In 2023, I published a case study showing the impact of syndicated content on rankings across Google surfaces (including the 10-blue links, Top Stories, the News tab in Search, Google News, and Google Discover). The results underscored the importance of maintaining control over indexing when syndicating content and how that could impact which version of … Read more
Update 4: October 18, 2025Well, it sure seems that the robots.txt change that Wirecutter implemented on September 6, 2025 is working. Search visibility has been steadily increasing since then and is almost back to where they were in July 2025. I’ll keep an eye on this and see how things progress over time. But for … Read more
In December of 2024, Vercel published an article explaining how most AI platforms were not rendering JavaScript. Based on their tests, they found that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Anthropic, and others were not rendering client-side JavaScript, meaning that content could not be seen by those platforms. And that can obviously cause big problems for sites heavily relying … Read more
We were due for a broad core update, and a broad core update we received. The June 2025 Google core update was a red-hot update that rolled out on June 30th right before the July 4th holiday weekend. The update took 16 days to fully roll out, which was shorter than Google said it could … Read more
Like I said in my previous post about AI Search traffic, AI Search is here, it’s growing, and it’s important to analyze. It’s still a tiny piece of traffic for most sites (less than 1%), but again, it’s growing. Based on that growth, many site owners are extremely interested in understanding their visibility in AI … Read more
In this post, I’ll explain how to set up AI Search tracking in Google Analytics 4 to view the difference between AI Search traffic compared to Google Search and organic search overall. I’ll also explain how ignoring Google Search could lead to a drop in quality, which could cause problems with Google’s broad core updates … Read more
With the rise and surge of AI Overviews, and soon AI Mode, site owners are dealing with an unprecedented situation from a search traffic standpoint. Impressions in search might be stable, or even increasing, yet clicks might be dropping. And that’s often due to AI Overviews ranking in the SERPs for important queries that typically … Read more
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to use AI Overview data from Semrush, ahrefs, and Sistrix and combine that with GSC data exported via the Search Console API. The resulting spreadsheet could uncover the true impact to clicks and click-through rate based on AIOs ranking in the SERPs for your queries. At I/O last … Read more
Update: June 11, 2025Google finally sent me a statement after I asked if they sanctioned the Reddit AI translation situation. I also asked if it was ok now to use AI translations since Reddit was heavily doing that across countries. They have published tens of millions of urls with AI-translated content. Like I originally covered … Read more
When a major algorithm update rolls out, it’s often helpful to view hourly data in Google Analytics to see the impact in near-real time. If a site is impacted heavily (surging or dropping), you can typically see when the update actually lands and the stark difference in traffic when that happens. One of my most … Read more
While performing a link authority gap analysis recently for several companies, I noticed a common (and disturbing) theme. The sites had earned powerful links from major news and media publishers, yet the links were nofollowed. Or worse, those sites were mentioned based on their hard work and research, yet they weren’t linked to at all. … Read more
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