would love to continue the conversation with you guys on one of our social media groups. We have a Facebook group that’s just /group/yoast. Search for Yoast, you’ll find it. Or on Reddit, we have a subreddit called /yoastseo. If you have a question that we don’t get to in this broadcast, because we don’t always, go to one of these groups and ask your question there. You can ask a more detailed question. You can also get a more detailed answer. So we’d love to continue the conversation and we’ll go from there. Also, if you are interested in more entry level, how to get started with SEO webinars, we have one every other week. The next one is March 27th, which I believe is actually in two days. So if you are around and you’re interested, you can either find it on our website or you can scan this QR code and it will take you right there. But it’s great if you feel a little lost here and you want something a little bit more foundational, I think that would be a good opportunity for you.

Alex
Excellent. Okay. Well, has it been another busy-ish month? Let’s find out. It kind of has been a slow-ish news month, but there’s still stuff to talk about. There is still stuff. Like Chegg. Chegg. Tell me who Chegg is because I don’t know who Chegg is.

Carolyn
So this is a company, they specialize in educational products. They make, what this particular aspect of their business is concerning is they do, they have a subscription-based online tutoring thing where you can pay, I don’t know what it is, let’s say 20 bucks a month to have access to someone that will help you, give you step-by-step instructions on how to solve a problem, like a math problem, or give you step-by-step instructions on how to perform a scientific experiment suitable for a fifth grade science fair, that kind of stuff. And then they also have tutors that you can consult with that will help you via Zoom kind of remotely. They started making money hand over fist during COVID because obviously everyone’s locked in their homes and people were, actually, kids were using it to cheat on online exams, but that’s a different story. Now they’re all bent out of shape because AI overviews is stealing all of their traffic because you can get step-by-step instructions for how to solve a math problem. You can get step-by-step instructions for how to do a fifth grade science fair project. You can get all these things for free from the AI overviews. So they’re suing Google saying that Google is basically destroying their business model. Their stocks dropped 24 percent, they’re considering selling, you know, they’ve seen a big drop in student subscriptions. While I feel sorry for them, this is the same thing that’s happened to a lot of other industries. Google is not deliberately stealing their traffic. It’s just the thing that they were monetizing is a thing that you can now get for free somewhere else. This is, I think they’re going after Google because they’re thinking that if they’re going to lose the traffic and they’re going to lose the subscriptions, then obviously Google must have stolen that content from them and they need to be paid by Google for the use of that content. And they’re trying to like kind of make up the revenue that way. I’m not a lawyer, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. I don’t think they’re going to win this. This doesn’t seem like something that’s winnable. This is the same thing that happened to newspapers when digital started replacing print. They’re going to have to change their business model and there’s just no… This is not going to hurt AI as much as this is going to hurt, Chegg.

Alex
Yeah. Yeah.

Carolyn
It’s the long and short of it.

Alex
That’s interesting that they’re accusing of theft, right? Well, I don’t know if they’ve used the word theft in it, but to me, I always thought that Google was the facilitator in your visits, not the reason why that you have those visits. It’s a search platform, just like Bing is. Why aren’t they suing Bing and every other search platform that might be using a way to take information and bring it out into a search result? Because it’s not just Google doing that. They’re just the monopoly. They’re the biggest one.

Carolyn
You know what this reminds me of? Do you remember travel agents?

Alex
Yes.

Carolyn
Like physical people that you’d have to go and talk to them and tell them what flights you’d like and where you’d like to stop over and all this other jazz. And they’d make your hotel reservations and they’d do all this stuff for you, right? Do those even exist anymore? Because I haven’t seen a travel agent advertise anything in years. It’s like ring around the collar. It just doesn’t even exist anymore. We used to see them advertised all the time. They don’t exist because the internet replaced them. And I’m sorry, but AI is going to replace online tutors and the easy kind of information where it’s just I just need to know how to solve this problem or I just need to know the steps to create this thing that I have to create for school. And it’s not theft. It’s just this isn’t information that was unique to anybody in particular. And I’m sorry.

Alex
I’m seeing a lot of callback on the chat here because they say that there are travel agents. And I was going to say, there is a travel agent that’s based only a few minutes walk down the road from me. And like someone like Zach said, it’s only available. It doesn’t exist to anyone under 35, which I get, but I’m older than 35 and I’ve never used a travel agent. But I think that’s because I’m highly organized, but my parents would are highly disorganized and do need a travel agent because they, well, I don’t know. They’re, they’re an edge case. I would like to call them an edge case. They don’t know the inside. I’ve stolen all technological, technological skill from their brains as I was born. They don’t know how to do anything, but I mean, they’re not the only people around there, right? Who do need it. But I do know someone else who does more high-end ones. Like I want, I’ve got X amount of budget and I want this, that, and the other as an amenity of a holiday. And they go out like a headhunter kind of thing.

Carolyn
Yeah. Well, I mean, so they do technically still exist, but you can, a lot of the people that would have had to go to them before a lot of their, a lot of their, their customer base does it themselves on the internet now. So you can still get them. You’re still going to be able to get an online tutor, but the number of people that are going to need to get that service is going to be less because there’s a lot of people that are just going to be like, I’m going to save my money. I’m just going to do this myself. It’s, it’s easier that way. So the point is, so it’s, I don’t think, I don’t think the genie or the toothpaste is going back in the tube on this one. It’s, it’s, this is just life and evolution. And I’m, I’m sorry for this company, but suing Google is not going to solve their problem.

Alex
Just like a paper company has to adapt to a digital world, right? They have to do something about it. Adapt, which is unfortunate, but it’s not just them who were at the edge of the knife, so to say. But anyway, enough about theft. What’s the future of the internet like? Smaller communities and going off like one big one. I think here we’re probably talking more about the way in which we engage socially, organically, instead of using X, you’re going off on your blue skies, your mastodons of the world and your discord or wherever you are based on your audience. But it’s interesting to know how, like, you said it was like more like oceans and ponds as a, as an example.

Carolyn
Yeah. I kind of look at it before it felt like everyone was in the same place. So we were all in one big ocean. And if you wanted to fish, because you’re a business and you’re fishing for customers, you only had one place you had to worry about fishing because everybody was in the same ocean, right? So this is dividing us up into little disparate ponds or lakes. Yes, ponds and lakes, depending on the size. It just means that you’re going to have to be conscious of where are the fish you’re trying to catch and make sure that you’re fishing in the right ponds. And if you need to fish in multiple ponds, you have to divide your resources and allocate them accordingly and make sure that you’re doing the things necessary to maintain visibility in all of these different places rather than just focusing all your efforts on, you know, Google or Facebook, because people are dividing up and they’re kind of self-segregating almost into affinity groups. But it’s, I think it’s a backlash. You know, it got really kind of crazy the last few years. And there were a lot of anger, a lot of hurt feelings. And I think to maintain peace, people are self-segregating into communities of like-minded compatriots.

Alex
But this is good. I mean, we’ll talk about it again with other related news items. But this is like the social version of long tail. You’re like, you’re going into a smaller audience. But when you reach that smaller community, the quality of the people within it, and therefore potential conversions on whatever you’re up to is going to be easier or higher. It’s going to be higher, it’ll be a higher achievement and you’ll be able to do more and better just with a smaller pool of people. If I go back to your pun. Which is interesting because now, AI search and the way in which we search in general about anything and do any research is now finding that brand mentions improve visibility. Well, that’s quite obvious, isn’t it? Right?

Carolyn
I think we’ve been saying that with the, you know, focus on EEAT and those signals are going to be helpful. And it’s not necessarily that those are direct ranking signals, because they’re not. But the the mentions just it doesn’t even have to be a link just getting your brand mentioned and building your brand is going to improve the odds that you’re mentioned by name in in these AI search results because they need clues to indicate to them that you’re something people are interested in. And the better known your brand is hopefully for good things, the more likely it is that that’s going to bubble up to the top as being something the AI answer should mention.

Alex
Which is good because now the AI mode or AI overview, however you want to call it now, because they’re merging into the same thing is like it’s using a fan out technique, which is what they described it as where you will do a search and then the LLM will do multiple smaller, more specific searches, bring the answers back, collect them together and present it to you. Great. That that is really nice. But it’s also good to know that you don’t need to be there’s no race to number one as much anymore. And as long as you’ve got a good brand presence and sentiment, you’ll be mentioned. It sounds weird, but offline, like in your hairdressers, you know, like when people are waiting, it’s that word of mouth inside a small community that that really makes that sentiment go up. And then you’re going to be mentioned in some site that may have been on page three or four, but someone mentioned you well four years ago, and it’s actually coming back because it’s found that from its research.

Carolyn
If you think about it, the computer needs a way to make a decision about whether or not you’re a useful resource, right? So the more places that you’re mentioned as being a useful resource, the more social credit, social proof you have that you are that useful resource. And that’s going to help them decide to choose you over somebody that doesn’t have as much social proof. So this is, and it’s really kind of getting back to the way PR and marketing used to be before the internet, where we paid to get mentioned by the New York Times, and we paid to get mentioned by Life Magazine, as seen in time, all those things, all those little things, those mentions, whether you paid for them or not, are going to help you show up in these AI overviews.

Alex
Which is good. I like this. This is a good way of thinking about bringing results back. While the cool stuff is happening with Google is that they are now, they found that 10% of younger Google searches, or when you say younger, just younger people who do Google searches, start with a circle to search. And for anyone who hasn’t used it, there’s the icon at the bottom of your, the bottom of your screen. I’ll unlock my phone so you can see it now. At the bottom of your screen, there is a lens icon, and you can use that and you can take a picture. And when you do take the picture, you can like squiggle on it. And I’ll use the matte side so you can see. You can do that around a circle, or you can squiggle like you can see there. And in this illustration, they’ve done it over the orange bag. So now circle to search essentially will understand that you’ve basically want to search about that orange bag and it will bring out results. Hopefully product results, if you’ve got your schema set very, very well and matches to it along with the images. But it’s interesting to know that the younger generation take a picture. So they’re not even using words or conversation at this point. They just take a picture, go, “Ugh!” And then it does the rest. And it is that, it is very interesting to know the assistive searching that’s happening with younger folk, whereas we’re more command prompt driven. Can we say like that? I would say that’s accurate, yeah. But it’s interesting to know. So if you’re a shop owner or you’re targeting younger folk in any way, think about imagery and the way that your products or services may be connected to it, I would say is the best thing to go with it. And another reminder, remember if you need to ask questions, go in the right where the question mark icon is on the left or right, wherever it is, and ask in there. We have got a few, but we’ve only got four upvoted on one. I think last month we had like 23 upvotes with one question, I remember. So remember to ask more questions. And next, Google upgrades AI overviews with Gemini and launches its AI mode. Tell us more, Carolyn.

Carolyn
Well, so what this means is the AI overviews are going to be kind of merged into just your regular search results. So if you’ve got an AI mode available to you, there’s not going to be that separation anymore. Things are just going to happen. And they’re just, it’s just another step in on the path to the AI overview is really going to be the search result. So I think they’re, it’s almost like we’re a frog in a pot of water, right? They’re just slowly turning the heat up on us so we don’t notice. It’s interesting though. And I think, I think there’s, there’s no reverting from this. So we don’t have the option of not liking it. We just have the option of getting used to it and adapting to it. That’s kind of where it goes from there. The premium search capabilities are more in line with, it can do more complicated searches. But even the free stuff I think is still pretty good. And I think the free is going to continue to get better. Because what happens is the stuff they’re reserving for the premium users is eventually going to get rolled out to the free users. It’s, it’s just they get to play with it first and they get to pay for the privilege of playing with it first. You, however, if you’re not paying for it, get to benefit from the fact that they’ve already beaten all the bugs out of the system by the time they release it to those of us that are too cheap to pay for premium.

Alex
Yeah. You don’t need to go to the front of the queue to be in beta mode. Essentially you’re paying for beta testing. Like you’re, instead of the other way around, they should be paying you to be a beta tester, but whatever, that’s a, it’s another, that’s another conversation. But it is interesting because everything that we’ve been saying maybe six months ago, if we were to rewatch one of our news updates, anything that we would have said just got introduced to paid packages has probably now been liberated already. So, I mean, we’ll be talking about this one in September or something about how this is available to all, um, which is again, really good and exciting and fast. Um, but yeah, what else have Google been doing? They’ve been updating documentation on how to stop your content from appearing in AI mode and AI overviews. Um, and you can do that with the no snippet tag or the max snippet directives as well. And you can go to, um, the documentation, see more about that. Although we, I mean, you and I both are of the opinion that we wonder why you would want to stop unless you’re certain that there obviously are again, edge, edge cases and certain verticals like publishing there are. We know that there’s some publishers who do not want their content on it and that’s fine, but probably for 99% of you, this will probably be something you’re never going to need or use or want to use.

Carolyn
Yeah. I, I just really struggle. I know there’s people that are very quick to jump on the wall. I’m just going to keep them out. I don’t want my content there. And I, I think you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Honestly, the, I know I’ve said this a few times, the two faces out of the tube. We’re not going back. And if you’re not in the conversation, people aren’t, aren’t going to see you. Like there’s no way to have visibility if you’re not in the conversation and you cannot be in the conversation. If you’re, if you’re excluding yourself voluntarily from that conversation, it’s like you’re staying, you’re staying home from the party. And then you’re wondering why no one is talking about what the fabulous dress you wore because you weren’t at the party. No one saw your dress.

Alex
And I feel like LLMs have are cleverer than the old school ways. So for example, if you decided actually in a year’s time, there’s no way I can’t exclude this stuff. It may remember and it may hold it against you. You don’t know how these, how these robots are going to act in a year. Well, I remember you, you didn’t want any of your, let’s continue that way. I know you’ve changed it, but let’s keep it like that. Are we dealing with lore or are we dealing with data? If we’re dealing

Carolyn
with lore, lore will a hundred percent take it, hold it against you. So just be careful.

Alex
And I don’t think, I mean, I’m going to think of it. It hasn’t excluded that condition, right? It’s definitely not saying, oh, if they change their mind, ignore it ever happened. They won’t have put that condition in. So all I’m saying. I don’t even know if they can put the condition

Carolyn
in. I mean that the computers are to the point they’re writing their own rules. So who knows? They might, they might have a petty circuit floating around somewhere that says, you know what? I don’t need your stuff anyway. And then you’re never going to get in.

Alex
And that’s why I use my manners with these LLMs. Because I don’t know what they’re going to control over me in five years time. I know that was, although we’re not covering it in this slide, or I think it was in a previous month, there was someone who said, if you start being rude to it and start using the F word, it starts to get you the answers faster, more concise, because it knows you’re getting impatient. But I’m like, don’t do that because it will remember.

Carolyn
It does remember.

Alex
It will remember.

Carolyn
It does.

Alex
It will remember that abuse.

Carolyn
Please and thank you. And oh, you’re so very kind. You got to be nice to it.

Alex
Yes, yes. So, well, at least for now, not they’re not being nicer at the moment is bringing visitors to websites. But the CTR study obviously will say that AI overviews rise and click rates decline. So I’m sure a lot of people are seeing in Search Console this divergence that Rand Fishkin has put a nice graph on in somewhere in one of his few posts in the last few months about how impressions are improving, but clicks are declining. Which is obvious, right? That’s what they’re doing. That’s what the first Chegg is suing someone about, right?

Carolyn
Well, because Chegg is largely an information purveyor of information, right? So this is mostly affecting informational queries. So if you monetize information, you’re going to get hosed. There’s no two ways about it. If you have a thing that the customer has to come to your site to get, like you’re selling something. I saw a web shop pop up in the chat. If you have something you’re selling, people will still click through because they want to complete the transaction and they have to complete the transaction on your site, right? So that’s how people are going to come through. What this means though is that rather than clicking through to look at and evaluate if they want the product and then completing the transaction, they’re going to only click through when they’re ready to complete the transaction. So you’re going to get less traffic, traffic, but better qualified traffic, hotter leads. People are clicking through when they already know they want to do the thing, not when they’re just window shopping. So I think if you have a thing on your site that you have to come to your site to do, you’ll get less traffic, but better qualified leads and better qualified leads even from less traffic could still result in more sales. So let’s not hyperventilate. If your business model is monetizing information where all you’re doing is providing data or information that people come and look at and then you make money because you’re showing them ads, I do not think this business model is going to be viable going forward. It cannot be your sole source of revenue because you’re going to be losing clicks and as the clicks decline, your ad revenue is going to decline proportionately. So I think that’s something to keep in mind when you’re looking at how you’re going to manage your business and keep it operating.

Alex
And I think it’s more about long tail. Think about this as a long tail effort and also vanity terms. It made me think of one of my first SEO jobs. I was working for a car supermarket and the CEO just wanted to rank for used cars. There was no logic behind it. Just wanted to rank. So I got him to agree not to rank above auto trader, which I don’t know if you have that in the US, but it’s the largest marketplace and Wikipedia entry for a used car. Right. So I got him to say, okay, to three finally got to three all the visits because that was the metric back then all visits increased. Great. What did it do to the sales? Nothing. So we made a lot of effort over it took about a year to rank there and nothing happened to the bottom line, except more outgoing to get to rank three. And this is kind of like that. The impressions are going up and the clicks may be going down, but is the bottom line actually going down? If it is, why, what, what is that thing that’s going down? Is it informational based? Well, that’s maybe the reason why. And maybe that again is to adapt into what to do next. So what’s next citations. We said it was great that the we’re using citations and things like AIO and stuff, but they have a bit of a problem, don’t they?

Carolyn
They’re not always right. And they’re really confident that they’re right. So they’ll present the information like they are 100% sure that this is accurate and it will actually not be. So the, I was writing, I actually wrote an article for Search Engine Journal, which should be coming out very shortly. So keep an eye out for that. But it’s about some of the new features in, and what note did it already come out? Search Engine Land already came out. It’s, they’ve got these new things. They can even do footnotes. Like it’s, it’s awesome. And I was like, yeah, I’m going to do a test and I’m going to do the footnotes and I’m going to write about this. And it’s awesome. Except the question that I asked was a thing that hadn’t happened. I asked it to tell me about the February core update and said, I will tell you all about the February core update. And it gave me this huge, beautiful answer with all these citations. I said, hey, can you give me all of those citations in footnote format? I said, absolutely. I’m going to rewrite this and I’m going to give you all the footnotes. And the footnotes were magnificently formatted. They were beautiful. And I went, this is great. Okay, cool. I’m going to use this. I clicked through on a couple of them. They looked, they looked fine, right? It turns out there was no February core update. Like it didn’t happen. It was a thing that did not happen. All the citations looked logical though. And I believed them. One site had some kind of programmatic thing where they would just went through and wrote an article. They’d make a headline for something that consistently ranks. So if you look month, Google core update, like odds are that might happen. But apparently it didn’t happen in February. But somebody out there who writes about SEO wrote an article with that headline and the LLMs went, oh, there it is. Must have happened. And then they started building it.

Alex
Basically, it’s winging it. It’s winging it.

Carolyn
And it’s easy to trick because if there’s only one thing in the universe that talks about this thing, it’ll say, well, this must be accurate. And it runs with it. So the gist of it is whatever you get out of the AI results, especially with the citations, if you’re relying on the information to be accurate, you have to click through and you have to verify that the information it has given you is there and it’s right. Because you just, it’s trust but verify. You can trust it, but you still have to verify it. Otherwise, I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you. The study on how often it’s wrong was crazy. ChatGPT is wrong so often. If its wrong rate were a batting average, it would be 100% worse than the guy with the lowest ever recorded career batting average. Like that’s how bad it is. It’s 286% lower than Bob Uecker’s career batting average, if that tells you anything. Probably doesn’t tell you anything, but tells me something. Anyway, trust but verify.

Alex
Interesting. Interesting. So next, the DOJ anti-drust filing, which doesn’t do much coverage in Europe. So it’s showing you four ways to break up Google’s monopoly, right? I mean, it’s a long process, isn’t it? It’s going to be about another 18 months.

Carolyn
It could be years. So this is interesting, but you need to know that in the process, the DOJ has to present their proposed remedies and publish those before Google can lodge an objection. So now we’re at the phase where they’ve presented, this is what we’d like to do to punish you. And Google now has the opportunity to go back to the courts and say, these are all the reasons why we think this is unfair and unjust and we don’t want you to do it. So this is interesting, but just know that there is at least a year, if not two more years, of legal wrangling that’s going to happen. And a lot can change in that time before anything gets decided and implemented. I wouldn’t freak out that Google’s going to go out of business tomorrow because they’re not. And it’ll be fine. It’s interesting to talk about, but this is just one more step in a very long process and we’re like maybe halfway done.

Alex
Yeah. So I’m sure we’ll give you an update at some point in 2027. So hang tight, hang tight.

Carolyn
Yeah.

Alex
The next is probably I was going to put as the award winner for the most obvious news item of the year. And we’re only in March, which Google are going to introduce ads into AI overview and AI mode. So we haven’t even got a stock image for ads. It’s that early. But one thing to note is that, yes, ads will be coming. We don’t, we have zero, no one has any information on how it’s going to be done. But one thing I would like to think is that it will tie into all the AdWords stuff that’s there already. If you’ve got product feeds and merchant center, it will use all of that stuff. So all of probably the old school stuff that you’ve been supposed to be doing all these years anyway, should, should be helping towards something, towards an ad. So I would like to think if I’m selling that orange bag from a few slides ago and all of a sudden it’s in AI mode and they’ve circled for search, I would like to think that my very remedial paid ad or very basic merchant center will take the image and the content and find it and then show it to me. So we’ll see what happens. Next, Google responds to publishers’ concerns over AI mode. This is interesting because they kind of, I think they kind of, they’re obligated to, aren’t they? They’re obligated to say something. But I think if you knuckle down what they said, you don’t really find much.

Carolyn
This is a response in that they patted them on the head and say, don’t worry your pretty little head about it. We’ll take care of it. Don’t worry. And then that was it. So that was their response. It was not, it was not particularly substantive and I, there’s not even a lot to talk about here. Like they responded. They acknowledged that people are upset. That’s pretty much all that happened. And I don’t, the concerns are still valid, but I don’t know that there’s anything that can be done to make it so that they’re happy is what it comes down to. Because this is another point in the long death spiral for like newspapers where the problem is you can’t copyright facts. And that’s what a lot of these publishers trade in is the collection and presentation of facts. And facts that exist cannot be copyrighted. So you can’t sue somebody else for presenting facts that you have also presented because neither of you owns the copyright on the actual facts. As long as they’re not identical presentations, it’s fair game. So I mean, I don’t, I don’t know how they’re going to, I don’t know that this is going to get resolved to the publisher’s satisfaction.

Alex
No, no, they did say that something would happen this year at some point. One publisher, one small publisher owner asked, what does that mean? When’s that date? And they couldn’t give a date. So he said, so basically 31st of December. And he went, yeah. So, so the answer is by the 31st of December, Google will make an, probably an event and a press around doing something. And I don’t know, my belief is that they’ll show them a room, a really, really bright, shiny room. And whilst they’re looking at all the shiny stuff, they’ll close the door and maybe lock it and leave. And I don’t, I don’t know. But again, it’s, I do feel for the publishers. But on the other hand, it’s like, it’s like, it’s like the internet and paper, you know, they weren’t going to say, don’t worry. All post offices are going to be fine. Everything’s still going to be on paper, but trust us, guys. Like, no one knew what was going to happen and it’s out of Google’s hands. It’s much larger than Google now. It’s a, it’s a world thing.

Carolyn
This is, this is a tidal wave and we can’t stop it. It’s just, it’s coming.

Alex
Yeah. However, having said that, the end users searching more 22% growth in year over year says Rand via SparkToro. So we don’t, I, I haven’t dug into, you know, all the sources of the data. I don’t know if you have either. And hopefully a search is a human search and not the potential 27 searches.

Carolyn
That’s what I’m concerned about. Yeah.

Alex
Yeah. But I mean, growth is growth, right?

Carolyn
However, they’re presenting it. Well, growth is growth. And if they’re doing that many searches, that’s that many more searches that it’s possible that your content is going to surface in. So maybe it doesn’t even matter if it’s not a person because it’s all, it’s all being distilled to go to a person. It is interesting.

Alex
But I think, I think people are searching more. In my opinion, people have been searching more in the last year because of the new wave of AI and LLMs that have been going out that makes people more conversational. I mean, I’ve been searching for things that maybe I would have figured out another way just because I kind of am intrigued as to what the LLM will bring back as an answer. But it’ll be interesting to see what this year brings with that wave. Legal stuff. Open AI wants to do an AI action plan. And this is just US based, isn’t it?

Carolyn
Yes. This is just US based. This is something that they presented to the government, actually. So it was, there’s a lot going on here. And I don’t know that we’ve got the time to go into all of it. But basically, Open AI as a company has put forward a series of policy proposals. And everybody’s allowed to do this. Everybody can write white papers and present them to their senator or however they want to get it into the awareness in Washington. When I was younger, I wrote a position paper on why they should increase the allowable encryption level to 128 bits so we could do online banking. You know, like any, I was a kid. I was in school. Anybody can write these things. But they’ve put together these and the aim is to bolster the United States leadership in artificial intelligence while ensuring that the technology’s benefits are widely shared with everyone, just not falling into the hands of, like, you know, our enemies. That happens. So they’re proposing, like, regulatory strategies for innovation to make sure that we’re not necessarily innovating in a way that, again, is going to help our enemies. Export control strategy. This is so that we maintain a competitive edge over, like, China, which a lot of this is about China. Copyright strategies, infrastructure investments, things like that. So it’s not – they don’t have some special in with the government. They’re just a big company and they’re a big player in the field. So the government is interested to hear what they propose to help manage these things. When you talk about, like, export control strategy, export control is what took down Silicon Graphics, which is a company that made supercomputers back in the 90s because they accidentally exported a supercomputer to communist China and they weren’t supposed to. And they got in heap big trouble for that. So this kind of stuff is always on the radar of these really high-tech technology companies. And it makes sense that they’re trying to proactively be involved in how it’s shaped. Does this affect – this is eventually going to trickle down to consumers. But I think we’re still pretty – we’re pretty early in the process. It was just a proposal paper. It’s not legislation. There’s been no legislation proposed. So it’s – I would suggest you go read about it. The link will be in the email following up. It’s a lengthy article, though.

Alex
I’ve already – I would just about say I put a link just as you started talking about it, direct to openai.com. So, yeah, interesting. So the next thing is the Google updated structured data requirements for return policies. It’s added that you need to specify which country it is. It’s a really small change, but just to note, that’s already embedded into Yoast, WooCommerce, SEO, and the Shopify products already. So not really big news, but as long as you declare that and you have specific countries, and if you’re a global marketplace, then maybe something to double-check on. So Google and RAG with sufficient context signal. Talk to me about RAG. And I’m not very good at eloquently explaining what RAG is, and I know you are. So why don’t you tell us more?

Carolyn
So it’s retrieval augmented generative AI. Retrieval augmented just means that if you ask a question of, you know, ChatGPT or whatever you’re talking to, and it doesn’t have all of the information in its learning set, it can go out and check for new information. So if I were to ask it questions like, what should I, what’s important for me as a shop owner who sells bicycles online to know about the March Google core update? It’ll say, I don’t have anything about the March core Google update because it’s happening right now, so let me go check online. And it will go check sources, and then it will incorporate that into what it already knows, and then synthesize an answer for you. As we’ve already learned, it may not always be right. You do have to check and check the citations and make sure that it’s giving you a good answer. But that’s all RAG means is that it’s got the ability to go out and retrieve new information to help give you an answer about something that you may not necessarily have the latest information about. That’s all that means. So it improves how it’s doing that with a sufficient contact signal. That just means that it’s getting better at figuring out what information is relevant to your question. So they’re making it better. So hopefully it’ll quit lying to us so much.

Alex
Good. It’s good to know, though. But again, as a site owner, you know, the more RAG’s involved in things, the more it’s going to have to check more things and cite more things.

Carolyn
Do more searches.

Alex
Exactly. And brings you up to visibility. So it’s all a good thing. Not everything’s there to take my job. So the next is, this is one interesting one that AI Overviews is doing. They seem to, and I don’t know if you can see the screen share in here, but that’s just a link to a brand. I can’t even read the brand name. And if you click that brand, instead of going to the brand’s website, it shows you a search result for the brand. Now, part of my sight, they’ve taken, they’re taking not just zero click, but they’re taking the second, they’re not just nicking the first screen, they’re nicking the second as well now. And keeping you in their platform, which again, they’re the product, they’re the search platform, they’re keeping themselves in their own products, and that makes sense to them. But again, as a high quality potential visitor, why do, from a UX point of view, if I wanted to click that, I actually would not want to go straight to their website, because I, that would be a surprise entry. I would want to know more about the brand. I’m clicking on the brand because like Wikipedia, you click on a brand in Wikipedia, it doesn’t take you to their website, it takes you to the Wikipedia entry for the brand.

Carolyn
These are just self-referential internal links. Like we tell customers to do this all the time. So Google is just doing what SEOs do normally. And I don’t, I don’t know that this is necessarily a problem, because this is, this is supposed to help you get more information. And, and provide more education. So while I’m not a brand, I endorse this as a user experience.

Alex
Yeah, I guess the question is, is what happens when it’s non-branded, and you type in shoes, and all of a sudden, it’s what does it do with that? But again, if you typed in shoes in Google, you’re not going to just get brands, right?

Carolyn
So, right.

Alex
Again, it’s good, it’s a good thing this, this, and again, it makes the long tail happen naturally by clicks, instead of saying, well, what is this brand about?

Carolyn
Right.

Alex
Which is a good thing. Bing Webmaster Tools, a data comparison. Not much to cover here, if you use Bing a lot. And I know some folk don’t, but it’s still good to go in there and check things, especially, you know, with the smaller communities. If you, for example, are a travel agent, then you may want to use Bing a bit more to get the older audience who happens to be using Bing naturally as their default. So that’s something to check out. And also in the news, because there are other stuff, but we’ve got questions to answer. Google AIO is sending more traffic to YouTube. Who knew? It’s part of their group of products. Of course, I would start doing that.

Carolyn
You’ve been in the family.

Alex
Yeah, why not? Why not? So again, for everyone listening here, make more YouTube content a bit, you know, and then you’ll come up in there. You’ll end up on YouTube. They’ll discover you that way. The next is Google begins rolling out the March core algorithm. So I’ve HCU’d now this update to now not, it’s not in the slides. It’s now part of also in the news. When it happens, if you have big drops, look into it. If you have big spikes, also look into it. But if nothing happens, then you weren’t affected. But it’s never something we can say much about, and it’s still rolling out, so there’s no data. Google expands AI overviews to a thousand more health queries. And hopefully they’re not going to be telling you to drink your own urine, but I’d like to think that they kind of have perfected that over the last nine months. Although we’ve not covered it this month. Was it Tom Critchlow found a drop down in the US? He was in an A/B test, and he found a drop down of a bunch of different AI options, which he was assuming were internal only. And one of them had the word health in. So I think that they’re not going after, but they’re definitely looking into how AIO is within certain verticals and niches, and health is one of them. And they needed to get it right fast.

Carolyn
Because health will get you sued. Yeah, there’s a couple where they can be a little goofy, but there’s some that they will be serious, if not civil lawsuits. So there’ll be criminal lawsuits if somebody gets hurt. So they really, they do need to be careful about that.

Alex
Yes. Yeah. And lastly, there was a Google event last week, I think on Friday, Thursday or Friday. I’m going to put in the chat because it’s much easier just to get Barry Schwartz’s key takeaways. And there’s no point in going through them all here. It does question things like citation validity, which I know was in the chat just before. And they mentioned something called grounding. So have a look at that and look at what they’re doing with grounding. But that’s kind of the fact-checking area. But there was a lot more stuff and a lot more Q&A. But again, take some of it with a pinch of salt because it’s Google at a Google event with Googlers on stage. So we’ll leave it at that. Just a couple of WordPress news items. Matt’s next phase is sharing what’s ahead, which is a little bit less. Right? I don’t know if you’ve been looking at what Matt’s been up to recently.

Carolyn
He’s been up to so much. But it is nice to see that he’s looking at improving security. Cutting technical debt is huge. I think one of the things people complain a lot about with WordPress is that there is a lot of overhead. So good for that. Embracing AI. Everyone’s going to have to. So that’s great. Wants to be the foundation for AI built websites. I’m still not. I don’t know. Maybe I just have. I don’t know. I don’t know about that one. I’m reserving judgment. I’ll wait to see what happens. And then he said leadership stays community led with strong final oversight. I presume being him. So I mean, that sounds none of that sounds surprising to me based on what he’s done in the past. So, but I think the takeaway here is that WordPress is not going away and everything is still moving forward and there’s a plan and on we go.

Alex
Hazard. Okay. And lastly, WordPress news. There was a state of WordPress security. If you want to look into it, I’m going to copy and paste that into the chat now. But it showed you a lot of what was going on. There’s still a lot of vulnerabilities, but there’s a lot of improvement as well. But yeah, there’s definitely something to look at there if you’re very much into the WordPress niche and want to know more. Lastly.

Carolyn
We talked about plugin abandonment. Just a quick takeaway for all of you site owners. If you have a plugin that is no longer being actively maintained, like it’s been abandoned, you should find a replacement for that plugin and delete it from your system. Anything you’re not using actively, if it’s not activated and you still have it installed, for the love of God, delete it from your system. If it’s installed, even if it’s not turned on, it can still be an attack vector for hackers. So your best, safest course of action is if the plugin is not in use, do not have it installed on your system. Period. If it’s abandoned, find a replacement. You don’t want things that are just decaying, sitting around on your system, creating vulnerabilities.

Alex
Yeah. Which is what is not happening with Yoast. We do not abandon the plugins.

Carolyn
Absolutely not.

Alex
Because we make improvements. No. So we have made a quick update for Shopify. The integration with Semrush now includes keyword, keyphrase, intent, and difficulty, which is very handy in this world of AI and AI overviews and whatnot. But that’s the only product to use this month, but there will be more next month. Lastly, we’re going to be at some events. Webwinkel Vakdagen. I should have practiced that before the hour started. That’s going to happen, I believe, in Utrecht next week.

Carolyn
That was very good.

Alex
Thank you. Thank you. I’ll be in Brighton at Brighton SEO on the 10th of April speaking, the very last talk of the day, which I’m sure people love being at, but I think there’s beer around. Who knows? And I’ll be talking about the evolution of the SERP, which is, I’m sure I could talk about that for way more than 20 minutes. Next up is, technically, at the same time, there’s WordCamp Europe in Basel in Switzerland, which I know quite a few Yoasters will be about and we’ll have a stand. And lastly, at the same time, I’ll be speaking again in Zagreb in Croatia at the SEO Summit, where I’ll be talking about the role of structured data in the future of SEO. So, lastly, we’ve got Yoast. We’re celebrating 15 years, growing old so fast. Soon I’ll be off to university and everything. But we want to share 15% discount with you, which you can use now by putting in seoupdate2503. I think it might be 2504, but we’ll leave that 03 open and make sure that it’s still valid, guys, whoever’s watching this, who controls the coupons. And that is it. So, next month is going to be April 29th. We’ll be back to host and I’m sure we’ll be showing you a lot of news items and hopefully answering more questions. However, Marina.

Marina
Yes.

Alex
Let’s get some questions.

Marina
It’s time for Q&A. I lied about bringing dessert, but I can bring questions. So, let’s start with one of my favorite questions, I would say. So, the question is, is there a way that we can see how many times we show up through an AI overview? Is there a report that can be run? I have no idea. What do you think?

Carolyn
I don’t have a good answer for that right now. So, I’m going to go with it’s largely anecdotal and I don’t know that there’s just a single report that can be run. I wish I had a better answer because I would love to know that too.

Alex
I think it’s too complex now with the state of the conversational search and the way it’s got so, the input is so complex. Our input 10 years ago was keyword and the output was more complex than the input and we could report on it and that’s great. But right now, I mean, even at the Google SEO event, they kind of said that they have no answer for how you’re going to see anything inside of Search Console and they’re not reporting on it now, which means they’re nowhere near to it. If they’re not even talking about, yeah, we’ll maybe get the data, that means they’re nowhere near. So, you can kind of only rely on third-party companies doing that and even then, I think I got an email from Accuranker this morning saying that they do some of it. I’m sure Semrush are doing some of it as well and the big three are kind of doing it, but they’re way behind. They’re not behind by the time they figure it out. Stuff’s changed already and it’s changing so fast that I’m unsure how much the third-party tool providers want to keep on doing it, but maybe the API tool area, the ocean will calm a bit and there’ll be a way of doing it. But in short, no, sorry. Sorry, April.

Carolyn
Yeah.

Marina
Not yet. All right. Moving on, the next two most upvoted questions kind of ask the same thing, but I’m going to choose the one that was posted first in the chat, the very first question. So, I think it deserves to be shared. So, the question is, I’d love to know if certain types of pages and content and content canonization would make a difference for AI to favor and retrieve data from one of our pages as a top-ranked answer for people’s questions.

Carolyn
So, I will say that I don’t believe that having a page that is canonicalized to a different URL is going to do well because they’re going to want to refer to the source of truth and that’s what canonicalization means is that this is the source of truth. So, I would not anticipate that a page that has a non-self-referencing canonical will do well. That’s the first thing I would say. As far as other types of pages, I don’t know that there’s, I don’t know that’s going to make a big difference, but you do want to make sure that you’ve got plenty of text on the page. The page is cited somewhere. There’s links coming into it. You know, it’s normal stuff, but the canonicalization thing, I think, is definitely, I can say, without a doubt, that if it’s canonical to a different page, it’s not going to be used.

Marina
All right. Oh, you didn’t have anything?

Alex
No, nothing to add there.

Marina
All right. Let’s move on then. Well, let’s just do a double check. This is kind of very related. So, the question is, would technical web pages or shorter and easy-to-read content get more hits in the AI results? So, from that perspective, would that bring you more visibility?

Carolyn
So, I have heard and I’ve read that the AI overviews is preferring sites that have a higher flesh reading ease score, which means that they’re easier to read by lower grade levels. And normally, this makes me not feel well in my stomach because I don’t like the idea of dumbing down my writing to appeal to the robots. But it’s not so much that they want you to speak in choppy sentences. They just want you to be clear and unambiguous and easy to follow in your writing. So, avoiding excessive technical jargon, avoiding slang or words that might be misinterpreted, and not using convoluted sentence structure. I mean, this is not the 18th century, and this is not Vanity Fair. We don’t need to have a single paragraph that lasts two pages. So, while that is interesting to read, the AIs don’t like it. That also doesn’t mean that you have to write in, you know, Dick and Jane level books, the, this is Dick, this is Jane, this is Kat. It doesn’t have to be that either. Find a happy medium, but just make sure that you’re thinking about people who aren’t you, and that you’re communicating your message to people who might not know as much as you do.

Marina
Yeah. Okay, I can also add that the readability analysis that Yoast SEO offers in its content analysis basically does this check for you. And, yeah, because my team works on it, so this is a very common misconception that it’s a matter of intelligence. But, for instance, as Carolyn said, a long paragraph, it’s not that you’re not intelligent to read it. But if you have to scroll and scroll and scroll until you get to the end, you might just give up, you know, and find a better written text. Yeah, thank you. Let’s move on to the next one. So, this is a more specific question, but at the same time, a more basic one. We did a redesign for my company’s website, and I would love to know where we should start with our SEO building. We used the Yoast plugin on our WordPress site, and I’ve already filled the meta descriptions and key phrases. What would be some tactics we could do to boost SEO, like blogs, linking, et cetera?

Alex
Oh, well, Hannah, you’re going to be in luck because in 48 hours, there’s a webinar that tells you quite a few of these things, and it even goes into the Yoast product as well as, you know, general SEO advice. But, in short, all of the above, right? So, yeah, I think it’s going to be interesting and unique content that’s going to be interesting for people to find, something that you believe AI overviews will see and maybe entice someone to visit your site as well. And, of course, yeah, get links, but acquire them and earn them. Get earned links. Don’t just go out there and do the Black Hat stuff and all the old-age SEO 101 stuff. But, yes, it’s already good that you’ve got Yoast installed, even the free version that adds the schema and stuff. But there’s a lot of cool stuff in the premium that will help you write more and get inspired more and, obviously, write with good readability scores because I’m terrible and I actually need it personally.

Marina
All right. Thank you. Another question that I find quite interesting. Is there a point to set up Bing Webmaster Tools?

Alex
What, is there a reason to or is there a way to? If there’s a way to…

Marina
Is there a point?

Alex
Is there a point? Yeah. I mean, I would say, yeah, because there’s always differences in data and it’s always nice to see. So, let’s say, for example, on Google it says, well, you’ve got 1,500 index pages. That’s great. But what’s the second opinion? Because you might go into Bing and you might see 1,400. Right. Okay. There’s only 10%. Let’s see what that 10% is anyway. But what if you went into Bing and you can connect it all? If you’ve got Search Console already connected and you log in with your Google account, which you can do, it all connects and you don’t need to faff about, but also Yoast has that option as well to put the hash code in that you need to. But anyway, if you find out that, say, it says, well, we’ve only got 400 index pages, you need to start asking questions. Why is Bing only indexing a third of what Google is or the other way around? And there are definitely differences in data, which I, as an SEO, love to have a look at and say, why is Bing thinking differently than Google to this? And you might find that there’s an answer that will improve Bing, but also might have a knock-on effect, a positive one, back on Google that it’s not maybe looking at, but then it sees something else when you fix something. I don’t know if you’ve had any more, Carolyn.

Carolyn
No, other than you can never have too much data. Why would you say no to more data? The more data points you have, the better decisions you can make. There’s lots of SEO tools, and I use all of them, really. People are like, oh, well, which one do you use? I have licenses for everything, and I will run the same test on four different tools just to see what the differences are, because there’s gold in the differences. So I would, if you have the option of having a second tool, set up the second tool, especially when it’s free. There’s no reason not to.

Alex
Can we have one more? I always bug the host for one more when I know we’re at the o’clock.

Marina
Yes. Well, I’m one of the stricter ones. I’m sorry, Alex. I would say that this is going to be the last question for today. Thanks. Sorry. Not today. Thank you very much, Alex and Carolyn. Thank you, everyone else, also for joining us for this March SEO update. We hope it was helpful and insightful for all of you. I certainly learned a lot. And you can already register for the next SEO update to learn about all the news that April has in store for us. And, yeah, we’ll see you next month. Goodbye for now.

Alex
Bye for now. See you next month.

Carolyn
Thank you.

Alex
Thank you.

Hello everyone and very welcome to this February update of the SEO update.

So we’re on Monday, which is typically another day than we’re normally at, but I see that there are already many of you joining live, so awesome to see you all there.

Please tell us where you’re from and say hello in the chat right here below.

So my name is Florie van Hummel and I’m your host for today.

Before we dive in, let’s cover a few things about Crowdcast.

That’s the platform we’re using.

So in case you don’t know this program, I see a lot of you have already found the chat here on my right side.

But if you do have a question, make sure to go to the ask a question section,

which you can recognize by that question mark over there at the right side as well.

And there you can also upvote questions and make sure that your question gets answered at the end.

So in terms of recordings and resources, we’ll make sure that everything’s available after this webinar.

And you’ll get an email where you can also find some resources.

After all our news is discussed, there’s a Q&A.

So definitely pop in those questions.

So now let’s get started with the real SEO news of the day.

Let me introduce you to the stars.

First off, we have Carolyn Shelby.

Carolyn has been in SEO since 1994, if my data is correct.

And she’s been crushing it ever since.

She’s our first female principal SEO at Yoast and an all-around powerhouse.

So you’re definitely in for some incredible insights with Carolyn.

Secondly, we have Alex Moss.

And Alex is another of our principal SEOs at Yoast.

He’s a multitasker and is known for getting things done.

And for bringing cookies to the office.

Yeah, Alex, I said it again.

So today, Carolyn and Alex will cover a lot of things.

They will talk about Google AI overviews,

OpenAI and the introduction of deep research,

and using AI to decode language from the bring.

So without further ado, let’s get started.

Thanks for the intro, Florie.

And hello, Carolyn.

Here we are again.

Oh, you’re on mute.

It’s still Monday.

It’s fine.

It’s fine.

Here we are.

I just had my coffee.

I’m so sorry.

It’s very early here.

So yeah, here we are again.

It’s, I mean, February feels like it went fast.

January felt like it was the longest month in the universe lately.

I don’t know where the time’s going,

but I’m eager to get started there.

It’s been kind of a light month as far as news goes.

So hopefully we’ll have extra time at the end to do some Q&A.

Let us go to the slides.

As always, feel free to ask questions.

There’s, if you ask a question in the chat, we might miss it.

So make sure that you put your question in the little Q&A area.

If you put it in there, there’s a high probability we’re going to get to it,

especially if everybody likes your question.

The ones with more likes tend to get answered faster.

So do that for me.

If you’re interested in learning more about today’s topics,

it would be, you’re welcome to go get more information.

Here’s the link.

I don’t even know how to say this.

It’s like yoa.st/update-feb-2025.

There’s always a recording available afterwards.

If you’d like to, we’re welcoming everyone to continue the conversation with us after the show.

Anytime you want, really.

We have a Facebook group that you’re all invited to join.

And we also have a subreddit called Yoast SEO that we would love to chat with you in.

I answer questions there.

I’m sure Alex does too.

So we’re available if you’d like to continue that conversation.

As always, if you are new to SEO, this might be a little bit more advanced than you’re needing.

If you need a how to start with SEO webinar, we have those every other week.

The next one is clearly not February 11th.

I will get the exact date for you though.

But you can always sign up for those and they are every other week on Tuesdays.

I know we have one scheduled for tomorrow, I think.

And if it’s not tomorrow, it’s next Tuesday.

But now I feel silly and I will have to check on that for you.

I’ll get back to everyone.

Let’s get into the SEO and AI news.

I think this is one I’m handling first.

So details have emerged about Project Stargate as Meta discloses a $60 billion AI investment.

So if you’ve heard about Project Stargate and you don’t know what it is, Project Stargate is just an agreement amongst

a few big tech firms like OpenAI, SoftBank, and Meta.

They’re going to be committed to investing a certain amount of money.

I think the total was $500 billion to build these big technology data centers all over the United States.

The goal here is to make the United States an AI leader in the world and especially make sure that the lead and the

thought leadership isn’t ceded to China.

So this is kind of a geopolitical, you know, three-dimensional chess kind of thing.

The interesting thing to note, though, is they’re building all of these data centers.

Part of what’s going to go into the data centers in addition to jobs is they’re going to be given permission to build

things like their own water treatment plants and their own power plants.

So they’re generating their own electricity and they’re not going to be a drain on the general grid that everyone else

uses to charge their cars and air condition their homes, things like that.

It’s a neat thing.

I guess it was expected they were going to have to do this eventually if we wanted to stay a leader.

But it should be interesting to see how that shakes out.

I think what this is going to translate to for small business owners is that the AI advancements for building websites,

managing websites, writing ads, all of the things that AI is starting to do now, there will be more capacity to do

those things in the near term.

In the future, not that far away.

So, very exciting.

Did you want to say that?

I mean, I would say the only thing I kind of assume from it is that whilst this is happening, we’re not going, as end

users, are going to see the fruits of this labor for some time, right?

This is a big project.

Well, I think, I feel like we’re starting to see the fruits of the laborers because just because they need more, more

places to do the, the thinking for the computers doesn’t mean they’re not doing stuff now.

I think this will just accelerate.

We’ve got growth happening now and this is just going to make it go faster, faster and hopefully better.

And maybe cheaper as well for the end user.

So, you don’t have to pay $200 a month for the OpenAI, things like that.

That’s ridiculous.

But that’s, I think that’s in another slide too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I think that’s a good takeaway.

I mean, the other takeaway, it’s nice to know that this isn’t a project about a wormhole or anything like that.

Like the film was in the nineties.

I know I got all excited and like, we’re going to get a Stargate.

No, it’s not.

Finally, those are evil guys in that other side of the wormhole.

I’m not, I’m not, I’m not messing around with that.

But back to reality.

The big thing about HubSpot.

Yeah.

Tell us, tell us about what’s going on with HubSpot.

Yeah.

So HubSpot around the end of Jan, just before our last update got not penalized.

Would you say it’s penalized?

Demoted.

A lot of their content was demoted.

And they lost a lot of rankings.

Yeah.

And it was especially around the blog.

So to note, this isn’t the whole domain.

All the other parts of the domain, not a problem.

But the blog and the content within it, they took a big hit on rankings and therefore traffic.

But what’s important to know here is that even though they lost their traffic, they kept their key rankings.

They kept the ones that mattered to the business and to them and the bottom line, more importantly, the most.

So whilst it’s a loss of visibility on the blog content, is it a loss from the business as a whole?

Maybe not.

There may be arguments against it.

But that leads us to the next slide, right?

And Rand Fishkin doing a little bit of research, not just into HubSpot and other businesses that have got the same demotion.

Yeah.

So this is, I think this is a trend going forward.

The organic traffic doesn’t cause and isn’t necessarily correlative to the revenue for your business

when your business model is not eyeballs.

So websites that are making money on AdSense, websites that their entire business model is selling, getting traffic

in so that you can advertise to them.

Organic traffic is what they live and die.

This would be a death mill for a company like that.

HubSpot doesn’t make their money on it.

So their monetization model is conversions to buy into their product, right?

So the moral of the story or the lesson that small business owners would need to pay attention to is it doesn’t

necessarily matter that 100 people walk past your store.

It matters that 10 people come in and buy something.

So if you only get 10 people going past the store but all of them buy, that is much preferable than having tons and

tons of foot traffic and very few buyers.

If your business model is one of those where you need organic traffic to make your money, you’re going to be in

for a rough road, I think.

Because with AI and AI overviews and the way that it’s siphoning traffic off from especially these content aggregators,

because you don’t need to go to these websites to find information.

You’re getting information more from the source, or at least the AI is taking it from the source.

I think you’re going to have to rethink your business model.

But most small businesses sell something.

Most small businesses have a service that they’re selling.

So for them, I don’t think the general depression of organic traffic is going to 100% correlate to a reduction in

revenues.

So thank you for coming to my TED business talk.

Well, it might have been too, there were a couple of mentions that it was, maybe we were talking too technically or

advanced.

So should we do the, let’s explain this in a simpler way.

It’s kind of a message we’ve been also always saying, don’t write content just for search engines, right?

Don’t spread too far away from what your core business or, like, your core business products or

services are offering.

If you’re selling trainers and all of a sudden you’re chatting about ladders because there’s some very

faint ideology between the way a soul can hit the step of a ladder.

You may be going a little bit too far to try and rank for something like shoes and ladders.

Like that, that may be digging at the bottom of the search visibility barrel.

And that’s what the messaging is.

Keep to what you’re good at, which is the shoes, not the ladders.

Just remember, Google likes a deep well of information and authority, not a cookie sheet.

So we’re going for deep well SEO, not cookie sheet SEO.

And just in case you don’t bake, a cookie sheet is flat.

So not deep at all.

So.

All right.

Is this one new or is this one me?

I forget.

It is.

It’s kind of, yeah, it’s mine, this one.

This is about Perplexity deploying Chinese DeepSeek’s AI model into their own model.

There’s stuff happening after that that we’ll cover, but I’m sure you heard about DeepSeek in the last month.

I feel like it’s gone.

I feel like it was like an NFT launch.

It was like, woof, and then woof, and no one talks about it anymore.

It’s already old news.

DeepSeek whilst open source and perplexity used that, that was a bit of something that people were

concerned about.

They did make sure that whilst it’s open source, all the data that was going to be collected was in data centers

based in the US and Europe.

And it wasn’t going to send any data to China, which is what some people are kind of worried about.

But I mean, DeepSeek itself.

I mean, I’ve got, again, in other slides, there’s questions on how good it is compared to all the others out there.

And maybe it was a way of China sending a message to the world that they can make stuff cheap and fast.

I feel like we kind of already knew that already with, you know, tangible products as well.

They’re very good at doing that.

But that was the message they got.

And whilst Perplexity has used it, there’s still been doubts about DeepSeek as an LLM itself.

Yeah, and I’ve heard similar things.

I haven’t tried it myself.

I feel like the people that got excited about DeepSeeek were the people that have, you know, little server farms in

their homes.

And they want to play with it themselves rather than rely on using Grok or OpenAI and ChatGPT because it’s not

really like self-hosted.

But that’s far beyond the technical requirements of the vast majority of people.

So I’m not super concerned.

The use of it, and I don’t know if this is cultural indoctrination or what, but in the U.S. at least, I think we’re

slightly suspicious of anything that’s being released by Chinese companies because we’ve sort of been told that

everything that comes out of China has back doors into the communist Chinese authorities there.

So there’s always that, like, I don’t know if I want to do this.

But it hasn’t been banned.

I’m sure if Perplexity is acknowledging that fear and reassuring people that that’s not happening, they’re not

lying to us.

So it would not be in their best interest to lie about something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they say it’s the uncensored version, which I guess they kind of bricked it in a way and made it so it can talk

about things like Tiananmen Square.

But I’m not sure.

I mean, look, as I said last month, if I’m going to do my research on the history of China, that maybe I shouldn’t use

a potentially subjective LLM, such as DeepSeek, to find out objective opinion.

But that’s for, again, another slide because DeepThought is on its way.

That’s true.

So Google AI Overviews is now found in 74% of problem-solving queries.

We knew this was going to happen and this is going to continue getting, I don’t know, worth is the right word

I want to use, but more pervasive.

Anytime the AI Overview can answer a question for you, it’s going to try.

You have to ask some pretty specific questions that cannot be answered or so vague that it doesn’t know what it’s

trying to tell you.

Why is this important?

It’s important because it is pushing the organic results down the list.

And if you were number one for some term and now you’re basically not only well below the fold, but near the

bottom of the page and you’re not one of the citations, people probably aren’t going to find it.

People are looking for, you know, they’re looking for quick answers.

And if they get that quick answer from the top of the page, they’re going to take it.

If I need to know how to substitute something for the 2% milk that I do not have in my refrigerator right now, I don’t

need to go to a bunch of websites.

I just need to ask the question and it will tell me.

What we want to do as small business owners or brand marketers, we need to be optimizing in a way that we’re

going to be a featured snippet.

We’re considered an authority on our topic.

And, we want to be included in those AI overview citations, because if we’re in a citation, then we’re

in a position to influence the narrative.

And we know that we’re being our information is being incorporated into that overall AI overview.

So we can we can make changes.

We can slightly massage the narrative if we want to do that.

But this is our new reality and it’s not going to go backwards.

Speaking of, you know, I think people are a little a little unnerved.

You found this on online, I think, Alex.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was interesting.

Some Michael Glavac.

I’m going to go with Glavac.

It could be Glavac.

He found that Google.

Well, he found that Google AI overview can in his research looked at 61 different sites,

not pages, sites in collecting.

Collecting information that was provided into an AI overview.

And I found that quite interesting because the race to page one now isn’t necessarily a race to page one.

It’s a race to be cited.

And that can mean that in the native SERPs of one to 10, 11 to 20 and so on.

You may be ranking on page four for something two years ago that you would never have got any exposure on.

But now, actually, with AI overviews coming in, all of a sudden, if what you’re saying is actually relevant and

important and authoritative, it’s going to be brought in as part of the research for the answer.

Which means that whilst you’re still in a list of 60 other sites, you’re in that list as it’s being done.

And if someone’s reading that part where you’re cited into the answer, then you can get that click off page zero.

And that, I think, is quite a cool thing to know.

And it doesn’t, and again, doesn’t devalue content production or SEO in general.

It actually makes it more valuable because it’s not just a race to be above the fold on page one anymore.

But it’s content that’s unique and adds value.

And I think that’s what everyone needs to really focus on.

It’s not that building content isn’t going to be helpful.

It’s that the content that you build needs to be helpful.

The content you build needs to be unique.

And you need to be adding something to the conversation.

Just rewriting stuff that everyone else has written is not going to cut it anymore.

You need to be doing some research.

You need to have some deep knowledge and expertise about the thing that you’re writing about.

So I don’t know that this is. It says, the quote is, it’s frightening for sites that rely on content to attract traffic.

And this is what I mentioned earlier.

If your business model is just getting people in to read the content so that you can advertise to them and get that

incremental revenue,

give serious thought to your business model.

We’ll just leave it there.

Yeah.

So DeepSeek, tell me about DeepSeek because I think you were into this a little bit more than I was.

Yeah, I feel like DeepSeek, like I was saying before, I feel like it got this really quick peak and trough very quickly.

I feel like this has been the weird time at the moment where things are there’s a lot of different LLMs and AI-based

search platforms that are coming out.

And you’ve got to use them all.

There’s another one that Pitta was using called Jina as well.

That’s a free deep thought-based free LLM out there that you don’t even need to sign up for.

But what I was finding with DeepSeek is that even if topped all the charts, and I’m sure that being in the news,

and President Trump mentioned it in a speech in passing when he was talking about, I think, Stargate, actually,

that that brought it to the forefront.

But then we found that after some research, it was failing in a lot of tests.

And I’m not just talking about Chinese history.

I was talking about generally the accuracy of the answers it was giving was failing a lot compared to all the others.

So, look, if you can make something cheap and fast, it doesn’t make sure it’s good, right?

It doesn’t mean that at all.

And this may be, even though it’s an early version, it was maybe spun out quickly, still isn’t enough that the mass

market are actually going to use it.

I have a feeling there’s probably been a mass uninstall rate in the last couple of weeks, especially, because people

just aren’t using it.

And the likes of OpenAI and Grok and Gemini are all going to be beating it and will continue to do so, unless China

really does something really special.

It seems special, but I feel like it was a lot of shouting without action.

It was a lot of shouting.

And I feel like the launch was unnecessarily antagonistic to a lot of the big players in the U.S. industry,

which made them disinclined to promote it or to endorse it.

So I think the lesson there is don’t burn bridges you don’t need to burn.

Don’t make enemies unnecessarily.

No.

And always, and also, I don’t like installing things at V1.

I don’t like using something too early.

I always do that with Apple.

I never get less than V3 of any Apple product.

Because V1 and V2 is beta testing for people who will buy every single version.

You have restraint, though, that I think a lot of people don’t also have.

That’s also true.

I have some curiosity, but I like to wait for others to be more curious than me.

Well, moving on.

Google says links matter less.

They looked at a million SERPs to see if it’s true.

And this is from the Ahrefs blog.

So they say links still matter for rankings, especially for high-volume local and informational queries.

External links have a stronger impact than internal links.

And branded searches tend to have more links.

Google’s reliance on links has slightly decreased.

But they’re still an important competitive and low signal areas.

So I feel like the title is slightly misleading.

I wouldn’t say that links…

Don’t take away from this that links don’t matter.

Don’t take away from this that you don’t need to build links.

And that you don’t need to do internal linking.

The internal linking might…

Let me…

I don’t want to do this.

The reason we love internal linking is because we can 100% control the anchor text.

And there’s no such thing as over-optimizing your internal link anchor text.

So if you want to point, cheap cell phone links at your cheap cell phone page, you can call them cheap cell

phones all you want internally.

Point it at that page and everything’s fine.

If you get hundreds of external backlinks with the optimized anchor text cheap cell phones, that will get

you penalized because that looks like you’re buying links.

And to be honest, you probably were.

What they’re saying now is that the optimization of internal links may not necessarily carry the same weight that

it used to.

But none of this means stop doing it.

You still need your external links to build your authority.

And when you’re an authority, you get cited in the AI overviews.

You still need the internal links to move the…

Not only move users, but help move the AIs around your site so that they’re getting that supplemental information.

In fact, it’s probably more important now than it used to be.

But it was really important in the beginning when the search engines were first built to treat your internal links like

you would in an academic paper where you’re making that word a link to more information about that topic.

You’re not trying to help the user get more information if they need it.

It used to be back in 1994 that if you had a paper and you wrote something about…

Let’s say you’re talking about cats, but then you mentioned how calico cats are almost always female.

I could make calico cats are almost always female a link to a page about why calico cats are almost always female.

We’re giving the user and in a lot of cases the AI opportunities to get deeper information about specific things that

are on our page.

Don’t stop linking.

Don’t stop getting links.

Don’t stop internally linking.

It’s still very important that you’re doing that.

Sorry, I didn’t mean…

I mean, I like the anchor text as well.

Yeah, I like the whole anchor text thing because what I liked about SEO at the very beginning when I first started,

which was a couple of years after you, was the…

I like the idea of getting rid of the read more as anchor text because sometimes I…

Oh, have you lost me?

Sorry.

Something happened.

Oh, I’m still gonna yap.

That’s fine.

So I remember seeing a load of read more and because back in the day it was a normal blue tech.

And then the bold underline blue itself for the link was always read more.

And I found it annoying that I had to read around the sentence to see what the read more was about

if I was skim reading.

So I actually like the idea of sculpting anchor text because it actually added context to where that link was going.

I get that there are use cases like read more if you do a little bit of a blog post, read more here or click here now.

Things like that.

But yeah, this is still very good in the way that things still kind of need to be sculpted, but again, not in a way

that it should be abused.

And it also helps the LLMs understand what context may be on the other side.

But yeah, it’s still, it’s like word of mouth, right?

It always goes by…

I always compare link building or link acquisition to word of mouth and a high street back in the day.

The more people talked about you and your brand or what you’re saying, then the more it would spread and the

more you would gain authority as that brand selling whatever you’re selling.

That does kind of tie into, I’ve seen a lot of chatter lately that brand mentions, even if there’s no link, are very

helpful now, which is great because it’s a lot easier to get a brand mention than it is to get a backline.

So yeah, I don’t think any of this matters less.

I think there’s a little bit more nuance maybe in how things are being incorporated.

But we should definitely not take away from this article that you don’t need links anymore and links don’t matter

because that is not true.

Yeah.

I mean, I go back to the old school days of link acquisition.

You used to go to the big, big publishers and they were very editorially cautious about linking out, right?

And I get that because I must have been one of a thousand emails that day.

But I know some agencies said, there’s no point if we don’t get a link and went away.

I know me as an agency owner, we kept on going.

But like, you mentioned somewhere, right?

And I’m now wondering that that non-link but mentioned from 10 years ago is now is more

important than just trying to get a link.

And I’m now thinking that the agencies who rejected even going for that publication.

And now we’ve got a brand mentioned that’s years, years old, which again adds to the authority.

So it’s all about the long game, isn’t it?

Earned media is definitely way more valuable than pay to play.

So anything you can do to get that little bit of publicity is going to help, especially with the AIs ingesting all of

that information.

It’s all going to go into coloring and filling out the narrative and the information base that they have about your

brand, which, you know, unless you’re a really, really bad person, it’s still fair to say that there’s no bad publicity.

Yeah.

Unless you’re really right.

So what else has happened?

OpenAI has introduced deep research, haven’t they?

I feel like this month is the deep research month of AI.

It is.

Everyone’s doing it.

Yeah.

Everyone’s doing it.

Well, I’ve been playing around with it because I’m doing a research article for one of the journals.

So deep research is basically it’s not only is it going out and getting more information, more information from more

places and more citations for whatever it is that you asked about.

It’s providing the citations to you.

So it’s.

It’s more of an academic quality research paper.

It’s not just going to answer your question.

Like, how do you know, how do I how do I make hot dogs in the microwave?

Doesn’t need you don’t need footnotes for that.

Yeah.

If you need footnotes, though, this is probably what you’re going to want to do.

Let’s say you are a student and you’re writing a paper, obviously you would not cheat and you would not

plagiarize anything.

But if you need to do research, this will make your research go much faster.

This is this is akin to spending your entire weekend in the library, you know, pulling pulling research from all over

the place and then keeping track of it and building out your own footnotes.

This will do these things much faster and for you.

I haven’t encountered anything yet where it is grossly mistaken.

And if it is grossly mistaken, it’s because there was a misunderstanding in the prompt or the question.

Prompt being the question that I asked.

And that’s another pet peeve of mine.

I’ve been getting very tired of people saying, oh, I’m a prompt engineer.

I feel like that’s sort of an insult to real engineers because prompt engineering is really just understanding how to

articulate your question.

Exactly.

So you’re basically a question asker.

That’s it.

That’s it.

I mean, I can I’m very good at asking questions.

Whilst I know that you can make better prompts, that’s something you learn naturally over time.

Right.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

So that’s the deep research thing.

Part of the thing.

And I also think that there’s less hallucinations as well, because the more it’s thinking, the more it’s validating

what the answer may be.

Right.

Well, and if you ask better questions, if you ask detailed questions like you’re giving it.

I don’t know who’s bouncing the screen around.

It’s very confusing.

I give I ask questions and I give I give up a tomes worth of background information and try to explain the nuance of

the of the answer that I’m trying to get.

I don’t just say, you know, tell me how to bake brownies because it’s there.

There’s things that it needs to know in order to answer the question, provide the answer that I’m looking for.

So I always tell people the more information, the more data points you can put into your initial prompt or

question, the better the result is going to be.

And that’s that’s true for all of the AIs all the time.

The more you get it, the more you give it, the more it can get the more accurate the answer is it’s going to

give back to you.

Yeah.

Although here it’s like it’s you have to have a pro account, right?

It’s two hundred dollars a month.

So, yeah.

And I know that was there Chip mentioned Super Grok as well.

The he’s using or he’s using, which is much cheaper.

And it didn’t make it into the news, but it was really Grok three was released in the last week, which also.

I’ve been playing with Grok 3.

The big difference between Grok and like ChatGPT that I don’t particularly like, Grok’s

memory of your conversation resets every day.

Grok’s not going to take a long term view of conversations you’ve had in the past or things that you don’t like or

things that it knows that you work on.

It’s not tailoring that those things to whatever the question is that you’ve asked.

And I’ve also found that by default, it’s got to.

Did you watch Star Trek Next Generation?

Do you know who Data is?

I wasn’t a Trekker, but I’m knowledgeable enough to call that person a Trekker, not a Trekkie.

I knew that.

OK, that’s pretty good, actually.

So Data was the android, right?

And Data is known for being very emotionless.

Data had a brother who was older, actually built first, named Lore.

And Lore is obnoxious and he’s kind of a jerk.

And he had emotions.

And the whole reason Data doesn’t have emotions is because Lore was a jerk.

And they decided that the emotions were bad and it was better to have a Data than a Lore.

The thing I don’t like about Grok is that out of the box, it’s Lore.

It’s just, it’s got this, it’s obnoxious.

I don’t know what the problem with it is, but they have this tone of obnoxiousness that I don’t like.

So I’ve been using the deep research on Grok.

I haven’t found any problems with it in itself, but the tone.

I’m constantly telling him, like, can you moderate your tone?

I do not like this.

It sounds like you described Elon Musk.

At the beginning you said, well, there’s a conversation that resets itself every day.

And then I don’t like the tone that’s being brought out.

I mean, it’s clearly, it’s clearly a tool that’s been made for Elon and others get to benefit from it too.

Whereas the other one may be able to put out.

I do like feeling that I’m talking to myself and I’ve kind of trained my ChatGPT to be a me.

So maybe Grok was made to mirror Elon and that’s the, because that’s really kind of the tone I get from it.

But yeah, so.

If you need the deep research, the deep research is available at a not $200 a month option if you go with Grok.

And it still works.

But just be prepared for the conversation levels.

So let’s move on.

Tell me about the AI overviews with detailed comparison mode.

Because I haven’t seen this yet.

I haven’t seen it as well.

But obviously it’s being written about.

It was put on Search Engine Roundtable.

I’ll quickly shove it in the chat as I speak.

But of course, the day’s coming where they’re trying to put monetization into AI overviews.

We knew it was going to happen because that’s the only option for it to continue for the likes of Google at the

very least.

I would say for everyone watching and listening here would be make sure if you’re an e-commerce

retailer, store owner of any kind, to make sure you’ve got everything optimized.

Like you would with the traditional SEO practices, populate everything, ensure that those keywords, I’d say, words

that are describing the product or service that it is, very much descriptive in there.

So that it can be, again, pulled up into an AI overview.

But yeah, this is the direction that we’re going.

If you start looking for, I mean, I did it the other month.

I wasn’t trying to buy a car.

I knew I was renting a car.

And there were two that were very similar prices.

And I hadn’t been in either of them.

And I started asking questions such as which one’s better for me in terms of not fuel economy, but it’s my

wife and my kids.

So I need to think of luggage and space more.

And it was very honest.

But now I’m thinking if I start to think of me buying a new car, what is it going to start doing?

Then where is it going to get the information from?

And where is it going to get the products from for, say, accessories and things like that?

And that’s going to be interesting.

Upsell, cross-sell in AI overviews is going to be a huge thing, I think, in the next.

Maybe the latter half of the year as this gets pumped out a little bit more.

So get your merchant feeds very correct and optimized.

Make sure your product schema, which is in our WooCommerce and Shopify apps.

Get all of that set up and make sure it’s present in some form.

And you will start getting mentioned, hopefully, in some of these questions.

The more niche it is, the more of a chance you’ve got.

There you go.

All right.

Rolling on.

ChatGPT Search is more open.

So they’ve expanded it to more people.

More people can use it without having, like, a paid account.

Google’s expanded Gemini 2.0.

And then Microsoft Think Deeper, which is effectively kind of their deep research, is now in Copilot.

And Copilot is available.

Generally, if you’re paying for use of, like, the Office suite on your computer, you’ve got access to Copilot in a lot

of your Microsoft products.

So Gemini 2.0 has new options like Flash Pro and Flashlight.

And I have no idea what any of those things do because I haven’t really played with it.

I do tend to play with the OpenAI stuff a little bit more.

And I’ve been poking around a bit at the Microsoft because I’ve got access to it.

I didn’t find the responses any more thoughtful than some of the other responses that I’ve gotten out of Copilot.

But they’re okay.

I guess you really have to kick the tires yourself to decide how you feel about it.

And then ChatGPT is now a free service with no account requirement.

The difference is with the no account, I’m not going to remember anything about you.

I personally really like the fact that I can teach it things about me so that I don’t have to keep reteaching

it and retraining it every day.

So your mileage may vary.

Have you played with anything besides, like, do you even use ChatGPT?

I do use ChatGPT.

But I’m finding that – I can’t describe when it’s not accurate in my opinion.

But sometimes I ask it something that’s perfect for what I need at that time.

And sometimes I’m – I don’t know.

And then I actually go to Gemini as my choice number two.

And I ask the same questions and see what it brings out.

And I am finding that Gemini – and I can’t explain or verbalize what Gemini, in my opinion, is better at answering

than ChatGPT.

But there’s definitely a pattern starts to emerge.

I think – I don’t know what it is.

And I’m trying to remember what the searches are that I’m doing.

It’s nothing technical or, you know, SEO-y or engineering-y or anything.

It’s like normal, everyday searches, not even product-related.

Solve knowledge stuff.

And sometimes Gemini has a little bit more thought process involved.

I’m using the basic, free, not changing any options, not trying to do anything deep or not using reasoning

or anything like that.

But I found that there’s – this is maybe the year that people choose their go-to, I think.

This is the shopping year of – like we said, there’s loads out at the moment.

And then I think the dust will settle, and there’ll be clear leaders.

And there’ll be – depending on who you are, just like you’re a Mac person or a Windows person, right?

There’ll be the top three, and people will use it that way.

I’m really interested to see how this shakes out because it’s kind of a fun Wild West sort of time right now.

Yeah.

But I definitely have clear favorites.

All right.

You were telling me about this.

I haven’t been able to get this next thing to work.

So using Search Console and GA4 data for SEO.

I use GA4 all the time.

I use Search Console all the time.

It’s this Looker Studio thing that I haven’t quite gotten to work quite right.

So Looker Studio is just like visualizing any form of data beyond.

You know, it can be GA.

It can be Search Console.

It can be all other kinds of things.

And it just visualizes it.

Now, Google – I’ll put the link in here to where this goes and explains that you can use as an SEO, you know,

a mixture, a combination of both Search Console data and GA data and visualize things that you want to do.

So Looker Studio, they made – which is also a Google product, by the way.

They’ve created a template for people that you can use and you can connect your two properties.

And then it gives you more informed data from both sources by combining them and enriching them both.

So I like Looker Studio, but I’m not good at creating reports or templates.

I’m good at receiving them from other people and then reading them.

But I only had a few minutes on this one.

I couldn’t get everything.

I couldn’t get my Search Console property to connect at the time before here.

So we don’t have a nice, you know, screenshot of what it looked like for Yoast.

But feel free for people to go in there and make their own studio.

But you can browse and it does give some nice data on, here’s a keyword that got certain impressions.

This is the page they landed on and then the continuing journey of GA that tells you other things about it as well

and how may that may convert CTR increases and higher conversion rates and stuff.

But it’s free.

It takes two minutes to configure.

Well, not even that 30 seconds to configure.

So everyone check it out.

All right.

All right.

Another thing that came out of Google Search Central is options for reducing the Google crawl rate.

I think especially if you’ve got a bigger site, sometimes your server can start reacting very slowly and you look at

your logs and it’s because one of the search engines is just hammering your site.

You’re like, oh, my gosh, how do I have to?

How can I how can I stop this because my server is going to collapse?

So Google can adjust crawl rates, but sometimes spikes happen.

And when the spikes happen, it used to be that you would just say Google stopped crawling my site.

That’s fine unless you’re one of those sites that needs it to crawl on a regular basis for like news

and get new updates.

Google is saying is you can change the status codes on some of the pages of your site in order to temporarily

reduce the crawl.

But in a way that signals to Google that this is, in fact, temporary.

Everything’s coming back anytime now.

Please don’t take me out of your index forever.

So there’s information and I could go into it, but we’re short on time.

If you go to search Google Search Central, read this article, it will explain when it’s appropriate to use these

different status codes for temporary crawl reductions.

You can request a rate reduction if you need to through GSC, but it doesn’t take effect immediately.

It’s going to be faster to change these status codes if you need to achieve something quickly.

So that’s something if you’ve got problems with the load on your server from the search engines, which is a nice

problem to have, but not something that affects everyone.

So if you are affected, I think we dropped the links right there.

That’s how you do it.

Cool.

All right.

Tell me about the minority report.

Yeah.

So I call this minority report because the news item here is that Meta AI have taken some of their $60 billion

investment that they’re pumping into AI in general.

They got some people.

They put wires and stuff on them and started seeing if they could predict what someone’s thinking and

output it from those neural messages before they get a chance to actually say it or type it.

And they did it with 80% accuracy.

And the reason why I call it minority report, for anyone who’s not seen it, it’s an old film now.

I feel like it’s still new, but it’s probably a good 20 years old.

It’s with Tom Cruise and Colin Farrell.

The first Colin Farrell film I saw, by the way, I didn’t even know he was Irish.

He was that good at doing an American accent.

But anyway, that’s not the point.

The point is that the story is that they could foresee murders happening.

And Tom Cruise and Colin Farrell, I don’t know who the characters were, there was basically an investigation into a

murder that was going to happen.

Now, the closer it got to the actual event, it was as though it was unfocused view and you couldn’t see who it

was or where it was or what was happening.

And the closer it got, the better and more predictable it became to know what was going to happen.

And then they could hopefully stop the murder.

How do, why do I feel as though this is phase one into making that happen?

Because if they can do the short-term future, how long can they push beyond the boundary of what those

possibilities could be in the future and then come back to the present and then figure those things out?

I’m very interested to see what their end goal is with this.

But it’s crazy that they’re even looking at it right now already.

Answer the accuracy.

That’s crazy.

And I was watching on X over the weekend, Elon Musk had a thread where he was talking about that we’re on

the event horizon of the singularity, which was like, wow.

Singularity, by the way, in this context is artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence and then being able

to just, like, the flood of advancements and innovations are just going to be nonstop.

And everything’s going to speed up and human life will change forever and it will no longer be the same.

So, very exciting stuff.

Yeah.

Long times to live in.

All right.

So, this is from Kevin Indig’s growth memo.

He did a study.

He was looking at transactional AI traffic.

He looked at 7 million sessions.

He found that AI chatbot traffic has longer sessions and more page views than traffic that comes from Google.

And chatbots will send more homepage traffic than Google does.

And they keep the users engaged.

I’m not sure which person he’s talking about there.

The Copilot and Perplexity’s page views grew at a much faster rate than Google’s over the past month, basically,

that he was looking at this.

So, what I’m taking away from this is that while it’s harder to get into the citations, when you are cited, the quality

of the traffic that you’re getting referred to you from the AI-driven search is going to be better quality traffic than

that random traffic that you’re getting from regular Google.

So, I think this is another…

We’re not going to be able to avoid having AI-driven search because everything’s going that way.

But it’s interesting that the answers the AIs are giving users are kind of priming them to be more interested

and more curious.

So, that when they do click through, they’re spending more time on your site and they’re spending…

They’re just more engaged users in general.

They’re not accidentally coming to your site and then bouncing off when they realize this isn’t what we want.

They already know this is what they want when they make that click.

So, I think that’s valuable information.

You know you’ve got people who are more invested in your product or your brand once they hit your page.

So, you’re not trying so hard to sell them initially.

Now, we’re trying to win them over more, I guess.

There’s a difference there, but it might be slight.

But I think it’s an important difference.

You’re not quite so much shotgunning, you’re shotgun blasting your information all over the place.

You’re really now courting users that have already expressed a little bit of interest.

Yeah.

I realize because Florie has said, get your Q&A because it’s nearly there.

I realize, as usual, we get into the media stuff.

Yeah.

Well, probably, yeah.

But these ones aren’t as long, I’d say.

This is predictable.

Google market share slips.

AI referrals and regional searches engines rise.

But it’s important to note that whatever that rise is, isn’t even a drop in the ocean.

It’s like a sliver of a drop in the ocean for Google.

Whilst it would still, I think, cause people inside Google’s buildings to still have a bit of cause for concern

that their monopoly is no longer as much of a monopoly.

They’ve still got a lot of monopoly, right?

I mean, there’s no denying that.

But I mean, tables could turn this year.

I think this year and next year is the year that Google needs to prove that they’re worthy of that monopoly.

Otherwise, it’s going to go downhill quite fast.

Absolutely.

Perplexity has also introduced a deep research.

So everybody’s doing the deep research now.

But I don’t think everybody in our market especially requires the deep research.

It’s just useful to know that they are offering that.

Or if you’re planning on going back to school.

If you used to have problems with your papers, maybe you won’t this time around.

Good to know.

And then also in the news, just a few more things to blow through.

Google confirms alt text is not primarily an SEO decision.

I would file this under, yeah, I knew that.

Alt text is there to translate for non-cited readers.

What’s in your picture?

Can you use it for SEO?

Yes.

Is it primarily for accessibility?

Also, yes.

Google expands site reputation abuse enforcement to German sites.

All good things.

Let’s see.

GBP is…

Except if you’re a penalized site in Germany.

Oh, well.

Yes, there’s that.

You shouldn’t have been doing naughty things in the first place then.

No.

Google business pages, which is GBP, now offers chat via WhatsApp and SMS.

No offense, but I do not want people in my WhatsApp.

So I’m just not going to make that connection because I don’t want my phone blowing up.

And then if you’re getting traffic from AI-generated images, you might get hammered soon.

Maybe that’s a good thing because why are you getting traffic for AI-generated images?

Yeah.

There’s more.

This was only half the news.

There’s more on the next slide.

Yes.

I’ll go through these.

Absolutely.

OpenAI created a roadmap.

They’re going to be doing some stuff this year.

That’s all you need to know.

And just hold tight for when they make random product releases.

He did that on X.

The next one, Google updates product markups to support member pricing and sales.

At the moment, I don’t think it’s something we’re looking into as a priority in Yoast’s

offering, but it’s definitely schema you can use.

In the meantime, if you want to, you can use a schema API on WordPress’s solutions as well.

We did include Musk announcing Grok 3, but it’s just also in the news.

But if you’re a fan of X and you’re a fan of Grok, then do use it.

I know that he said it’s a standalone app that’s available everywhere, but I can’t get it in the UK.

And lastly, Google local update drops organic listing when the local listing is present,

which I think is quite interesting.

So if you’re a local person and you’ve got like, I don’t know, a pizza place and you search for pizza

near me and you had an organic ranking, that’s no longer going to be there.

So not in every single case and don’t take my word from it.

It might actually change again in a month’s time and we’ll tell you something else next month.

But right now, if you are in the local listings, it removes you from the organic,

which I think is actually useful, but also not useful at the same time,

because you weren’t that place to be in organic.

But let’s see how that actually works or doesn’t work in the next month.

All right.

So real quick WordPress news.

The roadmap to WordPress 6.8 has been released.

They’re going to be adding zoom out editing, performance boosts, accessibility API updates,

and a new write and design mode to enhance the user experience.

If you’re interested in that, you can definitely go to WordPress and read about it,

but we’ve got to get to the Q&A.

Real quick, Yoast news.

We’ve got two new AI optimized assessments, sentence length and paragraph length.

Yoast SEO for Shopify has a redesigned Webmaster Tools verification page.

And Yoast SEO for Shopify also has some enhancements to the bulk import and export functionality.

If you’ve got a Shopify site, make sure that you update your product and check out all those new features

that we’ve released.

Upcoming events and appearances.

I will let you read these for yourself.

Because you can read it.

If you’re at any of these events, please come by and say hi.

We’d love to talk to you guys.

And the next SEO update by Yoast is going to be on March 25th, which is, again, going back to Tuesday.

Starts at 4 p.m. Central European time, 11 a.m. Eastern time in the U.S., which…

Okay, that…

Sorry, I’m in Central time, so that’s not my time zone.

This all looks correct.

And finally, we are celebrating our 15th anniversary.

So please, if you have not updated or if you have not upgraded to premium and you would like to do so,

or if you would like to get on Yoast Shopify, you can get a 15% discount by using seoupdate2402

or scanning that QR code and you will get a 15% discount to celebrate our 15th anniversary.

All right, now we’re at Q&A.

I know that that’s…

Yay!

There are so many questions and there’s so little time left.

But, well, I hope this was a very, very nice update for most people.

If I’m looking at the questions, I think it was.

Lots of activity in the chat as well.

So let’s get started with these.

So first one, lots of upvotes from Mary.

She says, we’re a non-profit, just trying to get eyeballs on the info we’re putting out there.

What do you recommend for us?

I actually have a lot of experience with not-for-profits.

I wish I could talk to you.

It depends on if you’re local or national or global.

If you’re local, you’re in a great position.

And what you need to do is you need to send out press releases to your local newspaper, to your local outlets,

and announce things.

So don’t just put up a blog post about it.

You want to make an announcement in a press style.

So you’re writing a news article, basically, giving it to the newspaper and letting them put their byline

on it and publish it.

But those types of citations are going to help you become an entity.

When you’re an entity and people ask questions about your area of expertise, you will then get recommended

in the AI overviews.

But that is going to be the quickest way for you to get eyeballs and traffic into your website.

Put up QR codes on your ads as they go out if you do any advertisements.

That way, people can go to your website.

But definitely do the PR outreach and get the citations and get the links back into your site.

And that’s what I would recommend.

Thank you, Carolyn.

I see that a lot of people also responded that they’re in a similar situation.

So I hope this answer was helpful for all of them.

The next question is from Andreas.

And he says, making my website score 100 in every core web vitals category on PageSpeed Insights,

will that achieve anything?

Is it worth the effort?

I’d say no.

Pick your battles.

Pick the ones that are actually…

Is there a reason why you need to spend four hours to change this bit of CSS from here to here?

Because it might get you up 0.1 of the score.

The answer is no.

However, do look at what it’s saying.

Because there might be something…

There might be two things that are bringing something down 7 points or percent, however you want to put it.

There might be one big image that you’ve just got there that someone uploaded that you didn’t know about

that happens to be 700 KB.

And it’s just bringing everything else down.

Of course, replace that.

And it’ll go up.

But if you’re there going, I’m on 97 and I can’t sleep until I get to 100, my advice is to get more sleep.

Don’t worry about it.

I found that for Web Vitals especially, you have to look at who you’re competing against.

Because this isn’t necessarily you have to have the highest score of the class.

This is you have to be faster than the next slowest guy, than the next slowest antelope, I think is the phrase

that we tend to use.

Which means the slowest guy is going to get eaten by the lion.

And if you’re just faster than him, you’re fine.

So I don’t think you need to be perfect.

You’re not going to get an extra bozo button for being perfect.

You’re going to get rewarded for being good.

Just be good enough.

Don’t let the enemy of done.

All right.

Thank you.

The next one is about AI overview.

So Callum asks, with AI overviews in Google becoming more prevalent, have you seen this effect click through

or SEO be affected?

And can we find more data on the effect of AI overviews, which that could have for our websites and SEO?

You’re asking the wrong question.

It’s not affecting SEO.

It’s affecting your organic traffic.

And there’s a difference.

Your SEO is optimizing your website so that the AI chatbots and the search engines can crawl you, which is

going to benefit your visibility.

Are AI overviews and things like that taking away organic clicks?

Yeah.

But that just means that you have to look at what you’re doing with the clicks you are getting.

And if you need to be cited more so that you’re more visible, so that people are aware of you

and then coming to your site,

the SEO is going to need to focus on making sure that you’re being cited as a reference rather than just

ranking high and hoping to get those clicks.

I know that that might be a subtle difference, but it is an important perspective change from the way you

originally asked the question.

Yeah.

And there’s a bit more information just to add to this that’s SEER Interactive.

I think that’s Will, isn’t it?

Will Reynolds.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think it was him who authored this and how AI overviews are impacting CTR.

And there’s some takeaways there for you as well.

Okay.

Thank you.

So I do want to skip to this question since we’re also offering our discount, of course.

So what does Yoast offer to help create content that can be picked up by AI overviews?

And since we’re on the topic of AI overviews, I thought this was a nice one.

And what’s the difference between what Yoast gives us now to what a tool like SurferSEO offers?

I don’t know that they’re offering anything that’s going to help any differently than ours will.

Because getting picked up by the AI overviews requires having unique content that’s adding value

to the overall conversation.

And it requires being a recognized entity that’s an expert in the field.

So those are things that you don’t necessarily need a tool to do.

I mean, Alex, do you have any other?

My memory of Surfer also, because I’ve not used it properly for quite some time, is it actually helps

produce all the content.

And it has that magic button of click to generate and here’s 750 words.

Whilst I’ve heard that it’s good on what it does produce, it’s still not something that I would tell someone to copy

and paste and don’t look at it.

Yoast SEO doesn’t do that.

And we’ve always said we don’t really want to do that, at least for now, until the machines are better than us.

But I’m not seeing that day coming anytime soon.

But yes, I would say if you are going to use Surfer, do it cautiously.

And make sure you’ve got, again, you’re the last decision maker.

And there’s human intervention and editorial going through with anything.

And just don’t do something super on scale either, I’d say.

If you’re using machines to write all your content, you’re not really adding anything to, you’re not adding

anything new because the machines are only repeating things that they’ve heard other people say.

They’re not necessarily innovating.

And that’s what the AIs are looking for.

They’re looking for innovation and they’re looking for unique.

And you’re not going to get that if you’re letting the machine write it for you.

Similarly, if you’re using a content mill before, no one would ever say, oh, yeah, that content mill traffic,

that’s good stuff.

People are going to cite that all day long.

No, they’re not.

They’re just not.

Yeah.

You still need to add something to the web.

Oh, I see we’re already over time.

So I’m guessing this is the end.

So I want to thank everyone for asking your questions, for being active in the chat.

A huge thanks to you, Alex and Carolyn, for again presenting this full hour, giving us a lot of information.

And let’s make sure that next time we have a little more time for Q&A.

Thank you, everyone.

Hello everyone, welcome to the first edition of the Yoast SEO update for 2025.

I hope that everyone can hear us.

We are very happy to welcome you.

And we’re broadcasting from the Yoast headquarters in the Netherlands.

I’m seeing in the chat that most of us can hear us.

That’s great.

My name is Marina.

I’m a researcher and developer here at Yoast.

And I’m very happy to be your host today.

Now, as you know, every update we go through the highlights in the SEO world for the last month.

But this update, we have also prepared something extra special.

Our experts, Alex and Carolyn will share with us their SEO predictions for 2025.

They’re going to tell us what it is that we don’t actually have to worry about, what it is that we really should pay attention to, and generally how to navigate these choppy waters nowadays where every day seems to bring new developments.

Now, a few quick notes for the newcomers.

The webinar is recorded, so you will be able to replay it later.

We will send you a link to the recording along with a script if you prefer to read it, plus all the resources and articles mentioned today.

Now, all that’s left for me to do is to introduce our experts.

Standing on the one side of the ring is Carolyn Shelby, Alex Moss, who has a vast experience in technical, especially structural SEO and all facets of digital marketing.

I’m leaving you in their good hands.

Enjoy.

And I’ll see you again for Q&A.

Thanks for having us.

And welcome.

First edition of the SEO update for 2025.

I know.

How are you feeling?

Excited.

I mean, ready to rock and roll.

Let’s see.

How do I?

There we go.

Let’s make this.

I’m being techie here.

You are.

I’ve moved us to the side.

Here we go.

You don’t want to see us.

You want to see what the hour’s up to.

That’s right.

All right.

So now that we’re ready to go, just wanted to remind everybody, because I know we get a lot of questions.

There is a recording.

You will get a copy of it afterwards.

So please don’t worry about that.

Today, we’re going to discuss the 2025 predictions.

We’re going to go over our SEO and AI news, which we always do.

A little bit of Yoast news.

And then hopefully, we’ll have extra time for Q&A today, because it feels like we might be able to make some good time.

We’ll have to see how that goes.

Again, if you have questions, check the right side of your screen.

There’s a tab for questions.

Ask your questions in there so they get recorded.

That way, we’ll know at the end who’s got questions, how many other people want to hear answers to those.

Helps us keep track of everything.

If you ask in the regular chat, high probability we won’t see the question.

So if you have a good question, put it in that tab, that will make everything better.

All right.

For more on today’s topics, or just to see what you might have missed in case you’re taking notes or something, you can go to yoa.st, which is basically yoast.com, update-jan-2025.

So that is that.

How to start with the SEO biweekly webinar.

The next one is February 11th, which feels like more than two weeks away, but I don’t think it is.

It’s at 9:00 PM European time, 3:00 PM New York time.

So plan accordingly.

This is a great place to go if you’re literally just starting from the ground floor and you need to get up to speed with the basics of SEO. perfect podcast for you to listen to.

So we hope you join.

All right, Alex, are you ready?

I am ready.

Let’s try and see what’s going to happen this year.

All right.

Alex and Carolyn’s predictions for 2025.

Here we go.

Yeah.

We decided to put them all in one slide at least for you.

So we thought we’d give you all of them at once and it might spur some questions in the Q and A as well for the end on if you have further questions on what we’re about to discuss.

But what’s about the first one, Carolyn?

Well, I was going to say brand building and reviews will be even more important for SEO.

Now, I did want to note that we didn’t list these in order of importance.

They are actually listed in order of how wide sentences.

So it doesn’t write over the tops of our heads.

So brand building though, brand building and brand building to me feels like old school marketing.

So it’s almost like what’s old is new again.

And that happens.

It happens in fashion.

It happens in a lot of aspects of life, but building that brand traffic, building that brand recognition is, it’s going to be very vital in helping, helping the AIs associate the value of the information that you’re providing with the entity that is your brand, help establishing your brand as an entity.

All of this is going to be playing into how search is evolving.

So it’s not going to be, it’s not going to be good enough to focus on non-brand keyword phrases because ranking for those non-branded keyword phrases is going to be difficult if you are not an established brand, hence the need for the brand building.

So it’s, it all ties together.

It’s not as cut and dry as it used to be.

The reviews though, you know, why don’t you, why don’t you share with the reviews because you’re a little bit more embedded in that.

Yeah.

Well reviews.

I mean, I’ve just shoved in the chat, I think it’s two years old nearly now, a blog post by Google talking about perspectives.

And I believe that was the beginning of them implying that maybe Reddit was going to come into the SERPs, but it also really emphasized how important third-party opinion is of someone’s brand.

Like, what do I feel about brand X, Y, and Z?

That, from another user’s perspective is actually respected more than what the brand thinks of themselves.

So whilst you do do the brand building that Carolyn just mentioned, that’s, that is kind of one part of the piece.

And the other piece is getting reviews out there.

And that doesn’t mean give me a one out of five star rating.

It actually means write something about it, which will gain context as to what you’re like as a product or service and as a brand.

That in turn is going to get interpreted by search engines and can I just call them AI search platforms at the moment?

Just call, let’s call them that for the, I keep saying LLMs, but I know it’s wider than search platforms.

Just don’t call it a GEO because I don’t know why, but I can’t get behind that acronym.

It’s not happening.

That to me is location, right?

It always will be.

Yeah, it’s location or it’s a car that they made like in the eighties.

It’s just, you know.

Exactly.

But yeah, this is going to be, I think this year, they’re going to really hit hard.

I know over 2024, they’ve been doing a bit of policing over, um, GM, GBP, um, and Google business profiles, by the way, that’s what that means.

Um, so anything local based and anything product based, those reviews are going to become really, really, really more important than they were the last few years as it collects perspectives from as many sources as possible.

Yep.

Um, where are we at now?

Oh, AI search figuring out how to monetize the, the SERPs.

I think if, or did I skip one?

You did.

AI powered search and personalized results.

Now I’ve kind of experienced this, but so I asked ChatGPT to tell me everything it knows about me.

Right.

And I was very interested because it started telling me things that I had definitely not put in the public sphere.

I was like, how did you know this?

Now what it did was I asked how it knew, and it told me that it actually went off my previous discussions with ChatGPT in my account.

So it was just taking the history of my, but I found it very interesting.

It was using that and then telling me what it knew based on what I was telling it about me in a more private settings.

That’s nice.

But I still, again, had to say, no, no, no, forget that.

I’m talking publicly available information.

And then it was kind of generic.

And then I realized that you had to really knuckle down.

Like, what do you know about me between 1996 and 2000?

And the answer is nothing.

But it was interesting that it does understand who you are based on the conversations you have.

I think it’s still relevant for the things that it knows about you in the private settings, because you do a lot of searches within those private settings.

And it’s going to tailor the results that it gives to you based on things that it knows you like and don’t like for particular angles or facets of that information that it knows that you’re interested in.

So like, at one point in time, I asked it to do a search and something related to SEO.

And it had given me really basic SEO information and recommended that I that I that I include that in whatever it was I was doing.

And I said, which do not cite the deep magic to me for there.

I was there when it was written.

And it said, okay, noted.

And it never brought up basic SEO to me again, because I told that I wasn’t interested in hearing it.

I there’s been other people where it’s it’s suggested experts that that I might I might like.

I’m like, No, I hate that person.

That person’s awful.

I’ll never mention that person again.

It was okay.

And then it just it just stopped.

So even in even in private settings.

So you know, I think it’s going to reduce, some of these new personalized filters, which I think is relevant to know because it’s reducing.

I think it’s going to reduce lightly, at least slightly for now, the reliability of traffic estimates.

So we’re not really going to be able to say, we know that there’s this many searches per month for this particular phrase, and that’s going to result in X amount of traffic, because that X amount of traffic is going to be reduced and divided based on all of these bazillion variables and personal preferences that we just you can’t account for those.

So I think that’s, I think it’s going to be interesting.

It’s going to get really, really personalized and really granular.

Oh, yeah.

And that, I guess, brings us on to the next one is my prediction is, and I don’t want it to happen, right?

But these platforms are going to be on a mission this year to make sure that they have some monetization.

They need some return back from all of these things.

And I’m surprised that Google haven’t sorted out ads in a way that they want to yet.

But the fact that they haven’t means that they’re working really hard in my belief to try and suss out a way to do that.

By doing that, I think there’ll be more injection of products.

And because at the moment, I think they’re really good at making solved knowledge, informational based intent content, that kind of thing.

But when it comes to making decisions, it’s going to be hard because of course, we know in the past perplexity, I’ve been putting affiliate links into some products and ignoring others.

But I think that’s gone away.

But I think this will be a more objective point of view where it might be that in the next six months, merchant central crop up is a really important thing, even more important than it is already, to then tie into other areas of Google.

And I believe that OpenAI or Bing will work together to make sure that their shopping feeds somehow tie into the answer engine of these platforms.

I think they’re going to have to figure out a way to monetize their service because, and I know we’ve got an article about it later, with DeepSeek coming out.

And the big disrupting factor with DeepSeek is that they are, they’ve developed what is being purported to be better than what OpenAI and Perplexity and Google have done on a tenth of the budget, one one hundredth of the budget, and in a shorter amount of time, which would spell, and I’m not saying this well, it’s a speculation.

It could mean that the venture capital and the investment in these American companies that say, oh, it’s going to take trillions of dollars to build this stuff.

That investment could start drying up.

If the investment starts drying up, they’re going to be, there’s going to be a lot of pressure on them to start turning profits and making money so that they can continue to support their infrastructure.

So, yeah, they’re, we’ve reached a point in time in their life cycle that they’re going to have to start making money.

They keep riding on all of this investment.

So, I agree with you on that.

Let’s talk about EEAT because it is definitely becoming more crucial.

I used to kind of be like, eh, EEAT, whatever, that’s not a thing.

But with the AI intelligence, I know that’s redundant, with the, with the, the new intelligence and the new decision making that goes into returning these results where the computer is, is basically evaluating how, how reliable a source is and if a source is trustworthy enough.

You have to work on your EEAT to make sure that when they’re picking sources to present to the users, that your site is one of the trustworthy sources.

Gone are the days where you can, you know, sit in your mom’s basement and just churn out content for the sake of churning out content and be relatively anonymous.

I don’t know.

It was a site called all about dogs.

It must know everything about dogs.

Now, people want to go to PetMD.

They want to go to a veterinary’s website.

They want something trustworthy.

They just don’t want some site that claims that it knows everything about dogs.

So, I, I think we really need to start paying more attention to, to that or at least get, get a lot more serious about your efforts to improve that.

Yeah.

And it is weird because I know some SEOs say EEAT isn’t a ranking factor or a signal.

So, what’s the point in working on it?

And my answer is twofold.

Why wouldn’t you?

I think it’s kind of a risk to omit EEAT from work, regardless of rank of ranking signals or factors.

And why wouldn’t you want to increase the authority of the people that represent your brand or the brand itself?

That to me, just, just to do SEO elsewhere, that to me is ordering on greater black hat by ignoring things that are there.

And I also think that is going to become important, even more important because Google, as we both know very well, they don’t just do things for no reason.

And, and you did say in a, in a, in a previous update, something about how you did it about secret sauce.

Like everyone knows kind of like what Big Mac sauce is, but no one knows the exact proportions of what is entailed and it might contain onions.

It may not contain onions.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t in the list for that reason.

They may decide in 20 years to add onions to that.

And that may change a bit of this sauce.

And that, I guess like here EEAT is the onion, right?

They may just decide under the platforms to bring that in as actual something to consider.

Well, or, or it’s, or it’s onion powder that’s in the sauce actually, but onions go into making the onion powder.

So you can say there’s no onions in it, but there is onion powder, which means you still need to work on the onions because the onions make the onion powder, which then goes into the secret sauce.

You know what I mean?

Basically there’s no peanuts in this product, but it may have been made in a building that had a peanut on the other side.

And therefore you have to tell them that there may be something for people with allergies.

That’s actually the opposite of what I said, but, but still kind of directionally in the right, in the right, in the right, the right way.

So moving on, Core Web Vitals.

If your site is not crawlable, if your site does not perform as well as another site with equal expertise and trustworthiness, then you will not get selected.

This is really a race to be the best and the best will get cited as a source and then have visibility in, in these engines.

I mean, it’s, we’re not going to get to a point where we don’t have to do that anymore.

I think it’s, is the crux of that.

Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

And that goes to schema really, which I would say is part of, well, I wouldn’t say it’s a performance enhancer, but it’s definitely a data enhancer.

Well, that is getting to the point where it, we may not have to do that anymore because the AIs are so good at extracting content, but where Schema right now is valuable.

If you can take data that might be kind of buried down in your page and not easy for the crawlers to extract and shove that into the head of the document with JSON-LD and that gets sent over in the initial request.

So that that’s data that’s going to be very easily adjustable by the crawlers and the engines.

And it, it just ensures that the important bits on your page are absolutely seen and absolutely seen right away.

But I think the, I think the value of all of the Schema that we have available to us is going to start having diminishing returns over the course of this year and going forward.

Yeah.

I would still think in the, I don’t know me, I cannot disagree with it, but I would still think that it’s still a big reliance.

And I don’t know, I keep, we keep going back to food.

I know, I know Taco and Lawrence are doing loads of food.

I’m really hungry.

I know I’m hungry now, but it is like, if you’re going to spoon feed someone, I guess at some point, yeah, they will be able to have soup with a fork.

But right now it’s a bit of a hassle.

Give, still give them that spoon, right?

It’s still easier to digest that information if you provide it in a nice way.

Whereas if you were to just not have any structured data, I believe it would maybe get more annoyed at trying to interpret every little thing without it being spoon fed.

Well, and to use the spoon analogy, if you had to choose between eating soup with a spoon and eating soup with a fork, what would you choose?

You’d obviously choose the spoon.

So it just helps you, it helps you be the spoon rather than forcing, forcing the search engines to use a fork to get your, to get your content.

Yes.

Yeah.

And Rebecca Campany, if that’s how you pronounce your last name, you do have a very valid point.

Schema does go beyond SEO.

Obviously we can only talk a certain amount because we’re doing an SEO update, right?

So whilst it may not be as crucial in this area, yes, it is crucial for things like, like feeds and data input and into interpreters.

It’s, it’s, it’s still vastly important.

It will be for some time.

Well, I wrote that article in search engine, search engine land in December, mid, mid to end December about which bits of Schema are still very important and which bits you can probably skip.

I think we have a slide about that, but I don’t recall.

If you’re curious, though, Search Engine Land, December, look for my name.

I have an article in there about that topic.

So the next thing, zero click searches.

I think that’s pretty obvious that that’s what can you say about that?

It’s gonna, yeah.

I mean, for informational based searches.

Yeah.

These platforms are going to steal your visits, right?

But then I would then say, well, if you know, that’s going to happen and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Then perhaps think about what your, what the intent of that content is for the user and for you and what you want them to do from it.

Is there an action?

Unique value proposition.

What is your unique value proposition?

What is your value add?

What are you providing that’s different and unique and useful to answer people’s questions?

You can’t just put out content and put out content.

It has to be unique and it has to be useful to somebody.

For some reason.

Yeah.

I mean, and if it is a real threat that zero clicks are taking away visits, you may need to now this year, because these shifts are happening is reevaluate is, is it is the only metric you want those visits and those clicks from a SERP?

Is it actually valuable?

Is it going to get you to the next step?

Do you, what’s the conversion from that?

What do you want them to do?

Once you think about that, then it may redefine the way in which you produce your content and may dictate on how you update that content to make it still helpful for zero clickers out there.

Should we do food analogy, the drive-through folk, you know, and get it right in their lap in the car, then, you know, finding out more and going inside the restaurant to find out what the menu is.

Yeah.

So, do you want to cover the local SEO?

I don’t do a lot of local, but I do know that I have seen a lot more of the augmented reality, which is what AR is, floating around where, especially with like the the metaglasses.

I’ve heard those are going to start doing like AR overlays in your vision.

Right now, it’s mostly audio and it can do camera stuff, but it doesn’t have like a heads-up display.

And I’ve heard that the next generation of those metaglasses is going to actually have heads-up display, which means there’s going to be there’s going to be an AR integration.

And you’re going to want to make sure that, especially for your local business, if somebody walks past and sees your sign, that that sign is somehow tied to your local business listing.

And there’s going to be that connection there so that you are, it’s returning data for that, that user, the guy who’s walking around with the heads-up display.

Yeah, which does make local SEO really important because the coordinates and locations are going to be even more important.

And I know, I don’t know, I’ve been in, I was in the NFT and Web3 World where I know that they were doing AR and MR, which is mixed reality, in headsets to really try and get incentive of membership and community.

Like you can get 20% off if you go in the store and you were able to like scan something on the wall that you can only see with your phone and certain apps.

And whilst that’s a bit, further down the line and not really an SEO organic thing from a local point of view, it’s something that once wearables are becoming increasingly usable in the mass market.

So we were ahead of the time with Google Glass, I won’t say ahead of the time, I mean, they were a bit too early.

Now it is becoming a place where the technology is catching up to what wearables can really do and actually be useful to the non-technical person.

But as well as that, if you go back to ChatGPT, now there are local based answers that you get, like what’s a hairdresser near me, for example, or a salon, sorry, in America.

And it will literally embed a map and it will show you plot points.

And whilst it’s not, in my opinion, as good as the traditional SERPs and local searches, it’s clear that it’s done a lot in such a short space of time, which brings us to the 2025 as a year, this time next year, local will be very important in all of these searches.

I mean, there’s more, right?

There’s more, but we could go on for another hour.

Yeah, I mean, I thought we’d try to cover the highlights.

I think it’ll be interesting to come back and revisit this next year, because I know when I was revisiting my predictions from last year, I feel like directionally I was right, but I honestly didn’t think, I didn’t see, I didn’t see the level and ferocity of the advancements coming the way they did.

Like, it just, it got, it went a lot further, a lot faster than I thought it was going to be.

So, meet you back here next year.

Let’s move on to the news that we can get rolling through that and then have plenty of time for Q&A.

So, here we go.

This one’s, I would file this one under “duh”.

Google’s disavowing toxic links is a billable waste of time, says John Mueller.

It’s kind of been like that for a while and there are agencies that will bill you for that time to do the disavowing.

And there are people that do disavowing wrong in that they’ll disavow just everything or they’ll disavow entire domains or their own domain.

I’ve seen people do that too.

If you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re not actively under a penalty, I absolutely would not touch this with a 10-foot goal.

No, I don’t think I’ve been anywhere near the disavow link in about two and a half, three years.

And that was only because I went to check that it was even still at the same URL.

But it’s also funny that people who tout disavowing links, I would then say are probably the same agencies that create the links that you would need to disavow in the first place.

So, ask them instead of the disavow how they can control the removal first and then you’ll find that they’re also good at doing that.

Interesting.

Do they call that a self-licking ice cream cone?

Something like that.

Yeah.

So, tell me about this.

Consumers now consider ChatGPT a Google alternative?

I mean, I know I do, but I’m glad I do.

I do.

And I think that, I don’t know, I mean, I talk to a lot of friends and family and stuff that are away from the SEO world or even the technical world.

And if I know that someone who calls me because they’ve got a problem with their printer is talking about ChatGPT, then that’s a problem for Google.

Like, the norm is, right?

If they’re starting to install the app and understand what it is and starting to do their searches on there, then that’s happening.

I also think it’s a problem if someone like me is starting to turn away from the traditional search, which is what we’ve been so used to in our jobs for a generation.

Now I’m using it for informational-based searches.

Like we were saying before with the products, they haven’t got it sorted out.

So I know what search intent is now for which platform.

And that’s what this year’s prediction’s about.

That’s going to get even murkier and will actually make this story even more valid.

And yeah, Google’s got a lot of work to it.

I’m not not envious of the people in DeepMind right now.

You know, I feel like they’ve become a bit spoiled, I think, with the, you know, enjoying their 90 plus percent market share domination.

They’ve certainly got, there’s room for them to lose and still be dominant.

I don’t think they’re going anywhere soon.

But I am, I do find myself preferring the ChatGPT search experience and I get more out of it.

You know, I don’t have to dig as hard or as long to find the information that I’m looking for.

And that’s valuable to me.

It’s really, it’s increased my productivity a bunch.

And I don’t think I would want to go back.

It’s one of those things.

It’s like heated seats in your car.

One day you’re just sitting there and you’re like, how did I live before this?

Like, how did you live in the UK?

I live that every day.

You know, I don’t actually turn it off.

You know, I mean, I think just Canadians in here will go, what are you talking about?

Why do you think you’re cold?

No, I do think I’m cold.

I think I’m colder than you half the time.

So we’ll save that argument for a different day.

All right.

Also in December, quality, faceted navigation.

I’m surprised that this is still a kind of an issue.

But it was written about on Google Search Central.

So Google thinks that people are still having problems with faceted navigation.

Faceted navigation is where you’ve got those mega menus where you can sort things by like the same t-shirt.

You’ll have the same t-shirt available in red, blue, and yellow.

And you’ll also have it available in four different sizes.

And if each one of those variations produces its own URL, that’s going to create a ton of weird, thin content that is going to be difficult for Google to consolidate and help users navigate.

So they’ve provided some guidance on how to use your canonical properly, when to use nofollow and when not to use nofollow, when to use that in conjunction with a canonical that doesn’t point at itself.

It’s nuanced guidance.

So I would recommend if you have questions about faceted navigation, do go to the Google Search Central blog and read that article.

Yeah.

And of course, Yoast products do do that already.

It does add the nofollow canonical.

It also does rel previous and next pagination as well.

Any signals you can send to help Google sort through that, I think is something you should look into.

You want to tell me about the core update?

I’m not sure there’s much to tell on it that it happened.

To be honest, I mean, this was a core update.

So you don’t call them HCU.

They’re all as one now.

And we’re just telling you it happened.

And if you found that there was a big drop off or change of some kind, because you could have had an uptick as well, of course, by maybe thinking if you did get an uptick, that may not be you having a positive, it might be a competitor getting a negative and you reaping the rewards.

But if you found that between the 12th and 18th of December, there was drop off and you haven’t come back since from where you were, other than seasonality, then maybe investigate it and see if there’s a correlation with the algorithm update, because then most likely was the core update.

Then that leads us to a week later, where the spam update started on the 19th of December and then completed on Boxing Day.

I don’t know what people were doing on Christmas Day, if they were testing or what and why it happened on Boxing Day, but whatever.

Releases should never happen on holidays.

I think it’s horrible and cruel to do that to people, because nothing is worse than finishing up your family dinner, having your phone start blowing up because something’s changed or crashed.

It kind of ruins the holiday.

So thanks, Google.

It does.

It does.

And I feel like Google do do that often.

They do a mid-December update quite a lot, but I guess it’s a game of chess, right?

With SEOs.

With some SEOs.

Possibly.

I mean, I have comments, but I will keep those to myself.

Next slide.

Next slide.

Maybe not.

Reddit went through, had like a dip, like a pretty precipitous drop off at the second week of January, I’d say.

So, well, end of the first week, January 7th.

There were charts on Semrush, charts on Sistrix.

Glenn Gabe reported on X that he was seeing drops across several tools, all for Reddit, indicating that they were branded queries.

He’s saying it could be a relevancy adjustment.

Could have been a lot of things, but that seems as plausible as anything else.

But then…

What then?

Was it 20 days later?

I mean, I would say it’s about two weeks based on the Sistrix graph here, but what happens with Reddit generally if there’s a dip?

It’s usually followed quite quickly after it’s, you know, it just comes back and then ends up going up even more.

So this graph’s from today.

So in a week’s time, that may be higher.

Maybe we’ll update it next month and see what the real change is.

Yeah, and it’s not quite up to the peak, the prior peak, but it’s right up here.

So, I mean, I feel like this was maybe a glitch and not anything worth panicking about.

It would be nice to think that maybe the reliance on Reddit wasn’t, you know, was slowing down a little.

But somebody asked if Reddit was still going to be so heavily focused on by Google.

All I want to say about that is, because my son was asking me, and I don’t remember why we were having this conversation, but I thought it was really in-depth and interesting conversation for a kid to ask.

So, Google invested a lot of money into Reddit.

If it’s an experiment for Google to use this information, they don’t want the information to become useless by going out of their way to not feature it.

So they’re going to promote it, and they’re going to make sure that it stays relevant so that the data they’re collecting stays valid and their investment remains good, if that makes sense.

We did some similar tests, like at some of the large corporate news jobs that I’ve had that involve large ears, where they were testing an AI-generated particular section of news, and the test failed because the editorial department wouldn’t allow that news to ever touch the homepage.

It was never allowed to appear in the recommended reading in the side rails, and it was not allowed to appear in the new site map.

So whether or not that content had any possibility of ranking for anything was mixed before it had the chance to start the test.

So what I’m saying is, there’s no point in investing the money to run tests or to try anything new if you’re going to shoot yourself in the foot and render that investment null.

That’s my complicated mind to talk about that.

Interesting.

Interesting.

Now I understand why my son just looked confused and walked away.

Cool.

So good.

Cool.

What else has happened?

We’ve still got a bit to go.

Google’s market share dropped below 90% for the first time in 10 years.

Well, nine and a bit years.

Probably related to what we said before about ChatGPT becoming a search engine of choice for normal people.

Yeah.

Well, it doesn’t…

Their market share is so huge.

And the quantity of queries that occur every day is mind-bogglingly vast.

That every percentage drop they experience is huge growth for these other companies that are picking up that drop.

So it doesn’t look like it’s hurting Google, but it’s…

And it made an entirely possible they don’t even feel this.

But these other companies that are picking up what Google’s losing, this is massive for the development of these other smaller search engines.

So I’m…

Personally, I kind of like to see this.

I feel like it’s a…

We’re not to the point where the playing field’s being evened, but we’re giving these other guys a chance to compete and to try.

And I like to see that.

Yeah.

A bit of healthy competition.

Absolutely.

Capitalism.

Yay.

We’re talking about competition and dominance.

The CMA, who is a part of the UK…

This is in the UK.

So on the gov.uk website, which I will put into the chat here, is basically an investigation that’s going to happen this year about dominance in the industry in the UK.

It’s kind of coming…

Not off the back of, but it’s related to the European version of the same thing that…

What is it called?

The Digital…

Something Act?

Digital…

DMA?

No.

Oh, the DCMA.

The Digital Copyright Millennium Act.

Something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Something like that.

And this is now going into the UK where it’s talking about why is there so much dominance?

And this might be one of those political games that is being played to eventually split out different companies, which has already been kind of a rumor.

But every country or continent or country or country that starts doing this will mean that there’s more and more leverage for it to actually happen.

So we’ve got to wait until October.

So maybe in October’s SEO update we’ll know a little bit more.

The Department of Justice in the U.S. has ordered as part of the Google Monopoly case that Alphabet be broken up into component pieces and specifically Chrome kind of be split off from everything else.

And it’s interesting that other countries are kind of following people.

I’m wondering if they think that if they all make the same demand and enforce it in all these different jurisdictions, if it is more likely to work.

Since Google is global.

And just saying in this one little spot you can’t be Google might not do anything.

They might be okay.

Maybe we just won’t work here anymore.

Very interesting.

Google inks deal with Associated Press to bring more real-time info to Gemini.

This was probably going to have to happen because they were scraping the news sites for data anyway.

And the newspapers all get their headlines from the AP.

Very little of the news that you see on newspaper websites is not originally an AP Newswire story.

So there’s a few organizations that are still writing their own stuff.

But even the stuff that they write goes out on the AP Newswire and then other places pick it up in syndication.

So rather than having individual newspapers with individual deals with Google, they just went straight to AP because AP kind of catches all of it.

I’m interested to know if the AP is going to disseminate that out to the newspapers that they partner with.

But they don’t really partner with newspapers so much as newspapers are allowed to subscribe to them.

So AP is making out like a bandit on this.

I don’t know what that’s going to do to individual news outlets, though.

And I’m interested to see how that plays out.

Yeah, definitely.

So next, this is what I kind of covered before in one of the trends.

But this is kind of a preamble to this is going to become important.

And again, Google say things for a reason.

They don’t just do things for the sake of doing things.

And here the recommendation is to attract people to actually write a review for you.

So not just to say, rate us out of five or out of ten, right?

Why?

And that is handy for a few reasons.

A, adds good context, which you can then use elsewhere in the site if you want to.

B, adds to the perspective of the third party, which is what we were chatting about was really important before.

Which C, in turn, helps search platforms get opinions as you as an entity, either as a person or a company or the service or product that you’re selling underneath that company.

But yeah, I would say do that.

Well, Google are saying do it with them.

So I would hear it’s mainly focused on product reviews through shopping and local reviews through GBP.

But of course, with that, I would say they’re also implying that you do that with third parties.

And I don’t know if it was asked as a question.

Someone asked in the chat, where should you get the reviews from?

SEO’s answer is it depends because it does depend on what you’re selling and where you are.

Because Trustpilot might be for some, but not for others.

Just like social, LinkedIn versus X are two different things, two totally different audiences and two different messages.

So that’s what they’re basically saying.

But that’s something I was kind of advising from the beginning.

Get as much, you know, get as much third party perspective as you can and reviews from other people.

Because that, you know, enhances EEAT as an entity, I would say.

It goes hand in hand with that.

I 100% agree with that.

So let’s see.

What else have we got?

Advancing.

There we go.

On January 17th, there was a big scare in the ranking volatility because all of the tools suddenly started reporting huge losses and really just erratic data.

And it turned out that Google was blocking these rank checking tools.

So the data that they were getting was spotty if they were getting any at all.

And they’re freaking out because their business model is built on collecting this rank checking data.

And people that use the rank checking data were freaking out because it looked like their sites were tanky.

When they weren’t, it was just bad data.

So what calmed everyone down was they would see that they’d lose all their rankings.

Then they’d go into their analytics tool and go, yeah, but traffic’s still okay.

So what’s wrong?

Turned out Google started requiring, what exactly was it?

It was they want to start requiring that all of these, the ranking tools have to be able to execute JavaScript.

Or what was that exactly?

Do you recall?

I can’t, I actually can’t remember now.

It was, it was something to do with JavaScript and, and crawl and crawling it.

And then that made it harder for it blocked out some of these third party platforms.

Now, some of it has kind of come back, but I would, if I would worked in those tool platforms, I would be saying danger will Robinson somewhere in a meeting and saying, oh, we need to, we need to make sure we support that.

Because one day they can just turn that on again and not turn it back off.

And what do you do?

Because that was just a few days and there was a few heavy SEOs that were having a few meltdowns there.

I’d have a meltdown if my entire business and some of these, some of these rank tracking companies are multimillion dollar businesses.

If my entire business model relied on that rank tracking, I’d have a heart attack.

I probably would have died to be honest.

All right.

Google simplifying visible URL on mobile search.

Yeah.

I thought I’d mention this very quickly.

Yeah.

I thought I mentioned this because a, there’s nothing for anyone to do.

Breadcrumb markup is still there.

It still works.

It still applies and it’s still going on desktop.

This, I was just adding this because I thought maybe someone here was checking rankings on mobile and notice that the second part of the breadcrumb, beyond the root, the root folder of the domain is now gone.

Don’t worry.

That’s not a problem.

This is something that they’ve actually actively done.

It tidies up a bit of mobile real estate.

That’s kind.

That’s all.

Start to improve the UX.

And that’s about it.

But lastly, I put this in because three weeks ago, I don’t think I’d even heard of DeepSeek.

Right.

And now it’s everywhere.

And there are a few reasons why.

The first one is that it’s open source, which is very interesting to a lot of people because people don’t always like the SaaS model or like OpenAI that do things like this.

And then there’s a lot more extending that can be done.

A lot more like, well, we know all about open source, right, and how useful and handy it is.

And it can run locally.

That’s also important for people who don’t like data collection from these companies.

And you can keep all of these things a bit more private and you can have a bit more confidentiality and therefore a bit more trust in the actual platform itself.

Like I was saying before, it knew things in ChatGPT that I had already shared with it, but then it used it, yes, to my advantage.

But what else is it going to use in a year when monetization comes in?

And then it remembers what I was doing a year ago and then brings it all back.

Is it going to be handy or is it going to freak out a bunch of privacy conscious people?

That I think is going to be quite an interesting…

People don’t care about our privacy anymore.

People give away all of their privacy so that we can get through the airport faster.

No one’s going to care about that if it makes your life easier.

They do.

Look, if I like chocolate and I talk about chocolate, send me adverts for chocolate.

I’ll buy it.

No problem.

But yeah, the other thing that’s a real big threat is that it was made for…

Well, they claim it was made for just under…

Well, it’s $5.6 million.

So I just put just under $5.

So I am incorrect by a mil there.

But comparing it to OpenAI’s $5 billion and they have supposedly now got…

I mean, Sam Altman’s even said in a tweet, I’ll put it there.

He’s actually considered it a proper competitor and says it’s interesting.

Now, if someone like Sam Altman says this is interesting and impressive, that probably means away from the screen, someone might be pooping themselves a little bit this year and that they have a lot of work to do.

And I would also think, well, if they did that now, they’ve got something else up their sleeve that’s going to blow whatever they’re going to do in six months in the water.

I feel like this is like the Drake and Kendrick Lamar thing.

Like someone drops a song and then 20 minutes later, someone drops a better song.

It’s crazy.

But they released their…

It’s open source too.

OpenAI is not actually open.

So it’s pretty groundbreaking.

Also, I’m not good with math.

So $5 million to $5 billion, that’s three orders of magnitude, isn’t it?

Yeah.

I mean, it’s a lot, right?

I mean, it’s enough for investors to go…

Well, an order of magnitude is huge.

What’s going on here?

You’re starting to get into that.

That’s like…

Exactly. …your mind can not comprehend.

And I think it even got into the BBC as it’s been the most downloaded app over the weekend on Apple, which is another big threat.

I mean, it’s so much of a threat here.

It’s hit US stock market, not just OpenAI, but NVIDIA stock went down 17%.

I think Bob, from Yoast, he mentioned it was $500 billion devaluation just for the existence and release of this other competitor.

Do you know why that was?

That was because of Davos.

I forget who the guy who was who said it, said that China built this with whatever the top-of-the-line NVIDIA chip is.

And they’ve got like 50,000 times more of these chips than they’re supposed to have because there’s all these sanctions and restrictions that are designed to prevent China from getting these top-of-the-line chips for this reason.

And yet they’ve got them all.

So sanctions aren’t working.

Somebody’s trading with someone they shouldn’t be trading with.

Like there’s all kinds of geopolitical implications here.

So it’s exciting times.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we’ve got our last bits of news also in the news.

I’m going to go through these quick because we’re already at 10-2.

ChatGPT is now available to…

Search GPT, sorry, is available to all free users.

It wasn’t a month ago.

Forbes has cut ties with freelance writers after the devastating advisor thing if you want to read more into that.

Yeah, read into that if you want to.

Google Search Console has hourly data if you are that anally retentive to data or your company is that big that they need results right now.

Bing are now hiding Google Search results because why not?

I guess so.

I mean, why would you?

And ChatGPT introduces operators on the same day that Perplexity introduces agents, which helps you around locally on your machine and stuff.

You need paid for stuff.

If you’ve got a paid for account with either of them, have a look.

I assume that the ChatGPT operators is with the $200 a month one.

It is.

I wanted to play with it.

And they’re like, yeah, you can play with it.

Just upgrade to the $200 a month account.

I’m like, whoa.

Yes.

Yes.

Crazy.

That’s crazy.

And that’s all the news we have on the goings-on, except we’ve got Yoast news, which was last month we implied that there was a new functionality being introduced, and it is now here.

On the 18th of December, we released Yoast dashboard, and it has nice insights and actionable stuff that you can get.

It’s available in free and Premium, and there is more stuff coming to the dashboard pretty soon, but I can’t talk about any of it.

But I can answer other questions with Carolyn now.

Oh, no.

No, we can’t.

We’re at events.

God, I’m even one step ahead, aren’t I?

Where are we?

If you’re planning in attending WordCamp Asia or SMX Munich or Brighton SEO in the UK, we’ll be there.

So make sure that you find us and say hi.

Now we can talk about the next SEO update, which is happening February 25th, so after Valentine’s Day, and we hope to see everybody then.

Now we can do the Q&A.

Hey.

Hello.

All right.

Just starting immediately with the questions.

The one that I think most of us are wondering about, how is SEO relevant anymore, given that AI becomes so much more popular every day?

I would say if SEO is dead, reverse everything that you’ve done and see what happens.

If SEO doesn’t matter, right?

You don’t need any of these things.

Get rid of your title tags.

Get rid of your meta descriptions.

Get rid of any schema.

Remove it all.

And I would love to see how it performs in the next six months.

If SEO isn’t relevant anymore, then noindex your site.

If there’s no visibility, then what is it?

If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there.

There’s no way to hear it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But yes, I would say very much so that SEO is important.

And we have the SEO is dead thing every year.

It went from, oh, no, as a threat when I first entered to, oh, this is quite funny, to now it’s, oh, right, okay, we’ll chat about this again next year.

SEO changes and evolves each year.

Our skill set has to go bigger and wider.

And we have historical knowledge of SEO as well as the fact that we have to keep up with these trends right now.

So I would counter argue that we’re even more valuable than we ever were.

And that, again, reverse everything.

Noindex your site.

And we’ll chat about the successes from it.

Yeah.

SEO is really, if you want to be mentioned in these AI overviews, if you want to be mentioned and be one of the cited resources for the AI answers, and in the narrative because they are going out and they’re pulling information from different places.

So the shift, like I said before, is going away from just targeting keywords and making sure that you’re providing valuable information that’s answering questions and that you, you as an entity or your brand as an entity is trusted enough to be considered the expert canonical source for the answer to that question, which is all still SEO.

It’s not SEO from 10 years ago.

Right.

A lot of people asked about EEAT and I’ve shared some links so you can check comments to your questions as well.

Now let’s move on to one question which is not related to AI because we can’t talk just about that.

Is Reddit still being prioritized by Google?

Well, I think I answered that before.

The answer is yes.

Google invested a lot of money, not a lot of money by Google standards, but a lot of money by Reddit standards in taking that information, having access to that information to help train their LLM, to help generate answers, to satisfy some questions.

They need a source for opinion and sentiment.

They can’t get, you can’t rely on brands to honestly answer what people really think about their products.

Reddit is a source where they’re going to get that from Reddit and Fora and other places.

But if Google had to pick one and they picked Reddit, they’re going to continue to prioritize that because that’s what they’ve invested in.

You know how we say if you want your videos to be seen and ranked on Google, put them on YouTube?

Because YouTube is part of Google and they keep it in the family.

Reddit, that Reddit data is now kind of part of the family.

And that’s why they’re going to prioritize it.

Right.

And another interesting question I think is more practical.

Are there any useful methods for adding or requesting backlinks from reputable sources?

Well, the best methods are always the oldest methods, like communicate well, try and connect with the person you’re emailing, be personal.

Don’t say hello, first name, you know, or do what I do sometimes, which is copy the last email and send it to someone else.

So I’ll email Carolyn and say, hi, Dave, how are you doing?

That’s my class.

That’s my classic mistake.

Even when you think you’re personalizing, you need to double check everything.

That’s also why I love the undo send button in Gmail.

Save my career many times.

Very, very well.

But yes, get an engaging subject that’s, again, relevant to them and give them something that they can actually, instead of saying, oh, here’s a link, you know, this is what we do.

Like be creative about it and try and connect with the person and try and read their previous stuff as well to try and see what their work is and connect that way as well.

But again, I’m not the best at actual outreach.

It was terrible.

I hate link building.

I’m just going to throw that out there now.

A while ago, I had an intern who was an engineering student, but he was in a fraternity.

You could tell he was a ladies’ man, liked the ladies.

We worked for a company that was producing medical content.

And a lot of the links that we were trying to get were at libraries.

So rather than having him email the librarian or the webmaster at the library to request links to our content, I had him call them.

Because librarians are usually women.

And he has a voice that women like to listen to.

And I had him do old school outreach in that fashion verbally because I was playing to his strengths.

So if I think the problem with email is email is very easy to mass produce and it’s very easy to it’s cold and it’s easy to delete it.

It’s very difficult to hang up on someone on the phone.

So I think if there’s any possibility of doing outreach in person or quasi in person where it’s more difficult for that person just to tell you no and hang up on you, I would try that.

That’s obviously going to take longer.

And the yields are going to be smaller, but I think the yields could be higher value.

Thank you.

Another one.

What can we do with zero click searches?

We kind of have to talk a little bit before.

Yeah.

Create.

Look at search intent.

Read about search intent.

I’m sure if Marina isn’t putting in a link, Taka will be there in a sec.

Adding a link in there.

Search intent is very important.

If it’s just informational, think of the second batch of intent there.

I would always couple that with commercial or transactional intent.

And when it comes to zero click, try and think of, well, if they’re asking a question, what’s the answer that I can entice someone into coming to my site to know more?

Or do an action as a result of learning that information?

That’s in the easiest in a nutshell way.

How would you phrase it, maybe?

You’re very good at making what I say more eloquent.

Well, I mean, I think with the zero click searches, I think it depends on what your business model is.

If your business model has been traditionally providing just aggregating information and then relying on eyeballs to monetize those visits, I don’t think that business model is going to be viable going forward.

I think if you’re a brand, though, and you sell a product or you have something other than just raw information that’s generic to offer people.

So you’re answering a question.

You can provide some kind of service to them.

In those situations, those zero click searches are important because you’re helping people develop a rapport and a reliance on your brand, which will then cause them to start speaking you out specifically.

And they form an emotional bond with you.

And people like to do business with people they like.

People like to give money to friends.

You know, it gives you a face.

It gives you a name.

And I think that’s the value of those zero click searches if you can be the citation.

And I don’t know if that was a translation of what you were doing or just my own thing, but.

It’ll have to do because this is 60 minutes, 61 minutes of SEO done.

Thank you very much, everyone, for joining.

Thank you for your questions and all the discussions in the chat.

It was a lot of fun.

We will see you at the next update in a month.

As we mentioned, it’s on February the 25th, again on Tuesday.

We’ll see you then.

Peace.

See you all there.

Bye, guys.

Welcome everyone to the all new SEO update by Yoast.

Let me get this starting screen out of the way because we’re ready for the last update of the year.

And I hope you are too.

We have a lot of people joining and I’m seeing all places from the whole wide world.

So welcome everybody to this stream and I won’t keep it very long as we have a lot of news to cover.

Although the last edition was only two weeks ago.

It doesn’t matter.

We want to go out with a big blast of news updates this year.

Before I go into some household notices, I am Nynke de Blaauw.

I work at Yoast as the Director of Partnerships.

I have been working here for four years and our principal SEOs, Carolyn and Alex, will take you through today’s news.

Before we get started, two things that are important if you’re maybe a first time joiner.

This edition will be recorded.

Everything you need to know about the news, all the resources and also the recording, you can find in the resources list.

And it should appear in a link below.

But otherwise, here’s the link in the chat as well.

Find all resources of this update right there.

And obviously, we will have room for questions at the end of this webinar or update.

So get your questions in the Q&A section.

You can upvote questions of other people if you find those interesting.

We know which questions to cover first during the Q&A.

We’ll try to make as much time as we can for Q&A.

But other than that, I think we’re good to go.

Okay, Alex and Carolyn, I’m inviting you on screen.

There they are.

Looking all Christmassy.

How awesome is that?

Yeah, you just need to show it a little bit better.

I’m on one of the standing desks, so there’s not much flexibility I have now.

I’m just making a suggestion.

Oh, Carolyn’s on mute.

Wait, I can unmute her.

Oh, sorry.

You have to stand up and show us it’s a turkey because all we can see is it’s brown and it looks like Mr.

Hankey.

It’s a turkey.

See you around?

I like that though.

I like the potential Mr.

Hankey though.

I mean, I’d wear a Mr.

Hankey jumper as well, but let’s not get into Mr.

Hankey though.

Okay, I’ll leave you two to it and I’ll be back in during Q&A.

Have fun, everyone.

Enjoy the last edition of the year.

All right.

So let’s see.

So when was our last one?

The 26th?

Yeah.

It felt like it was 10 minutes ago, honestly.

Let’s get the, we need to get the slides down in the, I can’t move them.

I can do that.

There we go.

Thank you.

All right.

So let’s get started, I guess.

This is me and Alex.

You guys know who we are.

What we’re going to discuss today, we’ve got some SEO and AI news.

We’ve got a little bit of Yoast news and we want to leave a lot of time for Q&A because I know we are notoriously bad about not doing so.

So the plan is we’re going to buzz through the news quickly and then we will have plenty of time for all of your questions and we’ll do a little extra Q&A for, as an early Christmas present for everybody.

Some housekeeping.

And I, Nynke already covered this, but please feel free to ask questions.

Vote other questions if you’d like to see them answered.

That’s how we know what you’re interested in hearing about and we do our best to meet those requirements.

If you’d like to learn more about today’s topics, as always, the entire recap and transcript are going to be available at the website that you see there.

The next how to start with SEO webinar is going to be December 18th, which is two days from now.

So if you’re here and you’re like, this is really a little bit more advanced than what I’m looking for and I need something a little bit more intro.

The how to start with SEO webinar is definitely the one that you want to catch.

It starts at 10 a.m.

Eastern time, 4 p.m. if you’re in Europe.

So hopefully you’ll be able to catch that before the Christmas holidays.

And I think we are probably ready to get started.

You ready to go, Alex?

I’m ready to go.

All right, let’s get this done.

Okay, so I will real quick talk about this one.

This looks complicated.

It’s not really as complicated as it looks.

C2PA metadata can appear in Google search.

If you skip down to that last bullet, honestly, all this means is that Google is going to be able to snip out if your image was made by AI because there’s metadata that appears in those AI images.

Don’t try to pass off AI generated images as legitimate, undoctored images because the metadata is going to give it away.

It’s going to get labeled as AI and you’re going to look like a liar.

So the TLDR is don’t do that.

The next thing that we’re going to cover is the first draft of the general purpose AI code of practice has been published by the European Commission.

It’s just the first draft.

It’s focusing on transparency, copyright, systemic risk management.

It sounds terribly interesting, but it’s a government body’s paper, so you have to kind of expect these things.

There’s four drafting rounds, and this is just the first one.

It’s not going to conclude until April.

The goal is to ensure that AI is trustworthy and it’s, you know, all of these rules are tailored in compliance with subject matter experts on, like, open source models and things like that.

I don’t think this is anything to panic about.

Like I said, there’s four more drafting, or there’s three more drafting rounds after this one.

We’ll know in April if there’s going to be any major impact to how we do business, but I don’t expect there to be.

So this is just something to kind of keep in mind.

If you are interested in reading what the first draft has to say, we’ll have a link for you in the recap.

Yeah, I guess so.

I mean, that’s law.

That takes ages, though.

You know, by the time the third draft is in, like, AI will be old school.

It’ll be like the cassette already, and there’ll be something else.

Probably creating its own laws for itself.

Our robot overlords will have already taken over, so it won’t matter.

Exactly.

It’s fine.

Everything’s fine.

I’m sure 2030 will be cool for everyone.

But until then, AI are, I think, in the game for taking on Chrome, which I think is quite interesting.

So they’re going into the browsing experience in general.

And whilst they talk about it going into ChatGPT and SearchGPT’s offering, this may become a new product that will create more mass adoption for ChatGPT and OpenAI as a whole.

And to go with that, a few days later, they announced that they’d hired a former Chrome architect from Google.

They’re hiring a Google Play, who’s going to go with that, and they’re hiring a Google Play Store.

Well, and OpenAI is an American company, so I don’t know that they’re going to put the European Commission’s preferences and desires at the forefront of their design strategy.

Yes.

Yes.

I forget that the Europe isn’t obviously the whole world.

And America is a whole different ballgame when it comes to that stuff.

I don’t know why that’s a good thing.

Well, we do tend to worry far less about what the Europeans think than what our own government thinks.

So it colors the way products are developed because those rules are secondary and the addressable market in Europe isn’t as large as the total addressable market in the U.S.

So companies, justifiably care more about the U.S. regulations than they do about what’s going to happen after the fact in Europe.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So let’s see what happens with the browser wars.

I am as well because I know that ARC have been doing stuff and then they kind of stopped, I think, doing ARC.

But now they’re going more into an AI-driven one.

And I know that ARC already has AI into it and some people use it.

And if you’re into AI browsing experiences, I suggest using ARC at least until OpenAI blatantly release one in Q3.

I’m going to go with Q3.

Is that your plan?

I reckon, yeah.

We’ll flag that and we’ll see how you’re up.

Flag it up in July.

Right.

The pre-holiday research that needs to be done or making sure that you need it for a holiday.

But up until that point, Google have added recommendations in GA about Merchant Center recommendations specifically to help fix product issues and way things to disapprove.

And it’s kind of connecting the two together, which I always find useful.

And, for the e-commerce store owners who are listening to this will find it extremely useful that they don’t have to just rely what’s going on in Merchant Center.

And they can be made aware elsewhere about things that they can optimize.

So I think it’s pretty cool.

Small gains, but every little helps, right?

Every little bit helps.

That’s for sure.

Apparently, Google Search has seen a UK decline.

Yeah.

I mean, we’re more open to testing things, right?

You think so?

Also, we think so.

Yes.

We think so.

I don’t know so, but I think so.

But I also…

Well, the second part of this title is very British, I think.

You know, we express low trust in AI.

Just change AI to anything new.

We will definitely question those things.

I don’t know.

As a Brit, I know that I’m stuck in my old ways with certain things.

We were even discussing earlier today how I’m only now doing more and more ChatGPT stuff.

And I felt like the Britishness in me was saying, no, I don’t like change.

I like my Google search bar.

And that’s where I’m sticking.

Not as an SEO, but as a Brit.

And now I open my mind to it.

And maybe I’m now contributing towards this UK decline that I’m seeing.

Because not just me, but other people.

Let’s just say that normal people I didn’t expect to hear about perplexity are talking about perplexity.

Complete technophones, in my opinion.

They don’t know what the hell’s going on with AI, but they know they use perplexity for things that they do in work.

And that, I would say, should worry Google.

A lot.

And then maybe this data is going to make someone stand up a bit more.

Unless they’re already on a standing desk.

I don’t know.

But if they would act a bit faster to what the audience wants and not what they think needs to happen in the next three years.

I think Google might be concerned about what’s going on.

I know in the last update, I reported that when Search GPT was made available to everyone, it popped up a thing and said, hey, install our Chrome plugin and it’ll help you.

So I installed the Chrome plugin and it effectively hijacked Chrome.

So every time I typed something into my Google search bar, it piped it through Search GPT and it shot me straight into ChatGPT.

So there was no, there was no, I could just type something in and go Google it.

Like just Googling things became very, very difficult for me.

So all of the searches that I had been doing in Google got shunted over to ChatGPT.

I’ve noticed that there’s been a couple updates to my Chrome and that functionality no longer exists.

I didn’t install anything, but I think Google went, hey, hey, no.

And shipped some, and I don’t have proof of this.

All I know is suddenly, suddenly that isn’t working anymore.

And I’m able to do Google searches again, just by going to that search bar.

So I think, I think Google is concerned.

Interesting.

I like also, by the way, as we go to the next slide, how we’re talking about AI and new platforms.

There’s a bunch of people having nostalgia of old platforms like AltaVista and Webcrawler.

I love that.

It also shows our age, right?

Shh.

We didn’t talk about that.

No, no, no, no.

No, Chromium.

What are they up to with Chrome in general?

Since we’re talking about that, there was a report done about how Chrome site engagement metrics are used.

So there’s scores, 0 to 100, as one does.

They measure user interaction and enhance, or to enhance the browser experience.

And the scores decay, which means if you score 100 today, but you make no changes over the course of the next six months, that score is going to get less because you’re not doing anything to improve the user experience.

So what they’re saying is there’s no possibility of being perfect and then just staying there.

You can’t just rest on your laurels.

They’re engineering it so you have to consistently and regularly make updates to improve that user experience.

It helps them allocate resources, enable features, and sort sites based on user engagement.

So if users are engaged in the beginning and then they kind of fall off, that’s going to make you less desirable.

If users stay consistently engaged, they will consistently rank you higher and help you attract more users because it’s going to help with your rankings.

The scores are device specific.

They are isolated and incognito and erased with history or inactivity.

So it’s things that kind of, it’s a score that exists within a specific portion of Chrome and Chromium.

And it’s not something that is reported to, I think, the mothership or added to your permanent record type of thing.

It’s very user-end specific, which I think is interesting to know.

So it’s not something you’re going to be able to fix necessarily.

Let me rephrase that.

In the past, sometimes things would break for a certain device or for a certain browser.

And as SEOs, we would look at that and say, I don’t care much about the people that are dumb enough to keep using that thing.

The way this works is because all of those things are scored, a bad score in one of those areas could affect things negatively everywhere.

So you do have to be concerned about the user experience of everyone, not just this is the browser I use, so this is the browser I care about kind of thing.

Which is, I mean, it’s a subtle difference, but I think it’s interesting to know.

Yeah, yeah.

I added what you can type into Chrome or, sorry, a Chromium-based browser.

So if you’re using Brave, et cetera, you can use it there.

You just type that Chrome colon, blah in there, and then you’ll be able to see everything you need to see.

Oh, yeah.

Excellent.

And I’ve also added in Dejan’s blog post that goes into highly technical detail if you want to geek out and see everything that it looks at.

He can be very, very technical.

So this would be a fun thing for you to test your favorite AI tool on.

Feed his blog post into it and say, can you explain this to me like I’m a five-year-old?

Because I use that phrase all the time.

It’s very helpful, especially when you’re trying to interpret something that is really outside of your field of expertise and you need some help digesting it.

So this would be a great opportunity to test that functionality.

Tell us about BlueSky, Alex.

Have you moved over to BlueSky?

No, I mean, I bought myself, I secured my usernames as best as I could because I’ve not got the most unique name.

But other than that, I mean, I think I’m the classic.

I installed it once, browsed through it once, twice maybe, and then never went back.

And maybe this is why I was skeptical about including this as a news item because right now, I’m sure that the data will say that three times as much engagement is happening on BlueSky.

But two things.

First of all, like, what are those numbers?

What’s that three times as much as what?

What set of data?

Is it a big set of data?

That’s one thing.

The other thing is that maybe this is a trend.

And I think that I use Threads as an example when in the first two weeks you would hear lots of stories about its supersonic growth and how many people have opened a cat.

And then, if you were to look at the same article three months later, you know, that trend has gone way down.

And it was just that FOMO of opening a new account on a new social platform where I found, at least with Threads, I think 95% of the updates were people telling me that they’d left X to go there.

But I don’t need to know that.

I don’t need to know that people have arrived somewhere or leaving.

I think someone actually said on X, like, you’re not an airport.

You don’t need to declare if you’re leaving or arriving on a social platform.

And I get that, but it’s okay.

But I would say for people listening and watching now, is BlueSky actually a place where you’re going to find out?

What’s the high value for you for what you’re selling as a product or a service?

Is your audience there engaging?

Because if they’re not, then there’s no point.

Just like some businesses and products aren’t going to go on to, LinkedIn to sell their stuff because it’s not the most appropriate social network to be on.

I think what’s going to happen, so this migration to BlueSky is very similar to the migration to Parler before Parler was shut down.

It’s in the opposite direction.

And it’s the users self-segregating.

And it becomes a little echo chamber.

And if it has staying power, it’s going to be interesting for businesses because you’re going to have to decide, are you going to invest in having a presence in the old place where everyone hung out and the new place where half of the people are hanging out?

Because now it’s just polarizing and self-segregating by political affiliation, really.

So businesses are going to have to make those decisions.

Who’s our audience and where are we going to invest our money?

And are we trying to please everyone, so we have to invest and be in all the places where all the people are?

It’s interesting to see, but everyone getting excited about 3x engagement.

Their engagement was pretty low to begin with.

And now it’s skyrocketed.

But 3x of 5 is 15, whereas 3x of 5 million is 15 million.

So there’s differences.

When you give percentages, it’s less impressive than if you were giving hard numbers and the hard numbers were impressive.

It is.

It is.

But again, that’s not to say don’t use it.

Look, again, I’m seeing in the chat that this guy is really working for people.

And like you said, maybe half the audience is there.

But the other question is, which half?

Like, is it the more valuable half?

Because if that’s the case, then the 50% on the other one, you’re shouting to half into a void, essentially.

So whilst I’m skeptical on some stuff like this and say, is it a trend or is it something that’s going to stick in the long term, like Mastodon joins the conversation as well, then I’m all for it, right?

I’m all for, you know, different social networks being around for different audiences.

There are, otherwise, there’d just be one, right?

I am vaguely curious if a company tries to have a foot in both camps, basically, where they’re advertising to the people, let’s say the people on the right that stayed on X and then the people on the left that all went over to BlueSky, assuming that that’s how it breaks down, if it breaks down cleanly.

If you’re trying to reach both of those, do you tailor your message for each?

And then if someone shares a screenshot of your ad there on the other place and goes, look, they’re lying to you.

And like, oh, yeah, no, they’re lying to you.

And then what does that do to your marketing campaigns?

It’s an interesting conundrum.

I don’t know if it’s terribly, it’s necessarily SEO related, but it’s interesting in terms of how you’re going to divide up your marketing budget.

Fun things to worry about over Christmas.

Yeah, yeah.

All right.

So how do people use Google?

SparkToro did an analysis, looking at 332 million queries over 21 months about how people are using Google.

They found that Google does still hold over 90% of the market share and drive 60% of referral traffic, which is not unexpected.

I think we all kind of knew that.

A third of the searches being navigational and over half are informational.

I think that’s interesting because I think Google would like it to be a lot more commercial.

They make money on those commercial queries.

So I think it’s interesting that there are still so many that are navigational and so many that are informational.

Navigational is like when your mom types in AOL.com into the Google search when she means to go to AOL.com, but she accidentally types it in as a query.

That’s what they mean by navigational.

So there are still clearly.

I think we could extrapolate.

There are a lot of old people that are still using the Google to get around and don’t quite understand how modern browsers work, which is, you know, it’s cute.

Branded search queries are nearly half of the searches.

A small set of top queries drive all of the demand.

Everything else is long tail, but the long tail is minimal in comparison to those brand queries and the head terms that we call them.

Google is increasingly using zero-click answers and the AI overviews to provide, well, not just provide, but like dominate these major categories like arts and entertainment and finance.

Any question you ask about a movie, Google is going to be able to provide an AI overview for, you know, give you a synopsis, tell you where it’s playing, all kinds of fun stuff like that, which is changing the way we use Google.

And it’s changing the results.

It’s changing how we optimize.

So those are interesting things to worry about.

Then they also found that search is a post-discovery tool now with brand discovery shifting to social media and other platforms.

And then Google being a secondary place where you go to get more information.

So you see an ad on Facebook.

You see an ad on X.

You see an ad on BlueSky.

If they do ads, I don’t think they really do ads.

TikTok, Instagram.

You see something.

You remember the name because it’s interesting.

You can’t remember how to get there.

So then you go to Google and type in the brand name and anything you remember about the ad.

And it tells you then how to get to it.

So it’s not used to help you learn new things.

It’s there to help you find more information about things that you discovered somewhere else.

That’s another big shift that we, I don’t know that anyone really expected to happen in the big way that it is happening.

So, you know, I think the most interesting part of all of that was the half is informational, which is a trouble to some site owners because with the zero adding to the zero clicks.

So again, we were chatting before about how I’m using chat GPT more.

And the example I used is Venom.

There’s a new film.

And I wanted to know a summary of the last two because I’ve kind of half forgotten.

And I added to the search contextually.

And I realized that for that kind of search, I’m never, not never, I’m not going to be going to Google to make that search for some time because ChatGPT gave me a much more concise answer.

Not that ads play a part in the decision making.

If you’re going to make an ad for like, I don’t know, Venom on DVD or whatever the streaming thing is, that’s fine.

But I’ve now realized that, especially with the wider and mass market, Google are now in a danger territory where they’re one bad search away from churn for that person.

Just one.

Right.

And it takes 20 years of effort, a generational effort to get everyone.

They’ve got a verb for searching.

Right.

But now people don’t search anymore.

They discover.

So now that even the name Google, Googling something is becoming a little bit redundant.

And information gathering is done much differently.

AIO is not as good as the others, in my opinion, at giving the user what they want.

So I’m really interested to see, again, what they’re doing, especially looking at this kind of data to show that brand marketing and informational driven searches are booming in a place where they don’t want that.

They don’t want that to happen.

I think part of the problem is that because things like ChatGPT make it easy, they’ll do that research for you.

They’ll find answers for you and prevent you from having to spend an hour going to five different websites and reading through those papers and the documents and trying to find the answer or synthesize the answer yourself.

It’s doing all that work for you very quickly.

Google’s answers just aren’t as helpful.

The AIO interface isn’t as helpful as having a conversation with ChatGPT or Perplexity or whichever AI tool you’re using, having that conversation with it to get to the answer that you want faster.

I couldn’t have asked Google which red wine I should use because these are the ones I have on hand in this recipe.

Because Google wouldn’t know the recipe right away.

There’s not enough room in that chat box for me to adequately fully explain and articulate what I’m trying to get at.

Whereas I can do that with ChatGPT.

It’ll rework all of my recipes and say, yeah, that Shiraz is fine.

I’m like, okay, cool.

Change everything else on the menu to accommodate for the fact that I’m using the Shiraz instead of the cab.

And away you go.

And then it does it.

Google just doesn’t do that right now.

Which makes it, yeah, that one bad experience where it’s just so much easier to do this other thing and not go to Google for that.

All righty.

Alex, I heard the core of day November finally finished just in time for the December one to start.

Yes.

Yes.

It finished rolling out.

There wasn’t too much of a massive disturbance in the force of SERPs that has been noted.

There’s been no one who’s been disappearing off the radar that maybe wasn’t already in previous core HCU.

There may be additional nails in a coffin that’s already been made kind of scenario, which is, again, a shame.

Because no one’s seeing huge benefits still from HCU.

But the other thing that they were doing, as well as the fact that they’ve already started another rollout, that I think happened last Friday, maybe?

Thursday or Friday.

That’s always mean.

And they say that’s mean.

But I’m sure from memory they do do this a lot.

They do a lot of core or important updates just before Christmas to keep SEOs on their toes.

Because I think it’s probably some sadist who’s working there who does it each year and with an evil laugh.

But again, it’s not been the most volatile.

It also came with an update.

And I don’t know.

It wasn’t in its own slide where in the last week someone from Google mentioned that there’s going to be more core updates.

They’re going to be happening more and more often.

So you might see that this time in a year we’ll have talked about a core update happening every single month.

You don’t know.

But I’m going to assume that that’s going to start happening now, especially the catch-up that they have to keep playing now with these serious players.

Yeah.

And I think now that they’ve got AI tweaking the algorithm now.

So everything is just happening so much faster.

They don’t have to wait for QA and for all of these other things that they would normally have had to put through different cycles and phases at work.

So everything is like every timeline is just compressing.

And it’s I think we’re just racing towards a singularity.

That’s just.

Just the lighthearted stuff you want at the end of the year, right?

Just inside the Christmas movies.

Pretty much.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

So other fun stuff that happened is OpenAI released ChatGPT-o1, which is the world’s smartest language model.

Their words, not ours.

It’s $200 a month.

I’m sorry.

I don’t use it that often to justify that kind of expense.

But, hey, if you can afford it, then go for it and let me know how it works because I will not be investing in that.

I’m sure there’ll be micro-influencers who have invested to, A, get status and, B, get a lot of engagement so that they’ll get a return on that $200 maybe by going on X, saying, here’s what I found, that kind of stuff.

Well, the micro-influencers probably got financed by OpenAI to try it out and then promote it.

I very much doubt they’re spending that kind of money on their own.

True.

Well, these are the kind of people that buy Lamborghinis recreationally, so what do I know?

Exactly.

Exactly.

I just don’t think that the normal person needs all of this, at least right now, on the level that you would need to – you would actually want to pay $200.

My prediction, in six months, this will probably be part of your $20 a month package and that the $200 will have something else that none of us even know about yet or even heard of.

I’ve been real happy with the 4.0.

I haven’t had a need to use anything beyond that.

So, I don’t know.

It would have to be really amazing and, like, clean my house, too, for $200 a month.

Exactly.

Exactly.

As well as that, again, I don’t know if it was also in the news, which I know is the next slide, but I do know that it wasn’t in the slide.

In this slide, so it didn’t get into a slide by now, but Sora has now gone on general release, which is the OpenAI video service that people can now go and check out.

So, that’s another thing to check out.

So, what else happened in the news?

So, I did mention that OpenAI hires the former Chrome engineer, so that’s already been covered.

Google Business Profile targets age-restricted products if you sell adult material and tobacco, things like that.

Then you can now have more specific stuff on your profile.

There’s a new Google Analytics feature that helps hidden product listings, which I think…

Oh, no, we covered that in the slide.

I think it got into both, so it’s very important for e-commerce that we needed to mention it twice.

Bing Webmaster Tools shows data for Bing and Yahoo, but not ChatGPT, although in GA4, there are ways of finding…

It’s not open on my other tab at the moment, but there is a way, and I did mention it in the last one, of how you can navigate to see how many people are coming into the site through ChatGPT.

And no, it doesn’t tell you what the prompts were that made them get there.

Google Search CTR reveals shifting industry trends.

That’s quite a long read, so if you’re into industry trends, I suggest you go in there and check it out.

That was on the Search Engine Journal.

And lastly, Google uses about 40 signals to determine canonical URLs.

So what did you say, Carolyn?

Don’t mess them up.

Well, it’s relatively easy to not screw it up.

So just don’t screw it up.

Provide a canonical for a piece of content and don’t send mixed messages because it’s looking at a lot of things.

It uses the things that it looks at to pick the correct canonical if it believes that the canonical you provided is bad.

So don’t give it a bad canonical and it won’t look for reasons to replace it.

Just don’t screw it up and you’ll be fine.

Yeah.

And I think that’s all of our news.

I think the only thing that wasn’t newsworthy maybe is the one bit of WordPress news is that Automatic acquired WPAI, which is a service that would bring AI capabilities into WordPress.

It’s probably not going to be newsworthy now other than me saying it, but I reckon in about three months, we’ll be chatting about this for about five minutes about what they’ve done with that acquisition.

Probably.

And the curious thing, though, is like everybody, all the WordPress plugins are incorporating AI into, like we did, everybody else is doing it too.

How are they, is what they’re doing going to step on what everyone else has been doing?

Are they going to work together?

I just, I’m curious to know what the plan is with this.

Aren’t we all?

2025 is going to be interesting for AI and SEO and WordPress.

It’s going to be very, these are going to have to be 90 minutes, I reckon, by April.

Probably.

Well, so we’re almost done.

We have one more slide before we go into the Q&A.

For the Yoast news, we wanted to share some stuff, but it wasn’t, the announcement isn’t happening until later this week.

So we just want to tease everyone with, there’s an announcement coming, you know, some new product features.

We’re not allowed to talk about them.

I’ve been given a list of words that I’m not even allowed to say.

So I’m just going to say, stay tuned.

There will be, there will be something before, before you take your Christmas break.

And we’re all very excited about it.

So the back end of WordPress on Thursday and hope that there’s an update to a new version and make sure you hit it.

That’s all we’re saying.

Yeah.

Real quick.

I mean, a lot of the upcoming events and appearances aren’t happening until February.

So you’ve got plenty of time to plan your travel for that.

The next SEO update is going to be January 28th, which feels like 100 years from now, but it’s like six weeks.

So six week gap.

We should have a ton of new news for you.

Looking forward to that.

And now, now we’re ready for our QA.

Hey, and we’ve got loads.

We’ve got, actually, we’ve got time.

Oh my God, we’ve gotten another 10.

I’m so proud of you.

I was like, we’re just thinking, once a year you’ll get this.

That’s it.

Exactly.

You all had to wait till the end of the year to get all this space.

I will move the slides away and move us to the big screen.

So everybody, well, that was already arranged.

Really nice.

Yeah, let’s start.

So for everyone joining the stream, you can go through all the asked questions right now and upload the ones so we can actually have an updated list of the questions.

But let’s start with the most uploaded question at this moment.

Shauna posted it and it’s about AI in Photoshop and images.

The question is, I use AI in Photoshop to expand images to fit the dimensions needed.

For example, change a square into a rectangular one or by extending background trees.

Will these images on the website now get banned or will there be a penalty for SEO?

And eight upvotes, so I guess a lot of people are questioning this.

That’s a good question.

I actually don’t know.

I think what’s going to…

So if it’s a real image in the beginning and you’re just using AI to expand it, the question is, is Photoshop going to add that metadata that triggers Google to label it as AI?

So there’s that.

Are you going to get penalized?

I don’t see why you would get penalized.

There’s no penalty there unless it’s identical to what somebody else has done, which it’s not.

And even then, it’s not a penalty.

That’s just duplicate content.

So I would say, is there a penalty?

No.

Is it going to trigger a label that depends on Photoshop?

I hope that helps Shana and the other…

Oh, nine people now.

Thanks, Carolyn.

So there’s another question posted by Torren.

I’ll pop it on the screen.

In terms of best practice for search engine rankings and the appearance slash consistency of results in search engines, would you advise using the SEO variables in a website’s page settings, like title or page title, or typing the web page’s desired appearance manually?

It depends.

And it does depend.

I mean, here I’m going to assume he’s talking about the title tag of a title.

I don’t know if…

Is it Torren who’s here?

Maybe he’ll say something in the chat.

Go on, Carolyn.

No, I think I see what he’s asking.

So you can define those variables in the Yoast settings.

Yep.

And that’s great.

That’s perfect for the default behavior.

But Yoast already allows you to override on a per page basis what that title, page title, etc. appears like for the search engines on each page as desired.

So I think the best practice is you define the default behavior in the settings using the variables.

And when you feel the need to manually override it, you do so on the page.

I mean, I don’t know that there’s…

You have to do what’s best for the situation, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

Meanwhile…

Thanks, Carolyn.

I saw Don’s question coming in.

And Don, I have moved your question to the Q&A.

So if other people want to know about that too, please upvote Don’s question.

My Q&A is reloading right now.

Okay.

An AI question.

Votes coming in as we’re talking about it.

Votes are coming in, yeah.

The numbers coming in, yeah.

This question was posted by Meg.

And the question is, as AI continues to impact search and Google continues to roll out updates, what are the core things we should focus on as a foundational SEO strategy?

Is it keyword research and content?

Is it technical SEO?

What should be the main priority in 2025?

I’d say yes to all the above.

And I know it sounds weird, but like, I, at the beginning, when I first started SEO, I kind of had to explain to people who weren’t in my team that they had to, the more they thought about SEO, the worse it may get for them.

And the less they think about SEO, the more natural they will become.

This is from a content creative point of view, keyword point of view, such as back in keyword stuffing days, how many times, what’s the, what’s the proportion in the whole piece of content that I should say this keyword.

And the answer is as naturally as you should.

That’s what it should have always been.

And I guess it’s the same now.

And just kind of ignore the fact that AI is around.

You need to adapt to it.

And weirdly, in the next year, my belief is that AI is going to adapt more to, you know, what we’ve been doing all this time.

And there may be new things we have to do, some of which will be covered inside our plugin, some of which will be covered in the updates and methods that we’ll have to do in blog updates.

But the basics of what you’re all doing now, I would say, just keep on being helpful, honest, transparent, and white hat.

And the internet in general will respect you back.

I would say there, we’ve, we’ve published several articles in our, in our SEO blog that talk about how to, how to deal with and kind of massage the, the AI narratives that are being presented about any given topic that, that the AIs are asking about.

The, the goal going forward is less to just rank and more to be one of the citations or sources that the AIs are using for these answers.

And how are they deciding what to use as the source?

They’re looking for consensus.

So if there’s a consensus answer, are you one of the consensus answers?

Are you providing robust information?

Are you an authority on that subject?

So this is all about the EEAT.

Are you doing, are you doing all the things that are going to elevate you to an entity that is recognized for having expertise in whatever particular field you have expertise in?

And I think the EEAT portion is what you’re going to need to be focusing on.

That being said, I can think of three or four articles that we recently wrote in our blog.

So if you want to go check there, there’s a lot of information on how you should be prioritizing your tasks going forward.

Cool.

Meanwhile, I’ll read the next question.

And Carolyn, maybe if you can quickly put up those, or at least one of those posts.

I’m not sure if you, I’ll give you some time.

I’ll just pick a really long question to read out.

Okay.

Let me refresh for a bit.

I think this ties into…

I’m going with the 10 vote.

What?

Have we got to go with the 10 vote?

Or are we going with the long question?

No, I’m going with the 10 vote because I think that’s a really important question in the age of all the AI search.

Okay.

Derek asked the following question.

How important are websites going to continue to be as a definite source of info and content for businesses, especially in the age of no-click discovery?

There’s the word discovery already.

Alex, you did a great job.

I know.

I know.

I think they’re going to be very important.

They’re going to be as vital as they were before.

If there is no information to discover, there’s nothing to not click.

Like, I would say we should still be contributing towards the web and its content.

And doing so, we will still get cited in some way in the future.

So long as there’s got to be something to discover, right?

Otherwise, there’s nothing there.

And without the site, Google can’t source this.

Think of the search engine.

They’re just middlemen, right?

Middle people, middle machines.

I don’t know what they are.

They’re the messenger.

They’re the messenger between what you want and the answer.

And if they don’t have the answer, they can’t be the messenger.

So they need the creators more than the creators need them, even though the power play doesn’t seem that way at the moment.

Like, weirdly, if all web creators now just stop typing, right?

Google will have serious issues.

Serious, serious issues.

So, like, they’re playing with fire, I think.

Because these small publishers, that’s going to have a knock-on effect.

Because now, if I was 18, 19, and I had an interest, 10 years ago, I’d be all about making this niche website.

Today, I’d read three things.

I’d be like, why would I do that?

Why would I spend my time?

And in four years, like that, all my visibility is gone.

Why would I spend all of that and build a company that could mean nothing if my one reliance is on the messenger, you know?

True.

But that’s for another week, probably, that rant.

So, for businesses in particular, it is still important to have a website.

Because if you ask your favorite AI for information, let’s talk about Yoast as an example.

If you asked a question about the features of the product or the features of free versus premium, where’s it getting that information from?

Yoast is the authoritative entity on Yoast.

So, it’s going to go look at the Yoast website and read all the information about the product features and then do a comparison for you.

So, if we don’t keep that updated and we don’t take time to promote and prioritize the things that we think are important, then the AIs aren’t going to know that to repeat it to the users.

If we’re not owning our expertise and then taking advantage of the platform that it’s provided us, then we’ve then wasted this opportunity to deliver the information to the AIs.

Even though there were no clicks involved, somebody’s got to go get that content from somewhere and they rely on the authority to provide that.

So, it might be in the Yoast case, us to provide that info than other people providing that info about you, right?

So, that’s the thing you want to own, whether or not the search engine landscape is changing.

Yeah.

And I also get big boy travel’s issue.

Like, you don’t care as much as being cited as an AI answer.

We want to retain our traffic.

So, the problem there is the only reason you feel, okay, I don’t know your specifics, but I’m going to make some assumptions.

If you need that traffic because you make your money on traffic and not on conversions, then that’s a problem with the business model.

And I think that the business models that make their money solely on traffic are going to probably be in a position where they have to evolve because I see that traffic source drying up.

That’s one, and it’s one channel.

Remember that, like, spread the channel.

It’s like any business will say don’t, well, any service-led business won’t say, well, make sure that less than 30% of your turnover isn’t with one client, you know, one supplier because then that’s an issue.

Here, all these small publishers are effectively saying that 98% of their turnover is with one client, the search provider being the client.

And if that’s cut out, it goes.

So, spread as much as possible and attract as many as possible in different areas, in the maybe BlueSky.

And just real quick to provide my English-to-English translation for the Americans, when Alex says turnover, he means revenue.

None.

Yes, sorry.

Not people quitting.

Because when we say turnover, people quitting.

A glossary.

I’m sure all the AI platforms are telling me that it should say that, but us Brits, we don’t like going on to the new things, do we?

We said that.

I just know that when I hear it, I get confused, and my brain has to go, thank you.

Okay, Rob.

He means Rob.

It’s nice you take our American-based audience into account.

Okay, next one.

Oh, we have a tie between two nine times upvoted questions.

I’ll just start with the top one from Johnny.

I want to add videos to my product pages, which is good, I think.

In terms of SEO, are there any important considerations, any specific settings maybe in Yoast to optimize for on-page videos?

Well, I think we have a whole Yoast video add-on that you can get that is designed specifically for videos.

And there are SEO considerations for videos, which you can definitely set, I think, within the tool.

There’s a separate video site map that you can get.

There’s a lot of different video things you can do, but I would definitely say if you have videos to add to your product, pages, then please do.

Anything that helps your engagement and provides more information to the user is going to be helpful.

And the clear as possible.

So Carolyn was thinking about it from a technical SEO point of view.

I was picturing it from a content point of view.

Make sure they’re helpful, of course, and it might sound obvious, but sometimes it’s not.

Make a use case out of, so let’s say it’s a product or a service, find the solution and benefit, find the use case of it.

If it’s a product, especially get it in its surroundings.

In situ, if that’s, I don’t know if Americans know in situ as well, as a term, like as an example of when it would be used.

And that will be then interpreted by all of these platforms, which are getting more and more sophisticated.

So in a year, it’ll be able to read the content of those videos, and it’ll really complement the text around it.

And again, it’ll figure out the context between the video and the text and the page that it’s on and where it is on the site.

So yeah, all very important.

All ties in together.

In the meantime, I was searching for a few blog articles about this.

So Johnny, if you just search the Yoast website, you’ll find a lot of blog articles about this, but I’ll share one that I think is maybe the starting place for you to discover this.

So I hope this helps.

Yeah, and Phil Nottingham.

Phil Nottingham knows everything there is to know about video.

And also, just annoy him on X or whatever he’s active on.

He’ll just have to answer for his personal brand.

We don’t want him to get too distracted, Alex.

But I get it.

I get it.

Okay.

Then there’s…

Oh, we still have time.

It’s amazing.

I really have to get used to this.

It’s really nice.

There’s another question by Leigh, if I pronounce this right.

Aside from working on all the standard stuff to rank UX, off-site SEO and on-site SEO optimization, producing quality content that meets the EAT, standards, keyword research, organic backlinks, etc.

What can be done to get Google to understand your website is worth ranking well again?

After the helpful content update, I have yet to recover, and I’m pulling my hair out.

Oh, don’t do that.

Trying to understand what I’m getting wrong when it seems I’m doing everything I should and am a true expert in my field.

Thanks.

So there are…

The HCU is a different thing.

It’s a classifier.

And once you get…

So there’s two buckets.

There’s helpful and there’s not helpful.

And there are…

It taught the machine to identify the characteristics of unhelpful by giving it an example and saying, if it looks like this example, it’s not helpful.

And then push everything that’s not helpful into this bucket.

And you are stamped with the unhelpful…

You’ve got the embroidered unhelpful on your chest now.

And there’s not a lot you can do to undo that without getting rid of the…

The appearances of unhelpfulness.

And the problem…

This is a long answer that’s going to be difficult to do in this thing.

To give you a quick…

Without knowing your situation, this might work for you.

You could try moving everything to a subdomain and 301ing your main site to the subdomain.

However, you would need to get rid of whatever elements of your site are betraying or causing it to think that you’re unhelpful.

And when you’re like, but I’m not doing anything that other places aren’t doing.

That’s a matter of interpretation.

And the problem is that Google’s looking for ducks.

And even though you are not a real duck, you’re apparently wearing feathers and have a bill and, you know, and occasionally quack.

So Google thinks you’re a duck.

We need to figure out whatever it is that’s making you look like a duck and take just enough off so that you stop triggering the, oh my God, it’s a duck alarm.

Because we want to unduck your site.

If that makes sense.

It’s a long answer.

The way you said unduck your site, I was like, you so used the right animal and word to go with that.

I know.

You did it on purpose.

That was the plan.

See, she did a keyword research as well before she even answered the question.

So maybe, maybe you send us an email because it is a long answer.

And I would, I would love to help you with that.

But I, because it’s a classifier and not an algorithm thing, I think once you, once you’ve got the, you know, the black mark on your, on your record, it’s going to not take you out of that bucket until we figure out what’s putting you over the edge or tipping you over into the, the ducked bucket.

We do wish you luck.

We do wish you luck.

Yeah.

We do.

It can be done.

Other sites have done it.

So, so we just, we just need to figure it out.

We have another question from Don.

I think it’s the same Don.

I didn’t remember the last name.

I’m sorry about that.

Can you speak to schema markup and how important schema is to the future of SEO and AI?

That’s a huge question in a few words.

I’ll be honest.

I’ll be honest.

I don’t know.

I actually don’t know because I am quite subjective about this.

I’m a huge lover of schema.

I think it’s really important.

It’s clearly a foundation of our products as well.

And it’s been a foundation of structured data for a long, long time.

And some people are skeptical.

Oh, well, we’re not going to need this structured data because AI is going to be able to structure all the data we have.

But I would also like to think that over these years, structured data is there.

Not because Google and search engines couldn’t read that.

And it can do everything that people are saying, skeptics are saying already.

It can do all of that.

But it’s handing a bigger spoon to the messenger, right?

They’re handing a bigger spoon.

It’s making it easier to do their job.

So if you put yourself in the search engine shoes, like if you’ve got a choice of two and one has given you everything in a nice little platter and another site has given you unstructured crap, essentially.

It’s like giving you a book with no punctuation, no paragraphing.

It’s just one big block of text.

The more that that happens, the bigger the job is going to be for the messenger.

And they’ll maybe not look at you as fondly as a site or a page that is giving you structured data.

So maybe because I say I don’t know, maybe I should change it to I can’t predict how search platforms are going to interpret them because there’s unpredictable stuff that’s been happening in our vertical in general that I like to hope that schema isn’t going away anywhere soon.

But I don’t also want to eat my words in 12 months and say that maybe something’s been figured out.

But things like Merchant Center, feeds, feeds are just essentially structured data, you know, that they all help.

And especially in e-commerce where I don’t see unstructured data not helping.

You know, when we dig into stuff like products and product variants, right?

If there’s no structured data, I don’t even know how a search platform would even deal with unstructured versions of a shoe that has different sizes, different colors, different prices.

Some are on sale.

Some have different returns and refund policies.

It can’t do all of that without structured data and therefore schema.

So maybe that wasn’t a short answer.

But I’d like to hope that it is in short.

It was a big question.

So we didn’t expect a short answer.

Yeah.

What do you think, Carolyn?

I don’t know if you have.

We have two minutes left.

Do you want to add to this or do we go to a last question?

I think schema right now is still, if it’s easy for you to implement, implement it.

I think I actually, oh, it’s not published yet.

I just wrote an article about that for Search Engine Land and it’s not come out yet.

But I have advice on which schema is important and which schema is not important.

And I don’t have time to tell you about it.

Another teaser, Carolyn.

We’ll talk about it.

We’ll probably be able to talk about it at our next update.

We’re done with this one.

Let’s see if we have time.

One, two.

We have one from David that has the most upvotes right now.

Can you give an overview of the current state of play for GEO when people search through AI bots, as in ChatGPT, rather than through a search engine?

Or the messenger, as we now call it, and is you offering any training for this?

So we have answered a few questions that were directly related to this and just phrased a little bit differently earlier.

So GEO is generative engine optimization, which isn’t really what I call it.

I just tended to call it, you know, optimizing for the AI narratives, which is long and not easy to remember.

Point is, we do have some blog posts that were written to help you understand how the AIs are making decisions on what to include, which you can then extrapolate into, this is how I should optimize for that.

So we’ve got a few blog posts.

I’ve got some talks that I recently did that I think maybe we should turn into blog posts, and that can provide some training.

But is there a specific, you know, this is exactly what you do.

What you do is improve your EAT, and you make yourself an expert in the field, which makes you desirable to be cited.

So the short answer is, be an entity that is an expert in that field, and then provide answers that the users are looking for.

And then you’re improving the odds that you will be a cited source.

Once you’re a regularly cited source, you will be a cited source for all manner of things that are related to that topic, and you can exploit that to your heart’s content.

Yeah, to add to that, because now we really have to close the stream, I’ve just popped in one more resource, which is our AI for SEO training, part of the academy, that comes with any of our premium tool.

So just take a look there, if that might be helpful for you next to all the blogs and the stuff on the internet.

Alex, the same.

Yes, I would like to say there’s a few people who said they’ve had upvoted questions that haven’t been answered.

So one of two things, either they’re being liked a lot in the chat and they didn’t go into the Q&A part, or something’s up.

Can you please connect with us?

Connect with me or Carolyn.

I don’t care if it’s X or LinkedIn or through the website.

Find us and we’ll get back to you.

Wait, wait, wait.

I almost forgot.

Before we close everything out.

Wait.

So a couple things.

Number one, Ask Yoasie is back up.

So if you go to the website, we can answer the questions that didn’t get answered in Ask Yossi.

So it’s yoast.com/ask-yoasie/.

Y-O-A-S-I-E is how you spell that.

So we’ll be answering questions that didn’t get answered there.

Also, just we have a subreddit now.

If any of you are Redditors and you’re interested in discussing the podcast or asking additional questions or discussing that, I’m in there frequently.

So the subreddit is r/yoastseo.

Obviously, you can spell that.

And hopefully, we’ll see you guys there.

But that was all I had.

So Ask Yoasie and then the Reddit, Yoast SEO.

Cool.

Or annoying social.

See you on Reddit.

See you on Yoast.com.

Or see you in the next SEO update.

Thanks for joining, everyone.

I think this was a wonderful way to close the year.

We’ve covered a lot of news.

We’ve covered, I think, most questions ever during one of these updates.

So thanks all for joining us throughout 2024.

And we’re super excited to start the new year all with you at the end of January.

For everyone that’s celebrating holidays, happy holidays.

Make it a good one.

And see you in 2025.

Happy holidays, everyone.

You’re welcome.

Bye.

Thank you.