From Malte: "If you're starting with a strong SEO base, GEO is a layer on top of it." Note, I'm not 100% on board with the final section about the 'perfect chunk', but the previous parts are great. :) www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZfB...

Also, AI image generation in AIOs: "To help bring those unique ideas to life, we’re bringing image generation directly into AI Overviews in Search. Using our latest Nano Banana model, this update transforms a simple text prompt into a high-quality, custom visual made completely from scratch..."

Prioritize local results (on your system) and remove promotional content -> Microsoft announces major Windows 11 search overhaul that prioritizes clearer, local results, and removes ads (rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Experimental Channel) blogs.windows.com/windows-insi...

Note, I checked my full list of sites that got hit then and most are still heavily down but some have started to come back. I need to dig in further soon. The first 3 screenshots above are Jan 2026 hits. 4th is recovery from the May core update. I'm seeing quite a bit of movement ~7/11 to 7/13...

The Jan 2026 unconfirmed update was huge for some sites. For a number of sites publishing and scaling "commodity content", self-serving listicles, etc., they got crushed. Most have not recovered yet... But I just surfaced several sites that got hammered then that are recovering (or have recovered).

Big update about the case I wrote about where a site was surging in ChatGPT w/out any Google visibility (due to Bing rankings). Well, the site was just nuked from the Bing index. The site has been completely deindexed as of this AM. There were ~90K urls indexed as of yesterday. Now gone. Poof. 🧨

After surging since 2025, Reddit's massive AI translation project may have hit a wall. Tens of millions of translated urls across countries were ranking well across Google's 10-blue links, AIOs, AI Mode, and downstream at ChatGPT for a bit. Now that's all dropping. www.gsqi.com/marketing-bl...

It's still surging. Totally dead in Google, but cited like crazy in ChatGPT (due to strong Bing rankings). Now cited in over 167K responses... Google has it right, while Bing is getting it very, very wrong.

Like my latest case study showed, it's not just about strong Google rankings (which is important for AIOs, AI Mode, Gemini, and even ChatGPT partly). Bing is important as well for ChatGPT and Brave is important for Claude. So *Organic Search* overall is important. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nqf_...

Hey, more links to publishers in AIOs. Eager to see this roll out fully... Nice catch -> Google AI Overview "Further Exploration" was seen in the wild www.seroundtable.com/google-furth...

Fraudulent DMCA Takedowns is a hot topic now and some may be new to the topic. Here's another interesting fact. When a url is taken down, it looks like it's removed from the index (since it's removed from the SERPs), but if you inspect the url, it's actually indexed. Just another confusing situation

Heads-up, I'm seeing some huge surges in Bing's AI Performance reporting starting right on June 1st. I'm seeing this across many accounts. I'll ping Bing about this, but it's worth taking a look at your own reporting. There may be some interesting findings. Also, use the new compare functionality...

This is so embarrassing for ChatGPT and for Bing (since that's where this site ranks well and it's what ChatGPT is using for grounding). The site is now being cited in over 122K prompts (up from 90K). Will be interesting to see how far this goes until the site tanks in Bing, and then in ChatGPT.

Good to see nobelprize.org start to turn around. They were blocking Googlebot with 403s for some reason and started tanking. I reached out to a few people on LinkedIn, never heard back, but now you can see Googlebot is freely crawling.

Spam Update Notes cont'd: And here are more examples of gambling sites surging or dropping. Some big swings there in June...

Good Morning Google Land! This is the 6/26 edition of "Spam Update Notes". Today, I ran the numbers for over 500 sites in gambling, casinos, and sports betting. As you can guess, there were huge swings for a number of those sites. I have included some drops and surges below... June has been nuts.

Crawl Safeguard on Lumar is a great feature. You can monitor that in real-time and it can stop the crawl based on the % of failures it sees. As you can see, this crawl is not going well. Just contacted my client. :)

As part of my analysis of the June spam update, I came across a powerhouse in coupons that got hammered by the May core update and now more with June volatility. Huge drop showing across tools. Spot-checking the SERPs does show it's gone for many of those queries. At least it's not Q4 yet...

The document also explains how long it will take for content to drop out of AI experiences. "Content will be excluded within 1-2 days after the control goes live, but some content may take longer to be excluded due to caching and propagation across systems." support.google.com/webmasters/a...

If you haven't reviewed Google's support documentation for blocking AI Search, there's a lot of info there. And that includes how child properties will inherit the settings from parent properties, but that can be overridden at the child property level. support.google.com/webmasters/a...

What's the worst that can happen, a manual action? Yes, and that can be very problematic. You could end up in a situation where you can't easily get out of it. That's what is happening here. Tough situation for the site owner. Sure looks like they need guidance... what they are doing isn't working.

Well, seeing them drop in ChatGPT had me checking Google rankings again for those AI translations, and yep, they are dropping in Google. This is the first time they have dropped based on my research. So once again, drop in Google and drop in AI Search (including downstream at ChatGPT).

More: The YMYL site is dead in Google, yet it's being cited like crazy in ChatGPT. Was this proof of OpenAI building its own index, or was ChatGPT grounding answers via another source? I dug into this super-interesting case to find out. www.gsqi.com/marketing-bl...

Programmatic SEO + scaling to additional countries/languages + in a YMYL category can be risky. Interesting case here. Tanks in visibility and now is barely indexed. No manual action from what I understand.

Yep, there are quite a few ads weaved in there... Super deceptive IMO. I really dislike the weaving of ads and content. Amazon might the worst doing this, but Google is doing it more -> Google Mixes Paid and Organic Results in Image Search ppcnewsfeed.com/ppc-news/202...

Big news from Bing. And you can compare changes over time. This is what Krishna Madhavan shared in April and now it's rolling out -> New AI Visibility Insights in Bing Webmaster Tools: Intents, Topics, Citation Share, Compare blogs.bing.com/search/June-...

Google updated its doc to say llms.txt won't hurt or help your search rankings, but it's fine to implement for other services. But again, Google clearly says it's not used for Search. searchengineland.com/google-says-... via @rustybrick.com

BTW, I just checked the sites on my list that were still 'back button hijacking' in late May and none of those are doing it now. Amazing how the fear of a manual action gets sites to change. I'll keep an eye on the situation and post more soon.

From an AIO perspective, Grok ranks in AI Overviews for 21K queries. E.g., like the one below in the screenshots. And from an AI Mode pov, Grok has surged since late 2025, but did take a hit post-May core update. So yes, Grok is being cited in Google's AI surfaces quite a bit.

Regarding Google's AIOs citing Grok, here is some information about Grok's search visibility. The account x.com/grok has surged in visibility over the past year, although it did take a hit recently post-core update. It ranks for 87K queries right now based on ahrefs data and 35.3K in the US.