Reports
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%.
SEO reports
30 articles · RSS
Recurring data reports on search volatility, AI answer coverage and index behaviour.
Reports
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.
Reports
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.
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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%.
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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.
Reports
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.
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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.
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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%.
Reports
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%.
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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.
Reports
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Reports
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.
Reports
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Reports
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.