Interviewing SEOs in an AI-first world
The search industry is experiencing something many of us have never seen before. The supply of search talent now exceeds the demand for search talent. Blame artificial intelligence. Blame the economy. Blame years of checkbox SEO execution becoming increasingly commoditized. Whatever the reason, the result is the same. Search layoffs are up. Job openings are […]
Google Is Building An Audience Loyalty Ecosystem
I’m far from Google’s biggest fan. In fact, I have a well-earned reputation as an outspoken critic. But I believe my criticism comes from a position of fairness and balance. When Google does something right, I want to highlight that as well. This is one such occasion. I see what Google is trying to do […]
Google Is Adding Business Profile Tools To The Gemini App
Google is adding business features to the Gemini app, including a direct connection to Google Business Profile and Business notebooks. The company announced the updates at its Google for Brazil event. Both features will begin rolling out globally this month, excluding the EEA and UK. Business Profile features in Gemini are being released gradually and […]
6 Ways to Automate International Marketing with Agent A
Here’s how the Ahrefs international marketing team uses Agent A to automate their work. International marketing is a job that gets exponentially complicated with each additional region and language you add. For example, we publish the Ahrefs blog in eight languages, which means roughly every meaningful task—refreshing an old article, checking hreflang tags, swapping internal links, tracking […]
Ginny Marvin clarifies AI Max, AI Search ads and what advertisers should prioritize after GML
Google Marketing Live may be over, but advertisers still have questions. To help answer some of the biggest ones, Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin joined Julie Bacchini and the PPC Chat community for an extended Q&A covering everything from AI Max and AI Overviews to first-party data, AI Brief, measurement and the future of search […]
Publishers push Common Crawl to stop collecting content for AI training
Digital Content Next (DCN) sent the Common Crawl Foundation a cease-and-desist letter demanding that it stop scraping and distributing protected publisher content. The U.S. trade group, which represents major digital publishers (e.g., the AP, the New York Times, NBC Universal, Bloomberg, NPR, and Fox), also asked Common Crawl to remove DCN members’ content from its […]
How to make prompt tracking much more accurate
By now, you understand that LLMs are probabilistic systems and that AI answers are highly variable. That fact has convinced a lot of people that prompt tracking is extra noise. But discounting prompt tracking as nonsense is the wrong conclusion. Even though prompt tracking is much less deterministic than keyword tracking, we can significantly increase […]
Google can be directly liable for false AI Overview claims: German court
Google can be directly liable for false claims in AI Overviews, a German court ruled. The Regional Court of Munich found that AI-generated summaries are Google’s own content and not protected as traditional search results are. The court issued a temporary injunction barring Google from repeating false claims about two Munich publishers, according to The […]
Google Search Sends 23% Of Queries To The Open Web
For every 1,000 U.S. Google searches, 232 clicks reach what SparkToro calls the open web, according to new data drawn from Similarweb’s clickstream panel. The report, published by SparkToro co-founder Rand Fishkin, found 68% of U.S. searches ended without any click from January through April. Its 2024 report, based on Datos data, separately reported 360 […]
How to make SEO reports more actionable
SEO reports often contain solid research, including keyword data, technical findings, competitor insights, content gaps, and recommendations. The problem starts when stakeholders finish reading and still don’t know what should happen next. For example, a report might say internal linking should be improved, but not which pages should be linked, who should make the changes, […]