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Google searches are up. Clicks to websites aren't keeping pace. And now rank tracking itself is breaking. We talked with Marcus Tober (Searchmetrics founder, now SVP Enterprise at @semrushofficial.bsky.social) about why. 🧵

2/ num=100 and the go-to redirects are just the latest round of a cat-and-mouse game Marcus has played since writing scrapers in college. What's new is AI agents. He estimates their request volume is 1,000x+ what scraping tools ever sent Google 🤯

3/ That's his read on the impression inflation in Search Console: impressions up sharply on lots of keywords, clicks flat or down. A lot of those "searches" are bots and agents, not people inflating impressions and wreaking havoc on reporting.

4/ Marcus Tober's most underrated tool for this: log files. A ChatGPT user-agent (only triggered by a real person's prompt) hits a product page. Minutes later a "direct" visit lands on the same URL. That's a leading indicator for dark AI traffic.

5/ And his favorite AI visibility fix is almost too simple. A ~30-year category leader had top SEO visibility but trailed in AI. They added plain, neutral homepage copy about who they are and what they do. AI visibility jumped almost instantly.