Google Updates Search Live With Gemini Model Upgrade via @sejournal, @martinibuster
Google has updated Search Live with Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio, upgrading how voice functions inside Search while also extending the model’s use across translation and live voice agents. The update introduces more natural spoken responses in Search Live and reflects Google’s effort to improve natural voice queries, treating voice as a core interface as a way for users to get everything they can get from regular search plus enabling them to ask questions about the physical world around them and receive immediate voice translations between two people speaking different languages.
The new updated voice capabilities, rolling out this week in the United States, will enable Google’s voice responses to sound more natural and can even be slowed down for instructional content.
According to Google:
“When you go Live with Search, you can have a back-and-forth voice conversation in AI Mode to get real-time help and quickly find relevant sites across the web. And now, thanks to our latest Gemini model for native audio, the responses on Search Live will be more fluid and expressive than ever before.”
Broader Gemini Native Audio Rollout
This Search upgrade is part of a broader update to Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio rolling out across Google’s ecosystem, including Gemini Live (in the Gemini App), Google AI Studio, and Vertex AI. The model processes spoken audio in real time and produces fluid spoken responses, reducing barriers to natural conversation, reducing friction in live interactions. Although Google’s announcement didn’t say that the model was a speech-to-speech model (as opposed to speech-to-text then text-to-speech), this update follows Google’s October announcement of “Speech-to-Retrieval (S2R). It’s a neural network-based machine-learning model trained on large datasets of paired audio queries.”
These changes show Google treating native audio as a core capability across consumer-facing products, making it easier for users to ask and receive information about the physical world around them in a natural manner that wasn’t previously possible.
Improvements For Voice-Based Systems
For developers and enterprises building voice-based systems, Google says the updated model improves reliability in several areas. Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio more consistently triggers external functions during conversations, follows complex instructions, and maintains context across multiple turns. These improvements make live voice agents more dependable in real-world workflows, where misinterpreted instructions or broken conversational flow reduce usability.
Smooth Conversational Translation
Beyond Search and voice agents, the update introduces native support for “live speech-to-speech translation.” Gemini translates spoken language in real time, either by continuously translating ambient speech into a target language or by handling conversations between speakers of different languages in both directions. The system preserves vocal characteristics such as speech rhythm and emphasis, supporting translation that sounds smoother and conversational.
Google highlights several capabilities supporting this translation feature, including broad language coverage, automatic language detection, multilingual input handling, and noise filtering for everyday environments. These features reduce setup friction and allow translation to occur passively during conversation rather than through manual controls. The result is a translation experience that behaves much like an actual person in the middle translating between two people.
Voice Search Realizing Google’s Aspirations
The update reflects Google’s continued iteration of voice search toward an ideal that was originally inspired by the science fiction voice interactions between humans and computers in the popular Star Trek television and movie series.
There are three inevitabilities in life. Death, taxes, and big tech companies dumping on the little guy. As zero-click searches reach an all-time high and content is stolen and repurposed for the gain of the almighty tech loser, there’s only one viable solution.
To paywall.
To create a value exchange that reduces reliance on third-party platforms. To become as self-sufficient as possible. Like an off-grid cabin or your mum’s basement, a paywall gives you a sense of security you just cannot put a price on.
Subscriber revenue is intrinsically more valuable to a business because it is predictable. Subscription and advertiser revenue are not created equal.
Don’t paywall everything. Use dynamic/metered paywalls and leave high-reach, generally lower-quality platforms like Google Discover free for email signups.
Subscription success relies on your USP – whether that’s exclusive data, deep, niche insights, or a certain vibe – you have to stand out.
The customer experience and understanding of your audience matter. Create habit-forming connections and products. Become an essential part of their life.
But What About Our Traffic?
Your traffic will decline. But guess what? You’re already hemorrhaging clicks and have been for some time. And traffic doesn’t pay the bills.
Two comparable pages, one with a paywall, one without (Image Credit: Harry Clarkson-Bennett)
The only way to sustain rankings over time is with high-quality engagement data. Navboost stores and uses 13 months of data to identify good vs bad clicks, click quality, the last longest click, and on-page interactions to establish the most relevant content. All at a query level.
Paywalls are not your friend when it comes to user engagement. Not for the masses. But for a small cohort of people who like you enough to pay, your engagement data will be excellent.
In an ultra-personalized world, you will still do well to the people who really matter.
We have data that pretty perfectly highlights the impact of a paywall on rankings. Over the course of three to four months in traditional search, your rankings start to steadily drop before settling in severe mediocrity. You’ve got to fight for every click. With great content, marketing, savviness. Everything.
We have used an image manager to try and generate a free-to-air badge. It rarely shows up unless there’s no featured image, but the idea is excellent (Image Credit: Harry Clarkson-Bennett)
In Google Discover – a highly personalized, click and engagement driven platform – this is even more pronounced. While Discover’s clickless traffic is lower quality, there will be a small cohort of highly engaged users that develop over time, you can target with a paywall.
Unpaywall for the masses, build your owned channels, and paywall for the highly engaged. The platform will take care of the personalization for you.
So, maximize your value exchange with ads and email signups for most users, but don’t neglect those with a high return rate.
There’s some psychology involved in all of this. When a brand becomes widely known for paywalling, I suspect the likelihood of a click goes down as users know what to expect. Or maybe what not to expect.
This likely perpetuates over time, so you should clarify what articles are free to air.
Is Our Content Good Enough?
To nail SEO bingo, it depends. It depends on what your value is in the market. There is a lot of free stuff out there already. But broadly rubbish. So as long as the bar keeps dropping, we’ll all be fine.
I am old-ish. I like words. Writing great content isn’t easy and is usurped in many cases by richer, more visually striking content. Content that satisfies all types of users. Scanners, deep readers, listeners and get the answer and go-ers.
In some ways, you can satisfy all types of users more effectively than ever. I think you have to hit three of the four Es of content creation. Make it resonate, be consistent, and understand youraudience. Whatever you create stands a chance.
But that doesn’t mean creating great stuff is any easier. If you work for a traditional publisher, the chances are you’ve brought a spoon to a gun fight. The war for attention is being fought on all fronts, and straight words are losing.
Fortunately, not every subscription model relies on the quality of the prose. It might be that you have unique data, granular insights into a specific market, or are just a bloody good laugh.
Subscriptions come in all shapes and sizes.
Ultimately, it comes down to your market, marketing, positioning and your USP. You have to know and speak to your audience and you have to stand out. As Barry would say, if you’re forgettable, you’re doomed.
How Do We Know If People Will Pay?
When it comes to paying for news, some markets are far more “advance” than others. The Scandinavian market is light-years ahead of almost everyone else when it comes to paying for news. You have to do your research to understand:
While it doesn’t align perfectly, it’s not surprising that those most likely to pay for news have higher income levels. Higher disposable income tends to create an environment where people buy more stuff.
And while the UK sits in a pretty shocking-looking position, almost 24 million of us pay for a BBC license fee. That is, in essence, paying for news. Insert joke about BBC bias and woke cultural agendas here.
Cultural and societal factors really matter. As does your understanding of the market.
“Most heartening is what this represents as the wider information ecosystem fractures: audiences recognise the value of professional journalism and are willing to pay for it.”
In an era of slop, paying for something good is not a bad thing.
Macro And Micro Factors Are Influential
You can only control what you can control. But you shouldn’t dismiss the wider climate.
In the UK and arguably globally, there is a cost-of-living crisis. Globally, there have been a number of very significant geopolitical issues that affect the wider economy. Money doesn’t go as far as it once did, and most subscriptions are a luxury purchase.
Is a £20 or £30 monthly subscription more valuable than a £10 Netflix one? Or Spotify? These are questions you need to ask. Why would someone subscribe and stick around?
How far your money goes has been declining for some time… (Image Credit: Harry Clarkson-Bennett)
And we aren’t just competing with other publishers. While screen time and content consumption are at an all-time high, video consumption and the creator economy are booming.
So your pricing strategy, customer service, and overall experience are hugely important. You are almost certainly going to be a nice-to-have. So make sure your customer journey and path to conversion are premium, and your audience feel listened to.
The standard customer experience (Image Credit: Harry Clarkson-Bennett)
You need to speak to your audience. You don’t have to go into this blind. Forging real connections with people is not impossible and making them feel listened to will go a long way.
You can try to figure out what they really value, how much they’re willing to spend and what’s stopping them.
Should I Paywall Everything?
No. Content is designed to do different things, and not everything is a premium product. Whatever journalists will tell you. If you shut down your site entirely, you become too closed off an ecosystem in my opinion.
Commercial Content: If you have affiliate-led content, paywalling is a questionable decision. It may not be wrong per se, but think about whether the pros outweigh the cons. Typically, it’s a good gateway drug for the rest of your content. And makes some money.
Content You Can Get Elsewhere: Evergreen content of a comparable quality to what already exists in the wider corpus is not a profitable opportunity. I’d argue that leaving this free-to-air has more pros than cons. You can always unpaywall the 100 best albums of all time, but gate the richer, individual album reviews.
Lower-Quality Platforms: A user that comes from a platform like Discover is far less likely to convert than someone who comes from organic search. So think about the role each platform plays in your content access ecosystem.
Paywall Vs. Newsletter signup: It is far easier to convert people to a paying subscriber from a newsletter database than from an on-page paywall. And the user journey is far less interrupted. Building an owned channel is never a bad thing, so think about how engaged users are and whether an email would be a more effective starting point.
As of just a few months ago, the search giant asked that publishers with paywalls change the way they block content to help Google out. The lighter touch paywall solution (a JavaScript-based one) includes the full content in the server response.
“…Some JavaScript paywall solutions include the full content in the server response, then use JavaScript to hide it until subscription status is confirmed.
This isn’t a reliable way to limit access to the content. Make sure your paywall only provides the full content once the subscription status is confirmed.”
According to Google, they are struggling to determine the difference. So the problem is on us, not them. They (and I strongly suspect other LLMs) are ingesting this content and training their models on us whether we like it or not.
For those of you who haven’t heard of Common Crawl, it stores a corpus of open web data accessible to “researchers.” By researchers, we now mean tech bros who don’t want to pay for, surprisingly, anything.
“If you didn’t want your content on the internet, you shouldn’t have put your content on the internet.”
It doesn’t stop there either. Even if you block all non-whitelisted bots from accessing your site at a CDN level, you may have syndication partnerships in place. If so, it’s likely your content is making it out into the wider world.
The internet is not exactly a leakproof vessel. If you’re setting one up now, try to implement a server-side option.
What Is The Right Paywall For Me?
I have written about the types of paywall available to you and the pros and cons of each. Generally, I think a metered or dynamic paywall is the best option for most publishers. At the very least, a freemium model. Something that gives people enough to draw them in.
And you can’t exactly draw them in if you just hard paywall everything.
You have to think of this as a full-blown marketing strategy. You need to know where people come from. How much of your content they have consumed. Whether it’s better to show them a newsletter signup as opposed to a paywall.
It is absolutely worth knowing that over time, a strong email database will convert far more effectively than a hard paywall.
So encouraging free signups and taking a longer-term view to conversions (you’ll need a good customer journey here) may be far more effective.
How Can I Set One Up?
There are a number of paywall management options out there for publishers. Leaky Paywall, Zephr, Piano. There are plenty.
The best ones integrate with your existing tech stacks, have excellent personalization and customization options, deploy ad-blocking strategies, and run flexible gating strategies.
Larger publishers tend to go with enterprise-level options with deep analytics and CRM integrations. Smaller publishers can work with lighter touch, cheaper operators. You really just need to scope out what will work best for you.
Particularly when it comes to monthly costs and revenue share options.
How Can I Map The Impact?
You’ll need to establish a few key things:
The average drop in traffic you expect to see.
The subsequent loss of existing revenue (probably ad-related, but there may be some knock-on wider commercial impact).
The average value of a subscription (and the expected conversion rate).
Focusing on Customer LTV shifts marketing from chasing traffic to profitable, loyal audience relationships. It makes businesses understand that not all audiences or subscriptions are created equal.
You generate more subs through paid media because the net is larger. But lots slip through the net. So you need a quality product (in both a product and marketing sense) alongside UX and customer service that reduces friction.
Search and owned channels are smaller, but far more likely to pay because they have taken an action to find you. In some cases, they actually want you in their inbox. The quality is higher, but the overall returns are lower.
So you just can’t treat everybody the same.
Closing Thoughts
Subscriber revenue is so valuable because it’s predictable. Subscription business models have boomed for that very reason. A pound of subscriber revenue is far more valuable than almost anything else, and it should be the focus of your business.
But that doesn’t mean you put all your eggs in one basket. You can have multiple subscription types on your website, and that can help you become habitual with all types of users. But you need to add value to their lives every day.
Puzzles, recipes, short and long-form videos, et al.
Businesses make money in many ways. A diverse business is resilient. Resilient to macro and micro factors that will decimate some publishers over the next few years. So talk to your audience, trial new ways of adding value, and commit when one works. Become habitual.
And, shock horror, people want to belong to something. So while the digital experience is crucial, making an effort to connect with people IRL matters.
Why Is Organic Traffic Down? Here’s How To Segment The Data via @sejournal, @torylynne
As an SEO, there are few things that stoke panic like seeing a considerable decline in organic traffic. People are going to expect answers if they don’t already.
Getting to those answers isn’t always straightforward or simple, because SEO is neither of those things.
The success of an SEO investigation hinges on the ability to dig into the data, identify where exactly the performance decline is happening, and connect the dots to why it’s happening.
It’s a little bit like an actual investigation: Before you can catch the culprit or understand the motive, you have to gather evidence. In an SEO investigation, that’s a matter of segmenting data.
In this article, I’ll share some different ways to slice and dice performance data for valuable evidence that can help further your investigation.
So, before we dissect data to narrow down problem areas, the first thing we need to do is determine whether there’s actually an SEO issue at play.
After all, it could be something else altogether. In which case, we’re wasting unnecessary resources chasing a problem that doesn’t exist.
Is This A Tracking Issue?
In many cases, what looks like a big traffic drop is just an issue with tracking on the site.
To determine whether tracking is functioning correctly, there are a couple of things we need to look for in the data.
The first is consistent drops across channels.
Zoom out of organic search and see what’s happening in other sources and channels.
If you’re seeing meaningful drops across email, paid, etc., that are consistent with organic search, then it’s more than likely that tracking isn’t working correctly.
The other thing we’re looking for here is inconsistencies between internal data and Google Search Console.
Of course, there’s always a bit of inconsistency between first-party data and GSC-reported organic traffic. But if those differences are significantly more pronounced for the time period in question, that hints at a tracking problem.
Is This A Brand Issue?
Organic search traffic from Google falls into two primary camps:
Brand traffic: Traffic driven by user queries that include the brand name.
Non-brand traffic: Traffic driven by brand-agnostic user queries.
Non-brand traffic is directly affected by SEO work. Whereas, brand traffic is mostly impacted by the work that happens in other channels.
When a user includes the brand in their search, they’re already brand-aware. They’re a return user or they’ve encountered the brand through marketing efforts in channels like PR, paid social, etc.
When marketing efforts in other channels are scaled back, the brand reaches fewer users. Since fewer people see the brand, fewer people search for it.
Or, if customers sour on the brand, there are fewer people using search to come back to the site.
Either way, it’s not an SEO problem. But in order to confirm that, we need to filter the data down.
Go to Performance in Google Search Console and exclude any queries that include your brand. Then compare the data against a previous period – usually YoY if you need to account for seasonality. Do the same for queries that don’t include the brand name.
If non-brand traffic has stayed consistent, while brand traffic has dropped, then this is a brand issue.
Screenshot from Google Search Console, November 2025
Tip: Account for users misspelling your brand name by filtering queries using fragments. For example, at Gray Dot Co, we get a lot of brand searches for things like “Gray Company” and “Grey Dot Company.” By using the simple regex expression “gray|grey” I can catch brand search activity that would otherwise fall through the cracks.
Is It Seasonal Demand?
The most obvious example of seasonal demand is holiday shopping on ecommerce sites.
Think about something like jewelry. Most people don’t buy jewelry every day; they buy it for special occasions. We can confirm that seasonality by looking at Google Trends.
Zooming out to the past five years of interest in “jewelry,” it clearly peaks in November and December.
Screenshot from Google Trends, November 2025
As a site that sells jewelry, of course, traffic in Q1 is going to be down from Q4.
I use a pretty extreme example here to make my point, but in reality, seasonality is widespread and often more subtle. It impacts businesses where you might not expect much seasonality at all.
The best way to understand its impact is to look at organic search data year-over-year. Do the peaks and valleys follow the same patterns?
If so, then we need to compare data YoY to get a true sense of whether there’s a potential SEO problem.
Is It Industry Demand?
SEOs need to keep tabs on not just what’s happening internally, but also what’s going on externally. A big piece of that is checking the pulse of organic demand for the topics and products that are central to the brand.
Products fall out of vogue, technologies become obsolete, and consumer behavior changes – that’s just the reality of business. When there are fewer potential customers in the landscape, there are fewer clicks to win, and fewer sessions to drive.
Take cameras, for instance. As the cameras on our phones got more sophisticated, digital cameras became less popular. And as they became less popular, searches for cameras dwindled.
Now, they’re making a comeback with younger generations. More people searching, more traffic to win.
Screenshot from npr.com, November 2025
You can see all of this at play in the search landscape by turning to Google Trends. The downtrend in interest caused by advances in technology, AND the uptrend boosted by shifts in societal trends.
Screenshot from Google Trends, November 2025
When there are drops in industry, product, or topic demand within the landscape, we need to ask ourselves whether the brand’s organic traffic loss is proportional to the overall loss in demand.
Is Paid Search Cannibalizing Organic Search?
Even if a URL on the site ranks well in organic results, ads are still higher on the SERP. So, if a site is running an ad for the same query it already ranks for, then the ad is going to get more clicks by nature.
When businesses give their PPC budgets a boost, there’s potential for this to happen across multiple, key SERPs.
Let’s say a site drives a significant chunk of its organic traffic from four or five product landing pages. If the brand introduces ads to those SERPs, clicks that used to go to the organic result start going to the ad.
That can have a significant impact on organic traffic numbers. But search users are still getting to the same URLs using the same queries.
To confirm, pull sessions by landing pages from both sources. Then, compare the data from before the paid search changes to the period following the change.
If major landing pages consistently show a positive delta that cancels out the negative delta in organic search, you’re not losing organic traffic; you’re lending it.
Screenshot from Google Analytics, November 2025
Segmenting Data To Find SEO Issues
Once we have confirmation that the organic traffic declines point to an SEO issue, we can start zooming in.
Segmenting data in different ways helps pinpoint problem areas and find patterns. Only then can we trace those issues to the cause and craft a strategy for recovery.
URL
Most SEOs are going to filter their organic traffic down by URL. It lets us see which pages are struggling and analyze those pages for potential improvements.
It also helps find patterns across pages that make it easier to isolate the cause of more widespread issues. For example, if the site is losing traffic across its product listing pages, it could signal that there’s a problem with the template for that page.
But segmenting by URL also helps us answer a very important question when we pair it with conversion data.
Do We Really Care About This Traffic?
Clicks are only helpful if they help drive business-valuable user interactions like conversions or ad views. For some sites, like online publications, traffic is valuable in and of itself because users coming to the site are going to see ads. The site still makes money.
But for brands looking to drive conversions, it could just be empty traffic if it’s not helping drive that primary key performance indicator (KPI).
A top-of-funnel blog post might drive a lot of traffic because it ranks for very high-volume keywords. If that same blog post is a top traffic-driving organic landing page, a slip in rankings means a considerable organic traffic drop.
But the users entering those high-volume keywords might not be very qualified potential customers.
Looking at conversions by landing page can help brands understand whether the traffic loss is ultimately hurting the bottom line.
The best way to understand is to turn to attribution.
First-touch attribution quantifies an organic landing page’s value in terms of the conversions it helps drive down the line. For most businesses, someone isn’t likely to convert the first time they visit the site. They usually come back and purchase.
Whereas, last-touch attribution shows the organic landing pages that people come to when they’re ready to make a purchase. Both are valuable!
Query
Filtering performance by query can help understand which terms or topic areas to focus improvements on. That’s not new news.
Sometimes, it’s as easy as doing a period-over-period comparison in GSC, ordering by clicks lost, and looking for obvious patterns, i.e., are the queries with the most decline just subtle variants of one another?
If there aren’t obvious patterns and the queries in decline are more widespread, that’s where topic clustering can come into the mix.
Topic Clustering With AI
Using AI for topic clustering helps quickly identify any potential relationships between queries that are seeing performance dips.
Go to GSC and filter performance by query, looking for any YoY declines in clicks and average position.
Screenshot from Google Search Console, November 2025
The resulting list of semantic groupings can provide an idea of topics where a site’s authority is slipping in search.
In turn, it helps narrow the area of focus for content improvements and other optimizations to potentially build authority for the topics or products in question.
Identifying User Intent
When users search using specific terms, the type of content they’re looking for – and their objective – differs based on the query. These user expectations can be broken out into four different high-level categories:
User Intent
Objective
Informational
(Top of funnel)
Users are looking for answers to questions, explanations, or general knowledge about topics, products, concepts, or events.
Commercial
(Middle of funnel)
Users are interested in comparing products, reading reviews, and gathering information before making a purchase decision.
Transactional
(Bottom of funnel)
Users are looking to perform a specific action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a service, or downloading a file.
Navigational
Brand-familiar users are using the search engine as a shortcut to find a specific website or webpage.
By leveraging user intent, we identify user objectives for which the site or pages on the site are falling short. It gives us a lens into performance decline, making it easier to identify possible causes from the perspective of user experience.
If the majority of queries losing clicks and positionality are informational, it could signal shortcomings in the site’s blog content. If the queries are consistently commercial, it might call for an investigation into how the site approaches product detail and/or listing pages.
GSC doesn’t provide user intent in its reporting, so this is where a third-party SEO tool can come into play. If you have position tracking set up and GSC connected, you can use the tool’s rankings report to identify queries in decline and their user intent.
If not, you can still get the data you need by using a mix of GSC and a tool like Ahrefs.
Device
This view of performance data is pretty simple, but it’s equally easy to overlook!
When the large majority of performance declines are attributed to ONLY desktop or mobile, device data helps identify potential tech or UX issues within the mobile or desktop experience.
The important thing to remember is that any declines need to be considered proportionally. Take the metrics for the site below…
Screenshot from Google Search Console, November 2025
At first glance, the data makes it look like there might be an issue with the desktop experience. But we need to look at things in terms of percentages.
Desktop: 1 – (648/1545) x 100 = 58% decline
Mobile: 1 – (149/316) x 100 = 52% decline
While desktop shows a much larger decline in terms of click count, the percentage of decline YoY is fairly similar across both desktop and mobile. So we’re probably not looking for anything device-specific in this scenario.
Search Appearance
Rich results and SERP features are an opportunity to stand out on the SERP and drive more traffic through enhanced results. Using the search appearance filter in Google Search Console, you can see traffic from different types of rich results and SERP features:
Forums.
AMP Top Story (AMP page + Article markup).
Education Q&A.
FAQ.
Job Listing.
Job Details.
Merchant Listing.
Product Snippet.
Q&A.
Review Snippet.
Recipe Gallery.
Video.
This is the full list of possible features with rich results (courtesy of SchemaApp), though you’ll only see filters for search appearances where the domain is currently positioned.
In most cases, Google is able to generate these types of results because there is structured data on pages. The notable exceptions are Q&A, translated results, and video.
So when there are significant traffic drops coming from a specific type of search appearance, it signals that there’s potentially a problem with the structured data that enables that search feature.
Screenshot from Google Search Console, November 2025
You can investigate structured data issues in the Enhancements reports in GSC. The exception is product snippets, which nest under the Shopping menu. Either way, the reports only show up in your left-hand nav if Google is aware of relevant data on the site.
For example, the product snippets report shows why some snippets are invalid, as well as ways to potentially improve valid results.
Screenshot from Google Search Console, November 2025
This context is valuable as you begin to investigate the technical causes of traffic drops from specific search features. In this case, it’s clear that Google is able to crawl and utilize product schema on most pages – but there are some opportunities to improve that schema with additional data.
Featured Snippets
When featured snippets originally came on the scene, it was a major change to the SERP structure that resulted in a serious hit to traditional organic results.
Today, AI Overviews are doing the same. In fact, research from Seer shows that CTR has dropped 61% for queries that now include an AI overview (21% of searches). And that impact is outsized for informational queries.
In cases where rankings have remained relatively static, but traffic is dropping, there’s good reason to investigate whether this type of SERP change is a driver of loss.
While Google Search Console doesn’t report on featured snippets (example: PAA questions) and AI Overviews, third-party tools do.
In the third-party tool Semrush, you can use the Domain Overview report to check for featured snippet availability across keywords where the site ranks.
Screenshot from Semrush, November 2025
Do the keywords where you’re losing traffic have AI overviews? If you’re not cited, it’s time to start thinking about how you’re going to win that placement.
Search Type
Search type is another way to filter GSC data, where you’re seeing traffic declines despite healthy and consistent rankings.
After all, web search is just one prong of Google Search. Think about it: How often do you use Google Image search? At least in my case, that’s fairly often.
Filter performance data by each of these search types to understand which one(s) are having the biggest impact on performance decline. Then use that insight to start connecting the dots to the cause.
Screenshot from Google Search Console, November 2025
Images are a great example. One simple line in the robots.txt can block Google from crawling a subfolder that hosts multitudes of images. As those images disappear from image search results, any clicks from those results disappear in tandem.
We don’t know to look for this issue until we slice the data accordingly!
Geography
If the business operates physically in specific cities and states, then it likely already has geo-specific performance tracking set up through a tool.
But domains for online-only businesses shouldn’t dismiss geographic data – even at the city/state level! Declines are still a trigger to check geo-specific performance data.
Country
Just because the brand only sells and operates in one country doesn’t mean that’s where all the domain’s traffic is coming from. Drilling down by country in GSC allows you to see whether declines are coming from the country the brand is focused on or, potentially, another country altogether.
Screenshot from Google Search Console, November 2025
If it’s another country, it’s time to decide whether that matters. If the site is a publisher, it probably cares more about that traffic than an ecommerce brand that’s more focused on purchases in its country of operation.
Localization
When tools are reporting positionality at the country level, then rankings shifts in specific markets fly under the radar. It certainly happens, and major markets can have major traffic impact!
Tools like BrightLocal, Whitespark, and Semrush let you analyze SERP rankings one level deeper than GSC, providing data down to the city.
Checking for rankings discrepancies across cities is possible by checking a small sample of keywords with the greatest declines in clicks.
If I’m an SEO at the University of Phoenix, which is an online university, I’m probably pretty excited about ranking #1 in the United States for “online business degree.”
Screenshot from Semrush, November 2025
But if I drill down further, I might be a little distraught to find that the domain isn’t in the top five SERP results for users in Denver, CO…
Screenshot from Semrush, November 2025
…or Raleigh, North Carolina.
Screenshot from Semrush, November 2025
Catch Issues Faster By Leveraging AI For Data Analysis
Data segmentation is an important piece of any traffic drop investigation, because humans can see patterns in data that bots don’t.
However, the opposite is true too. With anomaly detection tooling, you get the best of both worlds.
When combined with monitoring and alert notifications, anomaly detection makes it possible to find and fix issues faster. Plus, it enables you to find data patterns in any after-the-impact investigations
All of this helps ensure that your analysis is comprehensive, and might even point out gaps for further investigation.
As Sherlock Holmes would say about an investigation, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” With the right data in hand, the culprits start to reveal themselves.
Data segmentation empowers SEOs to uncover leads that point to possible causes. By narrowing it down based on the evidence, we ensure more accuracy, less work, faster answers, and quicker recovery.
And while leadership might not love a traffic drop, they’re sure to love that.
Ask An SEO: Digital PR Or Traditional Link Building, Which Is Better? via @sejournal, @rollerblader
This week’s ask an SEO question is:
“Should SEOs be focusing more on digital PR than traditional link building?”
Digital PR is synonymous with link building at this point as SEO’s needed a new way to package and resell the same service. Actual PR work will always be more valuable than link building because PR, whether digital or traditional, focuses on a core audience of customers and reaching specific demographics. This adds value to a business and drives revenue.
With that said, here’s how I’d define digital PR vs. link building if a client asked what the difference is.
Digital PR: Getting brand coverage and citations in media outlets, niche publications, trade journals, niche blogs, and websites that do not allow guest posting, paid links, or unvetted contributors with the goal of building brand awareness and driving traffic from the content.
Link Building: Getting links from websites as a way to try and increase SERP rankings. Traffic from the links, sales from the links, etc., are not being tracked, and the quality of the website can be questionable.
Digital PR is always going to be better than link building because you’re treating the technique as a business and not a scheme to try and game the rankings. Link building became a bad practice years ago as links became less relevant, they are still important, so I want to ensure that isn’t taken out of context, and we stopped doing link building completely. Quality content attracts links naturally, including media mentions. When this happens in a natural way, the website will begin rising as the site has a lot of value for users, and search engines can tell when the site is quality.
If you’re building links without evaluating the impact they have traffic and sales-wise, you’re likely setting your site up for failure. Getting a ton of links, just like creating content in mass with AI/LLMs or article spinners, can grow a site quickly. That URL/domain can then burn to the ground equally as fast.
That’s why when we purchase a link, an advertorial, or we’re doing a partnership, we always ask ourselves the following questions:
Is there an active audience on this website that is also coming back to the website via branded search for information?
Is the audience on this website part of our customer base?
Will the article we’re pitching or being featured in be helpful to the user, and is our product or service something that is part of the post naturally vs. being forced?
Are we ok with the link being nofollow or sponsored if we’re paying for the inclusion?
If the answer is yes to these four, then we’re good to go with the link. The active audience on the website and people returning by brand name means there is an audience that trusts them for information. If the readership, visitors, or customers are similar or the same demographics as our user base, then it makes sense we’d want to be in front of them where they go for information.
We may have knowledge that is helpful to the user, but if it is not on topic within the post, there is no reason for them to come through and use our services, buy our products, or subscribe to our newsletters. Instead, we’ll wait until there is a fit, so there is a direct “link” between the content we’re contributing, or being an expert on, and our website.
For the last question, our goal is always traffic and customer acquisition, not getting a link. The website owner controls this, and if they want to follow Google’s best practices (which we obviously recommend doing), we will still be happy if they mark it as sponsored or nofollow. This is the most important of the questions. Building links to game the SERPs is a bad idea; building a brand that people search for by name will overpower any link any day of the week. This is always our goal when it comes to Digital PR and link building. Driving that branded search.
So, that begs the question, where do we go for digital PR?
Sources To Get Digital PR Mentions And Links
When we’re about to start a Digital PR campaign, we create lists of the following targets to reach out to.
Mass Media: Household names like magazines, news websites, and local media, where everyone in the area, the customers, or the country or world knows them by name. The only stipulation we apply is if they have an active category vs. only a few articles here and there. The active category means it is something interesting enough to their reader base that they’re investing in it, so our customers may be there.
Trade Publications: Conferences, associations, and non-profits, as well as industry insiders will have websites and print publications that go out to members. Search Engine Journal could be considered a trade publication for the SEO and PPC industry, same with SEO Roundtable, and some of the communities like Webmaster World. They publish directly relevant content for search engine marketers and have active users, so if I was an SEO service provider or tool, this is where I’d be looking to get featured and ideally links from.
Niche Sites and Bloggers: There is no shortage of niche sites and content producers out there. The trick is finding ones that do not publicly allow guest contributions, advertorials, etc., and that do not link out to non-niche websites and content. This includes sites that got hacked and had link injections. Even if their “authority” is zero, there is value if they quality control and all links and mentions are earned.
Influencers: Whether it is YouTube, Facebook group leaders, LinkedIn that is crawlable, or other channels, getting coverage from people with subscribers and an active audience can let search engines crawl the link back to your website. It may not boost your rankings, but it drives customers to you and helps with page discoverability if the link gets crawled. LLMs are also citing their content as sources, so there could be value for AIO, too.
Link building is not dead by any means; links still matter. You just don’t need to build them anymore. Focus on quality where an active audience is and where you have a chance at getting traffic and revenue. This is what will move the needle for the long run and help you grow in SERPs that matter.
More Resources:
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
Budget SEO For Capacity, Not Output via @sejournal, @Kevin_Indig
Marketing leaders are still budgeting to grow clicks in 2026, even though AI Overviews cut organic traffic in half and AI Mode kills it almost entirely.
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Meanwhile, close to 60% of those who responded to my recent poll report their stakeholders don’t understand the value of brand mentions in LLMs.
The SEO budget conversation has to move from “Why isn’t SEO driving more clicks?/What can we do to drive more traffic?” to “What capabilities do we need to build authority in new discovery channels?”
In 2026, the best marketing teams will stop measuring SEO success by clicks and start treating it as what it really is: a capacity and influence system.
1. Traffic-Based ROI Is A Decayed Model
Marketing budgets, on average, rose modestly in the last 12 months. Overall, marketing budgets are up 3.31%. And digital marketing spending specifically is up 7.25%.
And for years, marketers invested this sliver of SEO budget like paid media – spend more, get more clicks. It’s time to let this go. There’s discomfort here, of course: We’re losing a significant leading indicator with traffic stagnation. In theory, SEO now appears to take “longer” to show results.
As Google dials AI in the search results up, organic clicks are destined to shrink. AI surfaces decouple visibility from clicks. Your brand can appear in every AI output response and get zero measurable traffic. In Semrush’s AI Mode study, 92-94% of AI Mode sessions produced no external clicks. (But that doesn’t mean people buy less. The opposite could be true.) Slowed growth in clicks is not a performance issue of an SEO team – it’s a system feature, and it’s the future of search. Platforms want users to stay within their ecosystems.
The implication: Traffic no longer equals demand. Brand visibility happens upstream inside AI responses, UGC threads, and recommendation loops that don’t often show in your analytics.
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
2. SEO Budgets Are Capacity Allocation, Not Spend-To-Output Trading
With paid ads, you’re buying impressions. Double your spend, you roughly double your impressions (with diminishing returns). There’s a direct, measurable relationship.
But most SEO costs are fixed: salaries, tool subscriptions, infrastructure. You pay for capacity regardless of whether your team delivers a 10% or 50% lift.
65% of those surveyed by Search Engine Journal don’t expect a reduction in SEO budget for 2026.
When deciding on next year’s budget, the question “What ROI do we expect from this spend?” is an outdated one. Instead, you need to answer this query: “What capabilities do we need to earn visibility?”
The variable isn’t spend; it’s prioritization and execution quality:
Paid media is transactional: Spend → user impression → user click.
SEO is compounding: Optimization → brand visibility → user impressions → brand influence.
Your SEO dollars don’t buy results. They buy the ability to earn trust and surface in the right systems.
3. Design Your SEO Budget Around Influence, Not Output In 2026.
Your budget planning must be scenario-based, not traffic-forecasted.
Because your SEO costs are mostly fixed, you can model it out: “If we allocate 40% of capacity to digital PR, 30% to technical SEO, 20% to content operations, and 10% to foundational research, what visibility outcomes can we reasonably expect?”
Allocate resources by priority, not by historical traffic performance. Strategize your resources for the zero-click world ahead:
Technical SEO + UX: Get the foundation right. Agents need to review your site and make recommendations or decisions quickly.
Audience + first-party data research: Users are making decisions about brands within the AI Mode outputs – know your audience and which search surfaces they use. Data from one study showed 71% of companies that exceeded revenue goals had documented personas.
Content operations + re-optimizations:Content recency is non-negotiable, and LLMs prefer it. Some evidence shows refreshing every ~90 days could be a competitive edge.
Additive content rich with information gain: Evergreen content is less valuable. Additive content that provides net-new takes, insights, and conversations is rewarded.
Engineering + design support for interactive tools:Once the validation click is earned, you must provide value that’s worth on-page engagement.
Video and custom graphics: Organic low-fi video content and custom graphics are earning highly visible mid-output placement in AIOs. Don’t let restricted resources stop you from investing in this visibility lever.
Your brand’s prioritization could vary based on audience, goals, and – of course – capacity.
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Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
Google Is Not Diminishing The Use Of Structured Data In 2026 via @sejournal, @martinibuster
A recent announcement on the Google Search Central blog gave a Redditor the impression that Google was significantly reducing the use of structured data, causing them to ask if it’s worthwhile to use it anymore.
“Google just posted a new update — they’re removing support for some structured data types starting in January 2026. Dataset already works only in Dataset Search, and rich results are getting more selective.
So… is schema still worth it? Or are we moving past it entirely?”
Matt Southern covered the blog post (Google Deprecates Practice Problem Structured Data In Search), focusing on the specific structured data that Google was deprecating. Google’s blog post, authored by John Mueller, could, if read quickly, be accidentally interpreted to be more alarming than it was intended to be.
“We’re constantly working to simplify the search results page, so that it’s quick and easy to find the information and websites you’re looking for. As part of this effort, we regularly evaluate all of our existing features to make sure they’re still useful, both for people searching on Google and for website owners.
Through this process, we’ve identified some features that aren’t being used very often and aren’t adding significant value to users. In these cases, we’ve found that other advancements on the search results page are able to get people what they’re looking for more seamlessly. So we’re beginning to phase these lesser-used features out.
For most searches, you likely won’t notice a major difference — most of these features didn’t trigger often and weren’t interacted with much by users. But overall, this update will simplify the page and improve the speed of search results.”
Ending with the following sentence:
“Starting in January 2026, we’ll remove support for the structured data types in Search Console and its API.”
Google’s Search Features Are Always Changing
Someone responded to the initial post to reassure them that Google’s search features and the structured data that triggers them are always changing. That’s true. Google Search has consistently been in a state of change and never more visibly on the front end as it is today with AI search.
Google’s John Mueller responded to the Redditor who noted that Google is constantly changing by affirming that markup types (which includes Schema.org structured data) are always changing.
He responded:
“Exactly. Understand that markup types come and go, but a precious few you should hold on to (like title, and meta robots).”
Structured Data Curation Is Automatic
Keeping up with Schema.org structured data is easy with any modern content management system through plugins or as part of a native functionality because they are responsive to Google’s structured data guidance. So in general, it’s not something that a publisher or SEO needs to think about. Publishers on WordPress just need to keep their plugins updated.
How To Cultivate Brand Mentions For Higher AI Search Rankings via @sejournal, @martinibuster
Building brand awareness has long been an important but widely overlooked part of SEO. AI Search has brought this activity to the forefront. The following ideas should assist in forming a strategy for achieving brand name mentions at a ubiquitous scale, with the goal of achieving similar ubiquity in AI search results.
Tell People About The Site
SEOs and businesses can become overly concerned with getting links and forget that the more important thing to do is to get the word out about a website. A website must have unique qualities that will positively impress people and make them enthusiastic about the brand. If the site you’re trying to build traffic to lacks those unique qualities then building links or brand awareness can become a futile activity.
User behavior signals have been a part of Google’s algorithms since the 2004 Navboost signals were kicking in and the recent Google antitrust lawsuit shows that user behavior signals have continued to play a role. What has changed is that SEOs have noticed that AI search results tend to recommend sites that are recommended by other sites, brand mentions.
The key to all of this has been to tell other sites about your site and make it clear to potential consumers or website visitors what makes your site special.
So the first task is always to make a site special in every possible way.
The second task is to tell others about the site in order to build word of mouth and top-of-mind brand presence.
Optimizing a website for users and cultivating awareness of that site are the building blocks of the external signals of authoritativeness, expertise, and popularity that Google is always talks about.
Downside of Backlink Searches
Everyone knows how to do a backlink search with third-party tools but a lot of the data consists of garbage-y sites; that’s not the tool’s fault, it’s just the state of the Internet. In any case, a backlink search is limited, it doesn’t surface the conversations real people are having about a website.
In my experience, a better way to do it is to identify all instances of where a site is linked from another site or discussed by another site.
Brand And Link Mentions
Some websites have bookmark and resource pages. These are low hanging fruit.
The “-site:example.com” removes the competitor site from the search results, showing you just the sites that might mention the full URL of the site which may or may not be linked.
The goal is not necessarily to get links. It’s to build awareness of the site and build popularity.
Brand Mentions By Company Name
One way to identify brand mentions is to search by company name using the TLD segmentation technique. Making a broad search for a company’s name will only get you some of the brand mentions. Segmenting the search by TLD will reveal a wider range of sites.
Segmented Brand Mention Search
The following assumes that the competitor’s site is on the .com domain and you’re limiting the search to .com websites.
Competitor's Brand Name site:.com -site:example.com
Segmented Variants:
Competitor's Brand Name site:.org
Competitor's Brand Name site:.edu
Competitor's Brand Name site:.Reddit.com
Competitor's Brand Name site:.io
etc.
Sponsored Articles
Sponsored articles are indexed by search engines and ranked in AI search surfaces like AI Mode and ChatGPT. These can present opportunities to purchase a sponsored post that enables you to present your message with links that are nofollow and a prominent “sponsored post” disclaimer at the top of the web page – all in compliance with Google and FTC guidelines.
Brand Mentions: Authoritativeness Is Key
The thing that some SEOs never learned is that authoritativeness is important and quite likely millions of dollars have been wasted on paying for links from low-quality blogs and higher quality sites.
ChatGPT and AI Mode are found to recommend sites that are mentioned in high quality authoritative sites. Do not waste time or money paying for mentions on low quality sites.
Some Ways To Search
Product/Service/Solution Search
Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.com “sponsored article” Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.net “sponsored article” Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.org “sponsored article” Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.edu “sponsored article” Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.io “sponsored article” etc.
Sponsored Post Variant
Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.com “sponsored post” Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.net “sponsored post” Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.org “sponsored post” Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.edu “sponsored post” Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.io “sponsored post” etc.
Key insight: Test whether “sponsored post” or “sponsored article” provides better results or just more results. Using quotation marks, or if necessary the verbatim search tool, will stop Google from stemming the search results and prevents it from showing a mix of both “post” and “article” results. By forcing Google to be specific, you’re forcing Google to show more search results.
Competitor Search
Competitor’s Brand Name site:.com “sponsored post” Competitor’s Brand Name site:.net “sponsored post” Competitor’s Brand Name site:.org “sponsored post” Competitor’s Brand Name site:.edu “sponsored post” Competitor’s Brand Name site:.io “sponsored post” etc.
Pure Awareness Building With Zero Internet Presence
This method of getting the word out is pure gold, especially for B2B but also for professional businesses such as in the legal niches. There are organizations and associations that print magazines or send out newsletters to thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of people who are an exact match for the people you want to build top of mind brand name recognition with.
Emails and magazines do not have links and that’s okay. The goal is to build name brand recognition with positive associations. What better way than getting interviewed in a newsletter or magazine? What better way than submitting an article to a newsletter or magazine?
Don’t Forget PDF Magazines
Not all magazines are print, many magazines are in the form of a PDF. For example, I subscribe to a surf fishing magazine that is entirely in a proprietary web format that can only be viewed by subscribers. If I were a fishing company, I would make an effort to meet some of article authors, in addition to the publishers, at fishing industry conferences where they appear as presenters and in product booths.
This kind of outreach is in-person, it’s called relationship building.
Getting back to the industry organizations and associations, this is an entire topic in itself and I’ll follow up with another article, but many of the techniques covered in this guide will work with this kind of brand building.
Using the filetype search operator in combination with the TLD segmentation will yield some of these kinds of brand building opportunities.
1. Segment the search for opportunities search by TLD .net/.com/.org/.us/.edu, etc. Segmenting by TLD will help you discover different kinds of brand building opportunities. Websites on a Dot Org domain often link to a site for different reasons than a Dot Com website. Dot org domains represent article writing projects, free links on a links page, newsletter article opportunity, and charity link opportunities, just to name a few.
2. Consider Segmenting Dot Com Searches The Dot Com TLD will yields an overabundance of search results, not all of them useful. This makes it imperative to segment the results to find all available opportunities. Even if you’re
Ways to segment the Dot Com are by:
A. Kinds of sites (blog/shopping related keywords/product or service keywords/forum/etc.) This is pretty straightforward. If you’re looking for brand mentions be sure to add keywords to the searches that are directly relevant to what your business is about. If your site is about car injuries then sites about cars as well as specific makes, models, and kinds of automobiles are how you would segment a .com search
B. Context – Audience Relevance Not Keyword Match Context of a sponsored article is important. This is not about whether the website content matches what your site, business, product, or service are about. What’s important is to identify if the audience reach is an exact match to the audience that will be interested in your product, business, or service.
C. Quality And Authoritativeness This is not about third-party metrics related to links. This is just about making a common sense judgment about whether a site where you want a mention is well-regarded by those who are likely to be interested in your brand. That’s it.
Takeaway
The thing I want you to walk away with is that it’s useful to just tell people about a site and to get as many people as possible aware of it. Identify opportunities for ways to get them to tell a friend. There is no better recommendation than the one you can get from a friend or from a trusted organization. This is the true source of authoritativeness and popularity.
Why Strategic Review Is The Missing Layer In Many SEO Campaigns via @sejournal, @coreydmorris
Whether you call your SEO efforts a strategy, campaign, or channel, many SEO programs start strong but slowly drift. That could be in the form of reports getting routine, dashboards taking over for thinking, and moving into a mode of “doing SEO” versus challenging and building it.
In many cases, there’s an initial audit, roadmap, and then turn to implementation. Those are all good things, and I strongly advocate for the right level of strategy, research, and planning before moving into any level of ongoing work. However, monthly reports or dashboards, and little reflection can lead to stale tactics.
When activity, tactics, and implementation are the biggest part of what is reported on and/or measured, I question if enough strategic thinking and approach exist.
A strategic review and approach included a structured, periodic checkpoint within the process to assess performance. That includes a mixture of team (and resource/partner/vendor) alignment, execution, and continued connection to overall business goals that SEO is mapped out to impact.
Similar to a retrospective or ending a sprint in agile methodology, it is time for a look backwards at what worked, what didn’t, and where we need to go next in the overall SEO investment. This is different than just a set of reports and metrics; it is time for true reflection and recalibration beyond just measurement.
Why Strategy Is Often Missing
There are some common reasons SEO teams and resources skip strategic review and don’t have the layer fully in place. At times, SEO can seem like an ongoing checklist of things to audit, crawl, fix, and optimize. It can also feel like something that is always on or never-ending.
While all of those things are true to some degree, I think with SEO being a longer-term discipline before seeing return on investment (ROI), there’s pressure to show activity as progress before seeing tangible results, and this can be hard to change after habits and patterns form are embedded in the process.
Agency and client relationships can become rooted in deliverables and lose strategic direction over time. Or, a lack of ownership can exist where no one person or entity truly feels accountable for stepping back and considering if the strategy is still right and delivering.
Risks Of Skipping Strategy
When teams lack or drift from strategy, they run the risk of optimizing for the wrong things. Whether that is the topics, content, context, or even chasing the wrong key performance indicators (KPIs). Going for traffic and things that show activity and progress alone, and are disconnected from the bottom line, lead to danger when they can’t convert at some point.
Additionally, silos can exist, and insights can stay within the silos. When SEO is reduced to activities, tactics, and just actions, learnings from content, dev, brand, product development, customer service, leadership, and other functions aren’t shared with SEO, and vice versa.
Plus, in a world where new information, strategies, and opportunities seemingly emerge daily with how SEO works, AI search, and other areas of change, it is easy to get outdated quickly with assumptions about intent, audience behavior, and connections to the bottom line.
Strategy Integrated Ongoing SEO
Establish A Cadence
The ideal timing for how often to revisit strategy or how it integrates into the ongoing SEO effort is different for everyone. Whether it is quarterly, monthly, or on some frequency that matches the speed at which SEO can and will be implemented, along with the speed of the rest of the moving parts in digital marketing, it is important to lock it in. And, adjust where necessary, but do not keep pushing it down the road.
Since SEO is often an indefinitely ongoing investment, I like the use of sprints and agile thinking, and in this case, building into the agile process. Ultimately, the goal is to not drift or move into a void far enough where strategy problems start happening, yet are missed or ignored.
Dig Deep Enough
However and whenever you build in the strategic review part of the process, there are some key questions to ask however formally you format the process.
This starts with strategy alignment. Are our current goals still the right ones to anchor to? Do they map out to business outcomes versus indicators or vanity metrics? Can we get deep enough in measurement of impact and attribution?
From there, execution and focus are important to review. This includes looking at the tactics that had an impact versus those that didn’t. And, to fully understand why.
Now, we can set our sights on the next sprint or period, looking forward. Consider the opportunities ahead, including trends, SERP features, audience behaviors, AI, and anything else that has emerged that needs to be factored into the effort.
Bring People Together
A tale as old as time in SEO having the best plans stalled out by a lack of resources or a strong resource plan. This means we need to make sure we have the right people, whether they are on the team, in another department, freelance, or at a vendor company, booked and lined up to help us implement.
Better yet, if you can have them in the room with you at any part of the strategic review to learn from the insights you’re seeing and help shape the plan, sharing out of their subject matter expertise and perspective, even better. This is your chance to break down silos and get more integration of SEO with other functions.
Be Structured
I have to confess that I love to iterate and try new things with processes. That’s part of what drew me into SEO over 20 years ago. However, I think that there has to be consistency in the approach and process. You don’t want to spend too much time overdoing it in ongoing strategic reviews. At the same time, you don’t want to be too shallow and gloss over it.
I recommend borrowing some agile retrospective agenda formats and structures to look at what to start, stop, continue, and plan what’s next. Borrow from that if you are struggling to come up with a simple enough, yet powerful review criteria and process.
Revise The Plan
It might feel like a given that you’ll take the work you did and integrate it into your plan and efforts. I simply want to wrap up here by stating the obvious that you need to feed insights into the next period’s plan. That could also include adjusting goals, KPIs, and tactical priorities.
The key is to take things from talk and spreadsheets to action. Especially if your efforts have multiple layers, integrations of teams, or client/agency relationships.
Wrapping Up
SEO is a long game, but progress happens in shorter cycles. It can become a routine, a checklist, or a thing to “do” over time. Often, outdated strategies and tactics come from a lack of frequent enough critical strategic review and adjustment.
My goal for you is to not encounter these issues or find out later than you wished that your SEO has been drifting or gotten stale and isn’t delivering (and hasn’t for some time). The most strategic SEO efforts aren’t always the busiest or most activity-filled with quantity, but are focused on quality and have the mechanisms in place and often enough to adapt intentionally.
The best SEO teams and efforts aren’t just executing; they’re evolving.
A Step-By-Step AEO Guide For Growing AI Citations & Visibility via @sejournal, @fthead9
This post was sponsored by TAC Marketing. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
After years of trying to understand the black box that is Google search, SEO professionals have a seemingly even more opaque challenge these days – how to earn AI citations.
While at first glance inclusion in AI answers seems even more of a mystery than traditional SEO, there is good news. Once you know how to look for them, the AI engines do provide clues to what they consider valuable content.
This article will give you a step-by-step guide to discovering the content that AI engines value and provide a blueprint for optimizing your website for AI citations.
Take A Systematic Approach To AI Engine Optimization
The key to building an effective AI search optimization strategy begins with understanding the behavior of AI crawlers. By analyzing how these bots interact with your site, you can identify what content resonates with AI systems and develop a data-driven approach to optimization.
While Google remains dominant, AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude are increasingly becoming go-to resources for users seeking quick, authoritative answers. These platforms don’t just generate responses from thin air – they rely on crawled web content to train their models and provide real-time information.
This presents both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity lies in positioning your content to be discovered and referenced by these AI systems. The challenge is understanding how to optimize for algorithms that operate differently from traditional search engines.
The Answer Is A Systematic Approach
Discover what content AI engines value based on their crawler behavior.
Traditional log file analysis.
SEO Bulk Admin AI Crawler monitoring.
Reverse engineer prompting.
Content analysis.
Technical analysis.
Building the blueprint.
What Are AI Crawlers & How To Use Them To Your Advantage
AI crawlers are automated bots deployed by AI companies to systematically browse and ingest web content. Unlike traditional search engine crawlers that primarily focus on ranking signals, AI crawlers gather content to train language models and populate knowledge bases.
Major AI crawlers include:
GPTBot (OpenAI’s ChatGPT).
PerplexityBot (Perplexity AI).
ClaudeBot (Anthropic’s Claude).
Googlebot crawlers (Google AI).
These crawlers impact your content strategy in two critical ways:
Training data collection.
Real-time information retrieval.
Training Data Collection
AI models are trained on vast datasets of web content. Pages that are crawled frequently may have a higher representation in training data, potentially increasing the likelihood of your content being referenced in AI responses.
Real-Time Information Retrieval
Some AI systems crawl websites in real-time to provide current information in their responses. This means fresh, crawlable content can directly influence AI-generated answers.
When ChatGPT responds to a query, for instance, it’s synthesizing information gathered by its underlying AI crawlers. Similarly, Perplexity AI, known for its ability to cite sources, actively crawls and processes web content to provide its answers. Claude also relies on extensive data collection to generate its intelligent responses.
The presence and activity of these AI crawlers on your site directly impact your visibility within these new AI ecosystems. They determine whether your content is considered a source, if it’s used to answer user questions, and ultimately, if you gain attribution or traffic from AI-driven search experiences.
Understanding which pages AI crawlers visit most frequently gives you insight into what content AI systems find valuable. This data becomes the foundation for optimizing your entire content strategy.
How To Track AI Crawler Activity: Find & Use Log File Analysis
The Easy Way: We use SEO Bulk Admin to analyze server log files for us.
However, there’s a manual way to do it, as well.
Server log analysis remains the standard for understanding crawler behavior. Your server logs contain detailed records of every bot visit, including AI crawlers that may not appear in traditional analytics platforms, which focus on user visits.
Essential Tools For Log File Analysis
Several enterprise-level tools can help you parse and analyze log files:
Screaming Frog Log File Analyser: Excellent for technical SEOs comfortable with data manipulation.
Botify: Enterprise solution with robust crawler analysis features.
Semrush: Offers log file analysis within its broader SEO suite.
Screenshot from Screaming Frog Log File Analyser, October 2025
The Complexity Challenge With Log File Analysis
The most granular way to understand which bots are visiting your site, what they’re accessing, and how frequently, is through server log file analysis.
Your web server automatically records every request made to your site, including those from crawlers. By parsing these logs, you can identify specific user-agents associated with AI crawlers.
Here’s how you can approach it:
Access Your Server Logs: Typically, these are found in your hosting control panel or directly on your server via SSH/FTP (e.g., Apache access logs, Nginx access logs).
Identify AI User-Agents: You’ll need to know the specific user-agent strings used by AI crawlers. While these can change, common ones include:
OpenAI (for ChatGPT, e.g., `ChatGPT-User` or variations)
Perplexity AI (e.g., `PerplexityBot`)
Anthropic (for Claude, though often less distinct or may use a general cloud provider UAs)
Other LLM-related bots (e.g., “GoogleBot” and `Google-Extended` for Google’s AI initiatives, potentially `Vercelbot` or other cloud infrastructure bots that LLMs might use for data fetching).
Parse and Analyze: This is where the previously mentioned log analyzer tools come into play. Upload your raw log files into the analyzer and start filtering the results to identify AI crawler and search bot activity. Alternatively, for those with technical expertise, Python scripts or tools like Splunk or Elasticsearch can be configured to parse logs, identify specific user-agents, and visualize the data.
While log file analysis provides the most comprehensive data, it comes with significant barriers for many SEOs:
Technical Depth: Requires server access, understanding of log formats, and data parsing skills.
Resource Intensive: Large sites generate massive log files that can be challenging to process.
Time Investment: Setting up proper analysis workflows takes considerable upfront effort.
Parsing Challenges: Distinguishing between different AI crawlers requires detailed user-agent knowledge.
For teams without dedicated technical resources, these barriers can make log file analysis impractical despite its value.
An Easier Way To Monitor AI Visits: SEO Bulk Admin
While log file analysis provides granular detail, its complexity can be a significant barrier for all but the most highly technical users. Fortunately, tools like SEO Bulk Admin can offer a streamlined alternative.
The SEO Bulk Admin WordPress plugin automatically tracks and reports AI crawler activity without requiring server log access or complex setup procedures. The tool provides:
Automated Detection: Recognizes major AI crawlers, including GPTBot, PerplexityBot, and ClaudeBot, without manual configuration.
User-Friendly Dashboard: Presents crawler data in an intuitive interface accessible to SEOs at all technical levels.
Real-Time Monitoring: Tracks AI bot visits as they happen, providing immediate insights into crawler behavior.
Page-Level Analysis: Shows which specific pages AI crawlers visit most frequently, enabling targeted optimization efforts.
Screenshot of SEO Bulk Admin AI/Bots Activity, October 2025
This gives SEOs instant visibility into which pages are being accessed by AI engines – without needing to parse server logs or write scripts.
Screenshot of SEO Bulk Admin Page Level Crawler Activity, October 2025
Using AI Crawler Data To Improve Content Strategy
Once you’re tracking AI crawler activity, the real optimization work begins. AI crawler data reveals patterns that can transform your content strategy from guesswork into data-driven decision-making.
Here’s how to harness those insights:
1. Identify AI-Favored Content
High-frequency pages: Look for pages that AI crawlers visit most frequently. These are the pieces of content that these bots are consistently accessing, likely because they find them relevant, authoritative, or frequently updated on topics their users inquire about.
Specific content types: Are your “how-to” guides, definition pages, research summaries, or FAQ sections getting disproportionate AI crawler attention? This can reveal the type of information AI models are most hungry for.
2. Spot LLM-Favored Content Patterns
Structured data relevance: Are the highly-crawled pages also rich in structured data (Schema markup)? It’s an open debate, but some speculate that AI models often leverage structured data to extract information more efficiently and accurately.
Clarity and conciseness: AI models excel at processing clear, unambiguous language. Content that performs well with AI crawlers often features direct answers, brief paragraphs, and strong topic segmentation.
Authority and citations: Content that AI models deem reliable may be heavily cited or backed by credible sources. Track if your more authoritative pages are also attracting more AI bot visits.
3. Create A Blueprint From High-Performing Content
Reverse engineer success: For your top AI-crawled content, document its characteristics.
Keywords/Entities: Specific terms and entities frequently mentioned.
Structured data implementation: What schema types are used?
Internal linking patterns: How is this content connected to other relevant pages?
Upgrade underperformers: Apply these successful attributes to content that currently receives less AI crawler attention.
Refine content structure: Break down dense paragraphs, add more headings, and use bullet points for lists.
Inject structured data: Implement relevant Schema markup (e.g., `Q&A`, `HowTo`, `Article`, `FactCheck`) on pages lacking it.
Enhance clarity: Rewrite sections to achieve conciseness and directness, focusing on clearly answering potential user questions.
Expand Authority: Add references, link to authoritative sources, or update content with the latest insights.
Improve Internal Linking: Ensure that relevant underperforming pages are linked from your AI-favored content and vice versa, signaling topical clusters.
This short video walks you through the process of discovering what pages are crawled most often by AI crawlers and how to use that information to start your optimization strategy.
[embedded content]
Here is the prompt used in the video:
You are an expert in AI-driven SEO and search engine crawling behavior analysis.
TASK: Analyze and explain why the URL [https://fioney.com/paying-taxes-with-a-credit-card-pros-cons-and-considerations/] was crawled 5 times in the last 30 days by the oai-searchbot(at)openai.com crawler, while [https://fioney.com/discover-bank-review/] was only crawled twice.
GOALS:
– Diagnose technical SEO factors that could increase crawl frequency (e.g., internal linking, freshness signals, sitemap priority, structured data, etc.)
– Compare content-level signals such as topical authority, link magnet potential, or alignment with LLM citation needs
– Evaluate how each page performs as a potential citation source (e.g., specificity, factual utility, unique insights)
– Identify which ranking and visibility signals may influence crawl prioritization by AI indexing engines like OpenAI’s
CONSTRAINTS:
– Do not guess user behavior; focus on algorithmic and content signals only
– Use bullet points or comparison table format
– No generic SEO advice; tailor output specifically to the URLs provided
– Consider recent LLM citation trends and helpful content system priorities
FORMAT:
– Part 1: Technical SEO comparison
– Part 2: Content-level comparison for AI citation worthiness
– Part 3: Actionable insights to increase crawl rate and citation potential for the less-visited URL
Output only the analysis, no commentary or summary.
By taking this data-driven approach, you move beyond guesswork and build an AI content strategy grounded in actual machine behavior on your site.
This iterative process of tracking, analyzing, and optimizing will ensure your content remains a valuable and discoverable resource for the evolving AI search landscape.
Final Thoughts On AI Optimization
Tracking and analyzing AI crawler behavior is no longer optional for SEOs seeking to remain competitive in the AI-driven search era.
By using log file analysis tools – or simplifying the process with SEO Bulk Admin – you can build a data-driven strategy that ensures your content is favored by AI engines.
Take a proactive approach by identifying trends in AI crawler activity, optimizing high-performing content, and applying best practices to underperforming pages.
With AI at the forefront of search evolution, it’s time to adapt and capitalize on new traffic opportunities from conversational search engines.
Oddest ChatGPT leaks yet: Cringey chat logs found in Google analytics tool
OpenAI’s response leaves users with “lingering questions”
After ChatGPT prompts were found surfacing in Google’s search index in August, OpenAI clarified that users had clicked a box making those prompts public, which OpenAI defended as “sufficiently clear.” The AI firm later scrambled to remove the chats from Google’s SERPs after it became obvious that users felt misled into sharing private chats publicly.
Packer told Ars that a major difference between those leaks and the GSC leaks is that users harmed by the prior scandal, at least on some level, “had to actively share” their leaked chats. In the more recent case, “nobody clicked share” or had a reasonable way to prevent their chats from being exposed.
“Did OpenAI go so fast that they didn’t consider the privacy implications of this, or did they just not care?” Packer posited in his blog.
Perhaps most troubling to some users—whose identities are not linked in chats unless their prompts perhaps share identifying information—there does not seem to be any way to remove the leaked chats from GSC, unlike the prior scandal.
Packer and Manić are left with “lingering questions” about how far OpenAI’s fix will go to stop the issue.
Manić was hoping OpenAI might confirm if prompts entered on https://chatgpt.com that trigger Google Search were also affected. But OpenAI did not follow up on that question, or a broader question about how big the leak was. To Manić, a major concern was that OpenAI’s scraping may be “contributing to ‘crocodile mouth’ in Google Search Console,” a troubling trend SEO researchers have flagged that causes impressions to spike but clicks to dip.
OpenAI also declined to clarify Packer’s biggest question. He’s left wondering if the company’s “fix” simply ended OpenAI’s “routing of search queries, such that raw prompts are no longer being sent to Google Search, or are they no longer scraping Google Search at all for data?
“We still don’t know if it’s that one particular page that has this bug or whether this is really widespread,” Packer told Ars. “In either case, it’s serious and just sort of shows how little regard OpenAI has for moving carefully when it comes to privacy.”
