SEO Test Shows It’s Trivial To Rank Misinformation On Google
An SEO crafting a newsletter with AI spotted a hallucination about a March 2026 Google Core Update and decided to publish it as an experiment to see how misinformation spreads.…
Google Explains Why HTTPS Migration May Negatively Impact SEO
Google’s John Mueller answered a question about moving to HTTPS, explaining why the process of making a site secure is actually a major undertaking that can have a negative impact…
AI Search Changes In Q1 2026 [Recap]
SEJ Live’s opening panel covered three months of AI search changes from three angles. I covered the news, SEJ Founder Loren Baker covered the business case, and Managing Editor Shelley…
Search Referral Traffic Down 60% For Small Publishers, Data Shows
Search referral traffic to small publishers dropped 60% over two years, according to Chartbeat data reported exclusively by Axios. That’s nearly three times the decline at large publishers. The analytics…
Google AI Overviews Cut Germany’s Top Organic CTR By 59%
AI Overviews cut the click-through rate on Germany’s top organic position by 59%, according to a SISTRIX analysis of more than 100 million keywords. The data, published by founder Johannes…
Google Removes ‘What People Suggest,’ Expands Health AI Tools
Google has removed “What People Suggest,” a search feature that used AI to organize health perspectives from online discussions. The confirmation came as Google held its annual Check Up event,…
Google AI Mode’s Personal Intelligence Now Free In U.S.
Google is opening Personal Intelligence to free-tier users in the U.S. Previously limited to paid AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers, the feature is now expanding to users with personal…
How Google Profits From Demand You Already Own
Boost your skills with Growth Memo’s weekly expert insights. Subscribe for free! Branded search inflates your return on ad spend (ROAS) by taking credit for demand you already own, and…
Vibe Coding Plugins? Validate With Official WordPress Plugin Checker
Vibe coding WordPress plugins with AI can raise concerns about whether a plugin follows best practices for compatibility and security. WordPress.org’s Plugin Check Plugin offers a solution for those who…
Trust Is The New Ranking Factor
Would you let an AI agent spend $50,000 of your company’s budget without checking its work? Probably not. Right now, our marketing world is distracted. We’re busy arguing over AEO/GEO…
3 CMS Platforms Control 73% Of The Market & Shape Technical SEO Defaults
Chris Green helped analyze 17 million websites and co-authored the latest SEO chapter for the Web Almanac, and his conclusion should matter to anyone who does SEO for a living.…
AI Content Wasn’t Good Enough. Now It Is.
It’s a common belief that AI-generated blog posts are inherently low-quality and inferior to their human-made equivalents. Companies that scale AI-generated content do so with the knowledge that they are…
AI Search Barely Cites Syndicated News Or Press Releases
A BuzzStream report analyzing 4 million AI citations found that press releases distributed through syndication channels barely appear in AI-generated answers. Background Press release distribution services have been marketing AI…
You’re Not Scaling Content. You’re Scaling Disappointment
Every few years, the SEO industry discovers a new way to mass-produce content and convinces itself that this time it’ll work. That the sheer volume of pages will overwhelm Google’s…
Google Shares More Information On Googlebot Crawl Limits
Google’s Gary Ilyes and Martin Splitt discussed Googlebot’s crawl limits, providing more details about why limits exist and revealing new information about how those limits can be adjusted upward or…
Merchant Center Expands, Google Clarifies Smart Bidding, State Of PPC Report – PPC Pulse
Welcome to this week’s PPC Pulse. Updates focus on Merchant Center access for agencies, bidding strategy, and how PPC marketers are adapting to industry changes. Google expanded access to Merchant…
What Actually Works (Based on Data)
With people now increasingly asking ChatGPT questions and product recommendations, if your brand doesn’t show up in those responses, you’re invisible to them. The problem: ChatGPT doesn’t have “rankings”. At…
AI Mode Data, Ask Maps & Branded Queries Go Live – SEO Pulse
Welcome to the week’s Pulse: updates affect how AI Mode links work, how local discovery works in Maps, and what you can do in Search Console. Here’s what matters for…
Digital PR Strategy in 3 Simple Steps — Whiteboard Friday
In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Chloe Osunsami provides 3 simple steps for crafting a successful digital PR strategy in 2026. Join her to discover how to analyze competitors, find…
What Is Content Decay? (And How to Fix It Before It Tanks Your Traffic)
Every piece of content you’ve ever published is slowly dying. That may sound defeatist, but unfortunately that’s just how the web works. Rankings slip, competitors improve, search intent shifts, and…
Starting Or Steering The Wave
I wrote a LinkedIn post on this very topic a while ago, and people seemed, at least, reasonably interested. So I thought I’d expand on it a little. It is,…
What It Is and How to Use It in Your SEO Strategy
Most people use “keyword intent” and “search intent” interchangeably. That’s fine as they refer to the same underlying concept: the reason behind a search query. But there’s a practical distinction…
Google Discover Core Update Data: Local Publishers Lost Reach
An analysis from Discover tracking tool DiscoverSnoop adds to the post-update data available on Google’s Discover core update, confirming some patterns identified in earlier NewzDash analysis while contradicting others. The…
Google Says They Deploy Hundreds Of Undocumented Crawlers
Google’s Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt published a podcast about Googlebot, explaining that it’s not just one standalone thing but hundreds of crawlers across different products and services, most of…
Formidable Forms Flaw Lets Attackers Pay Less For Expensive Purchases
A vulnerability in the Formidable Forms WordPress plugin installed on over 300,000 websites enables unauthenticated attackers to bypass payment verification. The vulnerability affects all versions up to and including 6.28.…
How AI Automation Turns Static Travel Pages Into Living Content & Experiences
For most of the past 20 years, growing travel marketing meant producing more and more output. This happened because success depended on building additional landing pages for new destinations, publishing…
ChatGPT’s Default & Premium Models Search The Web Differently
Ask ChatGPT’s default and premium models the same question, and they’ll cite almost entirely different sources, according to a Writesonic analysis. GPT-5.4 Thinking, ChatGPT’s premium model, sent 56% of its…
The Dark Side of AI No One Talks About
The model breaks visibility into four quadrants: Open areas known to your brand and customers Hidden areas you haven’t communicated to your audience Blind spots you’ve missed about how customers…
Google Maps Launches AI Conversational Search With Ask Maps
Google Maps is launching Ask Maps, a conversational feature powered by Gemini that lets users ask complex questions about locations and receive AI-generated suggestions on a personalized map. The feature…
The Shortcut Behind Some AI Optimization Tools
On March 3, 2026, OpenAI pushed GPT-5.3 Instant to all ChatGPT users, free and paid, with no fanfare about what else might have changed beneath the surface. Within days, SEO…