The Chase

Imagine you’re a news publisher. Your journalism is good, you write original stories, and your website is relatively popular within your editorial niche.

Revenue is earned primarily via advertising. Google search is your biggest source of visitors.

Management demands growth, and elevates traffic to the throne of all KPIs. Engagement, loyalty, subscriptions - these are now secondary objectives. Getting the click, that is the driving purpose.

You look at your channels to determine where growth is most likely to come from. Search seems the most viable channel. So, you make SEO a key focus area.

As part of your SEO efforts, you come across specific tactics that cause your stories to generate more clicks. These tactics are very effective. Applying them to your stories results in significantly more traffic than before.

You’ve caught the scent. The chase for clicks is on.

These tactics demand that your stories focus on clicks above all. Within the context of these SEO-first tactics, every story is a traffic opportunity.

At first, you manage to apply these tactics within the framework of your existing journalism. Your stories are still good and unique, and you apply SEO as best you can to ensure each gets the best chance of generating traffic. It works, and your traffic grows.

But the pressures of management demand more. More growth. More revenue. More ad impressions. More traffic.

The newsroom submits. Stories are commissioned only if they have sufficient traffic potential. Journalists learn to just write stories that generate clicks. Headlines are crafted to maximise CTR, not to inform readers. You write multiple stories about the exact same news, each with a slightly different angle. Articles bury the lede.

Everything is subject to the chase.

Your scope expands. You don’t just write stories within your established specialism - you branch out. Different topics. New sections. Product reviews and recommendations. Listicles.

Everything is fair game, as long as it generates clicks.

And it works. Oh boy, does it work.

The flywheel gathers momentum. You learn exactly what people click on, how to craft the perfect headline, select the ideal image, find the precise angle that will make people stop scrolling and tap on your article.

Traffic keeps growing.

But, somehow, you don’t feel entirely at ease. Because you know that, when you look at your content objectively, something has been lost. Your site used to be about journalism, about informing readers, improving knowledge and awareness, and enabling policies and decisions. It used to be good.

Now, none of that really matters anymore. Your site is about clicks. Everything else is secondary.

But management is happy. Revenue is up. Profits surge. So it’s alright, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

Google rolls out a core algorithm update. You lose 20% of your search traffic overnight. It’s a shot across the bow. A warning. But you ignore it. You focus on the chase even more. Tighter content focus. More variations of the same stories. Better SEO.

Traffic stabilises. No more growth, but you’re chugging along nicely. You maybe change a few things, try to get back onto a growth curve. Nothing works, but you’re not losing either. Things look stable. You can live with this.

Then the next Google core update hits. You lose 50% of your current search traffic. It’s code red in the newsroom. All hands on deck.

How do we recover? How do we get this traffic back? It’s our traffic, Google owes us!

You do what you’ve gotten very good at. You SEO the shit out of your site. Everything is optimised and maximised. Your technical SEO goes from ‘that will do’ to a state of such perfection it could make a web nerd cry. Your content output becomes even more focused on areas with the biggest traffic potential.

In the chase for revenue, you try alternative monetisation. Affiliate content. Gambling promos. Advertorials. More listicles. More product recommendations. More of everything.

Then the next update arrives. You lose again.

And the next one.

And the next one.

You lose, almost every single time.

It worked. Until it didn’t.

And now your site is on Google’s shitlist. Your relentless focus on growth at the expense of quality has accumulated so many negative signals that Google will not allow you to return to your previous heights.

You know none of what you try will work. Those traffic graphs won’t go back up. Every Google core update causes a new surge of existential dread: How much will we lose this time?

And yet, you still chase. You’ve long since lost the scent. But the chase still rules. Because you know that, to stop the chase, something needs to change. Something big and profound. And making that change will be painful. Extremely painful.

But do you have a choice?

Hindsight

I wish this scenario was unique, a singular publisher making the mistake of focusing on traffic at the expense of quality. But it’s a tragically common theme, played out in digital newsrooms hundreds of times over the last ten years.

In every instance, at some point the seductive appeal of traffic began to outweigh the journalistic principles of the organisation. Compromises were made so growth could be achieved.

And because these compromises had the intended result - at first - there was nothing to caution the publisher from travelling further down this path.

Well, nothing besides Google shouting at every opportunity that you should focus on quality, not clicks.

Besides every SEO professional that has ever dealt with a bad algorithm update saying you should focus on quality, not clicks.

Besides your best journalists abandoning ship in favour of a quality-focused outlet or their own Substack.

Besides your own loyal readers abandoning your site because you stopped focusing on quality and went after clicks.

The writing has been on the wall, in huge capital letters, for the better part of a decade. Arguably since 2018, when Google began rolling out algorithm updates to penalise low-effort content. If you’d been paying attention, none of this would have been a surprise.

Hey, maybe you did see it coming. But you weren’t able to make the required changes, because the clicks were still there. You were never going to deliberately abandon growth for some vague promise of sustainable traffic and audience loyalty.

If only you’d known that, once the Google hammer came down, the damage would be permanent. Maybe you wouldn’t have started the chase in the first place.

If only you’d known.

Recovery

When a site is so heavily affected by consecutive Google core updates, is there any hope of recovery? Can a website climb its way back to those vaulted traffic heights?

We need to be realistic and accept that those halcyon days of near-limitless traffic growth are not coming back. The ecosystem has changed. Growth is harder to achieve, and online news is working under a lower ceiling than ever before.

But recovery is possible, to an extent. You will never achieve the same traffic peaks as in your prime days, but you can claw back a significant chunk. Providing you are willing to do what it takes.

The recipe is simple, on paper: Everything you do should be in service of the reader.

Every story needs to be crafted to deliver maximum value for your readers. Every design element on your site needs to be optimised for the best user experience. Every headline must be informative first and foremost. Every article must deliver on its headline’s promise in spades. Every piece of content should serve to inform, educate, and delight your audience.

In short, your entire output should revolve around audience loyalty.

Not growth. Not traffic.

Loyalty.

Build a news platform so good that your readers don’t ever think about going anywhere else.

Of course you still need traffic, but this must be a secondary concern. Start with your audience, and then apply layers on top of your stories to aid their traffic potential.

Your output should be focused on original journalism - not rehashing the same stories that others are reporting. If all you do is take someone else’s story and write different angles on it, you’re not doing journalism.

Provide breaking news, expert commentary, detailed analysis, and a deep focus on your editorial specialities.

And accept that your audience isn’t a singular entity, but consumes news on multiple platforms and in multiple formats. Video, podcasts, newsletters, social media, you name it. Fire on all channels, as best you can.

Sounds simple. But very few publishers I’ve spoken with have the internal fortitude for such drastic cultural changes in their online newsroom. Most of the publishers I consult with that were affected by core updates just want a list of quick wins, some easy fixes they can implement and get their traffic back.

They want busy-work. They’re not interested in meaningful change. Because meaningful change is hard, and painful.

But also absolutely necessary.

Beers & SEO with Barry & Steve (and Luke!)

We published another episode of our podcast, this one featuring Luke Halls, Head of SEO at The Times. If you want to learn directly from a publisher whose editorial strategy makes them pretty much immune to Google’s algorithmic whims, pay attention to this one.

In this podcast we explore why The Times is so successful and growing their search traffic, the role that SEO plays in a hard-paywalled site, and why putting your readers first is the best long-term strategy.

Check out the podcast on your favourite platform via this link.

Also make sure you read this article on Press Gazette, where they spoke with The Times’s Deputy Head of Digital Anna Sbuttoni (a speaker at the 2023 News & Editorial SEO Summit). It details how their strategy of ‘fewer and better stories’ resulted in strong audience and subscription growth.

The 2026 News and Editorial SEO Summit

Want to know what actually works to generate sustainable traffic and audience loyalty? Buy a ticket for the 2026 edition of our News and Editorial SEO Summit.

This will be the sixth edition of our fully virtual online event dedicated entirely to SEO and audience growth for news and publishing.

The 2026 edition will be bigger than ever before, with three days of talks. Every day will have its own theme:

1. SEO for News

2. SEO and AI at large

3. Audience growth beyond search

I’m really excited for this edition, because John Shehata and I are putting together another truly epic roster of speakers and panellists from all over the SEO and publishing industry, with returning names and new speakers.

Super Early Bird tickets are now on sale, a staggering 47% discounted from the full price, so get in early and grab your seat to the best and biggest SEO for News event in the world.

Miscellanea

Official Google Docs:

• March 2026 Core Update

• March 2026 Spam Update

• Specifying a preferred image with metadata

Latest in SEO:

• Clicks don’t count (and they never did) - Jono Alderson

• How To Do Evergreen Content in 2026 (and beyond) - Leadership in SEO

• Paywalls: Expert tips for technical and editorial SEO - WTF is SEO?

• Reporting Uncertainty Without Losing Credibility - SEJ

• Do explainers still work? The experts discuss - WTF is SEO?

• SEO in 2026: Higher standards, AI influence, and a web still catching up - SEL

• Your GEO Strategy Might Be Destroying Your SEO - Lily Ray

• GEO Was Invented on Sand Hill Road - The Inference

Interesting Articles:

• The Metric That Lied To Newsrooms - News Pain points

• BREAKING! News Thrives in the Age of AI - Define Media

• The Role of News Publications in AI Citations [New Data] - Buzzstream

• Where do Americans turn first for information about breaking news? - Pew Research

• How publishers are diversifying and evolving their revenue models - INMA

• New Research: Search Happens Everywhere; an Analysis of 41 Websites with Significant Search Activity - Sparktoro

• How Accurate Are Google’s A.I. Overviews? - The New York Times

• What AI Userbot Traffic Actually Reveals About Your Website - Sistrix

• Which journalists and news outlets are most cited by AI answer engines? - Press Gazette

My Appearances:

• I’m Feeling Unlucky - ABC News Australia

• Optimising for Google Discover in the age of AI - SEO Charity

• How our Advisory Partners help build the capabilities that media leaders need - FT Strategies

That’s it for another edition. As always, thanks for reading and subscribing, and I’ll see you at the next one!

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This Google Zero narrative is entirely false, and extremely dangerous. And I’m going to explain why.

If you’re expecting a newsletter about Google Discover, I’m sorry to disappoint. I know I’ve been promising a detailed article about optimising for Discover for a while, and I have a rough draft ready.

However, there has been so much written about Google Discover recently - especially in the wake of the Discover-specific algorithm update - that I’m not sure I can add anything meaningful. Instead, I’ll just point you to some great resources and insights:

• How Google Discover REALLY Works - Leadership in SEO

• How to Analyse Google Discover - Leadership in SEO

• Why you should be optimizing for Google Discover - Raptive

• Google Discover’s 9-Step Content Pipeline - NewzDash

• Google Discover Feb 2026 Core Update Scorecard - NewzDash

• The Ultimate Google Discover Optimization Guide - Newsifier

• Google Discover’s Shift to AI, Youtube and X - Marfeel

Now, onwards to the real story.

The Road To Google Zero

When the concept of ‘Google Zero’ first began to emerge, I thought it could be a useful way to frame the strategic approaches publishers should consider when optimising for Google. But it’s taken on an entirely different meaning, one that is actively dangerous and downright false.

It’s true, gaining traffic from Google hasn’t gotten easier. Websites need to work harder to grow their share of Google visits, both in search and Discover. This is not a new development - the writing has been on the wall for nearly two decades.

Google started enriching its search results with all kinds of different elements in 2007, intended to provide exactly the kind of information Google’s users are looking for. The clean list of ten blue links has long been forgotten.

Since Google began introducing new elements into its search results, every new feature has diverted clicks away from websites. Often, these clicks were channelled towards Google’s own properties like YouTube, Google Maps, or the image search vertical. And increasingly, searches didn’t result in any click at all when the right information was shown to the user directly on the results page.

This trend continued with every new feature Google introduced into its results. Many websites were affected. Lawsuits were launched - some of which are still ongoing.

News publishers didn’t really feel the pain, however. On the contrary, the introduction of news carousels on Google’s results increased the traffic Google sent to publishers.

And then AI Overviews arrived, and everybody panicked.

Apparently The Verge’s Nilay Patel was the first to coin ‘Google Zero’ as a phrase, though I suspect he was more than a little inspired by Sparktoro’s Amanda Natividad and Rand Fishkin, who have been talking about ‘Zero Click Marketing’ for years.

I understand why Nilay is worried about Google. According to Similarweb, Google traffic to The Verge has been steadily declining since late 2023, predating the launch of AI Overviews.

Interestingly, this graph shows that Google is still the largest organic channel for The Verge, surpassed only by direct visits (which, by the way, are also declining). And you’ll also be interested to know that the periods of strongest Google traffic decreases on The Verge correlate with Google core algorithm updates and Site Reputation Abuse penalties.

I find it funny that The Verge seems to have an existential issue with the SEO industry as a whole. That too might contribute to their less than stellar performance in search. Not to mention the fact that every channel is sending less traffic to The Verge in recent years.

Perhaps it’s not entirely Google’s fault that The Verge is experiencing a decline.

Google Zero Isn’t Zero

One website’s editor complaining about Google traffic doesn’t make for a narrative. Yet somehow, the Google Zero story has become embedded in the publishing industry, with very little critical analysis.

A few weeks ago I was at a news-focused conference where one of the speakers presented a slide showing data from Chartbeat. This data indicated a huge decline in Google traffic to many of Chartbeat’s customers.

The data was published on the Reuters Institute’s website as part of their 2026 predictions, and seems to have been accepted as gospel by many in the industry.

The speaker who presented this slide works for one of my clients. I have access to this client’s Google Search Console data for dozens of their websites across Europe. I know exactly how much Google traffic they’ve lost in the last few years.

They haven’t lost any.

In fact, the speaker’s employer is showing growth in Google traffic across many of their websites. Yet the speaker presented the Chartbeat graph as fact, without any caveat, despite having access to a wealth of data that contradicts it.

It’s not just my clients - Press Gazette recently did a deeper dive into the Google Zero panic, speaking with many UK publishers. A clear consensus emerged: Google traffic isn’t actually declining all that much.

This is supported by data from Similarweb, published by Graphite, showing the actual decline of Google traffic to the top websites on the global web is… drumroll… two and a half percent.

So, why does the Chartbeat data show such a strong decline, and other sources do not? I have theories. One is that Chartbeat’s data is skewed by several of their largest clients, who may have suffered from Google’s core algorithm updates and Site Reputation Abuse penalties.

The Chartbeat data appears to be a simple aggregate, not taking individual sites’ comparative sizes into account. So when a few big sites experienced strong losses, it would skew the data heavily towards a decline, even when dozens of smaller sites don’t see any meaningful decreases.

When we look at Similarweb’s data on global web traffic, Google is still by far the most-visited website in the world, accounting for nearly 20% of all web visits. This hasn’t changed in any meaningful way in the last few years.

A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Despite an abundance of contradicting data, the Google Zero panic has permeated the publishing industry. Not a week goes by without some C-level leader at a publisher declaring a shift away from Google towards other channels for audience growth.

I’m all for diversifying traffic sources. Publishers need to be less reliant on Google for their traffic, and have alternative sources of visitors that can sustain their business model. I’ve been on record saying exactly that for years.

But traffic diversification should not come at the expense of SEO. When you take your eye off the Google ball, you’re making a colossal mistake.

No matter how you interpret the data, Google is still by far the single largest source of visitors for websites. There is literally no other channel that comes close (keeping in mind that direct traffic isn’t a channel - it’s all traffic where there is no referral string associated with the visit).

Yes, it’s gotten harder to win in Google. I’ve outlined some of the underlying reasons in my AI Survival Strategies newsletter.

But when things get harder, the dumbest course of action is to give up.

If you lower your investment in SEO, guess what happens? You lose more Google traffic. This will then reinforce your preconceived notion of Google Zero, so you invest even less in SEO, and down the spiral goes until you’re dead in the water.

Your Google Zero prophecy has come true, because you’ve made it come true.

In the meantime, competing websites that continued to invest in SEO will happily scoop up the clicks you’ve abandoned.

There is literally no sign that Google is in danger of losing its position as the largest source of traffic to the web. There is no other channel rising to take Google’s place. Choosing to abandon Google is a potentially catastrophic strategic error.

Consider yourselves warned.

SPUR Coalition

Last week the SPUR (Standards for Publisher Usage Rights) Coalition was officially launched. Masterminded by David Buttle, this ‘NATO for News’ group aims to establish shared AI licencing standards and protect the interests of journalism businesses.

The founding members are the BBC, FT, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and Sky News - huge media brands with strong bargaining positions. Combined, the SPUR Coalition looks to form a powerful block that AI companies would do well to engage with.

More details on the SPUR Coalition website.

New Podcast Episode

Steve and I recorded another episode of our Beers & SEO with Barry & Steve podcast, this time featuring our very first guest - none other than Reach’s Nicola Agius!

The main topic of discussion was Google Discover, and we also cover the latest news and developments in the broader world of SEO.

Check out the podcast on your favourite platform via this link.

Miscellanea

Official Google Docs:

• Google’s February 2026 Discover Core Update

• Help your readers find your site through preferred sources in Google Search

• Added information to the Get on Discover page for site owners

• Clarified information about the default file size limits for Googlebot

Interesting Articles:

• Ad lobby seeks law to protect publishers from AI scraping - Axios

• Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries, study suggests - The Guardian

• Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge - The Register

• The Great Masquerade: How AI Agents Are Spoofing Their Way In - DataDome

• Never Ask an AI Tool How It Came Up with That Answer - Sparktoro

• Why publishers are building their own creator networks - Digiday

• ChatGPT, LLM referrals convert worse than Google Search - SEL

Latest in SEO:

• AI Search has a Spam Problem - DEJAN

• Are Citations in AI Search Affected by Google Organic Visibility Changes? - Lily Ray

• Will Google Allow Publishers To Claim Google Discover Profiles - SER

• Google Exploring Ways To Allow Sites To Opt Out Of AI Overviews & AI Mode - SER

• Best TikTok Publishing times, Al Jazeera, Google Discover, Sun Video & William Gibson - Publishing Strategies

Interviews with me:

• Are we freaking out about AI too much? - WTF is SEO

• The Biggest Mistakes News Publishers Make in SEO - SEO by Marta

• Barry Adams on SEO, AI and the future of news publishing - Storycue

That’s it for this one. As always, thanks for reading and subscribing, and I’ll see you at the next one.

Subscribe now

He and I did a webinar for Norkon together a while back, and we both enjoyed it so much that it sparked a conversation about starting a regular podcast.

Which is exactly what we did. We wanted to keep it informal and accessible, so we decided the format would be a casual conversation between two veterans of the SEO and publishing industries, recorded whilst enjoying a refreshing beer.

Hence the title we ended up with: Beers and SEO with Barry and Steve.

We recorded the first episode in early December, and in that inaugural podcast we introduced ourselves and focused on the big question in publishing today: Will AI destroy publishing?

The answer, it’ll surprise no one, is a resounding no. It served as the starting point for our discussion, and we covered a lot of additional ground - including the role of Google Discover, YouTube optimisation, SEO myths, keyword research, and some case studies and predictions.

The second episode, recorded early in January, was a logical follow-up. If AI isn’t going to destroy publishing, what should publishers do to survive in the age of AI?

In this wide-ranging episode we talked about the role SEO still plays, how AI accelerated an existing trend in search, more about Google Discover, email newsletters, video and journalism, social media for news sites, and how publishers can build trust and authority.

For future episodes we have plans to invite some guests with specialised knowledge and experience. We want to tackle topics like KPIs and measurement, paywalls and subscriptions, topic authority, managing SEO for high-volume publishing sites, and so much more.

You can listen to all our episodes and subscribe to our podcast on these platforms:

• YouTube

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

If you have any feedback or ideas for topics and guests, do let us know in the comments! And if you like the podcast, I’d appreciate a thumbs up or a 5-star review.

Paywall Masterclass with WTF is SEO?

I’m teaming up again with the amazing Jessie and Shelby from WTF is SEO? to deliver a masterclass on paywalls. We also managed to rope in none other than Harry Clarkson-Bennett from the Leadership in SEO substack!

This will be a 2-hour online masterclass delivered on March 4th, where we’ll dig into all aspects of paywalls - from technical setup to commercial strategies and tactical optimisation. Limited places available, so grab your seat now!

Miscellanea

The Google Search Console team have been very busy, with all kinds of great new features introduced in the performance reports.

Official Google Docs:

• Introducing Query groups in Search Console Insights

• Introducing the branded queries filter in Search Console

• Introducing social channels in Search Console

• Introducing weekly and monthly views in Search Console

• Adding context to your Search Console data with custom annotations

• Streamline your Search Console analysis with the new AI-powered configuration

• Supporting the web with new features and partnerships

Latest in SEO:

• New GoogleBot: Google Messages - SER

• State of AI Search Optimization 2026 - Growth Memo

• AIO Impact on Google CTR: September 2025 Update - Seer

• What’s on tap for news SEO in 2026? - WTF is SEO

• Google’s December 2025 Broad Core Update: Analysis and Findings - Glenn Gabe

• Times and Substack among few UK winners in December Google update - Press Gazette

• What we learned about AI, Discover and Shopping from Google during the Search Central Zurich 2025 - Aleyda Solis

• What Will Change in Google Discover in 2026? Everything That Was Said at Google Search Central Live in Zurich - Clara Soteras

• Why Google’s Spam Problem is Getting Worse - Leadership in SEO

Interesting Articles:

• A myth-busting quiz to get you set for 2026 - Nieman Lab

• Debunking The Myth That Search Is Dying - Graphite

• Publishers rethink SEO in the age of AI overviews - Digital Content Next

• Cloudflare Radar: 2025 Year in Review - Cloudflare

• Five US publishers sue Google over ‘deceptive and manipulative’ adtech practices - Press Gazette

• Google vs. publishers: What the EU probe means for SEO, AI answers, and content rights - SEL

• News Integrity in AI Assistants - EBU

• Millions shown fake news about the state pension by Google - The Telegraph

My next newsletter is right around the corner, titled ‘The Tactical Guide to Google Discover Optimisation’. Subscribe to get it directly in your email inbox!

Subscribe now

The fact that AI is just past its peak in the hype cycle isn’t helping us form any clarity. The bubble is about to burst, but things will not go back to ‘normal’ - whatever that normal may have been pre-AI.

There will be a new post-bubble status quo that will eventually materialise. I strongly believe publishing as a whole will end up in a healthier state, but also that some individual publishers will suffer - and may even cease to exist.

In this newsletter I’ll outline what I believe are several key survival strategies that online publishers can adopt to help them weather the storm and emerge stronger and more resilient.

1. Search Lives On

Despite the bleatings of a number of misguided LinkedIn influencers who I mercifully shall not name, there is no evidence that search as a channel is dying. Google is still by far the largest driver of traffic to websites, and news is no exception.

What we do need to realise is that ‘Peak Search’ has already happened, and the total number of clicks that Google sends to the web will not substantially grow.

Publishers that are what I call ‘SEO mature’, with strong SEO and audience growth tactics in place for many years, will not be able to grow their readership through search alone. For these publishers search traffic is - at best - levelling off.

That doesn’t mean search cannot be a growth channel. Many publishers are nowhere near ‘SEO mature’ and have plenty of scope for growth in search clicks. In fact, I daresay most of the publishers I work with have not yet maximised their search potential, and can achieve strong gains from improved editorial and technical SEO.

But search as a whole is now a flat channel. We cannot expect to see the same consistent increase in search clicks that have been foundational to many publishers’ growth strategies for the last two decades.

Search is now a zero-sum game. When you get a click, a competitor isn’t. The pie has ceased to grow, which means we have to fight harder for our slice. Good SEO is even more crucial. You cannot rely on Google’s own growth to get your share, you need to wrestle it out of the hands of your competitors.

AI is an Accelerant

While publishers are rightfully skeptical of Google’s claims about the impact of AI on traffic, the flattening of the search traffic curve began long before AI appeared on the scene.

There have been many warning signs that the endless growth of Google clicks wasn’t endless after all. Zero-click search was a concept years before ChatGPT launched.

But most publishers failed to heed these warnings and continued to rely on Google as their primary growth channel, taking no efforts to diversify their audience strategies.

AI didn’t cause the search curve to flatten, but it did serve as a bucket of gasoline on that particular fire. AI has accelerated zero-click, and sped up the rising discomfort many publishers were already experiencing.

Featured snippets and other intrusive search elements, fragmented online user behaviour, algorithm updates, audience fatigue, bad user experiences, and many more factors formed the foundation of zero-click. AI merely hastened the trend by offering a channel for users to engage with the web’s content without the friction imposed by visiting a website.

Maximising Search

Apparently realising its precarious position as the gateway to the web and direct responsibility for the health of the publishing ecosystem, Google is throwing us a few bones to help us build audience loyalty.

One of these is ‘Preferred sources’. This is a new feature in Top Stories on Google’s results that allows a user to set preferred news sources.

When a Top Stories box is shown on a Google search page, if the user’s preferred sources have a relevant article, Google will give that source a spot in Top Stories.

Setting a preferred source can be done by clicking the relevant icon at the top of a Top Stories box and searching for your preferred publication, or directly with a link:

https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=yourdomain.com

So with this link you will set SEOforGoogleNews.com as a preferred source in Top Stories:

https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=seoforgooglenews.com

You can encourage your readers to add your site as a preferred source with a call to action. Google even provides an image for this that you can add to your website:

This new feature does raise some concerns about filter bubbles and echo chambers. But that’s a station the Google train long since passed, especially with the fully personalised and filter-bubbled content feed that billions around the world engage with daily:

2. Discover is Growing

Where search is flattening, Discover is on the rise. Most publishers I work with see good numbers coming from the Discover feed. For many, Discover is growing to such an extent that it more than compensates for diminished search traffic.

Despite this, I’m not a fan of building an audience strategy around Discover. There are several reasons for this, some of which I’ve outlined in a piece on Press Gazette and others which are detailed by David Buttle (also on Press Gazette).

Summarising those objections here:

1. Discover strategies encourage bad habits; Clickbait, churnalism, sensationalism, and low information gain.

2. Discover traffic is volatile, unlikely to generate a consistent traffic profile, and highly susceptible to algorithm updates.

3. Discover is not a core service that Google offers, and they can kill it without any meaningful loss for them.

4. Reliance on Discover gives Google enormous power over publishers.

5. Discover lacks the regulatory scrutiny that search is subjected to.

Yet I cannot deny the reality that Discover is a huge source of traffic, and publishers need to optimise for it to some degree.

In addition to the known Discover optimisation strategies which I will cover in an upcoming newsletter, Google has also given us a new feature:

Follow Publishers in Discover

Similar to setting preferred sources in Top Stories, the new Follow feature in Discover allows publishers to encourage audience loyalty. With the follow feature, a user will see more content from followed publishers in their Discover feed.

A user can click on a publisher name in their Discover feed and end up on that publisher’s dedicated Discover page. Tapping the ‘Follow on Google’ button there will add the publisher to the user’s followed list, and ensure more articles from that publisher will be shown in the user’s Discover feed.

The follow feature is not yet rolled out globally. As I’m on an iPhone and in the UK, I haven’t yet been able to see it for myself. So here is a screenshot from the Discover page for Barry Schwartz’s Search Engine Roundtable:

I’ll be dedicating an upcoming newsletter to Discover optimisation strategies, and include what I’ll learn about the Follow feature there.

In the same announcement where this Follow feature was introduced, Google also said that Discover will start showing more social media content like YouTube videos, Instagram posts, and even X posts.

This brings me to the third strategy for publishers to embrace:

3. Multimedia Content

Online news hasn’t been consumed in written form only for many years. It should come as no surprise that your audience wants to engage with your news in many different formats on different platforms.

As Discover is now integrating social posts into its feed, this presents additional opportunities for publishers to create content in various formats and publish these on popular platforms.

So you should be doing YouTube videos, especially Shorts. And Instagram posts and videos. Though I cannot recommend you stay active on X - I personally have gotten up from that table, and you should too.

Podcasts are another obvious format that enjoys great popularity. News podcasts dominate the top rankings on most podcast platforms, and news publishers are especially well-placed to carve out audiences for themselves there.

Email newsletters are enjoying a resurgence in popularity (one that I have taken advantage of myself, as you can see), though I would argue that email has never really gone out of fashion. It just lost the spotlight for a while, but always kept on delivering for those that do it right.

It’s never too late to start experimenting with multimodal content. If you have a great piece of journalism, it doesn’t take much to turn that into a podcast. That podcast should be recorded with a camera, and voila you have a YouTube video. You can then turn that video a series of YouTube shorts, which can also populate your Instagram feed, etc.

The barrier to entry is low, and you won’t need a massive audience to make your multimodal adventures pay off.

At the upcoming NESS conference, a few sessions will dig into channel diversification. I’m especially looking forward to Steve Wilson-Beales’s session on cracking the YouTube algorithm.

However, none of the above is going to save your publishing site in the long term, if you don’t do the most important thing:

4. Become Unforgettable

This has been a bit of a mantra for me for a while now. I strongly believe that if your news website is interchangeable with others in your topical area, you are going to have a Very Bad Time in the next few years.

It’s a tough reality to face for many websites, and I see the ostrich approach all too often. Many publishers are incapable of being honest with themselves and seeing the truth of their commoditisation, clinging to some vague perception of uniqueness and value add.

But the fact is that probably about half of all news websites are perfectly forgettable. They don’t have anything that makes them sufficiently distinct. These publishers don’t have loyal audiences; they have a cohort of habitual readers that can just as easily switch to a competing website.

The reason many publishers don’t understand their own place in their market is because they don’t really understand their readers.

I’m going to quote my friend and former colleague Andi Jarvis here, who runs a successful marketing strategy consultancy:

Such a simple thing, yet so very rarely done. When is the last time you talked to your readers? Asked them what they liked about your website, and what they didn’t? Ask them what they wanted to see more of, and what other things you could be doing?

That’s an exercise you should regularly be engaging in. I can guarantee you, your own perception and your audience’s perception of your site will be very different indeed.

Andi has a questionnaire out at the moment that I recommend you take a few minutes to fill in, even if you currently don’t talk with your customers. And definitely check out his Strategy Sessions podcast.

When you talk to your audience and understand what they want from you, it allows you to make the right decisions for your publication’s long-term health. You'll know where your real value-add is, and whether or not that’s worth a subscription fee (and how much you can charge).

It enables you to find the most popular channels and platforms your audience uses, so you can post there too. It tells you which creators’ content they enjoy, so you can reach out to them for partnerships. (Sparktoro is a great audience research tool that can help with this.)

There will be so much you will learn from just talking to your audience that it’s hard to overstate its importance. I know ‘marketing’ is a dirty word for many publishers, but it genuinely is the critical ingredient.

Most importantly, it’ll give you the insights you need to really nail down your publication’s USP and deliver the kind of value to your visitors that transforms them from casual readers into a loyal audience.

That’s where the key to survival lies. A loyal audience immunises you from whatever the ketamine-addled Silicon Valley tech bros next dream up. It ensures your continued success, independent of platforms and algorithms.

And that’s something worth striving for.

What about AEO/GEO/LLMO?

You’ll have noticed I didn’t mention optimising for AI Search as a survival tactic. That’s because it’s not. LLMs are great at many things, but generating traffic for websites isn’t one of them.

For websites that have a transaction pipeline driven by search traffic, such as ecommerce or travel booking sites, optimising for LLMs has some added value. Visibility in LLM-generated responses can generate conversions for these sites.

However, for content delivery websites like news publishers there’s significantly less value in optimising for LLM visibility. Citations in LLM responses don’t lead to clicks in any meaningful way, so the traffic opportunity there is non-existent.

However, if you adopt the survival strategies I summarised above, ironically you’ll also do better in LLMs. As it stands, 99.9% of LLM optimisation aligns with proper SEO, and the last 0.1% falls under the remit of what we’d call ‘good marketing’, which is what becoming unforgettable is all about.

I know, those suits in board rooms want to be reassured that you got this AI Optimisation thing in hand. When you do SEO well, you will have. Don’t let AI hype get in the way of good business decisions.

Not coincidentally, several sessions at NESS 2025 will be dedicated to AI and its impact on publishers:

News and Editorial SEO Summit 2025

Less than two weeks to go, so this is your last chance to get your ticket to the fifth edition of our fully virtual online event dedicated to SEO for news publishers.

It’s another amazing lineup of twenty speakers and panellists, delivering no fewer than sixteen talks and panels across two days! If you can’t join live, a ticket gives you access to the instant replays of every session as well as video recordings made available afterwards.

When you use the code barry2025 at checkout, you get 20% off the ticket price. Grab yours while you can!

Miscellanea

Official Google Docs:

• August 2025 Spam Update

• AI Mode is now available in more languages and locations around the world

• How to select your preferred sources in Top Stories in Search

• Catch up with the creators and publishers you care about on Discover

• New guidance on JavaScript-based paywall considerations

Interesting Articles:

• Generative AI and news report 2025: How people think about AI’s role in journalism and society - Reuters Institute

• Americans have mixed feelings about AI summaries in search results - Pew Research

• Publisher traffic sources: Google steady but social and direct referrals are down -Press Gazette

• AI bots bombard publisher websites with ‘no meaningful value exchange’ - Press Gazette

• ChatGPT Referral Traffic Trends: B2B Traffic Slows in August - Siege Media

• Despite the hype, publishers aren’t prioritizing GEO - Digiday

• MIT study on AI profits rattles tech investors - Axios

• The Tech Industry Has a Dirty Secret: The More People Learn About AI, the Less They Trust It - Futurism

• Giving users choice with Cloudflare’s new Content Signals Policy - Cloudflare

• Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives - Cloudflare

• ChatGPT Is Using Google Search To Answer Your Questions - Tom’s Guide

• “AI is an attack from above on wages”: An interview with cognitive scientist Hagen Blix - Blood in the Machine

Latest in SEO:

• Ask a News SEO with Barry Adams and John Shehata - WTF is SEO

• The Future of SEO for News Publishers in 2025 - Clara Soteras

  • Also see Clara’s SEO Playbook for News Publishers

• LLM is a Presentation Layer in AI Search - Dejan

• ChatGPT Is Not Replacing Google—It’s Expanding Search - Semrush

• What Our AI Mode User Behavior Study Reveals about the Future of Search - Growth Memo

• Why Informational Content Still Matters in the AI Search Era - AWR

• Why Splitting SEO and GEO Functions Doesn’t Make Sense - Chris Green

• Stop Trying To Make GEO Happen - SEJ

• SEO “Chunk Optimization” is Overrated - Ahrefs

• A complete guide to HTTP caching - Jono Alderson

My Interviews and Appearances:

• Barry Adams: What Publishers Must Do To Survive (Video)

• The AI Search’s Impact on Publishers (Video)

• News SEO: Challenges, Revenue Models, and Unchanging Truths (Video)

• Barry Adams on Google, AI, and the Future of Publisher Traffic (Podcast)

• SEO Confidential: Interview with Barry Adams (Interview in Italian)

• Barry Adams: How Google’s AI Mode Is Reshaping News Publishing (Podcast)

That’s it for another edition. As always, thanks for reading and subscribing, and I’ll see you at the next one.

Subscribe now

But I thought I should finish my version anyway, as my focus is slightly different and perhaps a bit more practical than Jono’s. You should still definitely read Jono’s blog, it says all I want to say and more.

Semantic HTML

Let’s start with a quick overview of what semantic HTML is. As the language upon which the web is built, HTML is markup that surrounds text to provide it with structure.

The <p> tag around a block of content indicates that it is a paragraph of text. The <h1> tag around a sentence shows that it is the page’s main heading. The <ol> tag indicates the start of an ordered (usually numbered) list. The <img> tag indicates you’ll be loading an image onto the webpage. And so forth.

Semantic HTML was used to code every webpage. Content was surrounded by specific tags that indicated what each bit of content was meant for, and then CSS was applied to make it look good. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but it worked.

It also meant that you could look at the raw HTML source of a webpage and see what the page was trying to deliver, and how. The HTML signposted the structure and meaning of each bit of content on the page. You could see the purpose of the page just by looking at its code.

Then WYSIWYG editors and later JavaScript frameworks arrived on the scene, and HTML took a backseat. Instead of <p> and <table> we got endless nestings of <div> and <span> tags.

The end result is webpage HTML that lacks structure and has no meaning, until it is completely rendered in the browser and visually painted onto a screen. Only then will the user (and a machine system trying to emulate a user) understand what the page’s purpose is.

It’s why Google goes through the effort of rendering pages as part of its indexing process (even though it really doesn’t want to).

We know Google doesn’t usually have the time to render a news article before it needs to rank it in Top Stories and elsewhere. The raw HTML is therefore immensely important for news publishers. Good HTML allows Google to effortlessly extract your article content and rank your story where it deserves in Google’s ecosystem.

Semantic HTML is a key factor here. This is the reason why SEOs like me insist that an article’s headline is wrapped in the <h1> heading tag, and that this is the only instance of <h1> on an article page. The H1 headline indicates a webpage’s primary headline. It signposts where the article begins, so that Google can find the article content easily.

Which HTML tags are semantic?

Beyond the <h1> heading tag, there are many other semantic HTML elements you can implement that allow Google to more easily extract and index your article content. In no particular order, the elements you should be using are:

• Paragraphs: Don’t use <div> and <span> tags to format the article into paragraphs. There’s been a tag for that for as long as HTML has existed, and it’s the <p> tag. Use it.

• Subheadings: Use <h2>/<h3>/<h4> subheading tags to give your page structure. Use subheadings in an article to preface specific sections of content in your article. Use subheadings for the headers above concrete structural elements, such as recommended articles.

• Images: Always use the <img> tag if you want to show an image that you’d like Google to see as well. Google explicitly recommends this.

• Clickable Links: When linking to another page, either internal or external, use the <a> tag with an ‘href’ value containing the target URL. It’s the only kind of link that Google will definitely follow.

• Relational Links: The <link> tag allows you to create a relationship between the current URL and another URL. This can be a canonical page, a stylesheet, an alternative language version of the current page, etc.

• Lists: Bullet lists should use the <ul> tag, and numbered lists should use <ol> tag. You can make them look however you want with CSS, but do use the list tags as the foundation.

• Emphasis: When you want to highlight a specific word or phrase, there are semantic HTML tags you should use for that; <em> for italics, and <strong> for bold.

All the above tags, with the exception of <link>, are intended for the content of the webpage, providing structure and meaning to the text.

There are additional semantic HTML tags that are intended to provide structure and meaning to the code of the page. These tags allow Google to identify different elements on the page, such as the navigation vs a sidebar, and process them accordingly.

• The <head> and <body> tags exist to separate the page’s metadata (in the <head>) from the actual content (in the <body>). Every HTML page starts with those two.

• <header> can be used to wrap around the head section of the page, where the logo, navigation, and other stylistic elements sit.

• <nav> should be used for your site’s main navigation. Mega menus, hamburger menus, top navigation links, whatever form your navigation takes, you should wrap it in the <nav> tag.

• You can use <section> tags to divide your page into multiple sections. One section could be the article, another could be the comments below the article.

• <article> is the tag that shows where the page’s actual main article text begins (including the headline). This is a very valuable tag for news publishers.

• With <aside> you can indicate blocks of content like a sidebar of trending stories, recommended articles, or the latest news.

• <footer> is used for, you guessed it, the footer of the webpage.

These structural semantic tags help search engines understand the purpose and value of each section of HTML. It enables Google to rapidly index your content and process the different elements of your pages appropriately.

There are many more semantic HTML tags at your disposal, for various different purposes. Chances are there’s an HTML element for every imaginable use case. Rather than cram your code full of <div> tags to make something happen, first see if there’s a proper HTML element that does the trick.

How does it help AI?

We know that LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity crawl the open web for training data, as well as for specific user queries that require content from the web. What some of you may not know is that LLMs do not render JavaScript when they process webpages.

Google is the exception to the rule, as it has devoted a great deal of resources to rendering webpages as part of indexing. Because Google’s Gemini is the only LLM built on Google’s index, Gemini is the only LLM that uses content from fully rendered webpages.

So if you want to have any chance of showing up as a cited source in ChatGPT or Perplexity, you’d do well to ensure your complete page content is available in your raw unrendered HTML.

Using semantic HTML to structure your code and provide meaning also helps these LLMs easily identify your core content. It’s much simpler for ChatGPT to parse a few dozen semantic HTML tags rather than several hundred (or even thousand) nested <div> tags to find a webpage’s main content.

If and when the ‘agentic web’ comes to life (I’m skeptical), semantic HTML is likely a crucial aspect of success. With meaningless <div> and <span> tags, it’s much easier for an AI agent to misunderstand what actions it should perform.

When you use semantic HTML for things like buttons, links, and forms, the chances of an AI agent failing its task are much lower. The meaning inherent in proper HTML tags will tell the AI agent where to go and what to do.

What about Structured Data?

You may think that structured data has made semantic HTML obsolete. After all, with structured data you can provide machine systems with the necessary information about a page’s content and purpose in a simple machine-readable format.

This is true to an extent. However, structured data was never intended to replace semantic HTML. It serves an entirely different purpose.

Structured data has limitations that semantic HTML doesn’t have. Structured data won’t tell a machine which button adds a product to a cart, what subheading precedes a critical paragraph of text, and which links the reader should click on for more information.

By all means, use structured data to enrich your pages and help machines understand your content. But you should also use semantic HTML for the same reasons.

Used together, semantic HTML and structured data is an unbeatable combination.

Build websites, not web apps

I could go off on a 2500-word rant about why we should be building websites instead of web apps and how the appification of the web is anathema to the principles on which the world wide web was founded, but I’ll spare you that particular polemic.

Suffice to say that web apps for content-delivery websites (like news sites) are almost always inferior to plain old-fashioned websites. And websites are built, or should be, on HTML. Make use of all that HTML has to offer, and you’re avoiding 90% of the technical SEO pitfalls that web apps tend to faceplant themselves into.

News and Editorial SEO Summit 2025

The full speaker lineup and agenda for the 2025 News and Editorial SEO Summit is now complete! Take a look at the NewsSEO.io website for all the details, and if you don’t have your ticket yet you should grab it now.

Use the code barry2025 at checkout to get 20% off the ticket price.

Miscellanea

Despite the summer holidays, there’s no let-up in the stream of news and events in SEO and publishing. The fight between Cloudflare and LLMs is heating up, which brings me a lot of joy.

Official Google Docs:

• June 2025 Core Update

• Google Search: Introducing AI Mode in the UK

• Web Guide: An experimental AI-organized search results page

• AI Mode is now counting towards totals in Search Console

• Introducing the Google Trends API (alpha)

Latest in SEO:

• Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results - Pew Research

• Google’s June 2025 Update Analysis: What Just Happened? - SEJ

• June 2025 Core Update: Winners, Losers & Trends - Amsive

• Goodbye, Featured Snippets: How SERP Features Have Evolved in the AI Era - Ahrefs

• Major UK publishers have seen Google search visibility ‘drop by up to 80%’ since 2019 - Press Gazette

• How to Build a Brand (with SEO) in a Post AI World - Harry Clarkson-Bennett

• A publisher's playbook for YMYL and E.E.A.T - WTF is SEO?

• Google’s Index is the Gatekeeper to AI - Indexing Insights

• Danny Sullivan Steps Away From Google Search Liaison Role - SEJ

Interesting Articles:

• Cloudflare Just Changed How AI Crawlers Scrape the Internet-at-Large - Cloudflare

• Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives - Cloudflare

• Top trends from our latest look at the UK’s news habits - Ofcom

• Google Discover adds AI summaries, threatening publishers with further traffic declines - TechCrunch

• Google Seeks Licensing Talks With News Groups, Following AI Rivals - Bloomberg

• Google's AI Overviews hit by EU antitrust complaint from independent publishers - Reuters

• MythBusting Large Language Models - Joe Lochlann Smith

• I sat in on an AI training session at KPMG. It was almost like being back at journalism school. - Business Insider

• Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task - MIT

• Not So Fast: AI Coding Tools Can Actually Reduce Productivity - Second Thoughts

• The dangers of so-called AI experts believing their own hype - New Scientist

• Google Offerwall explained: Easy way for publishers to test pay-as-you-go and ad-gated access - Press Gazette

That’s it for another edition. Thanks for reading and subscribing, and I’ll see you at the next one!

Subscribe now

We set out to create a small online event for a specific niche within SEO, featuring the type of content that we felt was lacking from mainstream SEO conferences.

That very first ‘small online event’ turned into a 500+ attendee two-day live conference with some of the brightest minds in SEO and publishing presenting and attending.

Three more summits have taken place since then, each edition getting better and more in-depth, with more amazing speakers and superb talks, and hundreds of people attending online from all over the world.

We’re now preparing for the fifth edition of our online event dedicated to SEO and audience growth for news and publishing, which will take place on Tuesday 21 & Wednesday 22 October 2025.

The speaking roster is nearly complete, and so far we’ve confirmed the following speakers and panellists (in alphabetical order):

• Nicola Agius (Reach)

• James Carson (Agentic)

• Harry Clarkson-Bennett (Telegraph)

• Erin Hallstrom (Endeavor)

• Marie Haynes (MHC)

• Rachel Heseltine (Paramount)

• Edward Hyatt (Wall Street Journal)

• Kevin Indig (Growth Consultant)

• Dixon Jones (Waikay)

• Christine Liang (New York Times)

• Lily Ray (Amsive)

• Barry Schwartz (Rusty Brick)

• Maddie Shepherd (CBS)

• Marshall Simmonds (Define Media)

• Carly Steven (MailOnline)

• Jessie Willms (The Guardian)

With myself and John also giving a talk each, and a keynote from Michael King. And we’re not quite done yet, still a small number of speakers to be confirmed!

This year, the topics our speakers will cover include Google Discover, SEO for B2B publishers, paywalls and SEO, entity optimisation, technical SEO & LLMs, algorithm updates, SEO beyond the click, site reputation abuse & affiliate content, optimising for multimedia, and several sessions on AI and SEO - both in Google’s results and other AI platforms - and what it means for the future of search and publishing.

We’ll also have three panel sessions: An ‘Ask the SEOs' panel where all attendees can put forth their questions live to the speakers, a ‘Careers’ panel focused on the various and highly interesting career journeys of the panellists, and a ‘Future of SEO’ panel where we’ll look forward at short term and long term challenges coming our way.

Altogether NESS 2025 will feature 14 sessions across two days. Plus, a ticket also gives you permanent access to all the session recordings to watch back at your convenience. Incredible value for $299 USD, if you ask me.

Moreso because of our Early Bird offer, where you get 25% off this price when you use the ‘EarlyBird’ code at checkout.

This offer is only valid until the end of June, so you only have one week left to make use of this discount! Get your early bird ticket to the 2025 News and Editorial SEO Summit today on NewsSEO.io.

This new tab in Google’s results, currently only active in the US, enables users to get an AI-generated answer to their query. You can ask a detailed question in AI Mode, and Google will provide a summarised answer.

Google explains how it generates these answers in some recently published documentation.

The critical process is what Google calls a ‘query fan-out’ technique, where many related queries are performed in the background. The results from these related queries are collected, summarised, and integrated into the AI-generated response to provide more detail, accuracy, and usefulness.

Having played with AI Mode since its launch, I have to admit it’s pretty good. I get useful answers, often with detailed explanations that give me the information I am looking for. It also means I have less need to click through to cited source websites.

I have to admit that, in many cases, I find myself reluctant to click to a source webpage, even when I want additional information. It’s simpler to ask AI Mode a follow-up question rather than click to a webpage.

Much of the web has become quite challenging to navigate. Clicking to an unknown website for the first time means having to brave a potential gauntlet of cookie-consent forms, email signup popups, app install overlays, autoplay videos, and a barrage of intrusive ads.

The content you came to the page for is frequently hidden behind several barriers-to-entry that the average user will only persist with if they really want to read that content. And then in many cases the content isn't actually there, or is incomplete and not quite what the user was looking for.

AI Mode removes that friction. You get most of the content directly in the AI-generated answer. You can still click to a webpage, but often it's easier to simply ask the AI a more specific follow-up question. No need to brave unusable website experiences and risk incomplete content after all.

AI Mode & News

Contrary to AI Overviews, AI Mode will provide summaries for almost any query, including news-specific queries:

Playing with AI Mode, I’ve seen some answers to news-specific queries that don’t even cite news sources, but link only to Wikipedia. For contrast, the regular Google SERP for the same query features a rich Top Stories box with seven news stories.

With these types of results in AI Mode, the shelf-life of news is reduced even further. Where in search you can rely on a Top Stories news box to persist for a few days after a major news event, in AI Mode news sources can be rapidly replaced by Wikipedia links. This further reduces the traffic potential to news publishers.

There is some uncertainty about AI Mode’s traffic impact. I’ve seen examples of AI Mode answers that provide direct links to webpages in-line with the response, which could help drive clicks.

Google is certainly not done experimenting with AI Mode. We haven’t seen the final product yet, and because it’s an experimental feature that most users aren’t engaged with (see below) there’s not much data on CTR.

As an educated guess, the clickthrough rate from AI Mode answers to their cited sources is expected to be at least as low, and probably lower, as the CTR from AI Overviews. This means publishers could potentially see their traffic from Google search decline by 50% or more.

AI Mode User Adoption

The good news is that user adoption of AI Mode appears to be low. The latest data from Similarweb shows that after an initial growth, usage of the AI Mode tab on Google.com in the US has slightly dipped and now sits at just over 1%.

This makes it about half as popular as the News tab, which is not a particularly popular tab within Google’s search results to begin with. It could be that Google’s users are satisfied with AI Overviews and don’t need expanded answers in AI Mode, or that Google hasn’t given enough visual emphasis to AI Mode to drive a lot of usage.

I suspect that Google may try to make AI Mode more prominent, with perhaps allowing users to click from an AI Overview into AI Mode (the same way you can click from a Top Stories box to the News tab), or integrate it more prominently into their default SERP.

When user adoption of AI Mode increases, the impact will be keenly felt by publishers. Google’s CEO has reiterated their commitment to sending traffic to the web, but the reality appears to contradict that.

In some of their newest documentation about AI, Google strongly hints at diminished traffic and encourages publishers to “[c]onsider looking at various indicators of conversion on your site, be it sales, signups, a more engaged audience, or information lookups about your business.”.

AI Mode Survival Strategies

Broad adoption of AI Mode, whatever form that may take, can have several impactful consequences for web publishers.

Worst case scenario, most Google search traffic to websites will disappear. If AI Mode becomes the new default Google result, expect to see a collapse of clicks from search results to websites. Focusing heavily on optimising for visibility in AI answers will not save your traffic, as the CTR for cited sources is likely to be very low.

In my view, publishers have roughly three strategies for survival:

1. Google Discover

Google’s Discover feed may soften the blow somewhat, especially with the roll-out onto desktop Chrome browsers. Expanded presence of Discover on all devices with a Chrome browser gives more opportunities for publishers to be visible and drive traffic.

However, a reliance on Discover as a traffic source can encourage bad habits. Disregarding Discover’s inherent volatility, the unfortunate truth is that clickbait headlines and cheap churnalism does well in the Discover feed. Reducing reliance on search in favour of Discover is not a strategy that lends itself well to quality journalism.

There’s a real risk that, in order to survive a search apocalypse, publishers will chase after Discover clicks at any cost. I doubt this will result in a victory for content quality.

2. Traffic & Revenue Diversification

Publishers need to grow traffic and income from more channels than just search. Due to Google’s enormous monopoly in search, diversified traffic acquisition has been a challenge. Google is the gatekeeper of most of the web’s traffic, so of course we’ve been focused on maximising that channel.

With the risk of a greatly diminished traffic potential from Google search, other channels need to pick up the slack. We already mentioned Discover and its risks, but there are more opportunities for publishing brands to drive readers and growth.

Paywalls seem inevitable for many publishers. While I’m a fan of freemium models, publishers will have to decide for themselves what kind of subscription model they want to implement. A key consideration is whether your output is objectively worth paying for. This is a question few publishers can honestly answer, so unbiased external opinions will be required to make the right business decision.

Podcasts have become a cornerstone of many publisher’s audience strategies, and for good reason. They’re easy to produce and you don’t need that many subscribers to make a podcast economically feasible.

Another content format that can drive meaningful growth is video, especially short form video that has multiplatform potential (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Discover).

Email newsletters are a popular channel, and I suspect this will only grow. The way many journalists have managed to grow loyal audiences on Substack is testament to this channel’s potential.

And while social media hasn’t been a key traffic driver for many years, it can still send significant visitor numbers. Don’t sleep on those Facebook open graph headlines (also valuable for Discover).

3. Direct Brand Visits

The third strategy, and probably the most important one, is to build a strong publishing brand that is actively sought out by your audience.

No matter the features that Google or any other tech intermediary rolls out, when someone wants to visit your website they will come to you directly. Not even Google’s AI Mode would prevent you from visiting a site you specifically ask for.

Brand strength translates into audience loyalty. A recognisable publisher will find it easier to convince its readers to install their dedicated app, subscribe to their newsletters, watch their videos, and listen to their podcasts.

A strong brand presence on the web is also, ironically, a cornerstone of AI visibility optimisation. LLMs are after all regurgitators of the web’s content, so if your brand is mentioned frequently on the web (i.e. in LLMs’ training data) you are more likely to be cited as a source in LLM-generated answers.

Exactly how to build a strong online publishing brand is the real question. Without going into specifics, I’ll repeat what I’ve said many times before: You need to have something that people are willing to actively seek out.

If you’re just another publisher writing the same news that others are also writing, without anything that makes you unique and worthwhile, you’re going to have a very bad time. The worst thing you can be as a publisher is forgettable.

There is a risk here too. In an effort to cater to a specific target segment, a publisher could fall victim to ‘audience capture’: Feeding your audience what they want to hear rather than what’s true. We already see many examples of this, to the detriment of factual journalism.

It’s a dangerous pitfall that even the biggest news brands find difficult to navigate.

Optimising for AI

In my previous newsletter I wrote a bit about how to optimise for AI Overviews. I’ll expand on this in future newsletters with more tips, both technical and editorial, for optimising for AI visibility.

Miscellanea

Official Google Docs:

• AI features and your website

• Google Search's guidance on using generative AI content on your website

• Top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google's AI experiences on Search

• Revamping our SafeSearch documentation

Latest in SEO:

• Reactions and Responses to AI Mode - WTF is SEO?

• Google I/O 2025: Announcements, Takeaways & Impacts on SEO - Amsive

• Seriously, please stop with the new acronyms. It’s still SEO: Search Everywhere Optimization. - Sparktoro

• SEO still matters for AI Search engines - Ziptie

• Google AI Mode’s Query Fan-Out Technique: What is it and How Does it Mean for SEO? - Aleyda Solis

• How to measure topical authority [in 2025] - Growth Memo

• How Google’s AI Overviews Are Impacting News Visibility in Search - Newzdash

• Fresh Doc Dump: PageRank, Navboost, and RankEmbed: DOJ Papers Outline Google’s Stack - SEW

• 5 questions about backlinks - WTF is SEO?

Interesting Articles:

• How Google forced publishers to accept AI scraping as price of appearing in search - Press Gazette

• Anthropic CEO Admits We Have No Idea How AI Works - Futurism

• Google’s chief emissary to the news business is stepping down - Nieman Lab

• The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity - Apple ML Research

• AI doesn't know 'no' – and that's a huge problem for medical bots - New Scientist

• Tech prophet Mary Meeker just dropped a massive report on AI trends - ZDNET

That’s it for another edition. Thanks for reading and subscribing, and I’ll see you at the next one!

Subscribe now

AI Overviews in 2025

Almost a year on from Google’s announcement of AI Overviews (previously in beta as the Search Generative Experience) we now have a pretty solid grasp of its impact on search and the wider web.

AI Overviews are now active in over 100 countries globally. For many informational queries, users will see an AI-generated snippet at the top of a Google search, with the option to expand the snippet for more detail.

A typical AI Overview will cite sources for the information it provides, with on average around 6 sources being cited. The AI Overview will provide anchor links for each of its claims, which then shows one or more links to webpages that purportedly contain the information the AI Overview is citing.

The percentage of Google searches that show an AI Overview is a point of contention. It appears to vary from industry to industry, with some being overwhelmed by AI Overviews. Data from BrightEdge shows that 76% of Google queries in the entertainment category will show an AI Overview.

Looking at search query data in aggregate, Sistrix says that in the UK the prevalence of AI Overviews is now around 18%, which is a sharp increase compared to the previous average of 4%.

That means that currently nearly one in five of all Google queries in the UK will show an AI Overview. That percentage is likely to rise more as Google’s confidence in AI Overviews increases. Other studies show similar percentages and strong growth of AIOs in numerous verticals.

The impact on traffic is meaningful. The latest data from Ahrefs indicates that a top ranked organic page will on average see a 34.5% loss of clickthrough rate if an AI Overview is shown above the organic results. This mirrors other studies, for example this one from Seer Interactive, that show similar declines in clickthrough rate when an AI Overview is shown.

Despite Google’s earlier claims, it’s now overwhelmingly clear that AI Overviews drive fewer clicks to webpages, even when a page is a cited source in the AI answer.

Nonetheless, there is some good news. The loss of clicks is a least partially mitigated by strong YoY growth in Google queries. Numbers collected by Datos and visualised by Sparktoro show that there was a 21% rise in Google queries in 2024 compared to 2023.

The theory is that extensive usage of LLMs like ChatGPT and Copilot drives increased Google usage. The likely causation is users wanting to verify the generative AI output with actual trusted sources, turning to Google to find those sources.

The second bit of good news is that news-focused publishers have less to fear from AI Overviews. With very few exceptions, a Google search that contains a Top Stories carousel will not have an AI Overview. Back in 2024, Google’s Liz Reid said that they “aim to not show AI Overviews for hard news topics, where freshness and factuality are important”. So far that has proven true.

Publishers that are heavily dependent on Top Stories news boxes on Google for their search traffic are not experiencing significant traffic losses… yet.

Optimising for AI Overviews

When engaging with AI Overviews, expanding the answers and clicking on the cited sources, you’ll quickly find commonalities among many of the webpages that Google will link to in its AIOs.

More often than not, these webpages will be structured in a certain way. The content will be divided - ‘chunked’ if you will - into concrete sections, each answering a specific aspect of the broader query.

For example, if it’s a webpage about tooth ache after an extraction, the page will have different sections on likely causes of tooth aches, how to manage the pain, when to seek medical advice, etc. Each of these sub-questions are highly relevant to the higher-level question around tooth ache, with each subquestion serving as the focus of a section of content on the webpage.

When Google then looks for a webpage to support a claim made in AI Overview, such a webpage is a logical source to cite.

If you want to increase the chances of your content being used as a cited source in Google’s AI Overviews, implementing such a structure on your informational pages is the primary tactic. Chunk your content into concrete sections, each with its own topical focus relating to the overarching topic you’re covering. Ensure every section has a strong subheading that signposts what the section is about.

Google’s AI Overviews use a grounding RAG process to decrease the likelihood of hallucinations. Structuring your content in a logical way, with distinct topical sections on your pages, helps Google understand that your webpage is a viable candidate for citations in AI Overviews.

If this content chunking/segmentation tactic sounds familiar, you’re right. It’s been a staple of SEO for many years. Content segmentation with distinct topical focus per segment is also a key tactic when optimising for featured snippets and passage indexing.

ChatGPT et al

Google is not the only AI player on the market, though arguably they’re the biggest by virtue of their global search dominance. Nonetheless, some industry watchers predict ChatGPT or another AI player like Perplexity might become a threat to Google.

So far, we’re not seeing a radical shift in user behaviour. Yes, ChatGPT is growing, but not at a rate that would alarm Google. Plus, most ChatGPT queries aren’t replacing classic Google searches.

The data published so far suggests that only around 30% of prompts on ChatGPT would be ‘search equivalent’, i.e. a query that the user would have previously relied on Google for.

If we take OpenAI’s own numbers as gospel, with 1 billion prompts per day, we end up with 300 million daily search-equivalent prompts on ChatGPT. That sounds a lot, until you realise that Google handles 14 billion searches per day. And that number is also growing.

Independent traffic analysis sources are less optimistic about ChatGPT’s numbers, with some data suggestion that this AI platform handles only around 37.5 million daily search-equivalent prompts. Now that’s a 2024 number, so likely to be higher now, but still way off OpenAI’s own numbers. ChatGPT hasn’t 10xed in the last six months.

A New SEO?

Optimising for ChatGPT or any of the other LLM-based chatbots aligns with optimising for Google’s AI Overviews. This is unsurprising, as they’re all founded on the same technology. The biggest difference is that ChatGPT relies on Bing search for its RAG/grounding process.

Classic SEO has three main pillars:

1. Technical SEO is optimising for crawling and indexing

2. On-page SEO is optimising for relevancy and usefulness

3. Off-page SEO is optimising for authority and ranking

In the new LLM paradigm, these very same principles apply:

• Technical: We need to ensure LLMs can crawl our sites and extract our content.

• On-page: Content needs to be useful, accurate, and relevant to users’ prompts.

• Off-page: To be a cited source, your brand needs to be a frequently mentioned authority on the topic

While there are some differences in emphasis, the same principles apply. For example, in classic SEO links are a primary source of authority, whereas in LLMs an unlinked brand mention ticks that box. But unlinked brand mentions have always had SEO value!

LLMs are another search surface to optimise for. Just like maps, news, images, videos, etc., LLMs are another arrow in the SEO industry’s quiver.

It’s why I am so resistant to any attempts at rebranding. GEO, AEO, LLMO, AIEIO, whatever you want to call it - it’s still just SEO.

I would challenge any GEO/AEO/WTFEO advocate to name me one foundational strategy that only applies to optimising for LLMs and has no relation to classic SEO in any way. If you know of such a strategy, let me know in the comments and there’s a chance you’ll have me eat my words.

AI Mode

While AI Overviews are painful but not catastrophic for websites’ traffic from Google search, there is a bigger threat on the horizon: AI Mode.

Currently in beta for users in the USA, Google’s AI Mode replaces the search result with a completely AI generated page of answers.

Similar to AI Overviews, the AI Mode will cite sources and even link directly to webpages from within the generated answers. But, as we’ve seen with AIOs, users are much less likely to click on these links compared to regular search results.

Moreover, AI Mode doesn’t appear to exclude news. I’ve seen screenshots where a user asked Google’s AI Mode to give the latest news on a topic, and it generated a summary. Yes, there were links to cited news articles, but these simply not receive anywhere near the same level of clicks as a Top Stories box.

While it’s in beta at the moment, I fully expect AI Mode to become a core Google feature in the near future. It may become an alternative tab for users to click on, as is currently the case with News, Images, Videos, etc.

But the popularity of AI generated answers could mean Google chooses AI Mode as the default search result. The classic ‘ten blue links’ could then be relegated to one of the alternative tabs at the top of the page, like the ‘Web’ tab.

If that happens, Google has truly broken its social contract with the web. Due to the radically lower traffic numbers emerging from AI generated answers, a search engine that provides such answers by default is not going to serve as a strong source of traffic for the webpages that provide it with those answers.

The impact on the free and open web, where most websites depend on traffic to survive, and Google serves as the monopolistic gatekeeper of most traffic, would be radical.

It would also, beyond a shadow of a doubt, make Google a publisher. As a publisher, Google would have to take responsibility for the content produced by its AI.

Which brings me to…

Hallucinations

Since the introduction of SGE, then AIO, and now AI Mode, people have been trying to poke holes in the answers Google’s AI provides. This has proven to be frighteningly easy.

AI Overviews are prone to what the AI industry calls ‘hallucinations’. Basically, this is when the AI makes something up that’s not actually true. I think calling that a ‘hallucination’ is too kind a phrase.

You could call it ‘lying’ instead, but that would imply that the AI knows it’s being inaccurate. But these AIs don’t know anything - they’re LLMs, probabilistic word predictors with limited reasoning capabilities - so you can’t call it lying either.

Bullshitting is probably the most accurate term to use. The AI just makes stuff up and confidently presents it to the user, without an ounce of awareness of its accuracy.

With the best effort in the world, AI companies cannot prevent their machines from spewing forth bullshit. In fact, with every new iteration of their LLMs the likelihood of bullshitting appears to increase.

Social media is rife with examples of extremely wrong answers generated by Google’s AI Overviews. Lily Ray regularly shares examples, some of which are actively dangerous if the user were to uncritically accept that answer.

Some of the more informed tech media regularly point out the problems with bullshitting in AI, especially in AI Overviews. But I don’t think enough emphasis is being placed on this rather foundational flaw in AI technology.

Truth vs Convenience

At the 2025 WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress earlier this week, AI was a common theme for many sessions across the event’s three days. Yet there was precious little mention of hallucinations inherent in LLMs. The media seemed more obsessed with how AI could help them rather than how AI would hurt them.

More importantly, I don’t feel the media as a whole takes the existential threat of AI seriously. And by ‘existential threat’ I don’t mean those dumb predictions about sentient machines causing an apocalypse.

The real threat is how AI is replacing truth with convenience.

AI-generated content is often wrong. It’s inherent in the LLM technology underpinning all the current AI chatbots. Bullshitting is in their very nature.

And a knowledgeable, prepared user can mitigate this problem, by verifying the AI generated output. But, as we see with the decreased CTR from AI Overviews, many users won’t verify. They’ll take the generated answer at face value.

The convenience of an instant answer has started to replace the difficulty of finding out what’s actually true. That is something that journalists especially should care very deeply about. At its core, journalism is about truth.

Why are journalists so unphased by technologies that are actively destroying truth? In politics, newspapers are often front and centre in the fight against authoritarianism and repressive regimes. Yet when faced with a repressive technology like AI, the default reaction seems to be passive acceptance.

Isn’t it the media’s role to expose truth to the public? If so, you should be having front-page spreads about the dangers of AI-generated bullshit (call them ‘hallucinations’ if you want to avoid profanity) and educate your readers on the risks inherent in depending on AI for any factual information.

Media has always helped shape society. Here is an opportunity to help shape how the world adopts AI, and where AI is actually appropriate and useful - and, more importantly, where it’s not. Yet, with few exceptions, most of the non-tech media is eerily silent, just quietly letting this informational apocalypse happen.

I would strongly urge you to change your passive acceptance of AI into active engagement with its dangers. And soon, before truth has been irrevocably replaced by convenience.

Miscellanea

Official Google Docs:

• Update on country-level top domains

• Google Clarifies Googlebot-News Crawler Documentation

• Adding AI Mode to the robots meta tag documentation

Interesting Articles:

• Most AI spending driven by FOMO, not ROI, CEOs tell IBM - The Register

• Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, economists claim - The Register

• How to Check Whether AI Assistants Are Distorting Your News Stories - Generative AI in the Newsroom

• International Journalism Festival 2025: what we learnt in Perugia about the future of news - Reuters Institute

• Five takeaways from the 2025 International Journalism Festival in Perugia - Thomson Reuters Foundation

• OpenAI content boss on Google ‘ten blue links’ and arrival of ChatGPT search - Press Gazette

• Trapping misbehaving bots in an AI Labyrinth - Cloudflare

• Bot farms invade social media to hijack popular sentiment - Fast Company

Latest in SEO:

• 5 Questions about Backlinks - WTF is SEO?

• New Study: The 130 Day Indexing Rule - Indexing Insight

• Why updates to Google's Page Quality Rater Guidelines matter for Publishers - Leadership in SEO

• 5 AI Insights from Google Search Central Live in April 2025 - Aleyda Solis

• AI Overviews Glitch May Hint at Google’s Algorithm - SEJ

As always, thanks for reading and subscribing. See you at the next one!

Subscribe now

Since the start of the generative AI hype cycle, much of the discourse has been about how GenAI might replace and/or de-incentivise traditional (human-written) publishing. Those are valid and necessary discussions to have.

Here, I want to add my own two cents these discussions by outlining what I believe GenAI is doing to the quality of content that’s available to readers on the web.

The Content Quality Bell Curve

Before GenAI, the quality of all content available to read for free on the web - every article, review, blog post, explainer, opinion piece, and so on - could be mapped to a standard distribution bell curve.

Pre-GenAI, most of the terrible content on the web was automated spun content, easily identifiable as machine-generated and intended mainly to game search engines. While the number of terrible content pieces was high, most of it was never meant to be read by humans, so its impact on the online information ecosystem was extremely limited.

We can say that the majority of content meant for human consumption would’ve fit in the middle of the bell curve; mediocre content, often produced by low-paid freelancers, with little to no genuine insight or information gain.

Content beyond the mediocre mountain of the bell curve - the good, great, awesome stuff - sits on the right half of the bell curve. Mostly free to read, relatively easy to find, and usually published on high-authority websites.

Generative AI is dramatically changing this distribution. The widespread availability of large language models has enabled the industrial-scale creation of thoroughly mediocre content.

Mediocrity Is Built-In

Mediocrity is inherent in the nature of LLMs. Their training data is the entire corpus of available content on the web; all the terrible, the mediocre, and the awesome content out there and everything in between. The LLMs can’t determine quality and selectively ingest content; they’ll absorb everything on offer, regardless of its merit.

There is probably some measure of training data selection at work; Google doesn’t index all content, the Common Crawl corpus is somewhat moderated, and I imagine (and hope) AI engineers will have some guardrails in place to prevent their LLMs from being trained on pure gibberish.

What we end up with is a set of LLMs that are trained on everything without a qualitative measure of anything.

(This is a bit of a simplification; LLMs do use some qualitative training data that likely skews their models a bit. Nonetheless, due to the necessity of scale, the vast majority of their training data will be quantitative and lacking any qualitative qualifiers.)

This means that the output generated by LLMs is, by definition, mediocre. You can’t ask a GenAI system to create ‘high quality content’ because the system quite literally doesn’t know what ‘high quality’ is.

I’m sure some AI ‘prompt engineers’ can find specific prompts that result in a simulacrum of quality, but that’s exactly what it is. LLMs don’t know anything. They’re highly advanced word predictors, without any semantic understanding of what they regurgitate.

GenAI Content Changes The Curve

This leads back to the concept of information gain. Because LLMs are trained on the available knowledge provided to them, they can’t come up with anything new. They can’t add any new insight or knowledge, because they don’t have any insight or knowledge.

Without branching off into a philosophical tangent about what it means to have knowledge, you can easily see this for yourself when you ask an LLM to create content for you. You get a perfectly digestible but always intensely mediocre product.

The widespread adoption of LLMs by (lazy) content creators on the web means that the content quality bell curve is dramatically shifting.

Bad content is being replaced wholesale by mediocre GenAI content. The ‘mediocre content’ bulge of the bell curve grows and swallows most of the ‘terrible content’ left side of the curve.

We end up with a web where the vast majority of available content is average. Much of it is created with GenAI, sitting alongside mediocre human-produced content.

The effects of this change are subtle, but noticeable.

Mediocrity Is The New Norm

Amidst this flood of mediocrity, publishers will have to work harder to stand out. Pre-GenAI, a publisher could survive just fine sitting in the middle of the bell curve, or even just to its left. The mediocre middle was big but still stood out from bad content. People would still see it as worthwhile to consume.

That is no longer the case. Mediocrity is the new norm. It’s not enough to merely be ‘good enough’. You need to be on the right edge of the bell curve to have any hope of getting people’s attention. The further right on the curve you are - the better your content, the stronger your information gain - the more chance you have of surviving and thriving.

But being awesome is hard. Moreover, it’s expensive. New knowledge doesn’t spring into being on its own (again, philosophers, hush for a second and let me make my point). It takes work and effort to uncover and report new information.

This shift in content quality is happening at the same time where the web’s revenue potential is the lowest it’s ever been. Thanks to monopolising behaviours from the tech giants, it’s harder than ever to make money from publicly available content on the web. And now, thanks to LLMs, it’s harder than ever to create content that gets people’s attention.

GenAI is in the process of shifting the quality distribution of online content. Publishers need to be aware of this, and ensure they’re focusing on the right side of the bell curve.

Being a mediocre, forgettable publication is a death sentence. You need to stand out and produce content worth consuming, worth subscribing to, and worth paying for. Anything less than that, and you will find yourself drowning in an ocean of GenAI mediocrity.

Miscellaneous

Here are some of the latest Google docs, interesting articles, and newest SEO insights from the last few weeks.

Official Google Docs:

• Google News transitions to automatically-generated publication pages

• Simplifying the visible URL element on mobile search results

• Robots Refresher: introducing a new series

Latest in SEO:

• Google Publisher Center Changes: Automatically Generated Publication Pages - SER

• The impact of AI Overviews on SEO; analysis of 19 studies - Growth Memo

• 2025 SEO Benchmarking Report - Similarweb

• Branded search for news SEO - WTF is SEO?

• Controlling Your Brand Position Online With SEO - SEJ

• The Disconnected Entity Hypothesis and Google Spam Updates - Shaun Anderson

Interesting Articles:

• OpenAI Admits That Its New Model Still Hallucinates More Than a Third of the Time - Futurism

• ChatGPT referrals to top publishers up eight times in six months but still negligible - Press Gazette

• Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared” - 404 Media

• There Is No AI Revolution - Ed Zitron

• MAKE IT FAIR: UK publishers unite against government's AI copyright madness - Content Aware

• The Great Media Reset: AI, Consumer Revenue, and the Future of Publishing - Matt Karolian

• US immigration is creating a mirage of mass deportations on Google search - The Guardian

Thanks for reading and subscribing, and I’ll see you at the next one!

In this newsletter I want to look at the key elements of an article’s search optimisation that make a genuine difference. Moreover, I will look at these elements in order of importance, highlighting what has the biggest impact on an article’s performance in Google’s news elements.

Keep in mind that the ranking elements I outline below are specific for news stories in Google’s news-specific ecosystem: Top Stories carousels, the Discover feed, Google News, and the News tab.

I will only look at the editorial aspects of an article. Site-wide authority factors are arguably more important for Google than an individual article’s optimisation, and I’ll dig into that in an upcoming newsletter Harry Clarkson-Bennett digs into those in his excellent piece here. I’ll also ignore technical SEO considerations for articles, as I’ve previously covered many of them.

1. Article Headline

The first and single most important ranking factor for an article in Google’s news ecosystem is its headline. Especially in Top Stories and the News tab, the topics contained in an article’s headline are used by Google to determine the article’s focus and what search terms it should rank for.

Simply put, the keywords you put in the headline are the keywords the article is most likely to rank for. If you write an article about the Superbowl, it really helps to have ‘Superbowl’ in your headline.

While article headlines can be quite long - up to 110 characters, including spaces - it’s beneficial to put your article’s keywords early in the headline. More weight is given to keywords that are part of the headline’s first 8 words. Craft your headline accordingly.

Sometimes you can use shortened phrases for a topic, for example ‘Trump’ rather than ‘Donald Trump’. Google will nearly always correctly understand the topic, as it also takes clues from other words in the headline and the rest of the article.

When you’re not entirely sure if Google will understand a keyword, just search it on Google and see what shows up. If the search result is clear and unambiguous, Google obviously has a good understanding of what that keyword means.

However, if the search result is a mixture of different interpretations of the keyword, you may need to help Google along a bit.

My favourite example of this is the keyword ‘Hamilton’. Depending on when and where you search for ‘Hamilton’ you’ll either get a search result focused on the Hamilton musical or the F1 driver Lewis Hamilton.

In such cases, it might be better to expand the headline to include the full topic (‘Hamilton musical’ or ‘Lewis Hamilton’, depending on what you’re writing about)

An article can actually have up to five different SEO-relevant headlines. If you have to pick just one to optimise, the main headline that’s visible for readers is most important.

2. Freshness

After the headline, the ranking factor Google cares most about is how fresh the article is. Google has a very strong preference for newer stories, especially in Top Stories boxes and carousels.

On many levels this makes perfect sense. A newer article on a developing news story is more likely to be up to date and contain the latest information. However, this also means that publishers that are first to break a story often don’t get the visibility they perhaps deserve in Google’s results.

I’ve written before about how breaking news isn’t always rewarded by Google. If you want to ‘own’ a story in Google, especially in Top Stories, it pays to do multiple stories on a news event or take a bit more time to prep and expand your story before publishing.

There are cheats for manipulating freshness signals (for example by changing an article’s URL), but I generally don’t recommend these unless absolutely necessary. Sooner or later, overuse of cheats will backfire when Google decides to alter its algorithms and punish websites that have been taking too many liberties.

3. Featured Image

In almost every context where a news story is shown in a Google list - be that a Top Stories box, the News Tab, the Google News vertical, or the Discover feed - it is accompanied by an image.

An article’s featured image isn’t a direct ranking factor. There are plenty of theories about Google’s image recognition capabilities, but generally we can assume Google doesn’t take the time to do proper image analysis for news articles. It’s too hard and time-consuming.

Article images aren’t a direct ranking factor. Yet they have a massive impact on a hugely important direct ranking factor: Click-through rate (CTR).

Google constantly measures where its users click, and various other click-related signals (click length, click quality, etc.). In news-specific results, especially Top Stories, this click data is used to tweak the articles shown with regular intervals.

As CTR is determined by a combination of headline, news brand, time stamp, and image, it’s worth putting effort into selecting the right image to accompany your story. As a rule, people will click on people, so an image of a person or group of people tends to be a good starting point.

Read more about optimising images for Google News in a previous newsletter.

4. Prominence

In Google’s own documentation on ranking in Google News, one of the factors listed is ‘prominence’. What does this mean?

Prominence is a factor derived from how prominently the article is displayed on the publisher’s website. If the article is top of the homepage and on important section pages, it’ll have a high prominence. This will help its ranking in Google’s news ecosystem.

If, on the other hand, the article is featured very low down where few users will go, is not featured on the homepage and/or it’ll take several clicks from the homepage to reach the piece, then it’ll have low prominence signals. This is likely to have a negative impact on the article’s ability to perform in Google.

The way Google measures prominence is, I suspect, in large part a measure of link value. A website’s homepage is almost always its most valuable page in terms of link value, and a highly visible placement on the homepage means the article will receive a lot of link value from that homepage.

Whereas if the article is several layers of clicks away from the homepage, and/or has a placement where users are not as likely to scroll to and click, then it’ll receive less link value.

This theory is strengthened by data discovered in the Google content API warehouse leak, which featured many link-based attributes that fit such a model.

To give an article the best chance of maximising its Google potential, prominent placement on the homepage and section page(s) is key.

5. Intro/Summary/Subhead/Dek

An often overlooked aspect of an article’s optimisation is the intro (or summary, or subhead, or dek, or whatever you choose to call it). The intro is the sentence right after the headline and before the article’s main text. This intro is usually marked up differently from regular copy, almost like a smaller second headline.

Intros help set the context for the rest of the article and often serve as a brief summary of the article’s main content.

In terms of SEO, the intro is an opportunity to add additional keywords and topics that may not have fitted into the article’s main headline. By including more keywords in the intro, you can broaden the scope of the article’s potential rankings and its visibility in the Discover feed.

Rather than using meaningless <span> or <div> HTML tags, marking up the intro with semantic HTML gives it extra emphasis. Use a <h2> heading tag or a <strong> tag helps Google to understand it should pay a bit more attention to the intro text.

6. Article Copy & Structure

The actual main body text of the article isn’t as important as many might assume. Google is notoriously bad at understanding content, so I generally advise publishers not to overthink the article text for SEO. Let the journalism speak for itself.

One thing that is worth keeping in mind is that Google emulates understanding of text through vector embeddings.

In practice this means that it helps to use words and phrases that provide the right context, like ‘Jaguar’ and ‘miles per hour’, so Google understands that the article’s focus is luxury cars and not feline jungle dwellers.

Using subheaders like <h2> and <h3> to segment your text can also help, especially if you phrase the subheadings as questions. Google will realise your text probably answers that question, so your article may be shown as an answer to that question when someone asks it in Google.

7. Internal Linking

While links contained in an article aren’t direct ranking factors, consistent internal linking to topic pages does help to improve the site’s overall topic authority signals.

This is one area where generative AI can actually help. LLMs are language models, and internal linking to topic pages is a language-based tactic. There are quite a few AI systems that automate internal linking using LLMs.

If you don’t want to manually add links to your articles you can rely on these AI systems to help you along the way with a very high degree of accuracy.

Much More To It

These seven basic aspects of optimising an article may already seem like a lot of work, but it really just scratches the surface. There’s a lot more you can do to optimise your visibility in Google’s news-specific surfaces. However, this can quickly degrade into great effort for minimal gains.

Consistently doing the basics right will get you most of the way there. The key word there is ‘consistently’. Success in SEO is not difficult, but it is hard work.

Upcoming Events

I’ve got a few events coming up in the next while, I might see some of you there!

19/20 February: WAN-IFRA Bangalore AI Forum - I’m delivering a talk (via Zoom) about the impact of AI on search and SEO.

13 March: Friends of Search, Amsterdam, NL - I will be moderating the main SEO stage.

27 March: SearchIRL, Dublin, IE - An informal meetup of SEOs in Ireland, and I’ll be there to talk tech SEO.

10/11 April: BrightonSEO, Brighton, UK - Just attending and networking.

5/6 May: WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress, Krakow, PL - I’ll be talking about SEO for publishers in 2025 and beyond.

15 May: Hive MCR, Manchester, UK - I’m part of a panel discussion on technical SEO.

Miscellanea

Here are some of the latest Google documentations, interesting articles from the last while, and cool stuff from the world of SEO.

Official Google Docs:

• Updating our site reputation abuse policy

• Crawling December: The how and why of Googlebot crawling

• Crawling December: HTTP caching

• Crawling December: Faceted navigation

• Crawling December: CDNs and crawling

• An improved way to view your recent performance data in Search Console

Latest in SEO:

• Predictions for news SEO in 2025, part 1 - WTF is SEO?

• Predictions for news SEO in 2025, part 2 - WTF is SEO?

• 2025 News SEO Survey: Industry Insights into Emerging Trends - NewzDash

• Mastering EEAT for publishers - Harry Clarkson-Bennett

• Google quietly updated the News and Discover manual action policies - SEL

• Top 5 takeaways from the 2024 Web Almanac SEO Chapter - SEL

• Why is Google losing market share in the EU? - Growth Memo

• The rise of the AI crawler - Vercel

Interesting Articles:

• 2025 Will Break Media’s Addiction to Ads - Matt Karolian

• World Press Trends Outlook: Digital growth and ‘other’ revenue streams steady the ship for publishers - WAN-IFRA

• Le Monde CEO: Digital subscriber revenue will pay for entire newsroom within two years - Press Gazette

• “Just give me the f***ing links!”—Cursing disables Google’s AI overviews - Ars Technica

• Google owes UK news industry £2.2bn from 2023 alone, claims new research - Press Gazette

• Knowing less about AI makes people more open to having it in their lives – new research - The Conversation

• A tool for evaluating the audience relevance of a news article - Baekdal

At long last, a new edition of SEO for Google News! Work and travel have kept me very busy. No promises for the next edition, but I have a few topic ideas in my head so hopefully it won’t be too long.

Thanks as always for reading and subscribing. Please send this on to anyone you think may find it useful.

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In previous newsletters I covered this policy and its impact once enforcement began in early May.

Fast-forward to the middle of November. For the last several months, publishers have been setting out their stalls in preparation for the biggest annual ecommerce weekend: Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Then Google decides to spoil everyone’s party:

This blog post on the Google Search Central blog explains how Google have ‘clarified’ their site reputation abuse policy.

“Our evaluation of numerous cases has shown that no amount of first-party involvement alters the fundamental third-party nature of the content or the unfair, exploitative nature of attempting to take advantage of the host's sites ranking signals.”

Their updated phrasing of site reputation abuse now reads as follows:

More importantly, Google now say that “we don't simply take a site's claims about how the content was produced at face value”.

They don’t care what you say about your affiliate content. If Google even remotely suspects it’s not entirely your own content and there might be any kind of 3rd party involvement, they’re gonna slap a penalty on that content and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

It didn’t take long for manual penalties to arrive:

These penalties number in the dozens, perhaps even hundreds. CNN Underscored, Forbes Advisor, WSJ Buy Side, and countless other publishers of all sizes have had their entire ‘shopping’ or ‘recommendations’ section wiped from Google’s search results, just in time for Black Friday weekend. One can only imagine the potential revenue loss.

Moreover, if you want to roll the dice by moving the content around and/or hiding it among your regular news output, there could be even more severe consequences:

Play games with Google’s policies and you could lose a lot more than just your affiliate traffic. Your entire presence in Google is at risk.

Penalty Accuracy?

While many of the penalties I’ve seen are for legitimate breaches of the reinterpreted spam policy, some of the penalised site sections are technically not in violation of the site reputation abuse policy.

The content on these sections is entirely first party, produced by actual employees, with no third-party involvement in the content. But this content contains affiliate links, and Google see that as sufficient evidence that this is 3rd party content.

Basically, Google are using the “I’ll know it when I see it” approach to penalising spam.

I see this as an admission of defeat. It’s become painfully clear that Google have no algorithmic way to accurately demote ‘spam’ content, however vaguely that is defined.

The numerous false positives from their Helpful Content Update algorithm changes were so vehemently protested that Google went into full defensive mode, going as far as to invite affected publishers to the Google offices for a group hug feel-good session (which, rather predictably, backfired).

Effectively, Google cannot find an algorithmic solution to their perceived search quality woes. Manual intervention is the only approach they can rely on.

Why Now?

Contrary to the first round of penalties in May 2024, there was no grace period for these latest penalties. Google updated their spam policy and started handing out manual penalties the very next day. No time to prepare, no time to change course, no time to do anything else but pray.

The timing of these penalties is dubious. First, with only a week left before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, publishers who had been building up to this period with their affiliate content suddenly find their whole strategy annulled.

There wasn’t enough time to change gears and try to earn organic rankings with a different approach.

But there was enough time to try something else to recoup all that investment over these many months. Publishers could still buy Google Ads to drive traffic to their affiliate pages…

Secondly, these penalties appear to be a reaction to bad PR.

Not too long ago, a hit piece was published about Forbes Advisor, offering insight into how Forbes’ affiliate section operated. This piece was shared widely on social media and caused a stir in SEO circles.

The piece itself didn’t offer much controversial insights, unless you were entirely ignorant of how affiliate marketing works. But it got people talking about the ‘injustice’ of Forbes’s affiliate pages ranking for all kinds of commercial search queries.

Then there’s the popular ‘Goog Enough’ account on X that frequently posts screenshots of what are deemed ‘bad search results’, often tagging Google’s search liaison in those tweets. That account started as a showcase of bad AI Overviews, but has since evolved to expose a much broader range of perceived spam in search results.

I find both of these rather unpalatable. Google seems to be taking note of these ‘exposures’ and using them to hand out targeted penalties.

I think the people behind these accounts perhaps still see Google as their ally, working together with SEOs to improve search results.

But that ship has long sailed. Any SEO that still thinks Google wants to work with them to better the web is hopelessly naive. Google are actively using SEOs for their own benefit, and have no qualms about throwing the whole industry under the bus when it suits their purpose.

These sorts of public exposures also reek of bad sportsmanship. Can’t beat your competitors with better SEO? Just badmouth your rivals, make sure to tag Googlers in your posts, and have Google erase your competition from search results.

What’s Next?

The writing is on the wall, in bloated neon letters glaring blindingly into your eyes.

Google wants publishers to stay in their lane. Stick to your core purpose, and don’t stray from your chosen focus.

If you’re successful in one area and have built up a lot of authority signals, and you want to monetise that success in any other area that’s not your perceived core purpose, Google will eventually come for you.

Highly ironic, of course, because this is exactly what Google have been doing themselves for the past two and a half decades. What else is Google Travel, for example, but a way for Google to monetise their dominance in search in an entirely unrelated area way outside their core expertise…

Or Google Maps, Google Shopping, Google Finance, Google Books, Google Jobs, …

And when Google are themselves told to stay in their lane by regulators, they tend to throw a rather infantile hissy fit.

At the moment, the only form of affiliate revenue that appears untouched by Google’s wrath is the type founded on first-hand experience and expertise. If you want any affiliate revenue, you’re going to have to put in the hard work to build up the E-E-A-T signals that position you as an expert voice on whatever products or services you’re reviewing.

The likes of Wirecutter and Indy Best seem to fall within Google’s realigned parameters for acceptable affiliate marketing. As they should, of course, because if Google were to disapprove of even this type of thoroughly researched and professionally produced first-party content, then half the web might as well pack it up and call it quits.

Yet, Google are known for constantly moving their goalposts. So who knows? Soon any business model that Google can’t skim its own percentage from might be at risk.

Their game is up, after all. Perhaps the C-Suite in Mountain View realise this and are working to maximise their bonuses before it all comes crashing down.

It’s worth following Lily Ray and Glenn Gabe (and myself) on Bluesky for more insights and opinions on these latest penalties and other Google shenanigans.

(And yes, you should be on Bluesky now. X/Twitter is dead and it’s long past the time to move on, the corpse’s stench is already overwhelming.)

NESS 2024

The 4th edition of our News and Editorial SEO Summit took place at the end of October. I can honestly say it was another amazing event. We had over 500 attendees in total for 12 superb sessions across the online event’s two days.

Our good friends Jessie and Shelby from WTF is SEO? published their recaps of the two days, which give you a great taste of the quality of the talks and insights shared by our fantastic speakers:

1. What we learned at NESS 2024 (pt1)

2. What we learned at NESS 2024 (pt2)

The interaction among the attendees helped make this event special. So many great conversations in the chat, with attending publishers happy to share their own experiences and insights on the topics covered.

The Q&As also had great questions, allowing live attendees to get input from our expert speakers on their specific challenges.

All in all, NESS 2024 was another huge success. Onwards to NESS 2025!

Miscellanea

Here’s my usual roundup of new and updated Google documentation, interesting articles about publishing on the web, and the latest developments in SEO.

Official Google Docs:

• Providing more data about news results in the EU

• Updating our site reputation abuse policy

• Farewell, Sitelinks Search Box

• Favicon Guidelines [updated]

• URL structure best practices for Google [updated]

Interesting Articles:

• DOJ Will Push Google to Sell Chrome to Break Search Monopoly - Bloomberg

• Google could be forced to sell Chrome – here’s what it would mean for users - i

• Are transformer-based foundation models running out of steam? - Understanding AI

• ChatGPT Search Fails Attribution Test, Misquotes News Sources - SEJ

• OpenAI Is Bad Business - Ed Zitron

• We need clarity about the deals between AI companies and news publishers - Reuters Institute

• Google Discover is sending U.S. news publishers much more traffic (Social? Still falling) - Nieman Lab

• Publishers hooked on Google Discover traffic risk race to the bottom - Press Gazette

• Google pulls news content from EU publishers in a limited-scale test - Phone Arena

• Algorithms are making political speech more extreme - User Mag

• The 'bias machine': How Google tells you what you want to hear - BBC

• News publishers didn’t sustain a traffic bump in the 2024 presidential election week like they did in 2020 - Digiday

• Bluesky already delivering more referral traffic than X for some publishers - Press Gazette

Latest in SEO:

• Google November 2024 core update rolling out now - SEL

• Google Core Update November 2024 - Risers and Fallers - Sistrix

• Crawl budget management for publishers and large sites - Leadership in SEO

• How Index States Indicate Crawl Priority - Indexing Insight

• How Google uses engagement metrics for search rankings - Leadership in SEO

• Google AI Overviews Rolling Out To 100+ Countries & Billion+ Users - SER

• What if Schema.org is just… Labels? - Jono Alderson

• US Presidential Election 2024 SEO Winners & Losers: A Detailed Analysis for News Publishers - NewzDash

• How to do SEO training in a newsroom - WTF is SEO?

That’s another long-delayed edition wrapped up. As always, thanks for reading and subscribing, and I’ll see you at the next one!

Subscribe now

This year we have another amazing lineup of speakers bringing their vast experience and expertise to the event:

Rand Fishkin (Sparktoro) is our keynote speaker, and he will look to the future of marketing, identifying five key trends that will shape audience growth.

Lily Ray (Amsive) and Glenn Gabe (G-Squared) will give their insights into Google’s continuous rollouts of algorithm updates and what they mean for publishers on the web.

Brendan O’Connell (NY Post) & Edward Hyatt (WSJ) are digging into AI overviews and will outline the essental tactics for this new SERP element.

Claudio E. Cabrera (The Athletic) shows us how SEO is best embedded in fast-moving newsroom environments.

I’m excited to have Martin Splitt from Google join us to talk about page performance, user experience, and core web vitals.

Ryan Kellett (Harvard, formerly Axios) is going to show us how Axios managed to expand their local news efforts in 30 US cities.

Olaf Seydel (Zeit Online) will explain how to measure and improve topic authority, a key factor for success in Google’s news ecosystem.

Andrea Volpini (Wordlift) talks about semantic SEO, schema markup, entity-based SEO, and AI-driven fact-checking for the news and media industry.

We have Vivienne Goizet (BILD) diving into the unpredictable world of Google Discover, outlining her 5-step process to optimising for this volatile channel.

My fellow NESS co-founder John Shehata will present his approach to SEO for elections, showing best practices and effective tactics.

And yours truly will deliver a session on site migrations for news publishers, outlining risks and rewards, pitfalls, and optimal approaches.

We will also have Q&A sessions with the speaker roster for each day, allowing you to ask your specific questions to our panel of seriously big-brained SEO experts.

As before, the event will be fully virtual and online, with every session livestreamed to wherever you’re located on the planet via the Airmeet platform.

This year, we’ll have expanded virtual networking tables, each with a specific theme: Technical SEO, Editorial SEO, and Google Discover.

There will also be enhanced sponsor booths. These provide more opportunities to network, learn about our sponsors’ offerings, take part in sweepstakes to win prizes, and find links to resources and worthwile reading materials.

Plus your ticket gives you full access to the recordings of all the sessions, available two weeks after the event, in case you can’t attend the whole two days live and/or you want to watch back the sessions at your leisure.

At the standard price of $225 USD per ticket, NESS 2024 is already incredible value for money. But we’re feeling generous, so when you use the barry2024 code at checkout you get 20% off your ticket price!

Grab your ticket today and join the first and best event dedicated to SEO for news and publishing: https://newsseo.io

Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.

Basically structured data is extra markup you put in your HTML code that tells machine systems - like Google - exactly what type of content is on the page. It makes Google’s life easier. And much of SEO is making Google’s life easier.

Structured Data Formats

The structured data that Google supports is based on the schema.org vocabulary. This is not a perfect marriage: In their documentation, Google states that you shouldn’t rely on the schema.org website but on Google’s own documentation instead.

In the context of SEO, we care about structured data primarily for its impact on Google. So, while sometimes Google’s requirements will be different from what’s stated on the schema.org website, in those cases you’ll want to follow Google’s rules.

You can implement structured data in different ways. The two most common approaches are in-line with the page content’s HTML (microdata and RDFa), or in a separate snippet using JavaScript object notation (JSON-LD). Google explicitly prefers the latter:

I also prefer JSON-LD, because it significantly eases any troubleshooting you may need to do. By keeping the structured data in a separate snippet in JSON-LD, you make it much simpler to test, implement, and fix.

A JSON-LD structured data snippet can theoretically sit anywhere in a webpage’s HTML code. In my experience, it’s best to have it as part of the <head>, and fairly high up in the <head> as well. This seems to reduce the chance of the snippet not being picked up by Google.

Most importantly, the structured data should be present in the raw (unrendered) HTML code. It should not rely on client-side JavaScript to be injected into the webpage.

The reason for this is speed. While Google does render webpages as part of its indexing process, that rendering is done relatively slow. Can take minutes, can also take hours or even days.

News has to start ranking in Google’s results straight away. Google cannot wait for its own datacentres to complete a full render of a news article, as this could mean the article isn’t shown until it’s already out of date.

So the initial indexing of a news article is based on its HTML code only. And that means all the SEO-critical components of an article (headline, full content, <title>, canonical tag, Open Graph, etc. - and structured data) need to be part of the HTML code before (and after) any client-side JavaScript is loaded.

I still see some implementations where structured data is loaded with JavaScript, for example with Google Tag Manager. This is fine for non-news webpages, but for news it simply doesn’t work.

Required Structured Data

So which structured data does a news publishing site actually need? Well, none of it is mandatory. A site can rank just fine in Google’s results, both news-specific and general, without any structured data at all.

But I believe certain structured data snippets are highly advisable, as they help Google understand the context and purpose of your content better. This can help with your content’s appearance in Top Stories, Google Discover, and other news-specific areas.

These are the structured data snippets I would strongly recommend a publisher implement:

• Article/NewsArticle on article pages

• LiveBlogPosting on live coverage article pages

That’s it. These two are the structured data snippets I think every publisher should definitely have. Everything else is optional - more on that below.

Before we move on to other structured data snippets, let’s answer a few common questions about these two.

• What subtype of Article structured data should you use?

In its Article structured data documentation, Google says it supports the BlogPosting, Article, and NewsArticle structured data types.

In my view, it doesn’t make any difference which one you use. They’re all valid. I generally recommend NewsArticle for stories aimed at the news cycle, and Article for evergreen content. I think BlogPosting is still supported by Google because many news sites started out as blogs, but personally I wouldn’t use BlogPosting anymore.

• Can you use NewsArticle subtypes?

There are more granular subtypes within NewsArticle, such as ReportageNewsArticle, OpinionNewsArticle, ReviewNewsArticle, etc.

I don’t think there’s an SEO benefit to using these. But they seem to work fine for Google, and validate as articles in Google’s Rich Results Test.

• Which attributes should your Article snippet have?

In their documentation, Google is fairly clear about which attributes are required and recommended. None are required, but the more recommended attributes you provide the easier Google can understand the article.

These are the attributes Google recommends for every Article structured data snippet: headline, image (ideally three, one for each of the preferred aspect ratios - 1x1, 4x3, and 16x9), author (with name and URL), datePublished, and dateModified.

That’s it.

Most implementations will have more attributes defined, such as description, publisher, URL (for the article itself), mainEntityOfPage, and complimentary attributes such as keywords, articleSection, and sometimes even the full articleBody.

But none of those are actually needed.

When you look at how Google displays news stories in its search results, it makes sense why so few attributes are recommended.

All that Google shows is the publisher, the headline, the image, and the timestamp.

I find it interesting that there is no recommendation to include publisher attributes in your article structured data, despite it being such an obvious part of the article ‘s visual presence. I think this is because Google establishes the publisher details on the hostname level, and doesn’t extract it from an article’s structured data.

A notable example is how content from The Athletic is shown on Google with The New York Times branding. The article structured data on The Athletic clearly defines it as part of The Athletic, but because the content is now published on www.nytimes.com it gets that hostname’s branding instead:

The additional recommended attributes for authors is, I believe, a way for Google to establish authorship and expertise. Beyond that, everything else is just noise.

Because every publisher has their own implementation, with some defining a shedload of attributes and others defining very few, there’s no way for Google to attach strong value judgments to the presence or absence of additional attributes. Rewarding more structured data would create a two-tier web space where sites with more development resources or better CMSs win over those less fortunate, regardless of the quality of the journalism.

Which is also, of course, the main reason why there is no hard requirement for any structured data. It’s all optional.

• Should I declare my paywall in the Article structured data?

Yes - more on that here.

• Do you need LiveBlogPosting to get the red Live badge?

Yes. But there’s no guarantee that you get the Live badge, even with a full implementation of LiveBlogPosting markup. It seems Google needs to somehow ‘approve’ the site for red Live badges.

I’m honestly not sure what it takes to get approved for a Live badge, but LiveBlogPosting structured data appears to be a hard requirement. Regularly publishing live articles with LiveBlogPosting seems to be part of the approval process.

• Can LiveBlogPosting exist with NewsArticle?

Theoretically, yes, you can have both LiveBlogPosting and NewsArticle structured data on one article page. You won’t get penalised for it. However, LiveBlogPosting covers everything Google needs to interpret a live article as such, so the presence of NewsArticle structured data is unnecessary.

• My LiveBlogPosting doesn’t validate in the Rich Results Test

Yes, welcome to the club. I have yet to see a LiveBlogPosting implementation that doesn’t show at least one error in Google’s Rich Results Test. And yet, it still seems to work fine, and the article gets the coveted live badge in Top Stories.

Despite the fact Google obviously supports live articles, there is no official Google documentation on LiveBlogPosting markup available to the public. There is some documentation available to those who were given access as part of the original Google pilot program for live coverage, but this seems to be dormant.

Generally I recommend copying the LiveBlogPosting snippet from a competing website that gets the red Live badge, and refer to the schema.org page on LiveBlogPosting to enhance your snippet. Use the Rich Results Test and the Schema Validator to try and get your snippet as close to perfection as possible.

Recommended Structured Data

Of course there’s more to structured data than just article markup. There are several more snippets that I would recommend every publisher implement. These are:

• Organization

Organization structured data should be implement on the site’s homepage (and only there, ideally). In this snippet you define your business’s name, website, logo, associated social media presence (in the sameAs attribute), and any contact points (such as the customer service desk) that you want the public to be aware of.

If you have a physical address for your headquarters, I’d recommend providing those attributes too. An actual office address is an extra level of credibility.

For news publishers, you can use NewsMediaOrganization instead of just Organization. This is a more granular subtype that makes it explicitly clear what your business’s purpose is.

• VideoObject

For pages that have a video embedded, you’ll want to implement appropriate VideoObject structured data.

Note that if the video is not the main content of the page - so if it’s just the ‘banner’ above the article, or embedded in the article content - Google will not accept the page as a video page. It’ll be shown in Google Search Console as ‘No video indexed’ even when your VideoObject markup is fully valid.

This is because Google only wants to show a video result if the URL is a dedicated video page.

I think it’s still worthwhile to include VideoObject structured data on articles where the video is not the primary content, even though you may not be rewarded by Google in any way.

• BreadcrumbList

I’m a fan of implementing Breadcrumb structured data. The direct SEO benefits are marginal; you basically get a somewhat nicer-looking breadcrumb when the article is shown in regular search results:

However, I think there’s more to breadcrumbs. I’m in favour of visual breadcrumbs on articles, as these show the content hierarchy and send strong signals about the position the article occupies in the site’s overall structure.

Breadcrumbs also help with sending link value to the article’s parent categories, and serve as an additional navigation method.

When you implement visual breadcrumbs, you should also implement Breadcrumb structured data.

• Person / ProfilePage

Having author pages for your regular writers has been a best practice for a while. On these author pages, you should also consider implementing Person or ProfilePage structured data.

This structured data makes the content on the author page more easily digestible for Google, allowing the search engine to establish the author’s entity in the Knowledge Graph and identify expertise and authority.

Make sure you implement the ‘sameAs’ attribute on your author pages, with URLs listing the author’s social media profiles and other publications they write for. This all helps with the author’s entity in Google’s knowledge graph.

• SearchAction

Lastly, I recommend implementing SearchAction structured data on the site’s homepage. With SearchAction you let Google know that your site has an internal search function, and how that search function can be accessed.

For large-ish news brands, Google will often show a search box as part of the brand’s search result - a so-called Sitelinks Search box:

If you do not provide SearchAction structured data, anyone using this search feature on Google will get another Google search result - just limited to the site in question:

With SearchAction, Google should theoretically trigger your own internal site search when someone uses the search box on your branded Google result.

I say ‘theoretically’, because in this example The Telegraph does actually have SearchAction structured data but Google is still generating its own SERP instead of using the Telegraph’s search function.

I suspect it could be related to the fact The Telegraph’s search function is JavaScript-powered. (Yes, it’s always JavaScript’s fault.)

Wrapping Up

There’s a lot more to say about structured data, as there are plenty more opportunities for implementation. Job listings should have JobPosting markup, a frequently asked questions page should have FAQ markup, etc.

Google’s own extensive documentation on structured data is a great resource, so please dig into that to see all the types that are officially supported and how to best implement them.

I may do a follow-up newsletter at some stage on additional structured data snippets. Let me know in the comments which structured data types you’d like me to dig into.

Miscellanea

It’s been a fun time in the world of SEO and publishing! Here’s a roundup of recent articles and stories I found worthwhile:

Official Google Docs:

• Introducing recommendations in Google Search Console

• Overview of Google crawlers and fetchers (user agents) - Updated

• Indexing API Quickstart - Updated

Interesting Articles:

• The Subprime AI Crisis - Ed Zitron

• Want to fight misinformation? Teach people how algorithms work - Nieman Lab

• Here’s how 7 news audience directors are thinking about Google’s AI Overviews - Nieman Lab

• No god in the machine: the pitfalls of AI worship - The Guardian

• New Research: So Far, AI is Not Disrupting Search or Making a Dent in Google - Sparktoro

Latest in SEO:

• The Sites Dominating Google’s Top Stories SERP Feature in 2024 - Detailed

• Google’s Top stories looks broken: Are news publishers to blame? - SEL

• Aggregation and SEO: Best Practices - WTF is SEO?

• Linking the News: Off-page SEO for News Publishers - Sitebulb

• Interview With Google's Search Liaison On The August 2024 Core Update - SER

• The Helpful Content Update Was Not What You Think - Moz

• Google: Core Web Vitals Aren't As Important As Some People Might Think - SER

• Google Issues Manual Actions Over Google Discover Policy Violations - SER

Lastly, some usual self-promotion. I was a panellist at the recent Future of Media Technology conference, where my panel spoke about the ‘interesting’ relationship between publishers and tech platforms in the age of LLMs. Here are two recaps from that session:

• Google killing publisher voucher codes overnight part of wider trend, says Mail exec - Press Gazette

• AI: should publishers sign up or sue? - Adam Tinworth

Recently I was interviewed on the topic of search and publishers, looking at underlying reasons for news sites’ decline in Google traffic. Here is the resulting article:

• Searching for search traffic - Editor and Publisher

If you like to watch hour-long videos of SEOs blabbering about SEO for news and publishers, I got just the thing for you. Sean Bianco from The SEO Club invited me onto his podcast and we had a blast:

• How to Rank in Top Stories and Discover (video) - The SEO Club

News and Editorial SEO Summit 2024

We’re just over a month away from our fourth annual News and Editorial SEO Summit. This year has a truly packed lineup across the two days of our online livestreamed event.

If you haven’t get secured your ticket, giving you access to the live event as well as recordings of all the sessions, better get a move on!

That’s it for this edition of SEO for Google News. Thanks as always for reading and subscribing. See you at the next one!

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The reason for the long gap between newsletter editions is that I’ve taken some time off from work, and also wanted to let the dust settle a bit on the AI Overviews hullabaloo.

As I predicted in my last newsletter, the hype around AI Overviews has turned out to be a storm in a teacup. Rather than heralding the ‘death of publishing on the web’ as some proclaimed, AI Overviews are just another search feature (and a relatively uncommon one).

AIO may cannibalise some traffic for some publishers, but that’s nothing new - it’s a trend continued from almost all previous search features Google has introduced.

Plus, it seems likely this current generation of AI technology (Large Language Models) could be more hype than substance. To improve LLMs you need more data, and frankly humans are incapable of generating the volume of data that LLMs need to keep improving.

So, in order to improve, LLMs will need to be trained on data (i.e. content) generated by other LLMs. And that, as it turns out, leads to model collapse. Perhaps LLMs aren’t the panacea of AI that some may have hoped for.

Now that the madness has calmed down and media commentators are dedicating fewer column inches to AI, with a better signal to noise ratio, let’s dig into another aspect of SEO that many publishers struggle with: site migrations.

Site Migration Best Practices

Rather than rehash what others have written about how to execute site migrations properly, let me start by sharing some of the best content out there on this topic.

Relevant Google Docs:

• Site Moves and Migrations

• Redirects and Google Search

• Change of Address Tool

Migration Guides:

• Site Migration Fundamentals - Wix / Chris Green

• 40-Step SEO Migration Checklist - SEOSLY / Olga Zarr

• SEO Guides, Checklists and Tools For Web Migrations - Aleyda Solis

Now, let’s look at the specifics of site migrations for publishing sites.

Types of Site Migrations

I keenly remember my friend Jono Alderson proclaiming, on stage at a major SEO conference, that there is no such thing as a site migration.

I raised my eyebrows at that one, but he had a point. ‘Site migration’ is a broad term that encompasses a wide range of different projects, and we need to clarify what type of site migration we’re dealing with if we want to define the best possible approach.

You can classify site migrations in many different ways. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll define four types of site migrations:

1. Redesign

2. Restructure

3. Replatforming

4. Relocation

Each of these has different types of changes applied to the site, which results in different levels of risk for any negative SEO repercussions.

Many migration projects will fit neatly into one of these four categories, but others can be hybrids. For example, a recent migration project I consulted on was a replatforming with redesign and restructure components.

Redesign

What changes: Webpage HTML

In a redesign, the site’s front-end design and layout may change, but the underlying technology remains more or less the same. This type of site migration has the fewest risks. There are still some areas where SEO could be impacted.

With any redesign, it’s important to ensure the new HTML is semantically optimised and clean (i.e. easily parsable for Google) and structured data and critical meta tags are properly implemented (title, meta description, Open Graph, canonicals, mobile alternates, hreflang, robots tag, etc.).

Beyond those aspects, redesigns are generally low-risk and don’t offer much opportunity for ruining the site’s existing SEO performance.

Nonetheless, you should never underestimate the inventiveness of developers. I recently saw a website where many of the very basics of SEO, such as <title> tags, were omitted as part of a redesign.

For even the smallest migration projects, it’s useful to have a detailed spec document that outlines everything the site needs to have in terms of features and capabilities. Use this to ensure all necessary SEO elements are in place.

Ideally, SEO is an integral part of the QA process that all website updates should undergo before go-live.

Restructure

What changes: Site navigation & internal links

Changes to the site’s navigation can impact on organic traffic. Top-level navigation and internal linking are key elements of a site’s SEO. Navigation links indicate the site’s topical specialities, and internal links determine how link value flows through the site.

A restructure of the site could result in drastic changes to these aspects - sometimes for the better, sometimes for worse - and you need to be aware of this and the potential repercussions before you push the new site structure into production.

I’ve previously written about how categories and tags play a major part in topic authority signals, so make sure you read that and consider the impact of navigational changes.

A site’s navigation is often taken for granted, and probably doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Navigation links can also be subject to corporate politics, with middle managers fighting to have their section represented in the nav bar.

Ideally, site navigation is designed as part of a taxonomy and/or information architecture project. Don’t make drastic changes to your site’s navigation links, section pages, and tag pages without having a detailed understanding of best practices and the potential effects.

Replatforming

What changes: Technology stack, webpage HTML, URLs (probably)

With a replatforming, the site’s technology stack is altered. A new off-the-shelf CMS is implemented, or perhaps the site moves to a headless CMS with an entirely new codebase.

What matters is that both the HTML code on every page is changed, and most likely the URLs of existing pages are changed.

Sometimes with a replatforming, existing URLs can be maintained. This makes for a much smoother process, but in my experience it’s quite rare. Most replatforming projects result in site-wide URL changes, with almost every page having its URL altered and requiring redirects.

It’s important to realise that even a tiny change in the URL - for example, changing from a trailing slash to a non-trailing slash - has the same impact as a radical URL change. The end result is the same: The URL changes, and a redirect has to be put in place from the old URL to the new one.

Note that URLs don’t have to be hierarchical, nor fully keyword-rich. A URL is a tiny ranking factor and not worth obsessing about. I often see migration projects used as a reason to implement site-wide URL changes to make them more ‘SEO-friendly’, but this is a misguided effort. A ‘suboptimal’ URL that is indexed by Google and ranks for relevant searches is infinitely more valuable than an ‘optimised’ URL would be if it means changing the existing URL.

A key reason for this is that redirects are a major source of SEO issues. While Googlers have gone on record saying that a redirect doesn’t result in diminished PageRank, in my experience there is actually some loss of link value.

I see it like this: A redirect acts like an extra link. When you redirect an old URL to a new one, you are inserting an extra link hop between the original page and the new page. PageRank diminishes with every link hop (the ‘PageRank Damping effect’ which I explain here), so a redirect causes a small loss of link value as if it was an extra link hop for Googlebot to crawl through.

This is confirmed by anecdotal evidence and some A/B tests, where reducing internal redirects on a large scale resulted in improved traffic to key pages on the site. It seems to support the theory that reducing redirects helps optimise the flow of link value and can drive improved rankings.

Redirects also create extra crawl effort. When Googlebot sees a redirect on the original URL, it then also has to crawl the new URL that the redirect points to. Twice the crawl effort for the same page.

So, for replatforming projects there is an additional level of care that needs to be applied. First of all, redirects should be in place for all changed URLs. And, to prevent unnecessary waste of link value, all internal links should be updated to point directly to the new URLs so that no internal link results in a redirect hop.

I also believe that Google uses a site’s primary category pages as crawl entries. Googlebot will crawl your main categories frequently to find new content associated with each category’s topic. When you change a category URL, you are essentially ‘resetting’ that category’s place in Google’s understanding of your site structure, and its value needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Best to leave the URL alone in the first place to avoid that issue.

Relocation

What changes: Hostname

The most difficult site migrations are relocations. This is when the site changes its hostname (i.e. the domain name or subdomain) which means that for Google it’s basically a new site.

The reason for a relocation can vary. For example, a publisher undergoes a rebrand and a domain name change is part of that. Or, some publishers originally started as a country-specific brand with a ccTLD and they want to broaden their international appeal by switching to a generic TLD. Or a foundational business decision is made to split a site up across multiple subdomains with each serving a specific purpose.

Relocations can be accompanied by redesigns, restructures, and/or replatformings, which makes them the most intensive form of migration projects with the most moving parts and greatest risks.

In an effort to reduce risk, often a relocation will keep the site’s design, structure, and technology the same (at least initially) and just move the existing site to a new domain name. This is what The Times & Sunday Times did recently, when they moved from thetimes.co.uk to thetimes.com.

The biggest risk with a relocation is that the site loses Google News inclusion.

Getting into Google News (and, by extention, into Top Stories carousels) is a tough challenge in the first place. With the algorithmic inclusion process introduced in 2019, it can take two years or more for a newly launched publisher to accumulate sufficient authority and trust signals for Google to rank it in their news ecosystem.

This inclusion is based on the site’s hostname. When the hostname is changed, Google News inclusion is not automatically moved across to the new hostname.

I’ve seen it happen all too frequently: A site moves to a new domain name, and most of their organic traffic disappears because the site’s articles stop showing in Top Stories on Google. The site has to re-earn that inclusion, taking two years or more, which can be disastrous.

Fortunately there seems to be a way to prevent losing Google News inclusion. Shared with me by Oleg Korneitchouk, a fellow news SEO consultant who first discovered this tactic, it works like this:

In the existing (Google News included) site’s Publisher Center, go to the Settings (the gear icon in the drop-down where you select your publication). In Publication Settings, you can scroll down to ‘Publication URLs’ where you can add ‘Additional URLs’.

This is where you should add the new hostname for the site before you migrate, ideally a few weeks before, to allow Google to understand that the new domain is an alternate URL for the existing domain.

Oleg tried this tactic with one of his clients, and it worked seamlessly; the new domain got Top Stories inclusion within two weeks.

Recently I’ve seen it work myself in another instance, where a new domain name was added to Publisher Center as an additional URL several months before the migration. When the site was finally moved to the new domain, it took only two days for the new domain’s articles to start appearing in Top Stories.

This seems to work independently of the Change of Address function in Search Console intended to facilitate domain changes in Google. I’ve used the Publisher Center tactic once on a partial site migration (so Change of Address wasn’t applicable, as the majority of the site remained on the original domain), and it worked smoothly with articles published on the new domain appearing in Top Stories within a few days.

Now, I should stress that this is not an official Google-approved tactic for ensuring Google News inclusion with domain changes. As far as I know, there is no ‘proper’ tactic for maintaining news-inclusion in Google when changing hostnames. We lost that when Google retired the manual Google News inclusion process which also featured a domain change form you could submit.

Use this tactic at your peril. I’m pretty confident that it works, but I can’t guarantee it.

What About Content?

One common aspect of site migrations I haven’t discussed is content. For most non-news websites, site migration projects also involve changing the site’s content in some form.

Stakeholders can get entranced by the shine of a new website and forget what made their old site successful. Best performing content is at risk of being left behind. This may cause drastic traffic losses which are hard to recuperate.

For publishers, this is less common. News websites especially shouldn’t want to go back into their archives and alter article content. After all, those stories were the news at the time they were published and are part of historical record.

In the context of SEO, changing and/or removing content can incur other risks. Google uses a metric called topic authority to determine the editorial specialities of a publisher. A key component of topic authority is the history of original journalism that the site has published on a given topic.

If you change or remove large numbers of articles in your archive, you risk undermining your topic authority signals, which will impact your rankings and traffic. Best to leave older content alone.

Sometimes a level of content pruning is necessary, for example when a replatforming project is unable to import all the old site’s content. In this case, it’s important to ensure the site’s most valuable content in terms of traffic, external links, and Googlebot crawl effort is definitely migrated to the new platform.

Access to the old site’s server logs can be very helpful here, as this will tell you which articles Googlebot crawls the most frequently. Make sure you migrate those across to the new platform.

More on Site Migrations

There are several types of migration projects I haven’t discussed, such as site mergers, site divisions, and partial migrations. At the upcoming 2024 News and Editorial SEO Summit on 29 & 30 October, I will be delivering a detailed session on site migrations for publishers.

If you attend the live online NESS event you’ll be able to ask me specific questions about your own site migration challenges. Make sure you get your ticket!

The Future of Media Technology Conference

On September 12, the 2024 edition of The Future of Media Technology Conference organised by Press Gazette will be held in London, UK. I’m delighted to have been invited to be part of the event.

I will be part of the panel discussion on “Platforms versus publishers: sign or sue?”, moderated by Charlotte Tobitt and also featuring ex-Googler Madhav Chinnappa, Mark Watkins from AWS, and one more panelist yet to be confirmed.

The event will boast speakers and attendees from most major publishers in the UK plus many from abroad, and is a great opportunity to network and stay up to date on the latest developments in the media technology landscape.

Details and tickets available on the event website here.

Miscellanea

I may have taken a bit of a break, the world of SEO and digital publishing sure hasn’t. Here’s a roundup of the most interesting pieces of content of the last two months.

Official Google Docs & Announcements:

• Introducing recommendations in Google Search Console

• Mobile-indexing-vLast-final-final.doc

Interesting Articles:

• Digital News Report 2024 - Reuters Institute

• Newsroom themes for 2024: Reuters Digital News Report at a glance - Press Gazette

• ‘Google Is a Monopolist,’ Judge Rules in Landmark Antitrust Case - NYT

• Generative AI Hype Cycle Is Hitting ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ - 404 media

• Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones) - 404 media

• Google cancels plans to kill off cookies for advertisers - CNBC

• OpenAI testing prototype search engine with news publishers - Press Gazette

Latest in SEO:

• 2024 Zero-Click Search Study - Sparktoro

• Google Trends Rolls Out New Trending Now Design - SER

• SEO in the newsroom: Tips from the SEO for News meetup - Wix

• Half the world votes in 2024. Our guide to election SEO - WTF is SEO

• SEO for News Publishers With Jessie and Shelby [Video] - Vixen Digital

• Google Leak: 71 News SEO Ranking Factors Revealed & Impact on News Publishers - NewzDash

• 20 SEOs Share Their Key Takeaways From the Google API Leaks - Moz

• How Google handles JavaScript throughout the indexing process - Vercel

• Google On How It Manages Disclosure Of Search Incidents - SEJ

• Google: Our Search Results Do Not Always Show Original Source - SER

• An Analysis of AI Overview Visibility in Google Search for Trending News - NewzDash

• AI Overviews Research: Comparing pre and post-rollout results on 100K keywords - SE Ranking

• Navigating the AI Search Revolution: Vector Search and Knowledge Bases - Man of Many

• The Best SEO Tools For Content Publishers - Rankalyzer

Let me conclude by shamelessly promoting some of my own recent articles and podcast appearances:

• Google and publishers: An unpredictable animal that could eat you at any time - Press Gazette

• News SEO and Google News Optimisation with Barry Adams [Video] - Don’t Panic It’s Organic

• SEO, Google and web traffic: is there a light at the end of the tunnel? [Podcast] - I Need More Coffee And Better Ideas

• News SEO for Publishers with Barry Adams [Podcast] - Earned Media

That’s it for another edition. Thanks for reading, and mega thanks to all 10,145 of you (as of right now) who’ve subscribed to this newsletter. Your support means the world to me.

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Since Google announced the rollout of AI Overviews at the I/O event earlier this month, there has been a deluge of stories and thought-pieces speculating what this new feature will mean for publishers.

The general tone of these articles has been one of doom, with some proclaiming the death of search as a viable traffic acquisition channel.

I believe this is inaccurate and easily disproven, and actively harmful to a healthy debate. Hyperbolic criticism of AIO makes it easy for Google to dismiss all criticism of AIO as merely panicked shouting.

Yet there is a real issue here, but it’s not a new issue. Google has been slowly chipping away at traffic to websites for years, with one new search feature after another, increasing the time users spend on Google’s own results and properties and reducing the clicks to websites that provide the actual information.

The search engine started out as a highway connecting users to websites. It didn’t take long for that highway to start featuring toll booths in the form of ads.

Then universal search was introduced in 2007. Google’s results started integrating various different elements in addition to the 10 blue links we were used to. Every new feature that appeared on Google has been another brick that helped turn Google into a walled garden.

That should be the real story. Not how AIO will destroy search (it won’t), but how AIO is another step on Google’s path to becoming the end destination.

Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible. There is no mention of sending traffic to the creators of the world’s information. Google simply doesn’t see it as part of their remit to generate traffic to publishers. The sooner we fully grasp this distinction, the more effectively we can hold them to account.

So let’s look at what AI Overviews actually mean for search.

What are AI Overviews?

An AI Overview is an AI-generated answer to the user’s query that shows at the top of a Google result. This is typically what it would look like:

Clicking on the ‘Show more’ button folds out the AI Overview, providing more detailed information:

As part of most AI Overviews, there will be one or more source articles cited for users to click on:

AIO will show between 0 and 10 source links, with an average of around 6 cited sources.

When do AI Overviews show?

At the time of writing this, AI Overviews only trigger if the following conditions are met:

• The user is based in the USA (no signs of a global rollout yet)

• The user is logged in to their Google account

• The user is on the Chrome browser

• The current browsing session is not in Incognito mode

Because of these conditions, 3rd party search data providers are struggling to get accurate large-scale information about AI Overviews. To avoid personalised results, most data providers scrape Google’s results without a Google account and using an Incognito browsing session, so they won’t trigger an AI Overview.

The data we do have is mostly anecdotal, based on relatively small query sets, and may not be statistically significant. Nonetheless, the data is starting to paint an interesting picture:

Estimates of how often AI Overviews (AIO) are shown range between 1.5% and 42% of Google queries;

• On average 14% of queries show AIO by default

• 28% of queries have a Generate option to create an AIO

• 58% of queries have no AIO feature

These numbers are very tentative and likely not fully reflective of the reality. The presence of AIO depends entirely on the intent of the query and whether an AIO would be beneficial to the user’s experience.

A small study done by Kevin Indig showed that informational queries that begin with ‘how’ and ‘best’ are much more likely to show an AIO than commercial queries that start with ‘buy’:

There’s a whole separate issue about the accuracy of AI Overviews, which I won’t dig into here.

AI Overviews and News

Using a VPN, I’ve been experimenting with AI Overviews since its launch, trying to trigger an AIO in combination with a Top Stories box. And I didn’t manage that.

I’ve tried hundreds of news-related queries, and I didn’t get a single AI Overview. It got to the stage where I had to doublecheck I was getting AI Overviews for non-news queries (I was), because I simply could not get them to show for news topics that featured a Top Stories newsbox.

My theory is that AIO and QDF are mutually exclusive.

QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) is a classifier that Google uses to determine if a query / topic requires a news box of some description. With the QDF classifier, searches on that topic will always show a Top Stories or Latest News box.

I suspect that when QDF is on, AIO is off for that query.

This makes sense, as the Gemini LLM that powers AIO isn’t being trained in real-time on the latest news (yet). For news topics, the AIO would not be able to provide accurate up-to-date information. Hence why Google defaults to a Top Stories box instead.

Traffic Impact of AIO

Again the following is pure speculation based on early anecdotal data. In Kevin Indig’s latest Growth Memo, his small study showed that AIO has a small negative impact on traffic:

• If AIO is present and your page is not cited as a source, on average you see a 2.8% decrease in Google traffic.

• If AIO is present and your page is a cited source, on average you see a 8.9% decrease in your Google traffic.

This indicates that AIOs may satisfy a user’s query in many cases. While users will be inclined to click through to other sources, they are likely to skip past the AIO’s cited pages and click on a regular organic result.

On the other hand, Aleyda Solis shared on X that product queries may actually benefit from being part of AIO. Her data shows that AIOs where the site is included as a source, traffic can increase by as much as 23%:

This could mean that for product-related searches it may be beneficial to show up in an AI Overview, and pages that are not part of the AIO will lose out.

You can prevent your site from being used as a source in AI Overviews, as explained here, but this may have additional repercussions for your visibility in Google’s wider ecosystem.

What This Means For Publishers

If your site is focused heavily on news content, you’re probably going to be fine (for now). The fact that AI Overviews don’t seem to show for news queries means that traffic from Top Stories is likely unaffected.

However, many publishers also get traffic from evergreen content like buying guides and explainers. Traffic to that type of content is likely to decrease due to the presence of AIO.

Is it time to panic? No.

AIO is not going to destroy search. Nonetheless, it is another brick in Google’s wall. For years Google has been trying to capture its users and keep them within Google’s own ecosystem for maximum monetisation. AIO is another step on that path.

We need to have a proper discussion about the power Google wields and how the media can effectively hold them to account. Panicked proclamations about how AIO is going to destroy publishing are not helpful. Nuanced, fact-based arguments need to be put forward.

So keep a close watch on AI Overviews and what their long term impact is, and try to stay calm.

Google Search API Data Leak

Another story I want to share with you is a purported leak of API data that relates directly to the inner workings of Google search. Rather than re-hash the whole story, please read Rand Fishkin’s article on the leak which includes his initial analysis.

If you have an appetite for a deeper dive into the leak, Michael King has published a lengthy article exploring many of the leaked attributes and what they could potentially mean.

In the next few weeks we’ll undoubtedly see many more amateur analyses of the leaked data. Read these with caution; we simply don’t know how accurate the leaked data is, how (or even if) Google uses the data in their algorithms, and whether the SEO industry can use the data for more effective tactics.

With that caveat out of the way, I do believe the leak is genuine and that it tells us some interesting things about Google search.

Two things I want to highlight from the leak which Rand and Mike also noticed:

As it turns out, Google likely has a siteAuthority attribute that indicates a site’s overall authority score. This is despite the fact that Googlers have been vocally denying such a score exists.

A site-wide authority score is likely used to provide a newly published page with an initial authority score, inherited from the site, until Google is able to calculate an individual authority score for the URL once enough link data has been gathered.

This explains why articles published on highly authoritative websites tend to easily rank in Google; they inherit their ranking potential from the site itself, even without having acquired any direct links themselves.

Another attribute worth noting is sourceType, which reflects the indexing tier a webpage is stored in.

Google has tiered storage for its index of the web (something I explained in this conference talk last year). It seems like the sourceType attribute indicates the value of links on a webpage depends on which indexing tier the page is stored in.

Basically, links from pages that are stored in the highest indexing tier (RAM storage) carry more weight than links from pages stored in lower indexing tiers (SSD and HDD).

News articles, due to their immediate value and ranking potential, initially tend to be stored in that highest indexing tier. As the story loses its news value and drops out of Top Stories, I suspect it eventually also moves from the first indexing tier to a lower tier. At which point any links the article contains will also lose much of their SEO value.

This shows the importance of ensuring your article has the right links - internal and external - before it’s published. Adding links to older articles isn’t as valuable, though may still be worthwhile in some contexts.

As we explore the data in his leak, expect more findings and confirmations (or refutations) of the validity of established SEO tactics.

Google Search Console Masterclass

There’s still time to book your ticket to the upcoming Google Search Console Masterclass that I’m doing together with WTF is SEO? on June 11th.

In this masterclass we’ll be digging into the most useful reports in Search Console, and what you can do with the data. Book your seat today!

Miscellanea

Here’s a list of recent interesting articles, developments in SEO, and new Google docs.

Official Google Docs:

• AI Overviews and your website

• Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, and X-Robots-Tag specifications [updated]

• Structured data for subscription and paywalled content [updated]

Interesting Articles:

• Google CEO Sundar Pichai on AI-powered search and the future of the web - The Verge

• AI, search, and publishers... How worried should we be? - Baekdal

• Google AI Overviews breaks search giant’s grand bargain with publishers - Press Gazette

• Google Researchers Say AI Now Leading Disinformation Vector - 404 Media

• Google adds “web” filter to only show text-based links in Google Search results - SEL

Latest in SEO:

• How to remove content and links from Google’s AI Overviews - GSQi

• What Are Redirects? Types, SEO Impact, & More - Ahrefs

• Google Crawl Budget Is Allocated By Hostname - SER

• JavaScript SEO Guide for SEOs and Developers - Seosly

• Directory Of Embarrassing Google AI Overviews - SER

Lastly, the early bird offer for the 2024 News and Editorial SEO Summit ends this week. If you want to attend our virtual online event dedicated entirely to SEO for news publishers, early bird tickets are the cheapest tickets we’re going to sell so make sure you get yours today.

That’s it for another edition. Thanks for reading and subscribing, and I’ll see you at the next one.

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The examples Google provides in its documentation make it explicit what they’re targeting. One in particular stood out:

A news site hosting coupons provided by a third-party with little to no oversight or involvement from the hosting site, and where the main purpose is to manipulate search rankings

Coupons/vouchers/discount codes are a common type of content on many publisher sites, and it was clear this would be in Google’s firing line.

When Google announced their new spam policies, they made the unprecedented decision to allow for a two-month grace period for publishers to mend their ways before the site reputation abuse policy would come into effect.

This is a very unusual approach. I can’t remember a previous instance when Google pre-announced new spam policies clearly and transparently, and then gave sites two months to clean up their act.

It was obvious Google is sending a signal. The most well-known culprits of site reputation abuse (also known as parasite SEO) were big publisher brands. Rather than come down with the penalty hammer straight away, Google wanted to give these big brands the opportunity to comply. This is a privilege most websites don’t receive.

My initial advice was clear: deindex this content if you want to escape a penalty. Most publishers didn’t take any action, calling Google’s bluff.

Manual Actions

May 5th came and went, and we didn’t need to wait long for the penalties started coming in. On May 6th the first notices arrived in Google Search Console:

The resulting loss of visibility in Google’s results showed the scale of the penalties:

I know of at least two dozen websites that have been manually penalised for hosting a coupons subfolder or subdomain.

While these penalties appear highly targeted, with the offending folder or subdomain suffering the brunt of the penalty, I have seen some of the bigger publishers suffer a loss of visibility in SISTRIX that exceeds the loss of visibility of the penalised section:

This shows that the impact may be more far-reaching than just the penalised section.

I’ve also seen some other types of content receiving a penalty, most notably sports betting and gambling content as well as blatant affiliate content.

Some of the penalised content seems to fall in a bit of a grey area, where you could make a case for editorial oversight. Theoretically that should qualify the content for an exemption as listed in Google’s documentation.

But it seems Google has zero chill on this issue and will penalise anything that even remotely fits their description of site reputation abuse.

In light of this, while Google has so far gone after coupons and gambling content, it’s very likely that more manual penalties will follow. I don’t expect other 3rd party content in niches like travel and shopping to be immune. These will also be targeted at some stage.

More importantly, these manual actions are just the beginning. Google has said there will be an ‘algorithmic component’ to the new spam policies, which means a site could be affected by a core algorithm update as well as a manual penalty. And core algorithm updates tend to have site-wide effects.

So I will repeat my initial advice: deindex this 3rd party content. Either remove it from your site entirely, or put a noindex meta tag on it.

I don’t think there is any value in trying to negotiate with Google. I’m sure the providers of this 3rd party content, seeing their business model evaporate, will do whatever they can to keep publishers on board and find a way to skirt around Google penalties.

But in my view, the risk is too great. Keeping this commercial 3rd party content on your site will result in a manual penalty and, more importantly, risks your entire site being massively downgraded in an upcoming core algorithm update.

And as we know, those can be truly devastating.

Are the benefits of this commercial non-news content worth the risk of losing most of your Google traffic? I don’t believe so.

AI Overviews

Yesterday Google held its annual I/O event where they introduce new products and features. The 2024 edition was, unsurprisingly, heavy on AI.

Search is not often featured in Google I/O, as it’s not a particularly sexy part of Google’s offering (despite being the breadwinner). However, this year search was in the spotlight as Google announced a wide rollout of its Search Generative Experience.

It’ll arrive under a different name: AI Overviews. Here is Google’s slick promo video of the new search feature:

Intended for more ‘complex queries’, these AI overviews are meant to help users find quick answers without having to do loads of research themselves. If you want the full details of what AI overviews can do, read Google’s announcement article here.

I’m quite interested in this particular sentence from that article:

“As we expand this experience, we’ll continue to focus on sending valuable traffic to publishers and creators.”

We’ll have to see what that actually means in practice, because right now it looks like Google - having trained its AI on the web’s copyrighted content - will do its best to summarise and replace that content in its own summaries, negating the need for users to visit the originating website.

I suppose it might be good for the user, but it does remove whatever meagre incentives remained for actual experts to create this content in the first place.

On the upside, it looks like SGE (and AI Overviews) will be less prominent in Google’s results. Research from Ziptie.dev shows that over the last few months, the presence of SGE in Google’s results (for users who had it enabled) kept being reduced. Currently the majority of results feature no SGE component at all.

Perhaps Google wasn’t too confident in this initial version of SGE. These new AI Overviews, generated by an updated Gemini model, might be more accurate.

Then again, they might not.

Publisher Center

In other news, Google has removed the ability to add a publication in its Publisher Center. Instead, as part of the algorithmic inclusion process for news websites, a website will automatically get a Publisher Center account when it’s deemed eligible for inclusion in Google News and Top Stories.

The intention is to ‘eliminate confusion’, which I sort of get. Many folks seemed to think that adding a publication in Publisher Center and getting the green ‘Live’ badge indicated the site was approved for Google News and Top Stories.

This was never the case. The Publisher Center setup was purely to control some aspects of how the site would appear in Google News, but it never meant you actually got any visibility in the first place. That was always up to Google’s entirely opaque news inclusion algorithms.

At first I was annoyed at Google for this change, but upon reflection I think it actually makes sense. Now a publication will only get a Publisher Center profile when it’s an approved Google News source. Hopefully this will also serve as a much-needed signal when a site has met the Google News criteria and is deemed an eligible publication.

I wonder how Google will notify a site when a Publisher Center profile has been created for it. Perhaps through Google Search Console?

Speaking of which…

Google Search Console Masterclass

I’m once again teaming up with Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley from WTF is SEO? for an online masterclass. In this one we’re doing a deep dive into Google Search Console, highlighting the most important reports and data that GSC provides for publishers.

The Masterclass will be held live on Tuesday 11th June 2024, at 11am EST / 3pm BST / 4pm GMT and will last one hour.

In the first half of the call, we will cover: 

1. Reports (including Crawl Stats, CWV, countries and more);

2. How to filter for insights; 

3. Using GSC to uncover opportunities. 

Participants are encouraged to bring questions relevant to their publications. This is an opportunity to get into the weeds on GSC, and get clarity on real-world problems that SEO and audience editors are facing every day.

After the masterclass, participants will receive the initial recording (the presentation in the first half), slides, an actionable tip sheet/checklist, and access to a private Slack channel with Jessie, Shelby and Barry for 60 days following the event to ask relevant follow up questions.

Book your Masterclass ticket here - limited seats available so get in there quick!

SEO for News Meetup in NYC

I’ve got my travel sorted and will be at the SEO for News meetup this coming Monday 20th May in New York. There’s an excellent lineup of speakers and panellists (including yours truly).

There are very few seats remaining for this FREE event, so reserve your spot ASAP and hang out with some of the top minds in news SEO this coming Monday.

NESS 2024

The early bird rate for the 2024 News and Editorial SEO Summit ends on May 31st. If you haven’t yet gotten your ticket to the premiere event on all things SEO for publishers, book yours today.

Miscellanea

Never a dull moment in SEO and publishing.

Official Google Docs:

• AI Overviews and your website

• Debugging drops in Google Search traffic [updated]

Interesting Articles:

• Google takes lion’s share of growing UK ad market as publishers lose out - Press Gazette

• Going deeper on the topics driving the 2024 US presidential election - Chartbeat

• Debugging tech journalism - Nieman Journalism Lab

• Google to pay up to $6 mln to News Corp for new AI content - Reuters

• Why FT may be wrong to license its content for AI training - Press Gazette

• Is $412 billion in one quarter a Big Tech monopoly? You tell me... - Future Media

• Facebook’s referral traffic for publishers down 50% in 12 months - Press Gazette

• News companies are sitting on a “gold mine” during great content shortage, AI model collapse - INMA

• OpenAI, Mass Scraper of Copyrighted Work, Claims Copyright Over Subreddit's Logo - 404 Media

Latest in SEO:

• What is going on with the Site Reputation abuse policy? - Marie Haynes

• Hit by Helpful Content Update? Read this - InLinks

• Unpacking Google’s 2024 E-E-A-T Knowledge Graph update - SEL

• On-page SEO and UGC for Publishers - Sitebulb

• Evergreen-ish: Durable content for news SEO - WTF is SEO?

• Google SGE Organic Traffic Impact Divided By Verticals [Data Study] - SEJ

• Webinar Recording: SEO for News & Publishing Brands - Sitebulb

That’s it for another edition. As always, thanks for reading and subscribing.

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I have a long and colourful history of ranting about the dangers of JavaScript in the context of SEO, which I will not repeat here. If you’re interested and have some time to spare, these two talks I gave in 2018 and 2019 respectively will serve to set the context:

Technical SEO in the Wild - Real World Issues and Fixes

JavaScript is Ruining the Web

I’m far from alone in pointing out the issues with JavaScript and SEO. The folks are Onely are among the best when it comes to R&D in this area, and they’re generous with their knowledge. Here’s a great resource from them that highlights the most common issues JavaScript can cause for SEO:

» 10 Most Common SEO JavaScript Issues and How to Fix Them

In the context of news websites, JavaScript poses additional challenges. News moves fast and fresh articles are published at an astounding rate. Google is constantly crawling news sites to find newly published URLs and index them rapidly.

When you have critical page content relying on client-side JavaScript, Google will need to render the page to index that content. This introduces a delay in Google’s indexing process, because rendering is far from rapid.

In fact, research from those same folks at Onely showed that JavaScript pages are crawled (and subsequently indexed) nine times slower than pages that contain all their content and links in the raw HTML.

Considering the speed with which news moves, I’m not sure a publisher can afford to be nine times slower than their competitors to get their stories crawled by Google.

Most importantly, this is a quote from Google’s technical guidelines for news publishers:

“Your articles’ pages should use HTML format and the body text isn't embedded in JavaScript.”

The message is clear: don’t use JavaScript to load article content.

But these recommendations are based on extreme scenarios where the page’s content is entirely loaded with client-side JavaScript. Fortunately for news publishers this is exceedingly rare.

There are, however, plenty of other implementations of JavaScript that don’t directly interfere with Google’s ability to index article content, but still cause issues with the site’s SEO.

Here are the most common JavaScript-related problems I see on publishing sites:

Navigation Menu

Top navigation menus often have a fold-out feature to show more links. Especially on mobile resolutions, fold-out hamburger menus are a common practice.

In and of itself, this doesn’t have to be an issue - as long as the links contained in the menu are already present in the HTML source. Their presence in the HTML means Google can see the navigation links there and crawl them without issue. It also tells Google what your main news categories are, which will help your site’s topic authority for those categories.

When fold-out menus use JavaScript to load links into the DOM, that’s when we start having problems. I see this with some regularity; the HTML only contains top-level navigation links, and the subcategory links are only loaded into the webpage when the menu is clicked.

The root of the issue is that Google doesn’t click. When rendering webpages for indexing, Google doesn’t perform any actions. No clicking, no scrolling, nothing.

So any content - links, text, or images - that relies on a user-action to be loaded into the webpage’s DOM are effectively invisible to Google. That includes navigation links.

By hiding these navigation links from Google you’re presenting a much shallower site to the search engine, restricting Googlebot’s access to your (sub)sections. This results in less effective crawling, and weaker topic authority signals.

Always make sure all your navigation links are present in the HTML and don’t require a client-side script action.

Pagination

A common way to implement pagination - i.e. showing more articles on a section page beyond just the first list of articles - is with Load More buttons or infinite scroll auto-loading.

If you’ve paid attention so far, you’ll see the issue here. Google doesn’t scroll, and Google doesn’t click.

If your site’s pagination uses JavaScript with either infinite scroll or a Load More button, chances are Google doesn’t see these additional articles on your section page. Effectively, you’re showing just a single list of articles to Google, with old stories dropping off rapidly as new articles take their place.

The impact on SEO is that, as far as Google is concerned, you have a short list of articles associated with any section page. This negatively impacts on topic authority.

Additionally, once articles drop off the first page of a section they lose internal link value in Google’s calculations, and their rankings will suffer accordingly (which is especially harsh for evergreen content).

You’ll want your pagination to be easily crawlable and indexable for Googlebot. This means old-fashioned pagination links with unique crawlable and indexable URLs. I’ve written about optimal pagination for news publishers before.

Comments & UGC

In a recent newsletter I spoke about the potential risks and benefits of allowing Google to index your reader comments and other user-generated content.

Usually comment functionality is implemented with client-side JavaScript, which means Google will have trouble indexing it unless you make specific allowances.

I won’t repeat my recommendations - if you’re interested, here’s the newsletter where I explore this issue in detail:

Recommended/Related/Trending Articles

Another common practice on news sites is to load related and recommended article blocks with client-side JavaScript.

Often, when such a block of additional content is provided within or underneath an article, it uses client-side JS to ensure the recommended articles are relevant to the story and/or align with currently trending articles.

This doesn’t have to be an issue, if you’re okay with Google not seeing these articles in the first instance.

If you’re diligent about internal linking to related stories directly from within an article’s content, then using client-side JS for blocks of related articles is fine. These extra article links are just a sprinkling of engagement bait and not really relevant for SEO.

However, if you do want Google to see those related article blocks, then you’d best load them directly in the HTML and not with client-side JavaScript.

Google may eventually render the page and see those related article blocks, but that rendering may happen days after initial indexing. At that stage those recommended articles could be very different and less relevant. If the recommended articles block uses personalisation, Google may even see something very different than your users.

SGE Doesn’t Render?

Now there’s a whole debate to be had about how SGE could impact news publishers’ Google traffic, but let’s park that for now (well, until May 29th when I’ll be speaking on exactly that topic at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress - more on that below).

In the context of this newsletter, it’s relevant to know that SGE primarily bases its responses on content found in a webpage’s HTML.

Again, the Onely folks have done the research to show that the vast majority of SGE answers are extracted from the HTML. JavaScript-dependent content is not surfaced in SGE at a similar rate.

If you care about showing up as an answer in Google’s SGE, you’ll want to load all your content in the raw HTML as well.

Advertising

I can’t talk about JavaScript and news websites without mentioning the elephant in the room: advertising.

Pretty much all online advertising uses JavaScript. Every bit of ad targeting, user tracking, personalisation, ad bidding, ad serving, etc. is done with JavaScript.

Publishers that rely on advertising as their primary monetisation channel will often find themselves at the mercy of their ad platforms when it comes to the amount and effectiveness of JavaScript loaded onto a typical article page.

Over the years I’ve seen some pretty egregious advertising payloads on article pages. The worst was a single article page that used over 1100 HTTP requests to load 240+ JavaScript files, clocking in at a whopping 10 megabytes of data (compressed; well over 24 MB uncompressed).

All that, just to load a single article for a single user.

Suffice to say, that website’s core web vitals scores were pretty disastrous. Moreover, loading that much JavaScript on an article betrays a deeper issue: an utter lack of respect for your readers.

Imagine if you’re a user on a data-restricted mobile contract. Loading 10 MB of data for a single news story is a significant and costly chunk of mobile data.

Additionally, many ad networks are known to collect user data on an industrial scale. Legalities aside, do you want your news website to serve as a privacy-invading data-harvesting platform? For me, that doesn’t align with what journalism’s fundamental principles should be.

Realistically, we need advertising to fund journalism. But there’s a balance to be found, and it should always start from the premise of treating your readers with respect. Overloading their browsers with advertising junk is not a sign of respect.

JavaScript and News Summarised

By now it should be abundantly clear: My recommendation is to use as little JavaScript as possible. JavaScript may not be evil, but it sure is evil-adjacent.

Upcoming Events

I’m speaking at and/or attending quite a few events in the next few weeks. In chronological order:

8 May - Webinar: From Crawling to Content, SEO for News & Publishing Sites
I’m doing a webinar with Sitebulb where I’m joined by Emina Demiri-Watson and Caitlin Hathaway to talk about SEO issues specific to news publishers.

20 May - New York: SEO for News Meetup
I’m trying to make the stars align for a short trip to New York City to join this event, organised by NewzDash and hosted by Wix. I can’t 100% say I’ll be there but I’m hopeful!

28-29 May - Copenhagen: WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress 2024
I’m delighted to be part of this event, where I’m part of a session with Condé Nast’s Sarah Marshall and Reach’s Dan Russell. I’ll be talking about the expected impact of Google’s SGE on publishers.

31 May - Eindhoven: Digital Olympus
I was born and raised in Eindhoven, so when an SEO event is taking place there I simply have to attend to soak up the knowledge shared by an awesome roster of speakers.

11 June - Online Masterclass: Google Search Console Deep Dive
Once again I’m joining Jessie and Shelby from WTF is SEO? for an online masterclass. In this one we’ll be digging into the intricacies of Google Search Console and show how to get the best data out of it.

19 June - Dublin: SEO Vibes on Tour
The folks at Whitepress are organising one-day SEO events all around the world, and in June they’re hitting the ground in Dublin. As part of a pretty packed speaker lineup, I’ll be closing the day with a rant about all the BS the SEO industry has endured the last quarter of a century.

I hope to see some of you at one or more of these events. If you spot me, please do come and say hi!

NESS 2024

We’ve nailed down our speaker roster early for the 2024 edition of the News and Editorial SEO Summit! On 29 and 30 October this year, the 4th NESS event will feature the following speakers:

• Rand Fishkin - Sparktoro

• Martin Splitt - Google

• Lily Ray - Amsive

• Claudio Cabrera - The Athletic

• Glenn Gabe - G-Squared

• Olaf Seydel - Zeit Online

• Ryan Kellett - Axios Media

• Andrea Volpini - Wordlift

• Ed Hyatt - The Wall Street Journal

• Vivienne Goizet - Bild

• Brendan O’Connell - The New York Post

I’m really excited about this amazing lineup. Early bird tickets are available until May 31st, so grab yours soon on the NESS website!

Miscellanea

There’s loads of interesting content to share with you all since the last newsletter:

Official Google Docs:

• Improving Search Console ownership token management

• Debugging drops in Google Search traffic [Updated]

• Understanding page experience in Google Search results [Updated]

Interesting Articles:

• The Man Who Killed Google Search - Ed Zitron

• Where Web Users Spend Time vs. Where Traffic Referrals Originate - Sparktoro

• Global audience insights from the first quarter of 2024 - Chartbeat

• Google Fined €250 Million in French Clash With News Outlets - Bloomberg

• OpenAI resorts to scraping YouTube as AI careens towards model collapse - Future Media

• How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I. - New York Times

• Discovering and Diagnosing a Google AdSense Rendering Bug - Merj

Latest in SEO:

• Breaking: SEO for Live News - WTF is SEO?

• Technical SEO Considerations for News Publishers - Sitebulb

• Google's March 2024 Core Update, Full Review, Analysis and Recovery - On-page.ai

• Google Will Fight Site Reputation Abuse Spam Both With Manual Actions & Algorithms - Search Engine Roundtable

That’s it for another edition, hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for reading and subscribing, and I’ll see you at the next one!

P.S. I hope you’re all ready for the May 5th deadline to get your act together for Google’s Site Reputation Abuse policies coming into effect. I’ve seen some publishers deindex content that would fit the profile, but many others seem to be calling Google’s bluff. Risky move.

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Suffice to say, we’re not lacking for conversational topics at this search marketing event.

We’ve seen many core updates before, and I’ve previously written about their impact on the news publishing industry. But this one feels different.

Changing the Narrative

First, it’s rare for Google to accompany a core update with a PR blitz, as they’ve done this time.

In addition to an extensive post on their main search blog, Google also added new spam policies to their documentation and many employees posted about this update on their official social media channels.

Elizabeth Tucker, Director of Product at Google Search, also spoke with Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz (arguably the most-read reporter in the SEO industry) to give background information about the update.

It’s obvious that this update is an attempt to change the narrative about Google search. The last several months have seen a steady stream of negative commentary about the quality of Google’s search results, with many claiming that AI-generated spam has made Google almost unusable.

This core update and the surrounding communication seems to be Google’s initial attempt to change that narrative and restore faith in their search results. I expect more of such endeavours to come, as Google strives to rebuild their reputation as the web’s best search engine.

Specific Targets

Second, this update is different because it has very clear targets. In their communications, Google explains what they hope to achieve and the type of SEO/spam tactics they’re targeting:

• Scaled Content Abuse: Google is taking aim at large-scale AI-generated content farms.

I find it a little ironic that Google wants to penalise AI-generated content, while also paying publishers to produce AI-generated content. Of course the contexts are very different, but at a glance the messaging seems a bit contradictory.

• Expired Domain Abuse: Spammers who buy up expired domains to host low quality content and get an initial boost will also be targeted with this update.

The targeting of expired domains is also interesting, as Google has insisted for years that this tactic doesn’t work. That, obviously, wasn’t quite true.

• Site Reputation Abuse: High authority websites that host 3rd party content with little editorial oversight can expect to be affected.

Site reputation abuse is Google’s terminology for what the SEO industry calls ‘parasite SEO’. In their spam policy documentation on this particular issue, Google uses the example of a news publisher hosting 3rd party coupon content with little to no editorial oversight.

All of the site reputation abuse examples listed there are applicable to many publishing websites that partner with 3rd party content providers. This has been a popular revenue stream for publishers for many years, but it looks like the party might soon be over.

Google is giving publishers a two-month grace period to mend their ways. In their blog post, Google states:

“We're publishing this policy two months in advance of enforcement on May 5, to give site owners time to make any needed changes.”

Now, when Google pre-announces updates to their systems to give site owners the chance to make the required changes, I’m always a bit skeptical.

Social Engineering

We’ve seen this before with HTTPS, mobile-first indexing, core web vitals - these were all pre-announced as major updates to how Google crawls, indexes, and ranks websites, and all proved to have very little impact.

The highly suspicious SEO in me understands that Google is well-placed to use these announcements as a means of manipulating the web as a whole and the SEO industry in particular.

Take disavow files for example. This was positioned as a way to let Google know which links pointing to your site were spam links, and shouldn’t be counted to prevent receiving a Google penalty.

Many folks in the industry realised that disavow files can also be used by Google to learn which links are actual spam links. By allowing the SEO industry to openly declare their spam links to Google, we’re giving Google the data to more accurately detect spam links.

This pre-announcement for site reputation abuse may serve a similar purpose. Google tells us to get rid (delete, robots.txt disallow, or noindex) 3rd party content, then sits back and watches us do exactly that.

This provides valuable data to Google about what we, as site owners, consider to be potentially spammy 3rd party content, thus enabling Google to train their systems to more accurately detect that content.

I’m probably being overly paranoid here. Yet, I’ve been in SEO long enough to understand the close attention the whole web pays to what Google says is a prime opportunity for Google to encourage certain behaviours that benefit them.

And it points to a wider issue, which The Independent’s Beth Ashton formulated on LinkedIn:

“No one wants spammy content in search but Google are so far down the road of deciding what journalism is surfaced that it has a responsibility, I think, to work with us for a more sustainable and innovative future.”

Google is quick to penalise, but slow to reward.

What To Do?

There’s no doubt that this is a major update that’ll have a profound impact. There are already reports of sites getting de-indexed and manual spam penalties being applied.

Is it time to panic?

If you’re not engaging in any of the behaviours that Google intends to target, then you’re probably going to be alright. There is a long history of collateral damage from core updates, with sites being affected that didn’t deserve it, so even if you’re not doing anything shady you might still feel some pain.

If you are engaging in any of the targeted tactics, especially in parasite SEO, you may need to mend your ways - and quickly, before the May 5th deadline Google has imposed.

The ‘brute force’ approach to avoiding traffic loss is to get rid of the parasite content entirely. But of course this also has a cost; you will lose the traffic and revenue associated with this content.

That may be the lesser evil - Google has previously hinted that parasite SEO penalties will be applied site-wide. So if you don’t get rid of your parasite content, your entire site could suffer when the May 5th deadline passes. And recovering from such site-wide penalties can be a lengthy (and costly) affair.

I’ve been having such conversations with clients for many months (years even), as I’ve always felt uneasy about mixing editorial journalistic content with obvious commercial content. Publishers have been hesitant to take remedial action, as commercial content only seemed to have benefits and no drawbacks.

This core update is the impetus required to take action and force publishers to focus on their core purpose as journalistic outlets.

Yet this begs the question, why should Google decide how publishers make money? It’s a tricky conundrum, but in reality we’re all subject to Google’s whims. Right now, we lack the power to change the dynamic between Google and publishers.

If you want to monitor how this update is rolling out and impacting websites, I highly recommend following folks like Lily Ray, Glenn Gabe, Marie Haynes, and Barry Schwartz.

Internal Linking Masterclass

I’m teaming up with Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley from WTF is SEO? to deliver a masterclass on internal linking for publishers. Join us live on Google Hangouts on March 28, 2024 at 11am EST (3pm UK) for a 60-minute session dedicated to optimizing your internal linking strategy. 

Internal links are little bits of SEO dust, sprinkling authority across your stories and telling Google what's important on your site. They're an SEO superpower, the main currency in Google's ecosystem — effectively, a recommendation from one page to another. 

In this live and recorded call, learn about using internal links as a core part of your overall SEO/search strategy. In the first half of the call, we will cover: 

1. Linking in your navigation; 

2. In-article/on-page internal links;

3. Crawl optimization.

Participants are encouraged to bring questions relevant to their publications. This off-the-record conversation is an opportunity to get into the weeds on internal links, and get clarity on real-world problems that SEO and audience editors are facing every day. 

After the masterclass, participants will receive the initial recording (the first half), presentation materials, an actionable tip sheet/checklist, and access to a private Slack channel with Jessie, Shelby and myself for 60 days following the event to ask relevant follow up questions. 

Details and tickets here.

Miscellanea

Here are official Google announcements, interesting articles, and the latest in SEO from the past few weeks.

Official Google Docs:

• What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies

• Adding structured data support for Product Variants

Interesting Articles:

• Google Is Paying Publishers to Test an Unreleased Gen AI Platform - Adweek

• Reddit and the 11.4 Million Organic Search Click Funnel - Sistrix

• News media versus AI: What if we win? - Press Gazette

Latest in SEO:

• What Is Google Discover, and How Can You Boost Your Traffic? - Moz

• How to succeed as a news SEO - WTF is SEO

• Google Most-Read Articles Search Carousel - SER

• Planning to live blog the next major event? Here’s what to expect for Engaged Time, Recirculation, and traffic sources - Chartbeat

Lastly, there’s still time to sign up for next week’s Advanced Technical SEO for News Publishers webinar with John Shehata and myself. Register here.

That’s it for another edition. As always, thanks for reading and subscribing and I’ll see you at the next one.

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Several parts of these internal documents stood out to me, because for me they explain the chaos we sometimes see in Google’s search results. There’s a rising tide of complaints that Google’s results are degrading, with obvious spam and low quality content becoming more prominent.

We feel that this is something Google should be able to fix, as it’s immediately clear to us that these spam webpages are full of awful content. If we can see it’s bad, why can’t Google?

The reason is that Google just isn’t that good at understanding content.

Clicks

Google struggles to read and evaluate content in the way humans do. Yes, Google can identify and extract keywords (topics & entities) and get a gauge of what the content is about, but actually understand content in a semantically meaningful way - and make evaluations about the content’s quality and usefulness - remains a tough challenge.

But what Google is good at is understanding how people interact with content. Specifically, when users click on a search result and whether they then return to the search result and click on a different page.

This ‘dialogue’ of search results and click behaviour is what allows Google to finetune and improve their results.

That’s Google’s ‘magic’. The scale of Google search means they have billions and billions of clicks that they can analyse and extract learnings from to help improve their results and show content that users have a positive engagement with.

(Side note: Chrome probably helps with this, as it collects its users’ click data.)

The SEO community has suspected Google uses click data in their ranking systems for many years. This piece from Rand Fishkin back in 2014 showed how a click experiment managed to directly influence a webpage’s rankings in Google.

While Google never fully denied using clicks, on many occasions Googlers have tried to cast doubt on clicks as a viable data source using woolly language and roundabout half-denials. It was clear that Google didn’t want us to know for sure that they use click data.

Looking back, those efforts from Google to undermine our assumptions were basically an attempt to gaslight the SEO industry into believing clicks didn’t matter. They probably felt that if SEOs understood exactly how important clicks were, we’d try to manipulate the signal and ruin Google’s results.

Which, I have to admit, is not an entirely unreasonable stance to take. After all, SEOs managed to manipulate Google’s other primary ranking signal: Links.

Links

In the first version of Google, launched to the public back in 1998, the primary ranking metric used was PageRank. This is a calculation of a webpage’s quality, derived from the number of hyperlinks pointing to that page from other webpages.

Using links as a ranking factor is what made Google the best search engine at the time, and to this day it is still a core component of their ranking systems.

Link metrics have evolved over time. Google doesn’t call it PageRank anymore, but I feel it’s still an appropriate word to use to describe link value and how it flows between webpages.

A few years ago I wrote an in-depth piece on PageRank and how it works: Introduction to PageRank for SEO. Worth a read if you’re interested in the topic.

Content isn’t King?

Despite Google proclaiming for years - decades - that all you need to do to rank well is produce great content, it turns out that content wasn’t the king of SEO after all.

At least, not directly.

Google is about links and clicks. Links provide the initial signal that a webpage might be worth ranking in search results, and clicks then confirm (or deny) that ranking as it shows how people interact with that webpage.

What does this mean for publishers? Do we need to drastically rethink our approach to SEO? Is an entirely different strategy required?

Well, no. In fact, it’s pretty much business as usual.

Let’s think about this for a moment. To succeed in Google, we now know beyond reasonable doubt, you need to get other websites to link to your site so that Google understands your content might be worth ranking. And then you need people to click on your page and not immediately return to Google’s results.

So you need to get links, and you need people to click on your stuff. How do you go about achieving these two things?

Cheat Codes

You may think there are ‘cheats’ that you can use to get links and clicks, and you’d be right. You can cheat your way to the top of Google’s results. It’s what spammers have been doing, with some measure of success, for as long as search engines have existed.

And every time, without fail, Google eventually catches on and spam sites lose their rankings. Sometimes Google finds out quickly, and sometimes it takes a while, but inevitably the game is up.

So, let’s assume you want to build a sustainable business in Google’s results, and not try to cheat your way to a temporary peak with an inevitable rapid demise. How do you accomplish lasting success in Google?

Content IS King

Of course, it is about content after all.

The best way to get other websites to link to you is to create content that deserves being linked to. Content that delivers something of value - an exclusive news story, an insightful piece of analysis, a compelling opinion voice, etc.

And this is something you need to do again and again. Create as many pieces of deserving content as you can, so that you accumulate links from various sources over a sustained period of time.

And then, as the link signals accumulate and Google starts ranking your pages in their results, you need to get people to click on your site and stay there. This, too, is founded on the quality of your content.

Make your content engaging and easy to read. Recommend other, related stories to your audience that are also engaging and easy to read. Provide a good user experience so people enjoy reading content on your site. Ensure visitors to your site can easily find what they’re looking for.

All these things have always been crucial to SEO: Well-structured content, internal linking, fast-loading webpages, strong UX, good site navigation, and so on.

What About Keywords?

With all this talk about links and clicks, it’s easy to lose sight of the very foundation of a search engine: Someone typing a search query.

Matching webpages to a user’s query is what a search engine does. And this all begins with keywords. Google tries to understand what the user is looking for by analysing the query itself.

Google has made strong progress over the decades in understanding user intent through Natural Language Processing, and understanding how words refer to concepts and entities and their relationships through the Knowledge Graph.

In a previous newsletter I showed how topic pages and internal links can empower your site’s presence in Google’s Knowledge Graph and drive improved rankings. Again, Google understands links very well, which is why good internal linking is such a powerful tactic.

But it all starts with the entities in the Knowledge Graph. Because Google isn’t as smart as humans in understanding content, we need to be explicit with our content.

That means you should use straightforward keywords to describe entities in your content - i.e. you need to use the right words in the right places.

In the Top Stories boxes on Googles results, articles are shown that match the topic of a user’s query. This is essentially keyword matching: Google looks to see if an article’s headline contains one or more keywords from the user’s query.

So saying that Google is all about links and clicks is not entirely correct - it’s also about keywords.

Keywords, links, and clicks. Those are the three main ingredients of Google’s magic formula.

The More Things Change

What the documents revealed in Google’s antitrust trial have shown is that SEO as we’ve always done it - optimising content for keywords, creating linkworthy content, and providing a great user experience - is exactly how it should be done.

Search and SEO have evolved of course, with algorithms’ emphases changing and different tactics falling in and out of fashion. Yet the core of SEO is still the same. That’s not something I expect to change anytime soon.

Miscellanea

If you want proper deep dives into the Google documents revealed in the antitrust trial, I highly recommend these three articles:

• How Google Search and ranking works, according to Google’s Pandu Nayak - Danny Goodwin

• Google’s Algorithms Uncovered: How the Search Engine Works According to Leaked Documents - Natzir Turrado

• What Pandu Nayak Taught Me About SEO - AJ Kohn

And here’s a selection of recent official updates, interesting articles, and SEO insights that are worth your while.

Official Google Docs:

• New in structured data: discussion forum and profile page markup

• Expanding markup support for Organization details, including Logo structured data

• The SEO Starter Guide got a makeover

Interesting Articles:

• Inside the News Industry’s Uneasy Negotiations With OpenAI - New York Times

• Why Google and Meta ‘owe’ news publishers - Poynter

• Why Google’s generative AI gamble is a game of chicken it could lose - Press Gazette

• Google’s working group for news publishers could shut down - Marketing Brew

• Traffic Declines in Google Discover, Top Stories & Google News Affect Publishers Across the Globe - Amsive

• 20 most profitable Google queries revealed during antitrust trial - SEL

Latest in SEO:

• Expert keyword research tips for news SEO - WTF is SEO

• Google Video Structured Data Docs Now Recommend Time & Timezone Inclusion - SER

• Rethinking AMP: Is it time for SEOs to let go? - Wix

• Google’s 2023 Search quality rater guidelines update: Here’s what changed - SEL

• News Outlets Can’t Avoid Google’s AI, But Here’s How You Can Prepare For It - iPullRank

• 10 Best AI SEO Tools for Publishers in 2024 - State of Digital Publishing

Lastly, if you’ll allow me some blatant self-promotion, I’m doing a webinar with NewzDash’s John Shehata about advanced technical SEO for news publishers on March 11th. Details and registration here.

That’s it for another (very belated) edition. Thanks for reading and subscribing, and I’ll see you at the next one!

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Turns out she had an article in the works about Discover, which has now been published on Moz with the title How to Drive Traffic in Google Discover: The Ultimate Guide.

And yes, it’s an ultimate guide. It covers everything I wanted to cover and loads more. So for now I don’t need to write about Discover, as Lily’s piece is quite simply the definitive piece on that topic.

So instead I moved on to the next topic on my list, which is an area I get many questions about whenever I deliver training for clients: user-generated content, and specifically comments underneath articles.

UGC is intrinsic to the web

User-generated content (UGC for short) has been a staple of the internet since the beginning. From bulletin boards to guestbooks and comments, the internet and the web have always allowed users to post and participate in various ways.

On the modern web, UGC is everywhere: comments, Q&As, forums and bulletin boards, guest articles, wikis, reviews - UGC comes in an endless variety of flavours.

Social media platforms are pretty much entirely UGC. Sites like Reddit and Quora are built on the contributions of their audience, with (almost) all their content generated by their users. Every page on Wikipedia is a combined effort from thousands of volunteers.

Essentially, UGC is open source for the web’s content.

UGC can serve as a deliberate tactic to generate vast amounts of content - which can rank in Google and drive traffic to the website - with relatively little effort. Instead of having to pay journalists and writers, you can just outsource the production of content to your audience.

The biggest risk is the potential abuse of UGC for unsavoury purposes. Oversight is required, which means you still need to invest in moderation resources to safeguard the quality of your site’s UGC.

For the purpose of this newsletter, I’ll focus on the most common form of user-generated content on publisher sites: reader comments underneath articles.

Can Google see comments?

The first question I get asked most often is ‘can Google see comments’? And the answer is, it depends.

You can easily test if Google can ‘see’ comments on your site. Simply copy a sentence from one of your user comments, paste it in a Google search in double quotes, and add the site:[example.com] operator to limit the results to your own domain.

An example:

This query is looking for a specific sentence from a comment on this article, and indeed Google shows it:

You may need to try snippets from comments on several different articles, and should always select articles that are at least a few weeks old. For Google to see and index comments, it usually needs to render pages as part of its tiered indexing process. The rendering phase of content is often delayed - it can take weeks for Google to fully render a newly published webpage.

So pick an old(ish) article that was relatively popular (so has a higher probability of being rendered), copy a snippet from a top comment underneath the article, paste it in a Google search box with quotes, and use the site: operator to focus the search on your own website.

If Google shows the article the comment belongs to, then yes Google indexes your comments.

Should Google see comments?

When we’ve answered the first question, the logical follow-up question is whether Google should be able to index comments. And, again, it depends.

Google has confirmed that it sees comments as part of the webpage’s content. In fact, Google has gone on record to say they like seeing comments. In the words of Google’s John Mueller:

“What I think is really useful there with those comments is that oftentimes people will write about the page in their own words and that gives us a little bit more information on how we can show this page in the search results. So from that point of view I think comments are a good thing on a page.”

I’ve had this experience myself, where one of my blog posts ranked top in Google results for a specific query that appeared only in the comments and not in the actual piece:

When I migrated my site to a new platform I chose not to migrate the comments across, and as a result I lost this particular ranking (which I’m genuinely a bit sad about).

But this also brings up a second point: Not all comments add value.

If you moderate your comments closely, you can ensure the published comments adhere to minimum standards and avoid spam, abuse, and profanity. With good moderation practices, it’s definitely worth allowing Google to index your comments as these can add value and enable broader rankings for your article in Google’s ‘ten blue links’ evergreen rankings.

However, if you have imperfect (or no) moderation, or your comment section has a certain community culture that features language which may be interpreted as abusive and profane, it might be safer to make your comments invisible for Google.

I have seen websites suffer from algorithm updates when their comment sections had specific features that were acceptable within the cultural norms of that site’s community, but to outsiders could appear to be abusive and harmful.

Google prefers to err on the side of caution. When Google sees an abundance of content on a site that could be interpreted as harmful, it can downgrade that website’s visibility in its search results - including in Top Stories if it’s a news publisher.

So you’ll have to take an objective look at the comments underneath your articles, and judge whether they’re acceptable for a broad audience. If the answer is ‘maybe not’, you should consider removing your comments from Google’s sight.

How can I block my comments from Google?

Which brings us to the third question: How can Google be prevented from seeing the comments on your site? The answer is, you guessed it… it depends.

Blocking Google from indexing comments is a technical issue. The best approach depends on how your site has implemented its comments function.

A common approach is to load comments through JavaScript. When specific JS files need to be loaded for your comments to appear on your articles, you could prevent Google from loading those JS files by blocking them with a robots.txt disallow rule. For example:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*comments.js

Some websites load comments with a separate URL attached to an article, for example with a URL parameter added to the article URL or in a subfolder (like Substack’s comment function) . These too can be blocked in robots.txt:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*?comments=yes
Disallow: /*/comments

Alternatively, if your comments are on a separate URL you can add a noindex meta tag to this URL to prevent Google from indexing them:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

If your comments are implemented on your site with a hashed URL, for example /article-url-here#comments, then blocking becomes more challenging. Google ignores hashes (and everything after a hash symbol) in URLs, so as a first step you’ll need to test whether Google can see the comments.

If Google indexes your comments, you may need to change how comments are implemented on your site to enable a specific blocking mechanism.

Some sites use a third-party comments feature like Disqus. I’m generally not a fan of those: Not only are such external comment features often terribly slow and have a negative impact on your site’s core web vitals, they can also come with additional problematic ‘features’.

The only upside is that, by virtue of trying to hide their footprint from Google, 3rd party comment features frequently make themselves unindexable for search engines. I’m not sure that payoff is worth it, though.

Blocking Google may not be enough

After the email edition of this newsletter went out, Will reached out and reminded me that comments are explicitly mentioned as page quality signals in Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines.

In these guidelines, Google states: “If a specific page on a website has unrelated ‘spammed’ comments, the page should be ratest Lowest.”

So even if Google can’t see bad comments but they’re shown to users, it can still impact your site’s quality signals as perceived by the machine learning systems that the quality raters are improving.

If you lack the resources to properly moderate your comments, it might be safer to get rid of comments altogether.

Comments and Crawling

So far I haven’t discussed an additional aspect to consider with comments: How it impacts Googlebot’s crawling of your site. Once again, this depends on exactly how comments have been implemented.

Some websites generate a unique URL for every comment that is posted. This could create enormous amounts of new URLs for Googlebot to discover, crawl, and potentially index. This represents a potential crawl waste issue, and adds an additional element to your SEO considerations.

If you’re finding that Google is spending an inordinate amount of crawl effort on comment URLs, you could consider blocking Googlebot from your comments with aforementioned robots.txt disallow rules or a similar mechanism.

Comments on Comments

If you have any thoughts of your own on the value of comments and how you would approach it, please leave a comment. ;)

NESS 2023 Wrap-Up

The third annual News and Editorial SEO Summit was held last month on October 11th and 12th, and I’m proud to say it was another smashing success. We had 546 registered attendees, of which 490 joined the live event at various stages.

The event had a truly global audience, with attendees from 53 different countries; from New Zealand to the USA, from Norway to Argentina! Every continent was represented at NESS 2023 (except for Antarctica - perhaps one day!). It's amazing to have such a diverse audience from around the world be part of the event.

The chat was very lively on both days - there were over 1600 messages posted in the chat in total, and a whopping 578 questions asked with the Q&A feature across all sessions! Amazing engagement from all our attendees.

The ever-awesome Jessie & Shelby have written roundups of both days of the conference, which you can read on their excellent WTF is SEO? website:

1. What we learned at NESS 2023 - Part One

2. What we learned at NESS 2023 - Part Two

We’re already planning the 2024 edition and have dates reserved: October 29th & 30th 2024. Save the dates in your calendar and keep an eye on the NewsSEO.io website for details.

Miscellanea

As usual I’ll end with a roundup of the most interesting updates, resources, and stories since the last newsletter.

Official Google Docs:

• A Q&A on Google Search updates

• Mobile-first indexing has landed - thanks for all your support

• Vehicle listing structured data for car dealerships

• Googlebot (updated: “When crawling from IP addresses in the US, the timezone of Googlebot is Pacific Time.”)

Interesting Articles:

• Google cuts dozens of jobs in news division - CNBC

• Social media traffic to top news sites craters - Axios

• Pervasive Unauthorized Use of Publisher Content to Power Generative AI Technologies - News Media Alliance

• Why Google’s generative AI gamble is a game of chicken it could lose - Press Gazette

• From headlines to algorithms: how newsrooms are approaching creating AI guidelines - The Fix

• Publishers' page views plummet 40% after latest Google tweak - Future Media

• 20 most profitable Google queries revealed during antitrust trial - SEL

Latest in SEO:

• How to Drive Traffic in Google Discover: The Ultimate Guide - Moz

• Google Experiments With Desktop Discover Feed - SEJ

• 7 must-see Google Search ranking documents in antitrust trial exhibits - SEL

• What is an Explainer? - WTF is SEO?

• Inside Google’s massive 2023 E-E-A-T Knowledge Graph update - SEL

• Google Core Update, Spam Update October 2023 - Sistrix

• Does Google AMP Still Matter for Publishers in 2023? - NewsDashboard

• SEO & Site Migrations: Common Pitfalls To Avoid [Podcast] - SEJ

That’s it for this edition. Thanks for reading and subscribing, and I’ll see you at the next one!

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