I'm working on a new site and we are publishing a lot of brand new content weekly. The team keep asking me "Are any pages ranking yet?" and so I thought there must be a quick Data studio report I can make, so anyone can dive in to see how things are for #seo. Here it is:

Today we released the May 2026 core update. We'll update our ranking release history page when the rollout is complete: status.search.google.com/inc…

Genuinely curious for those in the SEO space. Big debates about use llm.txt or not. It takes a few minutes to make a basic one, little cost. It won’t harm visibility as we know. So why are people against using it? Value unknown, effort, minimal

1/ You will absolutely continue to see blue web links in search results, and our AI features include prominent links to the web directly within responses. AI Mode is not the default experience in Search. Our new search box helps you describe exactly what you’re looking for, but using it does not mean that you will only get AI features — you'll continue to get a range of results on Search.

Wonder if bounce rate increased once visitors found out it was a pocket watch…

Don’t be too harsh on this. It’s experimentation. Not enough SEOs try different approaches to try new things. I’m sure Jake knows this could drop in days but he’s just showing a test, process and results so far. As with anything, only risk what you can afford to lose

Half of SEO/GEO is knowing how to improve organic visibility. The other half is knowing how to not put your site/brand in a situation where your organic visibility can be destroyed a few months later. In my opinion, it's the job of every qualified SEO/GEO professional to fully understand both sides of the equation. Many new folks are entering the space right now because AI tools make it easier than ever to "roleplay as an SEO/GEO engineer" and find some type of SEO hack that can be automated and scaled. I see the viral posts daily across many platforms: the idea that you don't need human SEOs anymore because Claude or Gemini can do all your research, content generation, content refreshes, etc. for you. (Just don't forget to like & subscribe, comment "GEO," and buy the course to learn how! 😉 ) I see new companies popping up that are literally raising millions in venture capital funding making similar promises. (I feel bad for the investors.) We're back in SEO/GEO gold rush mode. We have been here many times before 🫠 What many of the folks making big promises are lacking is the necessary experience in the SEO industry to know what happens on the other side. The things that happen a few months after these approaches are implemented... and after search engines have had enough time to figure out what the site is up to. Believe it or not, one of the main culprits that caused sites to get dinged over the last few years was using an overly-aggressive SEO strategy. The 2023 Helpful Content Update was designed to demote sites that were deemed as being created primarily for SEO, not for humans. I worked with many impacted companies, and know that many of them would have approached things differently if they had understood the risks. The same is true for many prior algorithm updates. This is why this has been a recurring theme in many of my conference talks over the years: because this cycle has continued for all of SEO history. We're starting to see the early signs of search engines cracking down on some of the new tricks people are exploring; but I think we are only just getting started. My money is on a major shakeup in the next few months that will do a lot of damage. My advice is: don't put your site in a situation that is incredibly difficult to dig yourself out of. It's not fun. Recoveries are extremely difficult, can take months or years to accomplish, and are not 100% guaranteed. Don't abandon or ignore your SEO strategy because of GEO. The two things should support one another. Read the search engines' spam and content policies. Work with real SEO experts who have dealt with algorithm updates and penalties before. If a tactic feels too good to be true, it probably is.

Today, we are excited to announce a new experiment in Search Console that offers site owners a unified view of their Google Search performance across their websites and social channels. developers.google.com/search…

story behind "why netflix built fast.com" is brilliant. so, netflix had a massive fight with ISPs around 2014-2016. ISPs were slowing down netflix on purpose. they wanted more money from netflix customers got bad streaming. but ISPs just blamed netflix. netflix had to pay comcast, verizon, at&t and time warner for direct connections to their networks. but in 2016, they launched fast dot com, clever part - It's not testing your general internet speed. It's testing your speed to netflix's servers specifically. so when someone complained about buffering, netflix could say "run fast dot com." If it's slow, the ISP is the bottleneck. suddenly millions of people had a tool to prove their ISP was the problem ISPs couldn't hide anymore. netflix positioned themselves as the transparent good guys fighting for customers while ISPs looked like greedy monopolies they solved a pr problem and a customer service problem with one simple website I guess, that's how you win a corporate war

The problem with “AI rank trackers” that solely rely on a custom list of prompts is that your data is biased from the start. When you only track the prompts you choose, you don’t get the real picture of your AI visibility — you get a picture you’ve already curated. As Gaetano Nino DiNardi ( @gaetano_nyc ) puts it: “AI Visibility monitoring tools can all be manipulated and puffed up to make the numbers look good to execs. You can selectively report on the prompts where your brand already has good coverage, while excluding others. Do cheap listicles just to get more artificial coverage. Use filtering to only show the good stuff, etc.” This is why I’m excited about the direction we took with Ahrefs Brand Radar. Instead of only letting you pick custom prompts, we built an AI visibility tool that’s powered by a large, existing index of prompts — so the measurement is broad, unbiased, and harder to game. Don’t get me wrong — tracking a custom set of prompts has its place, and that’s why we’ll be adding that functionality to Brand Radar very soon. But there’s a huge difference between measuring visibility honestly (using a wide, representative dataset) vs. manufacturing good-looking numbers (by narrowing the scope).

Have you seen this before @rustybrick? Glitch showing page sections on the SERPs

We are hiring an SEO Account Manager @snippet_digital (Freelance) – Urgent Hire 👇 Please share and tag your Freelance SEO friends. linkedin.com/pulse/seo-accou…

Incredible work from the PR team here 👏🏽

My mother in law randomly called @JohnCena, John Seaman. So here he is…