Adam Hafez

Bing now asks some searchers to verify they are human

Search Engine Roundtable reports Bing showing a verify-you-are-human checkbox before results. The trigger is unknown and the check was not reproduced.

Sep 18

OpenAI tests Sponsored Agents as a new ChatGPT ad format

OpenAI is testing Sponsored Agents: labeled conversations with a business agent that users start after clicking a ChatGPT ad, with select US advertisers.

Sep 18

Google Discover on desktop has disappeared, and Google is silent

Search Engine Roundtable reports Discover no longer appears on desktop Google.com, with no explanation from Google. What is verified and what is not.

Sep 18

Google tests an AI Mode button in the results page search bar

Google is testing an AI Mode button in the search bar on results pages, not only the home page. The button is inconsistent and regular search still works.

Sep 18

Google Search profiles get new article cards and a lower bar

Google cut the follower requirement for Search profiles to 10,000, added richer article views, and lets one account manage up to 10 profiles.

Sep 18

Canonical tag adoption, 2025: 68% of desktop pages set one

The 2025 Web Almanac SEO chapter puts rel=canonical on 68% of desktop and 67% of mobile pages, up from 65%, with mismatches under 1%.

Sep 18

AI training now drives 52% of crawler requests, Cloudflare says

Cloudflare reports AI training made up 52% of identified crawler requests in June 2026, up from 22% in Spring 2025, with search crawling shrinking.

Sep 18

Where desktop Google searches end: Datos Q4 2025 data

Datos and SparkToro's Q4 2025 clickstream shows 24.5% of US desktop Google searches ended with no click in December, versus 25.1% a year earlier.

Sep 18

INP in 2025: 77% of mobile sites pass, but the top 1,000 lag at 63%

The 2025 Web Almanac's INP data: 77% of mobile sites have good INP, popular sites trail at 63%, and mobile home pages beat inner pages 80% to 69%.

Sep 18

llms.txt fetch counts: what AI crawlers requested on 83 sites

EZY Research's 12-week server-log panel shows OpenAI and Anthropic crawlers fetching llms.txt in single digits while pulling robots.txt thousands of times.

Sep 18

What correlates with AI brand mentions? Ahrefs' 75,000-brand study

Ahrefs correlated 12 metrics with brand mentions in ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews: web mentions beat backlinks, and it warns of no causation.

Sep 18

How accurate are sitemap lastmod values? Bing's study

Bing's own study of sitemaps found 18% of lastmod values set incorrectly, usually to the generation date, and Google says it only trusts accurate ones.

Sep 18

Do AI assistants cite fresher content than Google? Ahrefs data

Ahrefs compared the age of 16.975 million URLs cited by AI assistants against organic Google results. Here is the method, the numbers and the limits.

Sep 18

Reddit's top-3 share after the May 2026 core update

SE Ranking tracked 100,000 keywords in 20 niches and measured Reddit's share of Google's top three results. This piece reviews its method and limits.

Sep 18

Sistrix CTR study: how SERP layout changes position-1 clicks

Sistrix analyzed 80 million keywords and found position 1 averages 28.5% CTR, ranging from 13.7% to 46.9% depending on the SERP layout.

Sep 18

Merchant Center feed fixes and three click gains, per Uproer

Uproer's published case study reports feed-level Google Merchant Center changes lifted clicks 130%, 116% and 3,500 for three unnamed ecommerce brands.

Sep 18

JunkCarsUs: HCU recovery from 30-50 to 400-500 clicks a day

SeoProfy's case study on JunkCarsUs: after the September 2023 HCU, pruning pages and rewriting templates preceded a rise to 400-500 daily clicks.

Sep 18

Log analysis cut a jewelry site from 16M to 730K crawlable pages

A JetOctopus case study: log files showed Googlebot spending crawl on filter, sort and pagination URLs, and closing them shrank the site to 730K pages.

Sep 18

Nuvemshop lifted good LCP from 57% to 96% by fixing image loading

Nuvemshop's web.dev case study: removing lazy loading on top images and adding fetchpriority took good LCP from 57% to 96% across its stores.

Sep 18

Programmatic SEO case: 100 pages, 398% traffic, per Suso Digital

Suso Digital reports a software supply chain client grew organic traffic 398.49% in 18 months from about 100 template pages. What the case shows.

Sep 18

Hreflang XML sitemap generator

Build a sitemap with xhtml:link hreflang annotations for localized pages, with every alternate listed on every URL as Google's documentation requires.

Sep 18

HTTP status code crawl handling checker

Paste status codes and see how Google's crawlers document handling each one, plus a redirect hop count against Google's 10-hop default.

Sep 18

Link rel attribute auditor: sponsored, ugc, nofollow

Audit the links in pasted HTML against Google's rel qualifiers: sponsored for paid links, ugc for user content and nofollow when neither applies.

Sep 18

Robots meta tag and X-Robots-Tag validator

Validate robots meta tags and X-Robots-Tag headers against the rules Google documents, and see the combined result for Googlebot.

Sep 18

URL normalizer and duplicate variant finder

Normalize a list of URLs by RFC 3986 rules and your own policy, then see which URLs collapse into the same page and need one canonical.

Sep 18

Google Analytics rolls out drag-and-drop custom dashboards

GA4 Dashboards let you drag dimensions and metrics onto a grid canvas, combining six chart types into one KPI page instead of separate reports.

Sep 16

Search Central Live returns to India for a Bengaluru date in October

Google's Search Central team holds a free, one-day Search Central Live event in Bengaluru on October 30, 2026, its first India event since 2023.

Sep 16

Logging bug undercounted impressions in Search Console's AI report

A logging error cut reported impressions in Search Console's Generative AI report from August 13, 2026, Google says, with no real drop in visibility.

Sep 16

Google ranking volatility spikes sharply, no update confirmed

SEO chatter and rank-tracking tool activity spiked hard on 15 September 2026. Barry Schwartz suspects an update is starting; Google has confirmed nothing.

Sep 16

An unconfirmed September update hit big sites, then fully reversed

Glenn Gabe tracked large sites dropping hard around September 3-4, 2026, then surging back on September 13. Google confirmed neither move.

Sep 16

How much AI Overview citations overlap with the top 10

BrightEdge's own year-long tracking: only 17% of AI Overview citations also rank in the organic top 10, flat since last year, with wide swings by industry.

Sep 16

AI referral traffic to publishers doubled in a year, Similarweb finds

Similarweb measured 770.7 million monthly AI referral visits worldwide, up 117.4% year over year, led by marketplaces and news.

Sep 16

Core Web Vitals by CMS, 2025: Duda and Wix lead, WordPress lags

The 2025 Web Almanac's CMS chapter breaks Core Web Vitals pass rates down by platform: Duda at 85%, Wix up 14 points to 74%, WordPress flat at 45%.

Sep 16

WebSite leads schema.org type adoption at 12.73% of mobile pages

The 2024 Web Almanac breaks JSON-LD down by schema.org type: WebSite tops out at 12.73% of mobile pages, Organization at 7.16%, Product at just 0.77%.

Sep 16

Google SERP volatility by category, mid-September 2026

Semrush Sensor's live index reads 2.1 out of 10 for mid-September 2026, but News and Finance run far hotter than Science or Health.

Sep 16

A randomized field experiment on AI Overviews and organic clicks

A randomized Chrome-extension experiment hid AI Overviews for 1,065 searchers. This piece analyzes Agarwal and Sen's SSRN study of the CTR impact.

Sep 16

What happened when someone actually A/B tested author bylines

SearchPilot ran a real controlled SEO split test on author bylines and bios. Result: no detectable ranking gain, and possibly a small loss.

Sep 16

SearchPilot test: canonical alone matched a redirect for duplicates

A SearchPilot split test added 301 redirects atop an existing canonical tag for trailing-slash duplicates. The result stayed inconclusive.

Sep 16

What a 10M-page site shows about links and crawl budget

Botify's case study of a US auto marketplace ties internal-link depth to crawl activity: a 19x increase in crawling once linking was fixed.

Sep 16

Why title rewrite rate studies disagree: 33% vs 61% vs 76%

Ahrefs found a 33.4% title rewrite rate, far below Zyppy's 61.6% and Search Engine Land's 76%. The gap traces to how each study defines a match.

Sep 16

CoinStats fixed a Core Web Vitals bug, tripled search impressions

DebugBear's case study: CoinStats found Base64 images were bloating 15,000 pages, fixed it, and saw Good URLs and search impressions both increase 3x.

Sep 16

Home Science Tools: pruning 200 blog pages, organic sessions up 104%

Inflow's case study on HomeScienceTools.com: removing roughly 200 low-value blog pages preceded a 104% rise in sessions and 102% rise in transactions.

Sep 16

IFTTT's internal linking fix and its 33% YoY traffic gain

Uproer's case study on IFTTT: searchbots reached only 59 pages via internal links until a fix, after which the site saw 33% YoY organic traffic growth.

Sep 16

Marshfield Clinic: 454% CTR gain from schema markup

Schema App's customer story on Marshfield Clinic reports a 454% CTR increase when a Review Snippet was awarded, plus 32% from entity linking.

Sep 16

Simms Fishing's Magento to Shopify migration: the real numbers

Inflow's case study: Simms Fishing saw organic traffic up 126% YoY and non-brand category traffic up 5,642% after a Magento to Shopify move.

Sep 16

Faceted navigation parameter analyzer

Check a filtered listing URL's query parameters against Google's own documented faceted navigation guidance, and get a suggested robots.txt block.

Sep 16

International targeting strategy planner

Score a ccTLD, subdomain, subdirectory or URL-parameter structure against Google's own documented geotargeting pros and cons for your constraints.

Sep 16

Meta refresh vs. 301 redirect checker

Parse a meta refresh tag's delay and target, and see which redirect signal Google actually reads from it: permanent at 0 seconds, temporary above 0.

Sep 16

Pagination and canonical conflict checker

Check a paginated sequence's URLs and canonicals against Google's guidance, and catch the common mistake: consolidating every page to page 1.

Sep 16

Robots.txt syntax validator

Lint a whole robots.txt file for structural and syntax errors against RFC 9309 and Google's own interpretation of it, line by line.

Sep 16

Google documents its EEA-only aggregator and supplier units

Google's September 2026 changelog documents aggregator units, supplier units and carousels: result formats limited to the EEA, South Africa and Turkiye.

Sep 12

JSON-LD syntax and required-field validator

Paste a JSON-LD block and get real syntax errors with line numbers, plus a check against the properties Google actually requires for that schema type.

Sep 11

Google splits site reputation enforcement along the EEA border

From 30 August, a site reputation manual action changes results only outside the EEA. Inside it, the section is separated and left to rank on its own.

Sep 10

Every confirmed Google ranking update since December 2025

Eight confirmed updates, with Google's own start dates and rollout durations, and what the pattern says about when to judge a decline in your data.

Sep 10

Who blocks AI crawlers: 60 robots.txt files, read in full

We read the robots.txt of 60 publishers and SEO vendors. News sites block AI crawlers almost universally. The SEO industry does not.

Sep 10

llms.txt is a vendor standard, not a publisher one

Only 14 of 60 major sites serve an llms.txt. Half of them sell SEO or hosting software. One is a news publisher. The file has an audience problem.

Sep 10

Redirect chain analyzer: check hop count, loops and mixed codes

Paste a redirect chain you collected yourself and check it against Google's guidance on chain length, loops, mixed 301/302 codes and protocol drift.

Sep 10

Bing reports how often AI answers cite your pages

AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools counts citations in Copilot and AI answers, names the cited URLs, and shows the queries behind them.

Sep 9

Search Console now reports impressions from Google's AI features

Google added a generative AI performance report to Search Console, showing how often your pages surfaced inside AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover.

Sep 9

Search Console now measures your TikTok, X and YouTube posts

Platform properties let a creator see the queries that lead people to their Instagram, TikTok, X or YouTube content on Google Search and Discover.

Sep 9

AI answer readiness checker for articles

Score an article on the structural properties that decide whether an answer engine can extract, quote and attribute it.

Sep 9

Image alt text auditor

Paste HTML and check every image's alt attribute for missing, empty, generic and keyword-stuffed alt text against Google's own guidance.

Sep 9

robots.txt and llms.txt generator with an AI policy

Decide which AI crawlers may take your content, see what each one actually does, and generate both files from that one decision.

Sep 9

Structured data generator for search and AI

Build valid JSON-LD for Article, NewsArticle, FAQPage, VideoObject, Organization and BreadcrumbList, with every required property checked.

Sep 9

SERP snippet preview with pixel-accurate truncation

Preview a title and meta description as Google renders them, measured in pixels rather than characters, on desktop and mobile.

Sep 9

The August 2026 spam update finished after three days

Google's August 2026 spam update ran from 18 to 21 August. Here is how to tell a spam-update drop from a core-update drop in your own data.

Sep 8

How often Google rewrites a title tag: 61.6% to 76%

Two independent studies measured how often Google rewrites a title tag rather than using it as written: 61.6% in 2022, 76% by 2025.

Sep 8

Breadcrumb schema generator

Build a valid BreadcrumbList JSON-LD trail from a repeatable list of page names and URLs, checked against Google's own documented structure.

Sep 8

Google opens AI Mode ads to exact and phrase match keywords

Google confirmed on 4 September 2026 that exact and phrase match keywords can serve text ads in AI Mode, once reserved for AI Max and Performance Max.

Sep 7

Site migration redirect map builder

Build a 1:1 old URL to new URL redirect map for a site migration and export it as CSV, Apache .htaccess or Nginx rewrite rules.

Sep 7

Bing tests bolded HTTPS and snippets without site names

Two separate September 2026 Bing tests change result snippets: one bolds the https segment of the URL, the other drops the site name line.

Sep 6

Core Web Vitals thresholds checker

Classify an LCP, INP and CLS number against Google's published Good, Needs Improvement and Poor thresholds, and see the overall pass or fail.

Sep 6

Publishers report Google News sitemap data stuck in Search Console

Webmasters say the indexed pages report for their news sitemap has not moved since August 28, even though new articles are indexed and visible.

Sep 5

SearchPilot: removing a breadcrumb link cut organic traffic 5.5%

SearchPilot split-tested removing a self-referential breadcrumb link on PLPs. Traffic fell 5.5%, likely from a schema markup mismatch left behind.

Sep 5

Canonical tag checker

Check a declared canonical URL against Google's documented rules: absolute URL, HTTPS, self versus cross-domain, and tracking parameters.

Sep 5

robots.txt tester: check a user-agent against a path

Paste a robots.txt, pick a crawler and a URL path, and see the exact Allow or Disallow line that decides the outcome.

Sep 4

Does llms.txt do anything? Three studies say mostly no

97% of published llms.txt files get zero AI-bot requests. A 10-site traffic test found no effect in 8 cases. The one positive figure has its own confound.

Sep 3

Sitemap vs robots.txt conflict checker

Paste a sitemap and a robots.txt, then see every URL the sitemap lists for crawling that robots.txt also blocks for the tested user-agent.

Sep 3

Readability and reading time calculator

Score pasted text with the Flesch reading ease formula and estimate reading time, computed live in your browser from real, cited constants.

Sep 2

Keyword cannibalization checker

Compare titles or H1s across your own pages and flag near-duplicate pairs using Jaccard word-overlap similarity, entirely in your browser.

Aug 31

SearchPilot: canonicalizing to a variant lifted variant traffic 22%

SearchPilot canonicalized product pages to a variant's URL instead of self-referencing. Variant pages gained 22%; main pages stayed inconclusive.

Aug 30

Google confirms AI Overviews now auto-expand on some queries

Google confirmed on 28 August 2026 that AI Overviews can dynamically expand into a full, detailed answer for some queries, dropping the Show more control.

Aug 29

Bulk title and meta description length checker

Paste many pages at once and see which titles and descriptions will truncate in Google search results, measured in pixels.

Aug 29

DOM.RIA's internal linking rebuild and its Googlebot crawl visits

JetOctopus's case study on real estate site DOM.RIA, reworking internal links to poorly-crawled directory pages roughly tripled Googlebot visits to them.

Aug 27

Hreflang tag generator and validator

Build correct <link rel="alternate" hreflang> tags for a set of localized URLs and check them against Google's reciprocity and x-default rules.

Aug 27

Open Graph and X card preview

Preview how a title, description and image will render as a Facebook or LinkedIn link card and as an X summary_large_image card.

Aug 25

Google fixes Search Console favicon bug and a crawl stats data gap

Google fixed a bug replacing site favicons with a default globe icon in search results, and separately restored a two-day gap in Crawl Stats data.

Aug 24

AI citation patterns shift sharply by search intent, Wix data shows

Wix Studio's AI Search Lab found articles win informational queries 2.7x more, and listicles and product pages win commercial and transactional ones.

Aug 24

URL structure analyzer

Check a URL's length, path depth, parameters and separators against Google's documented URL structure guidance and labelled heuristics.

Aug 23

Three named companies that disclosed real AI-search traffic losses

Chegg, Business Insider and HubSpot all show real, checkable declines. A widely repeated CNN figure does not survive a source check.

Aug 21

XML sitemap structure validator

Paste raw sitemap XML for real parse errors, a namespace and structure check, and the 50,000 URL and 50MB limits from the sitemaps.org protocol.

Aug 21

How long domain migrations take to recover organic traffic

A 892-migration study found the average new domain took 523 days to match the old domain's organic traffic, and 17% never did within 1,000 days.

Aug 19

Meta robots tag builder

Build a syntactically correct robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header, with Google-specific directives flagged and contradictions caught.

Aug 19

Google's own data: Rakuten and Vodafone Core Web Vitals A/B tests

Google's web.dev logged two named A/B tests: Rakuten 24 saw 53.37% more revenue per visitor, Vodafone Italy saw 8% more sales after a 31% LCP gain.

Aug 17

Google search operator query builder

Build a Google search query from site:, filetype:, exact phrase, exclude and OR fields, with operators Google no longer documents clearly flagged.

Aug 17

Do internal links still track with Google Search traffic in 2026?

Zyppy's 23-million-link study and Google's own crawling documentation show why pages with few internal links struggle to get discovered and clicked.

Aug 15

Anchor text diversity calculator

Classify inbound anchor texts against a target keyword and see the real split between exact match, partial match, branded, generic and naked URL anchors.

Aug 15

Keyword density and content length checker

Count words and keyword occurrences in your draft and see the density as a diagnostic number, not an optimal-percentage target that does not exist.

Aug 13

SearchPilot: promoting an H2 to H1 lifted organic traffic 4.5%

SearchPilot split-tested changing a travel site's top heading from an H2 to an H1. The change produced a statistically significant 4.5% traffic increase.

Aug 11

JSON-LD structured data adoption grew from 34% to 41% of pages

HTTP Archive's Web Almanac found JSON-LD on 41% of pages in 2024, up from 34% in 2022, while RDFa and Open Graph stayed the most common formats.

Aug 11

ChatGPT Ads adds oCPC bidding and a product carousel

OpenAI added beta conversion bidding, dynamic URL macros and a multi-product carousel to ChatGPT Ads product feed campaigns on August 7, 2026.

Aug 10

One publisher's Google Discover traffic loss and recovery

A consultant's self-reported case: a client site's Discover impressions hit zero for weeks, then recovered after a quality fix. One case, not a study.

Aug 9

Deloitte: 0.1s faster mobile speed lifted retail conversion 8.4%

Deloitte's 2019 study of 37 brand sites found a 0.1s mobile speed gain lifted retail conversion 8.4%. Shopify data adds a 100ms benchmark.

Aug 8

Ahrefs: AI Overviews cut position-1 CTR by 58%

Ahrefs analyzed 300,000 keywords via Google Search Console and found AI Overviews now cut position-1 organic CTR by 58%, up from 34.5% a year earlier.

Aug 6

SearchPilot: FAQ content lifted traffic, FAQ schema did not

SearchPilot split-tested FAQ content and FAQ schema. Content added 9.7% more organic clicks; removing schema alone changed nothing.

Aug 5

Review and AggregateRating schema: Google's real required fields

Google's own review-snippet documentation names exact required properties and exact abuse rules. Most markup fails one of those, not from being absent.

Aug 4

Zero-click Google searches hit 68% in the US

SparkToro and Similarweb's June 2026 report puts US Google zero-click search at 68.01%, up from 60.45% in 2024.

Aug 4

Mobile vs desktop Core Web Vitals: INP gap widest, CLS flips

HTTP Archive's July 2025 data broken down by metric: INP splits mobile and desktop by 20 points, LCP by 12, and CLS reverses the pattern entirely.

Aug 2

Pagination and infinite scroll: what Google actually indexes in 2026

rel=next/prev has been dead as an indexing signal since 2019, per Google's own words. Infinite scroll without real URLs is the same mistake in new clothes.

Aug 1

Do backlinks still correlate with rankings in 2026?

Backlinko's 11.8M-result study and Ahrefs' 1M-keyword study both find a positive link between referring domains and rank, but the coefficient is weak.

Jul 31

Hreflang error rates: what's actually sourced, and what isn't

Two widely repeated hreflang error statistics do not trace to any real source. Here is what could be verified instead, from Google's own documentation.

Jul 29

SearchPilot: nearby-region links lifted organic traffic 7%

SearchPilot split-tested linking each of 8,000 regional pages to its 6 nearest neighbors. Linked pages saw a 7% organic traffic uplift over controls.

Jul 28

AI citation hallucination rates: what three real studies found

GPTZero, the Tow Center and a Cureus study each measured AI citation hallucination differently, and none of their numbers agree with each other.

Jul 27

Google's own numbers: structured data lifted CTR 25-82%

Google's own documentation reports Rotten Tomatoes at 25% higher CTR and Nestle at 82% higher CTR from structured data. Here is what each figure measures.

Jul 27

What academic research actually says about AI citation factors

Four 2026 papers measured what predicts citation by AI search engines. Position and relevance win; most citations skip brand domains entirely.

Jul 25

Noindex does not save crawl budget, per Google's own documentation

A common crawl-budget fix is backwards. Google's own documentation says noindex still costs a full request before the page gets dropped from the index.

Jul 23

Site reputation abuse: what the evidence actually shows

Google's manual actions against parasite SEO are 18 months old. Here is what is documented versus what is anecdotal case tracking.

Jul 23

NavBoost: what the DOJ trial and the API leak actually confirmed

Court testimony and a leaked Google document, read together, describe a click-based re-ranking system Google spent years declining to confirm in public.

Jul 21

VideoObject schema: the required properties Google actually documents

Google documents three required VideoObject properties, not the four often claimed, plus exact date and duration formats and a rich-result caveat.

Jul 21

Why four 2026 'ChatGPT market share' numbers do not agree

StatCounter, Similarweb, Sensor Tower and OpenAI itself all published a 2026 ChatGPT usage figure. None of the four is measuring the same thing.

Jul 19

Core Web Vitals and rankings: what the correlation shows

CrUX data and a 20,000-URL ranking study both show a link between Core Web Vitals and rank, but Google's own docs put content relevance first.

Jul 19

Googlebot's two-wave rendering: how long JS content actually waits

A 2024 Vercel and MERJ study measured the real gap between crawl and render at scale. The median was seconds; the tail stretched to a full day.

Jul 17

E-E-A-T and author schema: what is actually verifiable

SEO content repeats precise E-E-A-T ranking-weight percentages. We checked the two most-cited figures against their sources and Google's own documentation.

Jul 15

Does content length correlate with rankings and AI citations?

Ahrefs' December 2025 study puts the word count to AI Overview citation correlation at 0.04. Backlinko's 11.8M-result study finds no ranking edge either.

Jul 15

What Google actually names in its own ranking systems guide

Google publishes a real, maintained list of the named systems behind Search ranking. Read directly, not summarized secondhand.

Jul 14

Local ranking factor percentages: what's real, what's not

A specific local ranking percentage breakdown circulates widely. It doesn't match Whitespark's real 2026 chart, and Google names no percentages at all.

Jul 13

How three CTR trackers reported three different position-1 rates

Three trackers measured 2026 organic CTR by position and reported position 1 anywhere from 27.6% to 39.8%, because none used the same method.

Jul 11

How five llms.txt trackers reported five different adoption rates

Five independent trackers measured llms.txt adoption in 2026 and reported numbers from 7.4% to 28%, because none counted the same thing.

Jul 8

How many confirmed Google updates ship a year, 2015 to 2026

87 confirmed major Google updates since 2015, counted year by year, next to Google's own figure for total changes, and why the two must stay separate.

Jul 7

Mobile-first indexing, from 2016 test to 2023 completion

Tracing Google's mobile-first indexing announcements from 2016 to the 2023 completion notice, and its documentation on mobile-desktop content parity.

Jul 6

x-default's real history: what Google has actually said, on record

x-default has been explained by Google at least three times since 2013. Here is the real, dated wording each time, and what current documentation says.

Jul 6

How often AI Overviews actually appear, January 2025 to April 2026

Semrush's own tracking: 6.49% of keywords in January 2025, a July peak near 24.61%, then 15.69% in November - the real trend, not a snapshot.

Jul 4

HTTPS as a Google ranking signal in 2026

Google called HTTPS a very lightweight ranking signal in 2014 and has never revised that number. Adoption data now shows why it barely needs to.

Jul 3

How Google's scaled-content spam enforcement moved through 2026

From the May 2026 spam-policy rewrite to the August spam update, tracing enforcement against mass-produced, low-value content across 2026.

Jul 2

What Google's own Discover documentation actually requires

Google's Discover eligibility page sets an exact image-size floor and a named list of content policies. Here is what it says, word for word.

Jun 30

What Google has actually said about Google Lens search volume

Google's own dated numbers: 12 billion Lens searches a month in June 2023, nearly 20 billion by October 2024 - and why the 22%/26% claims don't check out.

Jun 30

Google's AI Mode terms for French publishers

Ahead of its French launch, Google told publishers it would offer an opt-out, separate AI traffic reporting, and neighboring-rights compensation.

Jun 29

How much link equity does a 301 redirect actually pass?

Google has never published a percentage for how much link equity a 301 redirect passes. The 90-99% figure in circulation comes from somewhere else.

Jun 29

Search Console configures Performance reports from a prompt

AI-powered configuration turns a natural-language request into Search Console filters, comparisons and metric choices, no manual setup required.

Jun 28

Bot traffic passes human traffic on Cloudflare's network

Cloudflare's CEO says automated requests for HTML pages now outnumber human ones, 18 months ahead of his own forecast.

Jun 26

Featured snippet stats: which numbers are real, and which aren't

Featured snippet prevalence and CTR figures vary by nearly 2x across sources. Here is which trace to a real, dated study, and which don't trace anywhere.

Jun 25

llms.txt and robots.txt have two separate, unrelated standards tracks

A W3C tracking issue on llms.txt and an unrelated IETF working group on robots.txt-adjacent AI signals are getting blended into one false headline.

Jun 24

Google removes FAQ rich results from Search

FAQPage markup no longer earns an expanded snippet in Google Search as of 7 May 2026, though the schema stays valid and other crawlers still read it.

Jun 22

Article schema has no required properties, only recommended ones

Google's own Article structured data documentation names zero required properties, only recommended ones, which changes how schema work gets prioritized.

Jun 22

Publishers with OpenAI deals get 48% more ChatGPT citations

A study joining licensing-deal records to 129.3 million AI citations finds a ChatGPT premium for OpenAI partners, but no matching edge on Google.

Jun 20

How often Google rewrites a meta description: three studies compared

Portent, Ahrefs and Search Engine Journal each measured how often Google rewrites a meta description in 2020: 71%, 62.78% and over 70%, weeks apart.

Jun 19

IETF's AI Preferences group is still drafting, not shipping

The IETF's AI Preferences group is standardizing AI training and search signals that extend robots.txt. Still an Internet-Draft, not a shipped standard.

Jun 18

AI crawler block rate: how often a 403 actually stops the bot

Live HTTP data from Cloudflare's network shows AI crawler 403 rates rising through 2026, distinct from counting robots.txt disallow rules.

Jun 17

IndexNow adoption grows in 2026, but not at Google

Bing's own published numbers show IndexNow submissions climbing steadily since 2022, yet Google still has no roadmap to join the instant-indexing protocol.

Jun 16

AI citation rate by content format: what checks out

Five precise stats on AI citation rates by content format circulate online. Two trace to real studies. Three do not survive verification.

Jun 16

What Google and Bing actually say about schema and AI

Schema.org's own numbers, Google's AI documentation and Bing's public statements, separated from unverified SEO claims.

Jun 14

The page experience update: the real 2021-2022 rollout timeline

Google's own dated posts trace the page experience rollout from 2020 to its 2022 desktop finish, and what the 2026 docs now drop.

Jun 13

Gemini 3.7 Flash reaches AI Mode, a day after its release

Google added Gemini 3.7 Flash to AI Mode's model picker on 14 August 2026, limited to AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, one day after the model shipped.

Jun 12

Search Console adds a branded vs non-branded query filter

A new Performance report filter splits branded and non-branded queries using an AI-assisted classifier, not manual keyword rules.

Jun 10

AI Overview traffic decline: seven claims, four hold up

Studies put the AI Overview traffic hit from 24% to 80%. We traced seven quoted figures to source; four hold up, and they measure different things.

Jun 9

Search Central Live expands to Bogota and Ciudad de Mexico

Google's Search Central team adds Bogota to its live event roster and returns to Ciudad de Mexico in October, alongside a three-day Deep Dive in Barcelona.

Jun 8

AMP's traffic record: five publishers, five different outcomes

Independent.ie gained 55% mobile traffic on AMP. Kinsta lost 59% of its leads. Here is what really happened across five documented, named case studies.

Jun 5

Schema.org's vocabulary hit 823 types with version 30.0 in 2026

Schema.org's own release notes put the vocabulary at 823 types and 1,529 properties as of version 30.0, alongside a new Google-backed usage dataset.

Jun 4

The May 2026 core update finished after 11 days, its second this year

Google's May 2026 broad core update ran 21 May to 2 June, its second confirmed core update of 2026. What the dates mean for reading your own traffic.

Jun 3

Merchant Center adds AI Performance Insights for share of voice

A new Merchant Center report benchmarks brand visibility on AI Mode, AI Overviews and Gemini, plus shopping funnel and attribute-gap data.

May 20

Google's review-fraud scale, and its April 2026 policy tightening

Google's own Maps blog states 2025 review-fraud enforcement scale, and its April 2026 update bans staff review quotas and naming employees in reviews.

Apr 17

Google's 2026 Merchant Center product spec, three effective dates

New shipping and video attributes, a higher minimum image resolution and a longer rollout: what changes on 14 April 2026, 30 June 2026 and 31 January 2027.

Apr 14

AI Overview citations are decoupling from search rank

Ahrefs data shows top-10 pages went from 76% to 38% of AI Overview citations in eight months. Ranking well no longer guarantees a citation.

Mar 2

Penske Media v. Google: the antitrust timeline so far

Penske Media sued Google over AI Overviews in 2025. The dated record: the complaint, Google's dismissal motion, Penske's opposition, and an EU complaint.

Feb 12

Google ships its first Discover-only algorithm update

Google's first Discover-only core update ran three weeks, targeted clickbait and thin republishing. Discover clicks arrive fast: over 70% land on day one.

Feb 5