In 2024, Google turned the SERP into a storefront. In 2025, it turned it into a marketplace with an AI-based mind of its own. Over the past 12 months, Google has layered AI into nearly every inch of the shopping search experience by merging organic results with product listings, rolling out AI Overviews that replace ..
Tag : SEO
Perplexity published a response to Cloudflare’s claims that it disrespects robots.txt and engages in stealth crawling. Perplexity argues that Cloudflare is mischaracterizing AI Assistants as web crawlers, saying that they should not be subject to the same restrictions since they are user-initiated assistants. Perplexity AI Assistants Fetch On Demand According to Perplexity, its system does ..
Cloudflare announced that they delisted Perplexity’s crawler as a verified bot and are now actively blocking Perplexity and all of its stealth bots from crawling websites. Cloudflare acted in response to multiple user complaints against Perplexity related to violations of robots.txt protocols, and a subsequent investigation revealed that Perplexity was using aggressive rogue bot tactics ..
AI is rapidly changing the rules of SEO. From generative ranking to vector search, the new rules are not only technical but also reshaping how business leaders make decisions. Join Dan Taylor on August 14, 2025, for an exclusive SEJ Webinar tailored for C-suite executives and senior leaders. In this session, you’ll gain essential insights ..
You’ve probably seen the headlines like: “AI will kill SEO,” “AI will replace marketing roles,” or the latest panic: “Is your digital marketing job safe?” Well, maybe not those exact headlines, but you get the idea, and I’m sure you have seen something similar. Let’s clear something up: AI is not making SEO irrelevant. It’s ..
Google announced that they will continue to support some links created by the deprecated goo.gl URL shortening service, saying that 99% of the shortened URLs receive no traffic. They were previously going to end support entirely, but after receiving feedback, they decided to continue support for a limited group of shortened URLs. Google URL Shortener ..
Google’s Gary Illyes answered questions during the recent Search Central Live Deep Dive in Asia about whether or not they use the new Multi‑Vector Retrieval via Fixed‑Dimensional Encodings (MUVERA) retrieval method and also if they’re using Graph Foundation Models. MUVERA Google recently announced MUVERA in a blog post and a research paper: a method that ..
New AI platforms, powered by generative technologies like Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, Grok, and countless specialized chatbots, are rapidly becoming the front door for digital discovery. We’ve entered an era of machine-led discovery, where AI systems aggregate, summarize, and contextualize content across multiple platforms. Users today no longer follow a linear journey from keyword to ..
The Core Web Vitals Technology Report shows the top-ranked content management systems by Core Web Vitals (CWV) for the month of June (July’s statistics aren’t out yet). The breakout star this year is an e-commerce platform, which is notable because shopping sites generally have poor performance due to the heavy JavaScript and image loads necessary ..
Google recently fixed a bug that enabled anyone to anonymously use an official Google tool to remove any URL from Google search and get away with it. The tool had the potential to be used to devastate competitor rankings by removing their URLs completely from Google’s index. The bug was known by Google since 2023 ..
