SEO — search engine optimization — is the three-decade-old practice of earning visibility in ranked search results. Full entry for SEO in the glossary.
Kevin Indig of Growth Memo analyzed Google Analytics 4 data across 12 websites from January through September 2026 and found that while total Direct…
Via Growth Memo (Kevin Indig) ↗ · Oct 19 · · Research, AEO, SEO
Google Search referral traffic to publishers fell 40.2% year-over-year from July 2025 to July 2026, up sharply from a 21.9% decline the prior year…
Via Chartbeat ↗ · Sep 24 · · Research, SEO
A Typeface survey of more than 500 U.S. and U.K. marketing leaders found 49% plan to deprioritize or stop investing in traditional SEO, while 44% plan to…
Via PPC Land ↗ · Oct 15 · · Research, AEO, SEO
News/Media Alliance sent a letter to the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission on October 7 asking them to investigate Google's "site…
Via News/Media Alliance ↗ · Oct 8 · · Law & Money, Google Search, SEO
Google updated its guide on using generative AI content, adding information drawn from the Search Quality Raters Guidelines, per an October 1 entry on the…
Via Google Search Central documentation updates ↗ · Oct 2 · · Google Search, SEO
Google's AI Overview panel now generates a full roster listing for some NFL team searches, appearing above or below the team's own site, per Search Engine…
Via Search Engine Roundtable ↗ · Oct 1 · · Google Search, AEO, SEO
Ask YouTube is set to add product cards that send viewers directly to retailer sites, on top of the spec comparison tables the wire reported Sept. 23, per…
Via PPC Land ↗ · Sep 27 · · Google Search, SEO
Google's VideoObject structured data documentation, updated Sept. 24, 2026, added a recommended creator property — a Person or Organization with name and…
Via Google Search Central documentation updates ↗ · Sep 25 · · Google Search, SEO
Google appears to be testing a new position for AI Overviews on hotel search results, moving them from the top of the page to beneath the hotel knowledge…
Via Search Engine Roundtable ↗ · Sep 24 · · Google Search, SEO
Google Search Advocate John Mueller said on Reddit that Search Console does not report where an individual link sits inside an AI Overview — it scores the…
Via Search Engine Journal ↗ · Sep 24 · · Tools & Vendors, AEO, SEO
Across 74,752 websites tracked by Ahrefs's chatgpt-vs-google.com, all AI chatbots combined sent 3.5 million visitors in March 2026 — 0.28% of the sites'…
Via Ahrefs Blog ↗ · May 15 · · Research, Engines, SEO
YouTube added shopping features to Ask YouTube, the experimental conversational search tool it has been testing on watch pages and in search since earlier…
Via Search Engine Journal ↗ · Sep 23 · · Google Search, SEO
Google has begun emailing Merchant Center sellers whose store platform supports the Universal Commerce Protocol that their products are "automatically…
Via Search Engine Roundtable ↗ · Sep 22 · · Google Search, SEO
A preregistered field experiment by researchers at Northeastern University and the University of Pennsylvania — Stephanie Wang, Jeffrey Gleason, Yakov…
Via Search Engine Journal ↗ · Sep 21 · · Google Search, Research, SEO
Google is testing a "Dive deeper" button in Discover that opens an AI-generated topic overview linking to related stories, Google's Robby Stein said Sept.…
Via PPC Land ↗ · Sep 19 · · Google Search, AEO, SEO
A field experiment by Saharsh Agarwal (Indian School of Business) and Ananya Sen (Carnegie Mellon) randomly assigned 1,065 U.S. desktop searchers to see…
Via Digital Content Next ↗ · Sep 15 · · Google Search, Research, SEO
Google Search Central documentation updated Sept. 18, 2026 says the aggregator unit and supplier unit — alternative Search result formats Google built for…
Via Google Search Central documentation updates ↗ · Sep 18 · · Google Search, SEO
Google is testing an AI Overview label atop local knowledge panels for Google Business Profiles, with a "Show more" button that expands into an AI…
Via Search Engine Roundtable ↗ · Sep 17 · · Google Search, SEO
Ahrefs tracked 963 high-traffic French domains through Google Search Console for 28 days before and 9 days after AI Overviews launched in France on July…
Via Ahrefs Blog ↗ · Sep 16 · · Google Search, AEO, SEO
A University of Washington paper estimates Google's AI Overviews cut monthly search referrals to English Wikipedia by roughly 5% since the feature became…
Via Search Engine Journal ↗ · Sep 11 · · Research, Google Search, SEO
Le Monde CEO Louis Dreyfus told INfluencia the outlet has seen no sudden audience decline roughly seven weeks after Google's AI Overviews launched in…
Via Search Engine Journal ↗ · Sep 10 · · Google Search, SEO
Publishers in Similarweb's Top 100 Media index spent an estimated $113 million on Google paid search in July 2026, up 41% year over year and 274% over…
Via PPC Land ↗ · Sep 10 · · Google Search, SEO
AI Overviews appeared in 38% of manufacturing search results in January 2026, rising to 57% by July, per a Semrush analysis of 458 manufacturing keywords…
Via Semrush Blog ↗ · Sep 8 · · Research, AEO, SEO
Google Shopping ads' median click-through rate rose from about 1.20% to nearly 1.55% while impressions fell from roughly 1.85 million to 1.4 million…
Via Search Engine Roundtable ↗ · Sep 7 · · Google Search, SEO
The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a joint copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft on Sept. 4 in the Southern District of New York, the same day…
Via Chat GPT Is Eating the World ↗ · Sep 5 · · Law & Money, SEO
BrightEdge has rebranded Autopilot — its internal-linking automation tool with a decade of production history — as "Site Agent," now the first of three…
Via BrightEdge Blog ↗ · Sep 3 · · Tools & Vendors, AEO, SEO
Across the 400-plus news publishers NewzDash tracks, Google Discover supplied 67.51% of Google traffic in the fourth quarter of 2025 against 27% for Web…
Via Advanced Web Ranking ↗ · Aug 31 · · Research, Google Search, SEO
Everything published about the Coati algorithm traces to a single source: Hyung-Jin Kim, Google's VP of Search, speaking at the SMX Next keynote on…
Via Google Search Central ↗ · Sep 1 · · Google Search, SEO, AEO
A listicle with an old or unreadable publish date had 56% lower odds of reaching the Google top 3, the single strongest factor in a Growth Memo analysis…
Via Growth Memo (Kevin Indig) ↗ · Aug 31 · · Research, Google Search, SEO
Google's share of listicles holding position 1 fell from roughly 19-20% in January 2026 to about 15-16% in August, while top-3 listicle rates dropped from…
Via Growth Memo (Kevin Indig) ↗ · Aug 24 · · Research, Google Search, SEO
Google AI Overviews expanded into the finance category in April 2026, shifting query volume toward ticker lookups, according to a BrightEdge analysis of…
Via BrightEdge Blog ↗ · Aug 24 · · Google Search, AEO, SEO
A Fractl survey of 343 U.S. marketing decision-makers found 81% still refer to their AI search strategy internally as "SEO," with only 27% having formally…
Via Search Engine Land ↗ · Aug 24 · · Research, AEO, SEO
Blood Cancer UK's leukaemia information page lost 53% of page views over the past year, with declines of 17-45% across its other blood cancer pages, while…
Via PPC Land ↗ · Aug 17 · · Google Search, SEO
Shopify president Harley Finkelstein told the company's Q2 earnings call that AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify merchant stores tripled year over…
Via TechCrunch AI ↗ · Aug 5 · · SEO, Tools & Vendors
People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel told Digiday the publisher won't cut off Google's AI crawlers, saying doing so "would turn off search" and the company isn't…
Via Digiday Media ↗ · Aug 4 · · Law & Money, SEO
Just 40% of U.S. searches and 40.7% in the EU/UK sent a click to the open web in June 2026, a record low, per Datos and SparkToro's Q2 State of Search…
Via Search Engine Journal ↗ · Aug 3 · · Research, AEO, SEO
Google's "AI features and your website" documentation states plainly: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to…
Via Google AI features documentation ↗ · Jun 15 · · Google Search, AEO, SEO
Search Console's platform properties — which let Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube accounts be verified as first-class properties and show how their posts…
Via PPC Land ↗ · Jul 30 · · Google Search, Tools & Vendors, SEO
Time has converted its web pages into markdown — stripped-down, text-only copies without design or images — to make its content easier for AI crawlers and…
Via Digiday Media ↗ · Jul 30 · · Tools & Vendors, AEO, SEO
A new Similarweb report finds 95% of ChatGPT's 494 million users also used Google during the same March-to-May 2026 span, per Search Engine Journal…
Via Search Engine Journal ↗ · Jul 30 · · Research, AEO, SEO
An analysis by NewzDash founder John Shehata, reported by Search Engine Journal, finds Google now places Top Stories carousels inside AI Overviews on…
Via Search Engine Journal ↗ · Jul 28 · · Google Search, SEO
AI Overviews surfaced in 43% of Google searches, up from 15% a year earlier, according to a Similarweb analysis reported by TechCrunch.
Via TechCrunch AI ↗ · Jul 27 · · Google Search, Research, SEO
A new analysis of AI Mode text ads reported by Search Engine Journal found ads on nearly one in three commercial-keyword queries — and advertisers rarely…
Via Search Engine Journal ↗ · Jul 21 · · Google Search, SEO
Google search executive Nick Fox says AI features in Search now send billions of clicks to websites each week; no methodology accompanied the claim.
Via Search Engine Land ↗ · Jul 17 · · Google Search, SEO
