In Dec of 2022, Google CEO Sundar Pichai famously called a "code red" meeting. It moved Google to it's…
AHREFS Study - Stunning New Report on AIO and AI Search Engines
..a must read comprehensive study analyzing 55.8m AIOs across 590m searches. The stunning report includes some sobering statistics for SEO’s. Top 50 domains get 30% of all AIO shoutouts...
Fresh Doc Dump: PageRank, Navboost, and RankEmbed: DOJ Papers Outline Google’s Stack
Google’s own court-filed slide deck just spilled more tea on Navboost, and the details punch a few holes in years of SEO guesswork. The newly released trove goes further, mapping more than 100 raw signals into a ranking stew that still leans on old-school PageRank while layering in LLM toys like RankEmbed, re-ranking Twiddlers, and the rumored mysterious quality metric called Q*Star.
SEOs: The Unsung Heroes Behind Google’s Trillion-Dollar Success
Let's be honest: SEOs have been doing Google's dirty work for decades. We clean up the web. We format content…
Google Updates Logo - Goes Full Gradient Rainbow
In a move that some will surely see as political, Google went a more full rainbow gradient with their logo…
SEO's Again Being Targeted by Google AdWords Phishing Ads
Heads Up! Attackers are at it again - purchasing Google Ads targeting keywords related to SEMrush (they also did this…
Googles Navboost - Serp Click Tracking is one of Googles Top Ranking Signals
“Giving traffic to publisher sites is kind of a necessary evil.” That quote from a former Google exec sets the tone. In this three-part series, we unpack NavBoost—Google’s behavior-driven ranking system that might influence more than PageRank ever did. From DOJ trial slides to buried log analyzers, this is the most important ranking revelation since PageRank. If you're still optimizing for keywords and backlinks without thinking about user signals, you're missing the biggest ranking factor no one is talking about.
“Bing Was Better Than I Thought” - What a Study on Search Engine Habits Really Tells Us
A new academic study has stirred up old debates about search engine loyalty and added fresh insight to the lethargic…
Google Held a Brunch for 7 Bloggers - Apparently Called it A "Summit"?
At first glance, Google throwing a summit for seven social media influencers sounds like a bad Onion headline.
Google will pay a $1.375 billion settlement to Texas over privacy
The bad news keeps coming on this Friday for Google. $1.375 Billion Settlement with Google Related to Texans’ Data Privacy…
Googles 5 Options and How it Decided to Force Websites into AI Usage
Before Google trained on half the web anyway, it floated six opt-out tiers that would have let publishers throttle indexing,…
Google Faces Heat on Three Fronts: Discrimination, Diplomacy, and Dangerous Devices
Google is waking up to a trifecta of global headaches today – each one a bit more absurd or than the last. From the courtroom to the classroom the tech giant is at the center of controversy, chaos, and questionable decisions.
AdSense Enters Chatbots: Google’s Quiet Move to Monetize AI Conversations
Google is quietly laying the groundwork to monetize conversational AI, starting with chatbot-based AdSense ads. After testing ad integrations with select AI startups like iAsk and Liner in 2024, Google is now inviting more chatbot developers to embed AdSense-style ads directly into their conversational experiences.
WSJ Article on Search : Even Big Media Gets A Clue - The Massive Change In Search
There was a search related story on WSJ that had some eyebrow raising quotes in it. The Wall Street Journal…
Cloudflare CEO Pulls FIRE Alarm: Google AI Is Breaking the Web's Economy! Search Is Broken!
Ten years ago, for every two pages Google scraped, you got one visitor, today, it’s six pages scraped for one visitor. And with AI? It’s 250 to 1… or 6,000 to 1!
Classaction.org Begins Campaign to Organize Advertisers into Mass Arbitration Action Against Google
A new wave of advertiser pushback is gaining traction – this time through mass arbitration rather than a class action lawsuit. Attorneys working with ClassAction.org are organizing advertisers to challenge Google over alleged anticompetitive behavior in the display advertising market.
Half the Web Opted Out of Google AI Training! Google Trained Anyway.
A court filing just confirmed what many web publishers feared: Google's opt-out tool for AI training doesn't apply to Search AI. Despite 50% of content being excluded from Gemini training, Google still used that same data to train its search-based models—unless publishers blocked indexing entirely.
Google Doesn't have to care
In freshly disclosed testimony during Google's antitrust trial, a Google DeepMind exec confessed that Google continues training some of its…
Prepping for Google at I/O
The Google Circus comes to town this week and we’ve said it before, nobody Spams like Google
Alibaba’s "ZeroSearch" Teaches AI to "Google Itself"
A new research paper from Alibaba has introduced ZeroSearch - a new approach to training AI models to search without using real search engines. And for SEOs and the web economy at large, it signals yet another fracture in the traditional web-to-search-to-click model.
Y Combinator Files Scathing Amicus Brief
Y Combinator just stepped into the Google antitrust fight - and they're not mincing words. In a newly filed amicus…
Apple Exec Says AI Is Replacing Search and Google Just Took a $100 Billion Hit
Two years ago, I said that ChatGPT should be seen as a "Red Alert : This is Not A Drill"…
Google Tries Hollywood Makeover By Funding Films to Soften AI
For years, AI in film has meant one thing: a threat. From HAL 9000 to Skynet, AI has been played as a cold, calculating, ultimately catastrophic evil machine. Now Google is actively trying to rewrite that narrative. Through its new project
Necessary Evil : Signal Overload: How NavBoost Rewrote the SEO Playbook - NavBoost, Part Two
Signal Signal, Everywhere a Signal? What we know from our experiences running websites for three decades, is that there will…
Necessary Evil: Pushing Navboost, Lets Push Google's Top Ranking Signal - Part Three
"Yes, we have clear one-to-one data over the last nine months showing rankings being influenced by clicks. People told us that we needed to think in terms of large scale in order to make this work, but that is just not the case in the long tail where conversion rates are highest. We saw results with as few as a dozen clicks on Serps a day over six months. We can't wait to see six more months of data.
Google Gemini Half the usage of ChatGPT But Does Jump to 35m Users A Day
According to The Information (paywalled but reported by TechCrunch) Google’s Gemini reached 350 million monthly active users as of March,…
Google Caves to Pressure - will not Deprecate Third Party Cookies
In light of the DOJ antitrust trial, Google’s latest Privacy Sandbox update signals a pause in major changes to 3rd-party…
Google Ad Network Declared an Illegal Monopoly
A federal judge has ruled that Google illegally used its dominance in online advertising technology to boost profits and suppress…
Consistent, High-Quality GBP Content Using Generative AI
A well-optimized Google Business Profile (GBP) plays a crucial role in boosting visibility, engagement, and conversions. Artificial intelligence can simplify…
Google Attempts to Fix AI Overviews with Fresh Spam Bandaids
Barry spotted a post by Lily Ray on X that Google has started adding more Google Spam Search links in…