Browsing: SEO

The world’s most successful subscription publisher – The New York Times – regularly gives some of the most valuable real estate on its homepage to free articles, and, crucially, makes sure readers knowthey’re free.

The ranked results page stops being Google’s default first response for most queries somewhere between 2028 and 2030, starting in the U.S., with the UK and EU following a year or more behind. That is my forecast, not a finding, and the rest of this piece separates the two as carefully as I can. By…

We can debate about the rights and (broadly) wrongs of last-click attribution until the cows come home, but SEO has been the money channel. The channel the execs have leapt at.

Google’s John Mueller recently discussed how Google processes PDFs for ranking purposes, how it indexes them for use in AI Mode and regular search, and why it is able to use links in PDFs the same as it does for regular HTML web pages.

Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt recently discussed how HTML sitemaps may still be useful for SEO even though the XML standard has largely replaced it.

Google’s Martin Splitt and John Mueller discussed the reasons why Search Console may display a “couldn’t fetch” error even though a website displays a valid XML sitemap. While Mueller acknowledged there sometimes may be a technical reason for that happening he also said that the actual reason is often a quality issue.

Google is entering a new phase of SERP scraping due to AI agents. Some of it may be driven by networks of LLMs that are reverse engineering Google’s search results. The public face of Google’s war against scraping remains rank trackers but the real battle may be elsewhere.

An AI answer mentions your brand. That looks like progress, but it does not tell you what to do next. A competitor may appear more often, the answer may describe an old version of your product, or important pages may never reach the bots collecting information.

At some point, most of us working in ecommerce have had that email. A client, a colleague, someone senior, asking why a product looks like it’s on sale when it isn’t. Or why an old product image is showing up in Shopping. Or why a campaign that looks fine on Google is getting rejected somewhere…

Finally, we have visibility into how often our content features in Google’s generative AI features. Now, we can see exactly how many clicks we’ve lost to…