(Last Updated: 2-12-2026) Directory listings tend to get dismissed as legacy SEO, but that misses how they actually function today.…
SEO Industry News
Overit Acquires Web Traffic Advisors
Overit, (a full-service marketing agency from Albany, New York) has taken over Web Traffic Advisors, a consultancy focused on SEO…
Sponsorship Options Across Pubcon, SEW, WMW, and More
Media Kit Properties & Channels A quick snapshot of where your sponsorship shows up, and what each channel is best…
Expand Your Reach: Contribute to Search Engine World
Search Engine World Contributor Program Publish where search professionals actually read Search Engine World works with experienced practitioners who have…
RFC9309! Robots.txt Quietly Became an Official Internet Standard
Pop quiz hotshot: Is robots.txt a formally accepted internet standard? a) No b) Yes Most educated SEO’s will say “no,…
Differentiated Delivery: Evolving and Cloaking Your Robots.txt into an Active Bot Gatekeeper
Differentiated Delivery : Stopping the bot storms: Serve trusted crawlers like Google a permissive robots.txt while blocking rogue scrapers with dynamic robots.txt in Apache, Nginx…
SemRush Acquired by Adobe for $1.9 Billion
Wall Street Journal reporting that SEM Rush will be acquired by Adobe.
Is GEO Real or The Great SEO Hallucination? The SEO Community Speaks!
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) has moved from theory to playing and testing ground. We were curious to see where this…
Cloudflare’s Content Signals: The Right Problem, An Unlikely Solution
The open web has long depended on an implicit exchange: publishers make content freely available, and platforms like Google send…
How to Add SearchEngineWorld as a Preferred Source on Google
Google’s Preferred Sources feature rolled out on August 12, when it quietly rolled out as part of Google’s move toward…
AI Search Engines Rely on Less-Popular Sources: Implications for SEO & AEO
A new study from Ruhr University Bochum and Max Planck Institute shows generative AI search tools draw heavily from less-popular…
Influential Nielsen Norman Group Tees Off on Google AI UX
It’s been awhile since we’ve heard from the famous Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) in the search space. NN/g is a…
Self Hosted Website Search Engines are Easier than Ever!
As referrals fall from search engines, we believe there will be sites that forgo indexing. One thing that the big…
Instagram Posts Are Ranking and Showing in Google and Bing – SEO Meets Social
Starting July 10, 2025, Search Engines began indexing public Instagram content from professional accounts, making Instagram SEO a fresh tool.…
A Look at Todays Top Social Posting Tools
When I posted in the Pubcon Facebook group asking for recommendations on affordable, reliable social media scheduling tools, the thread…
Publisher Alliance Says AI Mode Is Theft!
A growing number of major news organizations are accusing Google of crossing the line with its new AI Mode. What…
New “Search” Report is Deeply Misleading – Search is NOT Up
A highly cited report came out earlier this week from BrightEdge. It even had it’s own press release (which should…
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…
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…
Fun Fact Friday – Did you know?
Did you know? That the original purpose of YouTube was to be a video dating (ugh, hookup) site? That there…
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.
AI and Search News Run Down
Another Publisher Inks Content Deal with OpenAI. Washington post has signed a content deal with OpenAI. “According to OpenAI, it…
Webinar: SEO is Changing Fast – Is Your Agency Ready? Top Experts Weigh In!
Search is changing fast—AI, evolving algorithms, and shifting client expectations are redefining what it means to run a successful SEO…
Nearly 30% of Workers Don’t Know What ChatGPT is
AI Chatbot Usage: Who’s Adopting and Why? A recent Pew Research Center study found that 55% of workers rarely or…
Genspark Secures $100M in Series A for AI Search Engine
The search engine landscape is heating up, with AI-powered startups racing to try to disrupt Google’s long-standing dominance. Reuters is…
Google Responds on DOJ’s Monopoly Breakup Proposal
Google is pushing back against the US Department of Justice, which wants to break up the company by forcing it…
WP Engine Wins Injunction
A federal judge granted WP Engine a preliminary injunction against Automattic—parent of WordPress.com—after WP Engine accused Automattic of sabotaging its…
Former Googlers to Build new AI Agents Operating System at /dev/agents
In a LinkedIn Post, former Stripe CTO David Singleton announced his new firm is building a next-gen operating system for…
Google to Site Owners : Your Website – Our Choice
We’ve seen alot of questionable behavior out of Google the last couple years, from trying to CoOpt the entire web…