Information Retrieval Part 4 (Sigh): Grounding & RAG
When we’re talking about grounding, we mean fact-checking the hallucinations of planet destroying robots and tech bros. If you want a non-stupid opening line, when models accept they don’t know…
SEO news from around the world
When we’re talking about grounding, we mean fact-checking the hallucinations of planet destroying robots and tech bros. If you want a non-stupid opening line, when models accept they don’t know…
A recent post on X (formerly Twitter) called attention to the fact that many popular open source projects, like WordPress, are run by a single person, often referred to as…
This post was sponsored by Scrunch. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. AI bots are visiting your website, interpreting your content, and shaping how customers perceive…
New research from BrightEdge shows that while AI Overviews (AIO) has expanded its coverage since launch, it surprisingly doesn’t represent a complete shift away from traditional organic search results, as…
Welcome to PPC Pulse weekly news review. This week’s focus includes asset guidance, budget pacing, and search controls across Google and Microsoft Ads. Google reinforced the importance of asset variety…
Microsoft has rewritten the Bing Webmaster Guidelines to cover how content appears in both traditional search results and Copilot’s AI-generated answers. The previous version focused on how Bing indexes and…
Welcome to the week’s SEO Pulse for the best of this week’s news: updates cover what early data reveals about the February Discover core update, why Google may ignore a…
Google’s February 2026 Discover core update has finished rolling out, per an update posted to the Search Status Dashboard at 2:02 AM PT on February 27. The rollout took roughly…
Google is preparing to test changes to how search results appear in Europe that would give competing vertical search services more visibility, Reuters reported, citing a person with direct knowledge…
Joost De Valk, founder of Yoast SEO, announced that he is stepping away from FAIR, a Linux Foundation project for creating an independent repository of themes and plugins. Fair Project…
Google’s Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt used an episode of the Search Off the Record podcast to walk through how Google’s crawler handles HTML. The conversation revealed differences between how…
For the past couple of decades, SEO has been about linear visibility. Your website ranks for more keywords in higher positions, which, in turn, drives more clicks, and has been…
Most people do not wake up one day and decide they are done with a product category. They leave when the workflow starts to feel like work. Think about something…
We’re bringing the SEJ newsroom to a screen near you. On March 11 from 12–3pm ET, we’ve gathered our own search experts, alongside some very special guests, to help you…
Researchers published the results of a study showing how AI search rankings can be systematically influenced, with a high success rate for product search tests that also generalizes to other…
Anthropic updated its crawler documentation this week with a formal breakdown of its three web crawlers and their individual purposes. The page now lists ClaudeBot (training data collection), Claude-User (fetching…
More U.S. consumers in an Adobe Express survey said they’ve used TikTok for search than in the company’s 2024 survey. But the platform’s position as a Google challenger may be…
Today, trust in popular platforms is diminishing, organic reach is haphazard and hard to predict, and user behavior is growing more difficult to discern than ever before. At the same…
Choosing the right pay-per-click (PPC) ad network is a core strategy impacting the success of your advertising program. Each network reaches distinct audiences, offers different ad formats, and suits different…
Boost your skills with Growth Memo’s weekly expert insights. Subscribe for free! AI-SEO transformation will fail at the alignment layer, not the tactics layer. 25 years of transformation research, spanning…
If more than half the web runs on a content management system, then the majority of technical SEO standards are being positively shaped before an SEO even starts work on…
In January, I wrote about the birth of agentic commerce through both Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) and Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), and how this could impact us all as consumers,…
NewzDash published an analysis comparing Discover visibility before and after Google’s February 2026 Discover core update, using panel data from millions of US users tracked through its DiscoverPulse tool. It…
SerpApi filed a motion to dismiss Google’s federal lawsuit, two months after Google sued the company under the DMCA for allegedly bypassing its SearchGuard anti-scraping system. The filing goes beyond…
The December 2025 core update had a significant impact on a large number of sites. Each of the sites below that have done well are either long term clients, past…
Google’s John Mueller answered a question about why a Search Console was providing a sitemap fetch error even though server logs show that GoogleBot successfully fetched it. The question was…
Welcome to this week’s PPC Pulse, where this week’s focus is on scenario-based planning in both Google and Microsoft platforms. Google introduced a new Scenario Planner within Meridian, giving marketers…
Welcome to the week’s SEO Pulse: updates affect how links appear in AI search results, where organic clicks are going, and which languages ChatGPT uses to find sources. Here’s what…
Microsoft’s Defender Security Research Team published research describing what it calls “AI Recommendation Poisoning.” The technique involves businesses hiding prompt-injection instructions within website buttons labeled “Summarize with AI.” When you…
Some advertisers are now seeing Performance Max placement data populate in Google Ads reporting, including Search Partner domains and impression counts that had previously been absent from the report. PPC…