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.

Check out the video. Pretty impressive :) -> Introducing GPT‑Live: OpenAI rolls out two versions of GPT-Live: GPT-Live-1, powering ChatGPT Voice for Go, Plus, and Pro users, and GPT-Live-1 mini, the default for free users

Google Search "broke all prior usage records" yesterday after the Argentina match. Yep, Search is alive and well. :)

Well that's interesting... I haven't seen this before. And when digging into the data, I'm seeing goto links for some AIOs, Top Stories, social posts in the SERPs (like X and FB), etc. Hmm... -> Google Tests google. com/ goto Tracking URLs In Search Results www.seroundtable.com/google-com-g...

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_...

This is cool. And they are separate properties in GSC. Go set them up today. :)

Interesting case study and backs what Lily Ray published about the evolving situation with self-serving listicles -> Self-Promotional Content Works — Until It Backfires (AI SEO Experiment)

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...

Reddit about their fight against AI spam. I wonder if spamming for "inauthentic mentions" is part of this :) "We look at signals right when an account is created to stop suspicious actors before they ever get the chance to post. For those that do, we leverage LLMs to catch the highly subtle..."

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

Finally updated... after weeks of being stuck. Go check your coverage reporting in GSC. Last update now is June 29th. Great to see -> The Google Search Console page indexing report has finally been updated, after being stuck for 3 weeks www.seroundtable.com/google-page-...

This is great. "I should probably get a check (from Google)... Just to be nice... just for your own Karma..." -> Jennifer Lopez says Google owes her a check over viral Versace look which led to the creation of Google Images Here's the video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49R...

Cloudflare evolves its AI bot blocking options -> Your site, your rules: new AI traffic options for all customers "We’re launching the ability to manage AI traffic based on three major use cases: Search, Agent, & Training crawlers. With these new options, our customers can more finely tune how..."

This is out of control. Definitely DO NOT ignore emails about DMCA takedowns... You should be receiving them if someone tries to do this to your content. I know Google is aware of the issue, so hopefully we see some changes on that front. E.g. Maybe the first move shouldn't be to remove the urls...

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.

Cool study from Siteline with some interesting findings -> How well do AI agents understand top software products? An in depth benchmark analysis. "We ran repeated simulations with a Claude agent across 100 top B2B products and took in-depth measurements of success rates, costs & efficiency."

Google's Liz Reid on how publishers can get more people reading their content (& not just reading the AIO) -> "Produce really interesting, expertise content. The more publishers produce content that's really where they shine, what they bring to the table, that it's unique and not the 1000th copy..."

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.

There you have it. The June spam update has completed rolling out. What a month June has been. I've covered the crazy volatility in mid-June and now more with the June spam update. What does Google have planned for July? Only the engineers know. Muahahaha. :)

Oh boy -> Google is asking publishers that test new AI features in Google News to grant it broad rights to their content, including to potentially train AI models

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...

Google's deep dive into how the new Search Console search generative AI control work www.seroundtable.com/google-searc... via @glenngabe.bsky.social #googlesearchconsole #googleai #googlesearch #googleseo #googleaimode #googleaioverviews

Focus on finance? Heads-up -> The latest Google Finance upgrades, including a new app *Track your own investment portfolio *Stay updated on market intel with a custom briefing *New Google Finance app

Heads-up, the June Spam update is rolling out. :) I hope it hammers all the AI spamming BS we have been seeing. I think we have already started seeing some of that. Brace yourself.

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...

Oh boy, brace yourself :) -> Time chief operating officer Mark Howard has explained how the US newsbrand is already commercialising an invisible bot-readable version of its website which is used to promote sponsored content

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.

Big news, and it's surprising. I'm reading Metehan Yesilyurt's post about Reddit AI translations dropping in ChatGPT and immediately needed to check search visibility for that content. I have covered how those AI translations have boomed in Google over the past year or two via a three-part series.

New from Google's Brendon Kraham -> Good SEO is good GEO "Our new Gen-AI features are rooted in the same core ranking and quality systems as traditional Search. And, because these AI experiences retrieve content from the existing search index, the best formula for success remains foundational SEO."

It's not often you see a site doing extremely well in ChatGPT without strong Google rankings, which is why I had to dig into this case -> Surging in ChatGPT, Dead in Google – The curious case of a YMYL site with no search visibility in Google, but cited like crazy in ChatGPT

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...

Here we go again -> AI reporters churn out error-strewn stories for football websites "Previously, these football brands employed multiple human journalists. She Kicks is the website for Britain’s oldest women’s football magazine, which has been published since 1996, w/the website live since 2001"

I shared some interesting nuggets yesterday, but Barry has all of the tweets there in his article. Worth going through and sharing with site owners that don't know about this information... Some good info there regarding site-level quality, chunking for AI, schema, commodity content, and more.

Like I've said before, there is no way Google lets companies spamming for AI Search continue. They will ramp up systems + add manual actions -> Google Research Shows How AI Spam Can Be Detected

An interesting change in the documentation. Especially since many site owners don't even have those properties set up in GSC. I always recommend having them set up for several reasons. Now Google is underscoring another, for domain name changes. I've seen some strange edge cases over the years...

Excellent post from Lily. For sites publishing self-serving listicles, that tactic could be backfiring now. Not only is it embarrassing to do, but the data shows that although you might be cited, the other companies you list beyond yourself could be the ones mentioned (including your competitors).

All quiet on the 'back button hijacking' front. I haven't seen any manual actions, I haven't heard of a site receiving one, and there is no chatter at all. Also, now NONE of the sites on my list are hijacking the back button anymore. So all of them stopped hijacking before the 6/15 deadline.

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-...

From John: "Web crawlers and search engines have decades of practice processing standard HTML. Extracting plain text from HTML is already a trivial task for automated systems and web libraries. Publishing normal HTML pages is the primary prerequisite for your content to be crawled, indexed, and..."

If you're interested in the May 2026 core update, you should check out my latest video. It's a companion video to my blog post covering interesting findings and cases. I cover everything from the rollout to the tremors to YMYL impact (esp. gambling) to Grokipedia rising, scaled content abuse & more.

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

"AI Mode". OMG -> Meta launches new AI features, including an "AI Mode" for search that uses Meta AI to surface answers pulled from public posts across the platform "AI Mode is a new way to search Facebook that uses Meta AI to surface answers pulled from public posts, including Groups and Reels."

Link to it from robots.txt or TOS -> Publishers to bill AI firms for unwanted scraping – and take them to court if they don’t pay "The contract is hosted online and websites wishing to use it can simply link to it from their robots.txt file and/or their website terms of use and website footer."

Enforcement of 'back button hijacking' is supposed to start today. Based on my research, many sites that were hijacking are not now. That said, some still are, & some are still using tactics that violate the policy (even if it's not directly hijacking the back button). Will be interesting to follow.

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.

In my feedly today, a red flag when a blog publishes a ton of content on one day and all are "How to..." Quick check, 100% AI-generated content. This will probably not end well for the site. Actually, checking trending over time reveals a "Mt. AI" situation from 2023, but probably not AI then...)