The SEO Update by Yoast – April 2025 Edition

Mike
And we’re live. All right. Welcome everybody to the April 2025 edition of the SEO update. Happy to have you here. So we have these live updates scheduled on the last Tuesday of each month. So you can mark your calendars already if you want to join in the fun. And during these updates, our two principal SEOs at Yoast, that’s Carolyn and Alex, they discuss highlights and insights from the SEO world that took place over the prior month. My name is Mike. And as your host today, I am delighted to welcome you and thank you for joining. I’m a support team lead at Yoast, which means I help to lead our support team in delivering 24-7 live chat and email support to our customers. I’m also happy to say that in May, I’m going to be celebrating my four-year Yoastaversary.

All right. Now I’m going to quickly go over two house notices and we’ll get to the fun stuff. All right. First thing has to do with the recording and the resources associated with this update. So the recording, yes, there will absolutely be a recording of this available to watch. One of the ways you can access it is if you go to yoast.com/webinar and then click on the past webinars tab. That’ll be later this week. You’ll be able to find this particular update, click on it and then watch the replay and check out the resources. All right. That’s the first notice. And the second notice has to do with the Q&A session for this particular update. So after the news is discussed, there will be 10 minutes for Q&A and I really highly encourage you to submit and or you can also upvote questions by clicking or tapping on the question mark icon on the right of your screen.

Okay, moving on to the good stuff. Your SEO update presenters, Carolyn and Alex. As I mentioned, they are our two principal SEOs at Yoast and they have a lot of experience in all kinds of industries. And I’m happy to bring them up on stage right now and introduce them. Let me see. Let’s bring first Carolyn Shelby. Hello, Carolyn. So she has extensive experience in news SEO, technical SEO and enterprise SEO. Next we’ve got Alex. Let’s bring him up on stage. There’s Alex. Hey, Alex. Alex Moss brings a deep knowledge of structural SEO and all things digital marketing SEO. Okay. I will be back for the Q&A. Alex and Carolyn, the stage is yours.

Alex
Thanks for having us, Mike. That was a lovely introduction.

Carolyn
It sure was. Are you ready to rock and roll, Alex?

Alex
Let’s go for it. I’ll move us to the stage because our faces aren’t as important as the slides, right?

Carolyn
Absolutely not. All right. So let me just make sure we’re all ready to go. I’m just going to go back over a couple housekeeping things. Don’t forget that questions go in the Q&A section and you can up up the questions that you want to have answered. We really try to get to them in order of votes, but sometimes there’s duplicates and sometimes we have to wing it a little. But we do try to answer all of your questions. And then if you want to learn more about today’s topic, there will be a recording afterwards. You can go to yoa.st/update-april-2025. There is a recording. We’ve had that asked like eight times today. I swear you will get a recording. I promise. If you would like to continue the conversation, you can join us on Facebook, which is facebook.com/groups/yoast. Or you can join us in our Reddit subreddit, which is reddit.com/r/yoastseo. So please feel free to join in. Give us your thoughts on the show. Ask us your questions. We’re happy to engage. Now, if for some reason you’re here and you’re like, I don’t understand what’s going on. I’m still really new to this. You can join us for our How to Start with SEO biweekly webinars. The next one is scheduled for May 6th from 10:00 a.m. Central European Standard Time or 4:00 p.m. GMT+8. I’m not even sure what that means because I’m bad at time zones. But anyway, I think it’s 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time. I could be mistaken. 10:00 a.m. Central European Standard Time, though. And if you can work it from there to figure out your own time zone, you’re better at math than I am. All right, let us get ready. Alex, are you good at time zones?

Alex
No. All I know is that I’m five hours ahead from New York and one hour behind Holland. And I kind of gauge from there.

Carolyn
Okay. We’re just going to leave it there. Let’s move on to SEO news because that is stuff I know about. Let us get started. I’ll just kick it off. On the 20th of March, which happened, I think, after our last show, Microsoft confirmed that Schema helps its LLMs understand your content. This is very good and helpful for many of us. Bing’s Copilot uses Schema markup to understand content. The fresh content and indexnow. Indexnow is that thing that Bing does where you’re allowed to alert them every time you’ve got new content going. So it kind of gets indexed within minutes instead of waiting for the crawler to come around. And all of this uses the structured data to help ingest and understand what your content is so that the GPTs can produce better answers. Alex, did you have any other sage wisdom to go along with that?

Alex
Not wisdom, just support. I mean, to me, this is great. Schema and structured data, of course, maybe subjective, right? But big fan of it. And in my opinion, and I know that you are sharing the same, that it’s something that’s going to be used in the future despite AIs being very sophisticated and going to get more sophisticated. It’s going to be much easier to understand if something’s structured, right?

Carolyn
Yeah, I think there’s some nuance to that that is going to get covered in like the last slide that we do. But we’ll table that for right now. Moving on, exciting things. OpenAI rolled out GPT 4.0 image creation to everyone, which means you can create really cool things by giving it reference pictures like of yourself to do things like, I don’t know, make coinage with your face on it or other cool things like that. It’s integrated right into ChatGPT, which is very helpful. You don’t have to switch programs to make images. You could be writing an article and say, oh, hey, I need a hero image to go with this article I just wrote. Can you make one? And it will go, sure, and then make one for you. It’s really awesome. It’s actually much better at text than they used to be, too. And I guess it’s available to all ChatGPT users, including the free plans, which is great. I have a paid plan, not the expensive one, just the normal paid plan. But I enjoy playing with it. I think Alex has been playing with it, too.

Alex
Yeah. Look at what we can make. I mean, this is humanity at its peak, everyone. We’re just creating illustrations of each other. And what was it? Studio Ghibli. I made a version of my headshot, which still makes me look weird. I don’t know. I don’t know. Ghibli doesn’t sit well. But the Muppet version of me, look at me go. I can see me on a Muppets episode being happy whilst thinking that AI should be doing something much more sophisticated.

Carolyn
We probably should be doing something more to benefit humanity than make Muppet pictures of ourselves. But this is what humanity does, right?

Alex
Yeah. I also wonder how much processing power this actually takes up. Because, I mean, I remember when NFTs were quite popular and there was that very expensive one that got sold and someone equated it to powering a small village for a week or something was minting one. And I wonder what’s going on here and how many trees just died because I wanted to look like a Muppet just then. And I’m hoping it’s not many.

Carolyn
I think it’s a lot, to be perfectly honest. I think it’s really, really pretty bad. We should all be ashamed of ourselves for making pictures of ourselves is what that comes down to.

Alex
Yeah, but it’s a good benchmark. Weirdly, it is a good benchmark. All of these stupid image creations that we are creating, which are useless to the grand scale of life, right? That it is actually because we’re doing it so often and so much and vastly in a mass market. Actually, when prices do come down, they’ll probably use the image generation of Muppets and Studio Ghibli as the benchmark of how much things cost. I think we’ve done one. There’s one positive that’s come out of this uselessness.

Carolyn
It does remind me of the beginning of the internet when there was so much development and innovation happening. But a lot of it was happening because of like porn sites. Because they have so much video is very labor, CPU intensive. The graphics were CPU intensive. They all required a great deal of bandwidth. And there was tons of traffic. So it’s stuff like this. The stuff that doesn’t seem important that actually does move along innovation because everybody’s using it. And we learned so much from all of that use.

Alex
Yeah.

Carolyn
Why don’t you tell me about what happened with the AI overviews?

Alex
Well, AI overviews seem to be getting a lot of traction, right? They’re rolling it out in more countries for more niches and verticals for more different kinds of context and intent that you’re doing. And less and less is becoming more for you to discover yourself. And whilst this is happening, and during the March 2025 update is when a lot more AIO was getting there, we’re saying that overview searches and searches that provided AI overviews were increasing. And I didn’t know whether things were increasing because more stuff is happening, which I’m sure is one of the variables. But maybe another variable is that the results are not the best. And when you search for something that pulls up something that isn’e accurate, you’re going to search again. And when you do that, you’re creating maybe another search. But also, you’re creating more searches for potential robots, which could be part of the data set. They’re not being very specific there.

Carolyn
Well, and I wondered, I don’t know if you recall, but I feel like it was in February, I wrote an article for Search Engine Land. Google made some big change where they were forcing all of the tools that go and scrape the results to use JavaScript. Because they weren’t before. They weren’t executing JavaScript. And Google said, you can’t use our stuff if you’re not going to execute JavaScript. You have to. And it caused a big interruption in like Semrush and Ahrefs and some of the other scrapers data. And there was, everyone was panicking. They thought the tool sets were going to go out of business, and they didn’t. But the rule stood, if you want to scrape the data, you have to execute the JavaScript. So why would Google make you execute the JavaScript? Because it triggers ads, and it triggers AI overviews and other SERP features. So if they’re forcing all of these bots that are hitting the SERPs constantly all day long to trigger AI overviews, wouldn’t that then result in this spike that we saw? So I’d be curious to see the exact data and how they’re calculating this. And if there is a lot of automated content now, or automated traffic that’s triggering this, and it’s not necessarily humans that are triggering it.

Alex
Yeah, which of course, again, makes rank tracking even more harder to be accurate, right?

Carolyn
Yeah, for sure.

Alex
Which is going to be a bigger problem. But I don’t know. Well, yeah, look, there’s a news item that doesn’t say Google at the beginning. They’re taking away the monopoly of news as well, of news items. There’s other stuff to talk about, isn’t there?

Carolyn
It’s refreshing, actually.

Alex
Yes, yes. But I don’t know. I haven’t tried Copilot, personally. Have you?

Carolyn
No, because it’s integrated with the Microsoft Edge browser, and I really kind of only use Chrome, which is, I’m ashamed to say, a Google product. And that’s the only one I use. And I’m really kind of a ChatGPT person. I’ve spent so much time training ChatGPT, and it’s got such a wonderful memory that it’s so personalized to me now that I’m most comfortable with it, and I don’t tend to move around and switch. So I haven’t tried Copilot. I’m interested in how they’re attracting new users when it does seem like once you get kind of married to your AI of choice, you don’t move around. But I think I also have a skewed impression of what’s going on because I think there’s – I’ve adopted, but I think there’s millions and millions and millions and millions of people that have not yet adopted. So just because I’ve already picked my partner doesn’t mean that everyone else has, and there’s plenty to go around. You haven’t tried it, have you?

Alex
I haven’t tried it, and I believe that maybe the audience are just like – I don’t know. As an SEO through the years, I’ve always pocketed Edge and Internet Explorer when it was Internet Explorer, and Microsoft users and also Bing users as older people because they’re people who would get a Windows machine, and they would not change anything because even that, changing a search engine might be too complicated. I can imagine my mom and my dad going, nope, staying with Bing, and they will do – they didn’t know Gemini. My dad only knows what Gemini is because he’s in the mailing list for Google, but they’ve both heard of ChatGPT. They will not have heard of Claude. They won’t have heard of Perplexity. They won’t have heard of Copilot, but may have used it, unaware that they’re actually using it, which I think Microsoft have a good edge. Hey, they have a good edge on that market and able to target that. But as Tom was saying, Tom Ostry, if that’s how you pronounce your name, he’s using them all, and they’re all different, but they’re all so unique that they’re not just when you’re searching for a car. A car’s a car, and you’ll go for a brand, and a shoe’s a shoe, and you’ll go for the brand you like, but it’s like saying – it’s like going from beyond a shoe to just general footwear, from a sandal to a Wellington boot, and they all serve a different purpose, and you’ll need all of them for those different purposes. Everyone’s got a pair of wellies, and a pair of sandals, and a pair of trainers, and a nice pair of shoes, but you usually only use one of them on a day-to-day basis. And it’s kind of the same thing here. You might soon use a mixture of Copilot, or Gemini, or Claude, or whatever you’re doing, to find what you’re doing in that certain – just like I’m using ChatGPT now, for certain things, I’m actually going towards a default now to using ChatGPT, and if I can’t do what I want to do, or I know it’s hyper-local or hyper-ecom, I’ll go to Google and use it. Other than that, I’m using my ChatGPT, and I’ve not had to go anywhere else yet.

Carolyn
I’ll back out and go to Google to actually do a search for a thing, because I think I’m still interested in seeing the differences and the variety of searches that are returned, rather than just having it pick one for me, because sometimes it’s a – I don’t necessarily know what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it, so I need to see a lot. And for product searches, I think. I do prefer that. But yeah, it’s difficult to move around. It’s like you kind of get settled into your groove, and you’re comfortable in your groove, and you don’t want to cause discomfort.

Alex
Yeah.

Carolyn
All right. Let’s see what else – oh! Bing is bringing us some other exciting products now.

Alex
Well, that’s interesting, because they’re actually bringing the Copilot and products into the SERP. I don’t know what Barry’s doing at the moment, what he’s up to, or what he’s searching for.

Carolyn
To be fair, this example was Barry’s. We didn’t choose this.

Alex
Yes, we didn’t choose this example. This was Barry Schwartz, so he’ll have to answer for that. Or maybe he’s searching for his wife or other part. I don’t know.

Carolyn
Let’s assume that’s the case.

Alex
This is the illustration that he provided where they do product placements inside of Copilot. So they’ve been quite busy, Microsoft, in this last month specifically. So I feel like they’ve gone from being a bit behind the game in Copilot to, well, let’s just do two or three things at once, and not just say, hey, we’re doing what everyone else was doing three months ago. They’re actually thinking a bit more forward, in a way, because no one else is doing ads yet. Yet.

Carolyn
Well, I think everyone’s going to have to, though, because you are going to have to monetize that traffic somehow, especially if it’s becoming so much part of the traffic that’s happening.

Alex
Yeah.

Carolyn
Another coming thing. It’s another one. Microsoft’s just on a tear right now with their Copilot stuff. I’ll take this one. So they’ve got Copilot search available in Bing. So we know that it’s integrated in with the Edge browser. We know that it’s integrated in with the Microsoft operating system and the various Microsoft Office suite things. But they’ve also got it now in Bing, which is their Microsoft’s equivalent to Google, basically. They say that it blends traditional and AI search for fast, summarized, cited answers. Okay. That’s what they’re supposed to do, right? Helps explore deeper with topic suggestions and in-context follow-ups. And that it’s available on desktop and mobile, and it supports trusted sources and discovery. Which, I mean, to be fair, sounds like what they do, right?

Alex
Yeah. It’s pretty obvious. It’s pretty obvious. But it’s good that it’s in. It’s their nice AIO version, I guess.

Carolyn
Competition. And Google probably welcomes this because they need to show that they’re not a monopoly. This is clearly competition. So good for everybody all around. Oops. I think I accidentally went back to you.

Alex
Yes. You missed multimodal. So AI mode and Google have brought multimodal, which is a fancy way of saying you can use multiple mediums to search for something, adding layers to that search and therefore context. That isn’t even a simpler version of what they said in multimodal. But what it does is you can take a video or a picture, you can add to text with a completely different search. This one, they took a picture of a few books of a person that owns those books in their room. And the search was, well, if I like these, what else am I going to like? That’s great. And again, it’s really good for product stuff. But again, when they go to AI mode, how are they going to present those answers? If it’s all going to be product related, is it going to be commercial or informational intent? Who knows? Is this just one big height to get into ads? So it can go, oh, right. Brilliant. Because those are the multimodal. All the examples are product related, right? Shopping related searches, not informational based.

Carolyn
So I can give you an example of this in real life and what it’s good for. I went to an estate sale over the weekend, drove four and a half hours each way to go to it. And one of the pictures that attracted me to this estate sale was a photograph of a cabinet full of handbags. So I gave the picture to the AI and I said, based on what you see here, is it worth it for me to drive four and a half hours to go to this estate sale to try to buy one of these bags? It identified with fairly reasonable accuracy. handbags that were in the handbags that were in the picture. It went out and it hit eBay and it hit some of the resale sites. It found the retail costs of the bag. It found the used value of the bag if you were selling it like on eBay. And then it gave me some guidance on what I might expect to get it for it in the estate sale, especially hoping that they don’t know what they have. And it’s like, I did a cost benefit analysis and it’s going to cost you this much to drive, but it’ll be fun. And you might get a $6,000 handbag for $600. Wouldn’t that be exciting? So it was kind of impressive. I’m not going to lie. It is good.

Alex
It’s getting more impressive as you use more examples. And I was talking, again, I’m teaching my mom to try and use it. And she keeps on saying, she keeps on referring to it as who, as though there is a person at the other side. And then I tried to describe what it was. And the only thing I could describe it as is while I was doing a talk at BrightonSEO and using LLMs as a library, comparing it to a library, which is quite good. And when it’s like going into a library and you going up to the librarian who has memorized every single book and not only has memorized the words, but understands everything in that building and probably more. Everything in every library, everywhere, from all time. And she couldn’t quite grasp that. And then my nephew said, oh, it’s like basically asking God questions. And I found that very interesting from a teenager to answer it very quickly in kind of the same way, but using it as a God complex because it’s obviously above us now already, isn’t it? And this is what it can do. Tell us new books to read.

Carolyn
Assuming you actually read them and you don’t just feed it back into it and ask it to summarize it.

Alex
Yeah. Yes.

Carolyn
All right. Well, let’s keep going so that we have time for Q&A. This excited you, didn’t it? You were telling me about this.

Alex
Yes. Google Maps has blocked loads of fake reviews. And as someone who has had a lot of clients over the years who are small businesses and doing local stuff, I hate it when clients have wanted to get fake reviews and have the conversation with me. Please don’t do that. And I see other competitors doing it. And funnily enough, I see former clients who then do it after I’ve told them not to. And now I’ve been back to those sites and they’ve all gone. It’s actually quite interesting to see their star ratings and their ratings go down. But only I know that that happened before and has happened now. But in short, I’m very, very supportive of get rid of all of these spammy things. The less spam there is on the internet, the better. Good riddance. And if you were doing it, I know it sounds harsh, but you were doing black hat stuff. You deserve the consequences of that. And maybe you might get punished as a result. So don’t do that. Don’t do fake reviews.

Carolyn
I think you could say we are in the FO phase of the FAFO.

Alex
I love it. This is quite the technical phase of that. And then we’ll have to abide by all of its rules, which is good because we haven’t been thus far, have we? No.

Carolyn
All right. So let’s see. Next we have Google confirms structured data still essential in AI search era. There have been multiple… There’s been a lot of stuff going on with, oh, Google says that schema helps. Google says… Or Bing says that schema helps. Microsoft says that schema helps. A lot of people really ran with this. They’re conflating the recommendation to use structured data because structured data is available with, you must have structured data in order to do well in the LLMs. And it’s not the same thing. And it’s more nuanced of an answer than that. Google has said, and they clarified, that no special optimizations are needed to get into the AI search features. And that doesn’t mean that if you just use schema, then you will get into the AI search features. All of this… The LLMs… You know what? I’m going to save it for the last slide because the last slide is what talks about this. The point is, though, everyone agrees that making your content accessible and easy to ingest for the LLMs is just as important as making it easy to ingest and accessible to the old school search engines. Because they’re all trying to access your content kind of in the same way. They’re going to break it up, ingest it, and then process it. So structured data is still helpful. Structured data has not been deprecated. You should not turn off your schema if you have schema in place. Should you bend over backwards to make sure that you’ve got schema? Maybe it’s not necessary if you have a really well-structured site. But schema is still incredibly useful. And it does overcome some architectural deficiencies that people tend to engineer into their websites. Does that make sense?

Alex
Yes, it does. And John Mueller was quite clear-ish in that. I know he said other statements a few days later about schema and ranking, about how just putting it in doesn’t just increase ranking. And whilst that’s not necessarily false, it’s not ranking and visibility here and discoverability, which is what’s happening in the AI search era, is wider than one ranking for one page. But again, that doesn’t mean that not having it is going to help your site rank more as well. So it’s always good to do it, but also do it factually and white-hattie. And just feed these LLMs as much as you can without abusing it, right?

Carolyn
Absolutely. All right. Google did file a new patent on personal history-based search. So they filed a request to patent a way to search your personal history using natural language. So it works in email, and it will go through your voice assistant’s past chats to search through it and tailor the results that it gives based on the things that you’ve talked about. You remember all of the times when you’re like, I think my phone is listening to me because now it’s showing me ads for this place that I only briefly mentioned in passing while I was in the car talking to somebody who was standing outside my car? It, like, kind of is. It actually is. That’s what’s going on. This is the reason I don’t use Gmail because it’s literally always read your stuff. And now they’re just, they’re going to go through all of your personal history. It’s going to color everything. I’m a paranoid person. I am not okay with this, but this is the way we’re going. Like, nothing is private anymore. And if you’re using a service, especially if you’re not paying for it, then you are, in fact, the product, not the user. So, yeah. I just feel like you need to do that with self-in-tinfoil now.

Alex
Yeah, well, I take my tinfoil off at this point and I submit to the nosy technology that I submit to. And I don’t mind. So I did read this. It wasn’t all about patency stuff. It was more of a, probably a clickbaity, like Gmail is going to be able to serve content from your emails in ads, on SERPs, in context. Initially, that’s creepy as hell. But then the more that I think about it, I’m like, actually, that’s pretty clever, isn’t it?

Carolyn
Well, they’re not saying they’re going to serve it to other people. They’re going to show it to you. So it’s going to be like, it’s going to be like, hey, Petco has having a sale on flea and tick powder. And you sent an email to your mom saying you thought that Fluffy had fleas because she was scratching excessively. You might want to go over there and check that out. So I can see where they’re trying to be helpful. But I can also see like this is, it just feels like a very slippery slope. That’s all I’m saying.

Alex
Yeah, I don’t know how it would interpret my old agency email, which is 13 years old. I’ve had clients of all types in all verticals. And I’m sure you’ll get this if you’ve been in the SEO world for this long. If you’re doing link building and you’ve got a site that’s got spammy links, some of the links that you discuss with your client are unprofessional, right? They’re not even worthy of mentioning in these kind of updates, right? And I’m thinking of them all right now. They’re like so adult and not safe for work. And yet, is that going to be pulled in? Because I talked about something really random and unprofessional in 2016 to a client. And now I’m going to get pulled in. I don’t, that doesn’t float my boat.

Carolyn
Could you imagine if you’ve had an email account since you were like 12 years old? And the stupid stuff kids talk about. Like, and all of that’s going to get rashed and all of that’s going to get colored. Like, no wonder they think adults are all in love with Minecraft. It’s because there’s all these kids that were talking about it. And, yeah.

Alex
And yeah, and they grow up. So the data’s long, right? I mean, my Gmail account, I think my personal one goes back to, I don’t know when it came out. But I was in the first million people to get it. And I’ve used it since. So it’s all no things from, I would say, a different life. You know, like 15, 20 years ago, I was a different person. I was consuming things completely differently. And will it figure that out? I would like to think it would understand history and life. And I don’t know. This is going to be the interesting part after it just splits out remedial stuff.

Carolyn
That is going to be interesting. Yeah. But, you know, Google’s always treated everything that they have like a, it’s like your permanent school record. It’s what you do in kindergarten is going to affect what happens senior year. Like, it’s just, they don’t forget. They forget nothing. All right. Let’s, I’m scaring myself now and I’m getting verklempt. So let’s, let’s keep going. There was an interesting interview with Google’s Elizabeth Reed, where she talked about human curiosity being boundless and people asking lots of questions. And the gist of it was that the, the function of AI Overviews is that it’s enabling longer and more natural. Multimodal just means different types of searches to be part of the same query. You don’t have to force the user to switch from, you know, regular Google to maps, to images, to videos, to find different things that are related to the question that they’re asking, because they might be asking a question about, I don’t know, giant pandas. And there’s going to be all kinds of information available. There’s going to be videos from the zoo. There’s going to be specials on plush animal, you know, stuffed animals. There’s going to be all sorts of things that the user might, their brain might be interested in seeing. But prior to having like AIO reviews, they would have had to decide that they were going to actively go seek out that different type of information. And now the search engine can just start showing it to you because they think that you, your brain might be interested in it. And your brain probably is. So it was an interesting, interesting view. You can, there’ll be a link to it in the summary that you guys got. Google’s acknowledging that there’s going to be some, some shifts and some growing pains, maybe with advertising and monetization of these new models. But they really do feel that it’s important to engagement. It’s important to, to growing the experience. And they do, they’re, they’ve reaffirmed their desire to keep core search functionality free. Did you, did you have a chance to watch that, Alex?

Alex
Not in full, no. And some, I was watching some of the beginning and some of it felt like, is this, you know, you’ve got the head of, you got Elizabeth Reed here. She had the head of products. I forgot the, her actual job title, but she’s better or like the SVP of products.

Carolyn
Yeah.

Alex
I always think, is it, is it actually innovative, the interview, or is it PR and sales? Because you’re a mouthpiece for a larger company. And of course, what you’re not going to do is say, talk about all your weaknesses and how you’re falling. But how you’re going to tell people how innovative everything is and relay things that you already know. Like we’re going to use previous searches to help, to help inform our future. So of course you’re going to do stuff like that. Is that, you know, like Captain Obvious stuff that the end, if you were to write a piece of what did I learn in here that I didn’t know probably beforehand, there wouldn’t be a big list of bullet points, but it is still interesting that they’re still coming out and saying that they’re going to be the leaders. And this is all going to work and we’re going to keep stuff inside the search engine at all times, which is what they’re doing quite well, aren’t they?

Carolyn
Yep.

Alex
Like this. This is exactly what they’re doing.

Carolyn
I thought this one was funny. So Google AI Overviews is linking to itself over and over again. In the example that Matthew Kerr pulled up and then wrote about, he had it search for narcissist where it linked over and over to itself. So I thought I appreciated what he did there. I thought that was funny. But it is interesting that it’s not linking to itself as a citation. It’s linking to itself for additional subsequent searches, which really is kind of what the, what hyperlinks were built for, like back in the 80s and 90s. Well, really kind of late 80s when hyperlinks came into being. That the point of having a hyperlink was that you could see a word that you wanted more information about, click on it, and then get more information about that word. So really it does just spawn more searches. I’m not surprised that they’re doing this, but I did, I did appreciate the, the little subtle, what he did there.

Alex
Yeah. Yeah. Plus, isn’t that going towards another search?

Carolyn
Yeah.

Alex
In the data set. So of course, searches are going up when you’re keeping all subsequent searches, thinking they’re going out to a source, but they’re not. They’re staying within the platform.

Carolyn
It’s increasing engagement, increasing clicks. Like this is all, this is all designed to increase.

Alex
Bravo data analyst in Google. Bravo.

Carolyn
This was an interesting one. You were the one who pointed this out to me. Can you tell me what’s going on?

Alex
Yeah. So Google obviously have a number of domains. So I’m in the UK. So I searching Google.co.uk. And if I was searching Google.com, I would actually get different results. And you would get different results on .com in the US as I would as .com in the UK and .co.uk in the UK. And I think you could even go on .co.uk in the US and get a full result. That’s all going away. It’s all migrating. Well, not migrating. It’s all combining itself into one nice Google.com.

Carolyn
Consolidating.

Alex
Consolidating. Yes. Yes. So it’s all going to be there. So soon you will no longer see your .co.uk, your .in, your .nl, whatever country you’re in, you will go to Google.com and it will know. So here there won’t be four different, well, there still may be four different variations. No, there won’t. Because I’ll go on Google.com and I’ll see my UK one. I won’t be able to see the UK one and neither will you because you’re in the US.

Carolyn
I would hope that they’d still allow us to change countries if we really wanted to.

Alex
You haven’t done that. I’ve never, I’ve not even seen that, that, that down arrow of select your country because again, me, I’d just go to the different domain, the top level domain. Don’t I? I just went to, if I want to search in Holland, I’ll just go to Google.nl. I don’t know what that’ll do to the UX. They haven’t gone into all the detail of how it would be to do something like that, but I don’t know. I guess it makes it more streamlined, doesn’t it?

Carolyn
It’s entirely possible that there just aren’t enough people who do that. And it might be only the SEOs that are interested in doing those kinds of searches anyway. I would imagine that you can trick it into giving you different countries by changing your VPN country. So if you’ve got a, if you’ve got a private VPN, which I would hope most of you do, right? You can change the country or the region that your IP address is coming from to make it look like you’re coming from Europe or look like you’re coming from the US or wherever it is you want to go. And I would imagine if you need to get specialized searches and there’s no other way to change the country, you can just do it that way. So…

Alex
And it is annoying because the last bullet point is…

Carolyn
I know you can get your Dutch results if you change your IP address back to the Netherlands.

Alex
Yeah, but that’s just a, that’s that, to me, that’s a hack, right? It’s a workaround rather than something you could have just done. It’s a bit annoying. But the last part, to me, is also annoying because as each year passes, some bit of data gets taken away. Not from, when I say us, I don’t mean SEOs. I mean from organic folk in general, even site owners who aren’t on ads. They’re getting forced into ads to see any useful data or any segmented data that’s going to be of any use, which is very annoying. But hey-ho, these are the rules now, isn’t it?

Carolyn
Yeah. Interestingly, people thought that with Google announcing that change, that that meant that they were somehow deprecating or devaluing country code top-level domains and that people wouldn’t need them anymore. And Google had to issue a statement that, no, no, no, international SEO is not changing. Hreflang still works. Please don’t copy Google’s approach. It might not work for your site. So it’s just so funny how Google scratches their nose and suddenly everybody has an itchy nose.

Alex
I do get that, to be fair. So AI overviews, that’s still… Well, was it an actual study where they got some data? It’s Ahrefs who did this, and they basically proved something that we already kind of knew that. If you’re going on a search and you’re doing AI overviews, you’re more likely to not get a visit or a click here than you would have done before, mainly because AI overviews are taking the answer for you. As well as the fact that a couple of slides ago, it’s not just 34.5%. It’s 34.5%. And then if they click again, there’s another reduction as they keep you in the SERP. So that’s, to me, that AI overviews reduces the first click by 34%. But then again, the second click by 34% of that 34%. Do you know what I mean? Every time it serves you a new AI overview, there’s another reason not to click into a third-party site.

Carolyn
So I know that they did this study in response to another claim. Someone said that Google said that AI overviews was increasing clicks. I never heard that Google said that it was increasing clicks. I heard that it was increasing the engagement and the intent of the people that come through to your site. So while it’s taking away a lot of the overall traffic, the traffic that does click through to your website is definitely interested. They’re more qualified. They’re more engaged. They already know they definitely want to be there. So what I think you’ll see is while there’ll be a reduction in overall raw traffic, the traffic you do get is potentially going to be more likely to convert. Which I think obviously is if your performance metrics aren’t raw traffic, if your business model isn’t monetizing eyeballs, this is ultimately going to be good for business, I think. So I would not be too panicky about this unless you are like a newspaper or something where you get all your money from eyeballs.

Alex
Yeah.

Carolyn
Next steps for privacy sandbox and tracking protections in Chrome. Google made a bunch of announcements just last week, a couple days ago. Chrome is going to keep their current third-party cooking settings. There’s no new prompt coming. Google’s also not going to… They’ve been talking about deprecating third-party cookies for ages. They finally said, not only are we not delaying it any longer, we’re just not going to do it. So your cookies will remain, your third-party cookies. And I know that there’s a lot of people breathing a sigh of relief. The privacy sandbox is going to continue to support privacy and the ad-funded web. And then they’ve got an updated API roadmap coming and they’ve invited industry feedback. So if you were into that stuff, please do step over to Google and give them your feedback. I will talk about this one because that is a picture of me. Just… Oh, I didn’t change the date on it. So literally just yesterday, I had an article published in Search Engine Journal about how LLMs interpret content and how to structure your information for AI search. And the reason I wrote this was because everyone was going, oh, schema, schema. Schema is going to fix everything. All the LLMs use schema and we should use schema. They weren’t talking about structured data. They were talking about structuring content. So structured data is a noun. Structuring content is a thing you do. It’s a verb. The LLMs process and tokenize information in a very specific way. You don’t need to have schema to communicate information to them. You don’t need to necessarily have specific tactics that you’re doing on your site. You need to structure your site well. You need to do a lot of the things that we’ve always said you should do, which is make your site easy to crawl. Don’t rely too much on JavaScript or other scripts to execute things. Don’t have a lot of irrelevant junk being injected into the content or into the DOM. There’s a lot of stuff that you’re probably that you’re aware that you should be doing that the LLMs are definitely using to ingest and deconstruct your content so that they can better understand what’s happening. It’s a lot to talk about here, but you will get a link to it. Or if you head over to Search Engine Journal and actually search for my name, you can see all the articles I wrote, but that’s the most recent one. And it’s a long read. It’s like 2,000 words. But it was very thorough and I’m very proud of it.

Alex
It is a good one. It is a good one. And I’ve been touching on it as well. I’ll be doing some of the Search Engine Journal post again about search behavior. And I talked about it in BrightonSEO a few weeks ago. So if anyone’s got a video bundle already, they can see it now. And I think in the next two, three months, they’ll liberate it onto YouTube so you’ll be able to watch it then. But yes, it’s all going in interesting places.

Carolyn
All right. Let’s hustle through. Oh, don’t forget to ask your questions. You know where it’s at. Let’s hustle through the also in the news. You want to read through this for me real quick, Alex?

Alex
Yes. So Anthropics Claude can search the web, which is good because it closes the gap with ChatGPT. I know that a lot of people have been loving Claude. I’ve not used it personally. But everyone who says you’ve used it has done very well. More on the technical side, whereas Perplexity is, I think, the creative side. NotebookLM. You can discover sources from around the web. If you haven’t been using NotebookLM, use it. I’ve found it personally great. I’ve been using it to practice my talk at BrightonSEO. So I recorded myself. I uploaded the YouTube video. Not the YouTube video. I uploaded it myself. But you can use a YouTube video. I uploaded the PDF. And then I told it to critique my talk. And it did. And it goes through it. And it tells you about pace. And it does all sorts of things. But if you were talking about, if you wanted to look into structured data, and you wanted to ask questions based on 10 different articles, you can just add those articles in. And now you can let it search for more. And it brings it all in into nice summaries. So that was really good. Meta has released two Llama 4 AI models. I haven’t really been using Llama 4. But I think, again, it’s more on the development side more than the everyday use. At the moment, I think they’re getting more developers involved in it. But yeah, ChatGPT and memory. You’ve told us about that. And yes, that’s amazing that it now has memory. Because it actually gets to learn who you are. And it’s, I guess, one step closer to becoming Scarlett Johansson in a movie.

Carolyn
It had memory before. But they’ve updated it and expanded it. And it’s amazing.

Alex
It is good. Oh, no, no. No, go for it. OpenAI. Sam Altman talks, ChatGPT, AI agents and super intelligence. I will get us to add that to an email, the after the session email. But there’s an hour-long interview where he talks about all kinds of stuff. And it’s all very interesting from an AI point of view. Not just about in search, but everyday life, the future. He talks about, is everything losing? Is everyone going to lose their jobs? And explains how that’s not going to happen and all the benefits that it comes with. OpenAI are also building a social network. So they say, I don’t know how it would work. I don’t know how that would work. But it’d be very interesting based on it’s knowing your memory. And it might even understand things that you… It’ll understand more. The algorithm will be better than, say, X. Because it’ll know more about you. More nuanced things about you.

Carolyn
Why would I want to socialize with other people when I can socialize with ChatGPT?

Alex
Exactly. And I don’t know about you, but I have a feeling a lot of people are telling ChatGPT like skeletons. They’re telling it their deepest, darkest secrets on how to improve. And that’s something I wouldn’t want to connect with a social platform. Personally. Personally. And lastly, Google announced that they’re deprecating the special announcement feature in structured data, which in short, that was introduced when COVID happened. So obviously now COVID’s over, then they don’t need to support it in their SERPs either. So yes, that was also in the news.

Carolyn
All right. So let’s hustle through the Yoast news and then get to those questions. Real quick. Real quick. We announced new product variants for Schema are available in our Shopify app. That rolled out on 27th of March. So about a full month ago. If you’re using our Shopify app, you should check it out. And if you can’t find them, you know, let us know and we will help you locate those. And also, we are celebrating 15 years of Yoast. 15 SEO tips for 2025 and beyond is the blog post we just put up. So if you go to the website, you will find that. Edwin wrote that. It’s 15 great tips for 2025. And I believe there is a coupon code either on there or I’m going to give it to you here or both. But I suggest that you go check that out if you’re interested. Here it is. SEOupdate2904 is your 15% discount on all Yoast products. You’ve seen the discount code on yoast.com. It expires on May 5th. So you’ve got six days to use it if you like. And you can just scan that little QR code and that will get you hooked up. So the next SEO update by Yoast is in May. That is Tuesday, May 27th. At 4 p.m. Central European Standard Time or 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Savings Time with me, Alex and Marina. And then I think that’s it. Now we’re going to go to the Q&A.

Alex
Yes, we are. And I thought this is probably the earliest we’ve ever done it. 49 minutes past. Usually we go over.

Carolyn
I saw so many questions.

Alex
Yeah, let’s do this, Mike. You’re ready.

Mike
Let’s do it. Yes, well done. Okay, so the first question we’ll start with is the most upvoted question, which comes from Olivier. I believe that’s how you pronounce that. So he’s asking, is it possible to perform well in SEO without having a blog? It doesn’t have time to write articles.

Carolyn
It is. It is. But you need to be a brand. And as AI kind of takes over and reshapes how SEO functions, you need to do something to attract links and something to attract attention. And usually people do that by writing articles. So if you’re not going to write articles, you’re still going to want to maybe put out press releases. You’re going to have to do things to get written about in other places so that you’re attracting links. And there’s knowledge about you in the corpus of information that these LLMs use. So can you do it? Yes. Is it easy? No.

Alex
Yeah. I would go wider than don’t think of just writing a blog. You have to think of content in general. And that can be like a press release, Carolyn said, or content can be image-related or video-related. It doesn’t have to just be text. And also note that these LLMs are getting cleverer. And I’m going to make a prediction that within a year, all of these short videos on YouTube that’s all connected to your website, they will have transcribed everything. And they’ll understand context and what’s going on inside a video and be able to use it back into it. So even if blogging isn’t your thing, because trust me, I hate blogging personally. I don’t like writing blog posts. Even though I do and they’re fine and everything, it’s just not something that I wake up in the morning and go, you know what I want to do today? Write a blog post. It just doesn’t happen. But I’m more happy talking like this all day, you know? And I’m sure that there’s lots of content that an LLM is going to use that humans in our team don’t have time to sift through all of this and take everything out of it. But an LLM will be able to do it. So even if it isn’t an immediate win, like SEO isn’t anyway, it will be in the long term.

Carolyn
I concur.

Mike
All right. Thank you for those answers. Let’s move on to this next question. It’s coming from an audience member named a Driving School. All right. So what regular updates of main content slash keywords slash headings of a website are useful and what can be detrimental?

Carolyn
I don’t know that you need to do updates just for the sake of refreshing things. I think I do updates when there is something to update.

Alex
Yeah. And if there’s a lot to update, that could be a new piece of content where you refer to the last piece of content and say, here’s what’s happened since, rather than changing what exists already over and over again. Unless maybe there are edge cases, right? There are places where that might happen. But that to me is more of an evergreen page. Like, I don’t know, our SEO glossary over time will add a new term. And that will change that one element of one part of the page. And maybe, maybe LLMs, for example, two years ago was not in the glossary. Now it is. And we’re writing about it. So it does counter into that, but not too much of a detriment unless you abuse it.

Carolyn
With headings, though, like, if there is a shift in the overall language of the universe, right? Like, when COVID first started, we didn’t call it COVID, we called it coronavirus. So all of the headings on websites would have said coronavirus. And then, people stopped calling it coronavirus or corona, and they started calling it COVID-19. And then eventually, it just became COVID. So if there is a, if there’s a change in the way people might be searching for your content, you would want to update your headings and your keywords to reflect that change. If, what was a good example? And, I don’t know, my mind went to really weird Renaissance fair places. So I just, I don’t know where I was going with that. Sorry.

Mike
No worries. Well, I would say, if I could just chime in with my own two cents, that I’m always running into this term holistic SEO when I’m learning and reading about Yoast. And so that always puts me in the mind frame or the mindset of the user, of the person on the website. So when I think about an answer to this question, I think about, well, let me put myself in the shoes of someone coming to this site. And the things that I do that improve that experience, well, let me do those. And the things that I would think, well, this might take away from the experience, well, I’m not going to do that. So that’s 22 cents. Okay.

Alex
Yeah.

Mike
Let’s keep it going. So this one, I think, is an interesting question. But it’s not like the most upvoted question, but it has to do sort of with somebody being new to SEO, right? So they’re saying, this is Oakley Wood asks, as a new person to SEO, is there a really simple ABC checklist that one can download or follow to just focus on my first search term that I want to rank for?

Alex
I want to say that we have some checklists in Yoast somewhere, some beginner stuff. And I would definitely say, look into the Academy and watch everything there. It may not be a single, your first search term. And if, well, if you would be, if you’ll be literal in what your first search term is, that should be your brand name, I would say.

Carolyn
And that’s easiest to accomplish too.

Alex
Unless you choose a normal word, we’ve had clients in the past where you just have the name of the company as an exact match domain, where it’s just: fullshoesfrommanchester.com. Like, oh God, what are you going to do now?

Carolyn
Somebody, a big company in Silicon Valley picked the name Prime for one of their products. And it’s like, I feel like Amazon got that already, dude.

Alex
Well, you should, that is one thing to think about. Because just before we were doing our run through for today and Copilot, which is part of AI system in Bing, happens to also be the name of another AI tool for a development tool called GitHub. And I had to make sure that Copilot was GitHub’s and not Microsoft’s Copilot that we’ve talked about earlier. So even when you get a brand name right, it’s wrong sometimes. Just if you do that, that’s just make sure you don’t just call it something that’s in the same territory like AI. Don’t call your AI tool Copilot, please. That kind of thing. But other than that, I would say do your competitor analysis and don’t think about one term. Think about a set of terms. Maybe get a list of 20 at least to cover that may or may not be overlapping depending on what your services and offerings are and naturally talk about them.

Mike
Yeah, I’ve got a second also what you said there, Alex, about the academy. So Oakley, if you go to yoast.com/academy, you can take quite a few free courses. We also have a whole bunch of paid courses as well. But start with the free ones if you’re not a premium member already. And SEO for beginners is probably a great place to start for the first course. All right. So we’re done with that question. All right. Now the next most upvoted question comes from Michael Thomas. It’s a pretty simple question to ask, but I think the answer is kind of difficult to really suss out. So does using AI to write content affect your SEO and ranking?

Carolyn
I would say that the way you’re asking the question makes me feel like you’re going to let AI do all of the work and all of the heavy lifting and all of the thinking, in which case, yes, and it’s going to be garbage. AI as a tool, when used correctly, is not detrimental. And it can be helpful because it can help you remember to write better. It can help you remember to include bits of information or expand on areas that might need elaboration. If you want to just say, I would like 15 articles about Jujubees, please write 15 articles about Jujubees for me. And make them 250 words long and use these as headlines and make sure you say Jujubees 12 times every article. That is garbage. And it’s not going to rank.

Alex
Would you read them all? Would you read 15 articles about Jujubees that you know with no other context were just generated? We all know that by the time you’ve probably got to the end of the third, stuff’s going to sound the same and it’s not going to be very innovative. But remember that AI and these LLMs, they’re assistance engines and they should do just that for you. They should assist. They should not take over and become the primary tool of production. You should be doing that. And I always say, look, if you care enough about your brand, you’re not going to let AI be responsible for your brand’s message and the content that’s pumped out. You should be.

Carolyn
Now, I will say, if you are skilled at writing a content brief and a content brief is like an instruction sheet for a content writer where you tell them, this is what I would like the keyword focus to be. This is the angle. This is the hook. This is what we should accomplish. This is our audience. If you’re skilled at filling something out to that depth, you could give that to an AI and it could probably take a really, it would make a really, really good first draft. You’re still going to have to work on it and you’re still going to have to polish it. But the more inputs you give it and the more instruction you give it, the better the output’s going to be. But it’s never going to be able to do it automatically, 100%, without you really, you’re not steering the ship, you’re pedaling the car, is what’s going on here.

Alex
And remember, it does assist. I mean, I was saying before how I hate writing blog articles, but I’ll be honest, it’s easier for me to write them now because it assists me in getting things started. I ask it to validate my ideas. Are they any good? What am I missing? What am I not missing? And it’ll give me feedback and I’ll decide whether I take that advice on board. And then I go and write it and then I ask for it to check for inaccuracies. What I don’t do is say, write it and then go the other way. And then I choose its inaccuracies, hoping that it’s not hallucinating too much.

Mike
Got it. Thank you for that. And I think this will be our last question coming up. This is from Charlotte. She asks, are there new CTRs or click-through rate baselines to go off of now for positions one through 10 in the search engine results?

Carolyn
I imagine that there’s going to be. So the baselines vary depending on the keyword. Like all the keywords have their own baselines. I think the tools are going to be updating the estimates, but I don’t know where they’re at with that. And no one’s come out with a really comprehensive study. But I am positive that things will be adjusting to meet the current reality on the ground.

Alex
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And I don’t know. To me, I am starting to mourn the inevitable demise of CTR as a success metric. It’s getting harder and harder. It’s becoming less of a thing that’s even there to even measure, let alone measure it well. Aren’t there like two or three now organic native links in a SERP where everything else is covered by their own owned platforms like ads or overviews from AI, which is keeping you in the SERP? Of course it’s going to. And with things impacting it by a third each time, it’s just too strong. So much so that I just don’t think it will be in reports in the next two, three years. Or it will in the same way that meta keywords or the Alexa rank will be. It’ll be that used to be there and we can still see it and it’s a row and a table for you. Very nice. But it’s not going to be something you’re talking about in a weekly meeting.

Carolyn
Yeah.

Mike
So it sounds like it’s just trending down maybe towards an inevitable demise. Okay.

Carolyn
Yeah.

Mike
Well, I hope that helps answer your question.

Alex
Because it’s a long-due of view of the site zone, right? It’s just the technology as a whole. That’s just like I don’t see many companies having progress reports on the uptick or downtick of fax machine sales or faxes being sent or received, right? It’s just something that’s dying out in replacement of something else.

Mike
Yeah. The natural evolution. All right.

Alex
Done.

Mike
Done answering that question. I think that, yeah, brings us to the end. Thank you all very much for joining. Any last words, Carolyn or Alex?

Carolyn
No. Hey, I know there were a lot of questions we didn’t get to. If you pop over to our Facebook group or subreddit, which is Yoast SEO, I hang out over there. Several of the other teammates do. So I’m sure we would be happy to take a flyer at answering those questions for you.

Alex
Yeah. And I think someone shared us on LinkedIn. I think Neringa did from before or Mike, you did connect with us on LinkedIn. We, well, I mean, at least I do. I reply to messages that come in that aren’t spammy, at least. So if you start with a, hey, I listened to you on the SEO update. I’ll continue reading.

Carolyn
Please don’t start with, I’d like to sell you some links because I will immediately. Yes.

Mike
Awesome. All right. Well, we’ll see you all on the next one. See you then.

Carolyn
Bye-bye.

Mike
Have a great day.