Search Engine Journal

Shopify's AI agent knowledge base now lives in the admin. Policies and contact details publish by default, and some app users need to re-add their facts. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social

Looking things up now makes up about as large a share of consumer ChatGPT messages as writing, though the increase is smaller than earlier data. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #ChatGPT

Allocate your next marketing budget increase by weighing retention and conversion fixes against more paid search, then stage funding around research. #marketing

Katie Morton and Ziff Davis' Jonathan Berthold discuss what to test first when traffic is flat and budget is zero, and how to get leadership to sign off.

Google's John Mueller responded to a stalled Search Console indexing report and suggested that SEOs may need to relax about data freshness. via @martinibuster.bsky.social #seonews #Google

New spam guidance says to noindex or block crawling on pages made for sharing. Google's docs say a URL blocked in robots.txt can be indexed. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #seonews #Google

Google and OpenAI now build answers as interfaces. The decision generative UI forces on a business looks like the one hotels made with booking.com. #Google

A buyer can arrive through Google after making the important part of the decision somewhere else. #Google

Meta delayed its updated business terms amid complaints to EU and UK regulators. The permission to crawl sites tied to its business users hasn't changed. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #smmnews #business

Brands logged-out ChatGPT rarely named without search also showed up less when it searched, even with cited-page coverage, in new comparison-prompt data. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #ChatGPT

STAT’s Tom Capper explained how to measure AI search visibility, distinguish brand mentions from citations, and connect prompt tracking with business outcomes.

Google reminds sites to use 503s during PHP patch downtime. Other updates cover robots.txt controls, bracket URLs, and JPEG XL in Google Images and Discover. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #Google

Make junior hiring part of your 2027 SEO budget by funding defined learning roles and tracking unfilled seats, so AI savings support your talent pipeline. #marketing

Rank trackers describe how they check suspect Google results, what customers see during checks, and what they say about reprocessing and past results. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #Google

Use roundups and comparison posts to win customers, build trust, and grow your audience by helping readers choose rather than chasing rankings.

OpenAI details how the ChatGPT ad stack uses a custom LLM orchestrator to interpret multi-turn intent, run auctions, and serve sponsored placements. #llms #ChatGPT

Google's CEO expects AI agents to reach websites by browsing pages and through protocols, and says protocols scale better but will take longer to develop. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social

As AI answers replace the list of links, SEO shifts from earning a ranking to earning a place in the answer.

Google's new robots.txt video says the standard covers crawling, not how content gets used, and recommends percent-encoding non-English robots.txt paths. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #Google

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says the future of Search is an agentic layer that unifies the Search and AI experiences. via @martinibuster.bsky.social #seonews #Google

Hackers installed backdoors on WordPress websites using stolen security keys, exposing over 3 million active installations of UpdraftPlus. via @martinibuster.bsky.social #wpnews #WordPress

Taking a site offline to patch PHP? Serve a 503 from outside PHP and keep robots.txt reachable. Days of server errors may get URLs dropped. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #seonews #Google

Build more resilient SEO reporting as rank tracking falters by measuring brand visibility, AI citations, and business revenue across modern search. via @taylordanrw.bsky.social

PHP's emergency security update, scheduled for today, October 21, at 14:00 UTC, is now available. Ask your host to patch PHP and upgrade unsupported versions. via @vahandev.bsky.social #WordPress

Chrome and Firefox now display JPEG XL, but Google says it isn't currently supported in Google Images or Discover previews. Keep a supported fallback. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #seonews #Google

Google's John Mueller says raw and percent-encoded brackets are different URLs and recommends using one form across links, canonical tags, and sitemaps. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #seonews #Google

China's voluntary GEO standards set rules for AI visibility metrics, vendor contracts, pricing, and manipulation. Here are five ideas Western SEOs can borrow.

New details on Google Discover's filters that remove articles before they can rank. Here's what to do preserve search performance. via @martinibuster.bsky.social #seonews #Google

Cloudflare says its network signals helped OpenAI index hundreds of millions of new pages for ChatGPT search. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #ChatGPT

Regain control of Google Ads with a curated article stack on lead quality, Local Services Ads migration, Smart Bidding goals, and proving PPC business value. #Google

DeepSeek opened its search API with authority scores and a promise to filter SEO and GEO spam. I spent $0.08 testing what it actually returns.

Search engines made up a smaller share of publisher pageviews in most regions than a year earlier. A lower share alone doesn't show search sent fewer pageviews. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #seonews

Meta removed training from the crawling clause in its upcoming Commercial Terms. The permission to crawl sites tied to business users is still in place. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #smmnews

A Chinese AI lab opened its search engine to developers. Each result carries a page-level authority tier, and DeepSeek says it filters GEO manipulation. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social

What a model learned from fictional biographies complicates the promise to make it remember your brand.

Researchers posted about a made-up concept on sites AI search tools cite. Four English-web tools cited it within a week. Other topics mostly didn't land. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social

Get journalist outreach pitches seen and understood by improving targeting, email authentication, subject lines, and the details AI inbox summaries pick up.

A paper tested whether Google results and OpenAI's API can stand in for ChatGPT's citations. They matched cited sites more often than the exact pages. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #ChatGPT

Google removed the Indexing API approval form and steps from its docs. Default quotas are listed, but the pages don't say how to request more. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #seonews #Google

A rank tracker logged Google pages missing their usual sites, some ChatGPT links lost tracking tags, and Google and Bing changed AI search links and data. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #ChatGPT

New terms let Meta crawl sites tied to business users and use the content to train its products, widening rights ad buyers had already granted. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #smmnews

The NYT uses the prime real estate on its homepage to show off its free-to-air content. If it’s good enough for The NYT, it’s good enough for you.

Approved forums and social platforms can send content and interaction signals through a separate pipeline. Here's who can apply and how it compares to crawling. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #Google

ChatGPT-attributed traffic fell sharply in several analytics datasets this month, and analysts tie the drop to ChatGPT links that open without tracking tags. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #ChatGPT

Universal Cart is rolling out in the U.S. across Search and the Gemini app, with checkout inside the cart or a one-way handoff to the store's own site. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #Google

Measure PPC value when AI journeys hide clicks using conversion tracking, impression trends, and CRM data to check platform claims against business outcomes.

Google is changing how links appear in AI Mode and AI Overviews, moving inline links higher and expanding the carousels that highlight Preferred Sources. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #seonews #Google

Prepare for a potential Panda-style Google update by tackling scaled AI content and fake authors that could put your entire site's rankings at risk. via @taylordanrw.bsky.social

Coywolf Pack makes EmDash more powerful, aids WordPress migration, and adds SEO tools supporting search engine discovery and indexing. via @martinibuster.bsky.social #seonews

Google's new Search Central video series tackles unusual technical SEO questions, starting with emoji, non-English characters, and keywords in your URLs. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social #seonews #Google