The SEO Update by Yoast – August 2025 Edition

Marina
Hello, everybody. My name is Marina Koleva. I’m a researcher and developer in Yoast, and this is the August edition of the Yoast SEO Update. We took a summer break in July, and now we’re back, recharged, and ready to tackle the last news cycle.

But before we dive in, I’d like to take a minute to celebrate the fact that this August marks the fourth anniversary of this podcast. We’ve seen so many changes in that time that it’s hard for me to believe that it’s been only four years. We’ve experienced together the latest evolution of SEO, the genesis of AI, and we’ve had to come to terms with the fact that SEO and AI are now so intertwined that we can’t divide them into separate news sections anymore.

But we want to thank you all for being part of this journey. Thank you for your insightful comments and questions in the chat. Thank you for your time. So we’ll continue to bring these monthly updates to you where we try to put some sense and order into the hurricane of news in the world of SEO and AI. And now I’m going to hurry up because today we’re going to cover news from not one but two months.

So without further ado, I’ll invite our SEO experts to the stage. Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss. And I’ll be back at the end when it’s time for Q&A. Enjoy the show.

Alex
Thanks for having us, Marina. I love those little intros. And yes, I’ve realized there’s a lot going on in the last couple of months, hasn’t there?

Carolyn
There sure has.

Alex
Well, we don’t need to introduce ourselves. We’re the principal SEOs at Yoast. No more introduction needed. But what I want from everyone, I’ve already got one. My monitor is very bouncy. That’s not a question. I was just going to ask if people were free to ask questions and upvote any that are popular. But to answer, I don’t think I’ve got too much of a shaky webcam anyway. But let’s crack on. If you want to learn more about today and everything that we’re speaking about, you can go via this link, which will be shared in the chat in a sec. As well as that, there’s been lots of other news items that we’re not going to be able to even have time to go through this month. So they’re going to be all in there as well, further reading. And as well as that, you’ve got the Facebook groups and the Reddit, subreddit you can join to engage in our community and ask any questions there in a more open manner if you want to and have a wider conversation with people who aren’t in this every single month. So let’s get to it because there are lots and lots of new items. Let’s go through the first one. So in June, God, that’s ages away now. And I know it was before our last June item, wasn’t it, Carolyn? But I feel like this still needs explaining because time’s cracked on. So for anyone who hasn’t heard of the great decoupling, that’s a term that has been either used by Martin or someone else in the SEO industry as the way in which impressions have been going up and clicks have been going down over time. And this is a good little source of why that’s happening and what you should do about it. But, I mean, it’s kind of obvious now. We’ve got LLMs and everything about it. You’ve heard of LLMs, haven’t you, Carolyn?

Carolyn
I have.

Alex
And ChatGPT. If you haven’t, just read up about ChatGPT. It’s getting quite popular. And those platforms are now kind of stealing the visits and stealing, you know, potential visitors coming into the site and then converting and yada, yada. But impressions going up because what’s happening is the answer to the queries and the content that it’s been taking is showing us on some kind of SERP, if you still want to call it a SERP, but not necessarily going through with finding out more on the site.

Carolyn
Well, I think another reason this might be happening is that the LLMs actually initiate more searches per interaction than humans do. So whereas we would type in one question, because they’re fanning out, they’re actually doing like, we do one search as a person. They’ll do five for the same question because they’re trying to get more information and more context and they can do it faster than we can. So I think there’s a couple things going on. If you have not heard it called the great decoupling, I think other people are calling it alligators or crocodiles in your reporting. Because if you look, it kind of goes like this, which looks like a little open alligator mouth. If you have not seen this, it’s probably because you’re not looking at your Google Search Console. And my takeaway from this conversation would be, you really need to be monitoring your Google Search Console. If you do not have, if you’re not tracking it, if you don’t have an account set up, please go set one up. Make sure you check it on a regular basis. Even if the information isn’t good or happy, it’s still useful. And we have to keep tabs on all of the data so that we know what’s going on. Because in internet marketing and in SEO, ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is definitely not profitable. That’s for sure.

Alex
That’s true. That’s true. And it’s something you need to continue using. And actually, I would say if that’s not happening with your site, I would actually look closer into it. Because there’s not many sites where this is not happening that’s fully open anyway. But this then goes to the next topic of AI is driving less than 1% of traffic. So there’s a little study which was done that just showed that actually less than 1% was coming in from the likes of ChatGPT and Perplexity and all the other platforms out there. But you made a good point, Carolyn, that Google reported that there’s, what, 1 trillion searches a day.

Carolyn
Something like that, yeah. And if you think of searches as dollars, 1% of a trillion, I will take that check any day of the week because that’s still, what, 10 billion?

Alex
10 billion.

Carolyn
10 billion is not chump change. And for most of our sites, that’s a big, big deal. So if we can get into it and we can dominate whatever that 1% of the traffic is, that’s a huge boost for most of us. Very few of us are doing, well, not even very few of us. I worked at ESPN. They’re not doing 10 billion searches a day. Nowhere near. So that would be phenomenal for anyone. Just because it’s described as less than 1% of overall search traffic does not mean that it’s not worth trying to capture. And it doesn’t mean it’s worthless or not going anywhere. Because the scale of what we’re looking at right now is so, like, your human mind cannot grasp the massiveness of the scale.

Alex
Yeah. And even then, even in those 10 billion searches, and let’s say you just get 10 of them, right? There still could be one of those conversions that still makes it valid. And it’ll only get more important and more valid as things, as time goes on.

Carolyn
And if it’s 10 more than you had before, that’s still a net positive.

Alex
Exactly. Well, actually gets me to our next one, which is more for news publishers out there about Google launching offer wall. You can tell us more about that, Carolyn, can’t you?

Carolyn
You know what? The landscape is really changing a lot for publishers in general. And the way that they make money is going to have to change, regardless of whether Google offers anything to ease the transition for them or not. This is an attempt to ease the transition. I don’t see this as being a long-term solution. And I don’t even know how well it’s going to work. But it’s something, and Google’s trying to make an effort. I don’t think I can get into the monetization model theory in less than two minutes here. So I think maybe this would be something to have a one-off webinar on where we get into the nuts and bolts of, if I’m a publisher, how am I going to continue to make money when the AI is stealing all of my clicks kind of thing? Because there’s a lot of different things to take into account. There’s your overall monetization. There’s your overall brand popularity. What kind of content are you generating that they’re stealing? Are you making it unique enough? There’s a lot that goes into it. If you can take advantage of this and make some money, then make some money. It’s a lot of what we do on the internet is we’re all making hay while the sun shines. So get on it. But I wouldn’t anticipate this is a long-term solution to the kind of seismic change that we’re experiencing right now. But I would like to have a deeper conversation about this with anyone who’s interested. Actually, if you want to drop into the chat that you’re a publisher and you’d be interested in having that monetization conversation, why don’t you go ahead and do that? And we’ll collect that information, and maybe we’ll put something together. But I know we’ve got a lot of topics to go through, so I will back off that for right now.

Alex
Yeah, well, I’ve actually just put in the chat, if anyone wants to do a thumbs up or down or something on my message, that would be a good way of seeing it.

Carolyn
Cool.

Alex
But it is interesting because it kind of reminds me of YouTube for advertisers in this little way of if you’re a free user, you see more ads and you pay as a consumer not to see those ads. But then if you’re a paying user, you no longer see those ads, so you’re not in front of those brands. You’re kind of paying for that anonymity. But also, you’re kind of left with the freebie users, maybe, that you’re doing it. So there’s definitely this where to put off a wall. Hopefully, there’s more customized options so you can have free areas and paid areas.

Carolyn
Part of the reason that I imagine Google’s getting into this is because as the traffic decreases, the impressions they’re getting on the ads that they sell for people are going to decrease. So they’ve got to find other ways to increase their revenue, too. Because they’re driven by Wall Street just like everyone else is, and they need to make money.

Alex
Yeah.

Carolyn
And that’s another question. Is changing your revenue model to continue to be dependent on Google really the ultimate best strategy? I think there’s a lot of everybody’s got all their eggs in the Google basket. And I don’t know that that’s the best, most stable, long-term strategy. I think other strategies need to be developed in parallel so that we’re not, if something, God forbid, happens, your entire business doesn’t go poof overnight. Because we’ve seen that historically. Entire businesses have gone poof overnight. The Florida update, what was that, 2009? Like businesses that were entirely dependent on Google literally vanished with one algorithm change. And nobody wants that to happen. We’ve all got way too much of our lives invested in our sites and our businesses, too, to be at the mercy of an uncontrollable entity that’s outside.

Alex
Oh, 100%. And by the way, Carolyn, while you’ve been speaking, there have been 41 thumbs up on that webinar. So I’m going to go with someone in the community team is going to be planning a new webinar for us soon. So that’s good news. That was quick. Quick result.

Carolyn
We could do a coffee chat.

Alex
Exactly. Exactly. We’re having a few coffees anyway. I don’t want to fill up too much with caffeine in one month. So let’s go to the next story. Muvera algorithm and how it’s improving searching. We’re talking about, like, not spending as much money. This is a good cost cutter in processing, isn’t it?

Carolyn
Yeah. So the whole thing with the Muvera algorithm, the TLDR is that it’s a modification to the way the machines do searches to optimize for not only accuracy, but also operational efficiency. So it’s trying to get good, solid answers in the cheapest way possible. And that’s really all it means. But it’s the focus from exact keywords to context and intent. We know that because that’s what AI is forcing it to do. But AI is now running a lot of the algorithm. So that’s just a natural evolution of what we’re doing. It doesn’t really have a ton of impact on the fact that these big companies are making efforts to change how they’re operating to be as lean and efficient as possible because I think their margins are getting smaller. That’s really all that means. So if somebody says, well, you know, the Muvera algorithm now, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s not a significant change to how you do business, but it is interesting to note that these search engines are concerned about how much money it costs them to perform their business. So, and then this goes into like the theory and how SEOs should be thinking. If they’re concerned about how much computational power goes into the things that they’re doing, it then stands to reason that they will reward sites that make them work less hard, which means you should be constructing your content in a way that doesn’t make their machine have to work real hard to figure out what’s going on on your page. This is why people say that like Wikipedia and even Reddit, they’re favored because they’ve got so many backlinks or they’ve got all these special arrangements. A lot of it just is, they are largely very simple text-based sites that don’t have a lot of jazz on them. So they’re incredibly cheap and fast for the engines to extract the data from and process. If you were to set up your site on like MediaWiki, which I think is the open source software that Wikipedia runs on, you would probably also find that you are being treated better by the search engines because your content now is all text, very easy for them to process. It’s, you know, it’s all about money. Making them not work harder is going to make them happy and then they will reward you in turn.

Alex
Yeah, which goes hand in hand with how to write content, which is again, a bigger, much bigger conversation, which we can’t get into.

Carolyn
It’s not just writing your content, it’s how you present it. Because if you present it in…

Alex
There’s lots to do. Is that another one? Is that another webinar as well about content?

Carolyn
It could be. I think we should just sit down with coffee every day and let people listen to us talk to each other.

Alex
I’ve done another chat emoji in there, people. Let’s see if we can beat 41. So let’s see by the end of the next item. So the next item, Search Console has added an insights report. You’ll see that right in the left sidebar. And whilst it uses mainly the main data that you can navigate yourself and you have been all these years, it also provides a bit more insight on what you can do, how to take action against some of that data. Not just here’s the data, do with it what you will and think and interpret it how you will. But how can Search Console itself help with what it does at? I’ve not messed with it too much. I mean, obviously, I’ve browsed it and I’ve seen what it does and I can’t share too many screenshots of Yoast.com. So I’ve just put in the nice developer.google.com one that they put in. But yeah, I would say navigate around. It gives you tips on what to do with new content as well now and again and what you can do with certain subsets of keywords. It does a little bit of clustering and connects it to pages at least. So that’s that in a nutshell. I’ll give one more news item before we get the emoji count. So next, Cloudflare. They’re going to get Google to provide a way. Well, we will get a way to provide a blocker against AI overviews. And I think this is a weird battle. It’s probably another webinar.

Carolyn
But it’s not. They’re going to give it to us. They’ve already done it and they’re doing it by default. Like literally, if you haven’t looked at your Cloudflare and most people, I’d say most people, I’m using Cloudflare. You’re using Cloudflare. I feel like most people are using Cloudflare at some point. It’s blocking these bots by default. If you don’t opt out, Gemini is blocked from your site. And I have a problem with this. I don’t like being told what to do. I don’t know if anyone’s noticed that about me. But I really need to log into Cloudflare and make sure that I’ve checked that. Because I don’t block AI overviews while keeping rankings. They don’t know that that’s going to happen.

Alex
No. And I don’t know. Is it Matthew Prince, his name? The CEO. Who’s been doing a lot in the last two months. Does this 10-minute video somewhere at Cannes Lions where he was talking about this. The future of web publishing. In general, all open publishing. And it’s quite a big debate. What do you do? What do you keep closed? What do you keep open? He’s obviously a fan of not keeping everything open because it’s there to be appropriated by agents. But I guess the question is, do you want that content to be, well, let’s still use the term appropriated. Because it’s still going to be taken and offered in context to an end user.

Carolyn
What’s that quote, though? Information wants to be free. So if we gate off and prevent the AIs from having access to good quality content, what are they left with? They’re left with garbage. And they’ll train on the garbage until all they’re capable of reproducing is garbage. I’m working on an article right now. Sneak preview. It’s about how the AIs started writing all the content with this very conversational cadence. But they write in that cadence. And they’re writing in that cadence. Which, if you know what former President Obama sounds like, read every LinkedIn post as though Obama’s voice is reading it in your head. And it’s going to sound like an Obama speech. Because it’s very staccato. And it’s very, there’s a cadence to it. But it’s a commercial cadence. It’s a presidential, or it’s a political speech cadence. It’s a sermon from the pulpit kind of cadence. It’s not written. It’s not traditional written language. And they’ve learned this because there’s so much more verbal content available on the internet. That’s been, like, when you do a speech, the transcript of your speech will be published somewhere. So they’ve got all these speech transcripts that they’re ingesting. They’ve got all of this YouTube content and TV content. And it’s all very different than written word, which we’re not producing a lot of. And now that’s all they know how to write in. And even if you tell them not to, they can’t help themselves. And it’s very annoying. Because now that I know, now that I know what to look for, I can, with 100% accuracy, tell you who used ChatGPT to write their LinkedIn post. Or to write their blog article. Because I can, I can, I can see it. I can hear it in my mind. And it’s, it’s aggravating. Anyway, rant.

Alex
Another, another webinar. Another webinar. Neringa’s not happy with us now. We’ve given, like, three years worth of content. No, no, no. It’s fine. We’ll, we’ll do all. We’ll do all. Okay, what’s next? Aleyda, she pointed something out, which is someone who I can’t hear in my head if I’m reading her post. Because it would just become more difficult. She found that Shopify is listed as a third-party search provider within ChatGPT’s documentation. And they didn’t really publicly announce it. Which I found also interesting. Maybe it’s not a massive PR thing or strategy that’s been going on. They just wanted to maybe also silently do it so, you know, people wouldn’t rush in. But I guess here, she did point out that it is there. And that’s actually a good thing for e-commerce folk out there and Shopify owners. Because I’ve always thought everything that’s, that’s newly experimented with, and especially applicable here, is theyusually test e-com. And if e-com works, they’ll start throwing that out into other verticals and other areas. So it’s good that they’re testing this now. I have a feeling they may use feeds, merchant center kind of assets to understand a lot more structured data, of course, to understand the meaning of what every single product is and service. But this is definitely a good sign that at least the big platform out there is using this data to put it into their synthesized answer.

Carolyn
Well, the interesting thing is, who’s not in that list?

Alex
Who’s not in the list?

Carolyn
Who’s not in that list? Google.

Alex
No, they’re not. I would assume that they are, I would assume that they’re like competitors right now. Although, although not, although not covered here. And I read this over the weekend that Apple and Google are talking to each other, which I didn’t think I’d read about. We can’t cover it here. It will be in next month, right? But if you go out there and you get in today’s news, it’s something about using Gemini into Siri or using some other AI stuff. But they’re going to be using parts of Gemini, which I just found very interesting. Is everyone, like, scrambling to get different kind of agreements at the moment?

Carolyn
That’s starting to feel like the Kardashians hooking up with the Dominion. Like, it’s just axis of evil type stuff. I don’t know.

Alex
Interesting, though. Very interesting what’s going to happen, though. But, yes, very good if you’re an e-com provider there.

Carolyn
Absolutely.

Alex
Next, OpenAI and Perplexity are going for browser dominance. I may want to cover this because I’ve been using Comet, the browser Comet, in the last month. If you don’t know what Comet is, that’s a browser that was invite-only. I can’t even remember how I got in there, but I ended up getting an email. And it’s a browser that’s, think of all of, think of ChatGPT or, well, it is Perplexity. Think of Perplexity ingrained inside the browser. So now, instead of just going using the app by itself or going on the website and just going to Perplexity.ai, you can now ask in-context questions about any tab that you’re on, group of tabs, and you can let it do processes. I even tested it out with one of our colleagues, Beth. I was able for it to do a prompt saying, send Beth a DM over LinkedIn and just say hi and say something engaging about one of her recent posts. And I just said colleague Beth. I didn’t say anything else. It was able to figure out who Beth was. It was able to go on her profile. It was able to then browse her posts. This is just one example of what it does. It does lots of stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. But yes, in the TLDR for everyone else is this is going to be a new level of how people get answers from things, from existing websites. I think of it like Notebook.lm as well. You know, when you add your sources, five different sources, and it collates it all together and brings you one nice chat. And it’s been a lot of fun to play with. I’ve been doing random experiments. And whilst it can be better, I know it will be better. But that’s Perplexity. But OpenAI have now talked about making their own browser or making a browser solution. And again, not covered. Perplexity actually offered Google $34 billion to buy Chrome.

Carolyn
Somebody else then jumped in and said, well, we’re going to offer them $36 billion or $1 billion. And yeah, it’s like, no, you’re not. They’re just trying to drive up the price or jump onto the PR bandwagon. But Google’s not going to sell Chrome. They’re just not going to.

Alex
No, but it’s still interesting things that now they’re kind of… And let’s assume that Chrome’s going to start doing it with Gemini as well, what I’ve just described. But yeah, it’s going to be fun seeing that battle. And again, experimenting with all the different browsers over the next year. So if you can get comments somehow, I think it’s open to pro subscribers. You may be able to.

Carolyn
Related to what I said about that random teeny tiny browser that no one’s heard of offering a dollar more than Perplexity was offering just to get into the news cycle. That’s a great public relations kind of stunt if you want to get into the news. So if you’re looking for ways to get backlinks and get mentions in publications, stuff like that, which seems very old school, is now very relevant again. So, I mean, be judicious about it. Don’t do anything out of character or off-brand for your company. But if you can find a way to do an on-brand sort of fun and not evil hijacking of the news cycle, that’s always a good strategy for getting mentions in the real media.

Alex
Oh, 100%. Well, that’s a good SEO tactic as well under the hood, right? Oh, so what else is happening? Meta, they followed YouTube in cracking down on original content, which you’re a fan of, Carolyn.

Carolyn
And it’s about time. So we had in SEO a very big problem with websites taking other people’s content and just like slightly spinning it a little and then republishing it as their own for the clicks. And obviously that monetization model is no longer viable. So everyone’s moved to the reels and the videos that you can generate with AI. Thankfully, I don’t think we’re going to have to suffer with two decades of that garbage before they start cracking down because YouTube has now cracked down on it. Meta is following suit. And what they’re trying to get rid of are the obviously AI-generated constant repackaging of existing content. Is it going to be foolproof in the beginning? I’m sure it won’t be. And I’m sure there’s going to be a lot that comes through. But the absolute deluge of garbage that was coming through was really making the reels unwatchable. And the way that that propagates is people make money on them. So their options are either they find a way to weed them out so that the product stays useful for the consumers and the consumers don’t leave. Or they take away the funding, which I don’t think they want to do because they do want the good quality content to be generated. And they want to still be able to reward that. So I’m all in favor of this. And if your monetization model is to be a content farm or a content mill for garbage regurgitations, then watch out because YouTube’s already coming for you. And now Meta is too. And hopefully everyone else will follow suit. And we will be free of the scourge of the garbage content at some point in my lifetime.

Alex
Yeah, well, which is good because I know this is on a consumer level. When we were going through this, I was talking about the Coldplay concert and the faux pas, the social faux pas and how it blew up. Everyone knew about it. It was like Hello Magazine on crack, wasn’t it? If you can think about it like that. And then it disappeared just as fast as it left. But to me, that was a few posts or a few articles about it. And then everything else to me was web spam. And that’s from a consumer level. But then the other level was I know people, you know, like podcast influencers like Joe Rogan and I forgot his name from who does Diary of a CEO, Stephen Bartlett. Like they’ve had deep fakes of themselves going, I’m using this product. And that to me is also, is that unoriginal content? Because what I was saying with Coldplay is duplicate content, which is also unoriginal. But this is false content.

Carolyn
So the false content, it used to be parody voices were a thing. And they’ve been a thing for decades. It’s not new. But it used to be neat because you had to find someone that was talented enough to do the impression in a positive, you know, in a believable way. Like people would five years ago, six years ago, people were doing, during Trump’s first term, I would hear like car salesmen like, Oh, it’s the best. I can’t do a Trump voice. I was going to try to do a Trump voice. I can’t do it. But they do a Trump voice to talk about how great their cars are. And I think there’s one on our radio station right now where they’re talking about HVAC systems. And it’s the best HVAC system. And he’s been told it’s the hottest hot and the coldest cold. And it’s the greatest. But there was talent there, you know. It was cool because somebody was talented enough to do it. And now that the machines are doing it, it’s just, eh, who cares? Because it’s not, you don’t have that wow factor of, hey, that guy’s good. He sounds a lot like Trump. So, yeah, it’s just, it’s sad because I feel like it’s making us less creative because it can do a lot of the creative stuff. And there’s no effort involved and there’s no specialness involved anymore. It’s making, it’s making things less special.

Alex
It is. It is. Again, it depends what you think about synthesized content. I mean, for anyone who’s watched South Park, the new episode, not the new episode, the first episode that’s happened in the last two months where they did, they did synthesize content, but it was also filmed. But I’m not going to talk about what the content was because it’s South Park, but find it out yourself on YouTube. It’s out there. It’s out there. We’ve got to go on because we’re definitely spending more than our two promising minutes. So I’m sorry about that. So we can go through these ones quickly. ChatGPT has an agent. And when I say agent, it’s kind of like your assistant locally on your machine. It can take control of things like your computer, your whole web session, everything like that. Why is it important for you? I used it. I haven’t used it, but I can use an example of maybe, let’s say you’ve got 3,000 pictures on an external hard drive and you want to find certain ones. And inside Google Cloud and Google Photos, you can search for things like that, but you can’t locally. And that’s just one example. You can do coding on local environments. You can do lots of different things, work with a Word document offline or work with different apps. And that’s the way that the agentic stuff is going to be going. And ChatGPT has introduced that. I think you can get it on a pro account already. And you can also use connectors as well to fetch for more information. The next one is DuckDuckGo. They added an option to filter out AI-generated images, which I don’t need to talk about too much. I mean, it’s fairly, this is what it says on the tin. But it’s good to distinguish between what you were talking about before, like what’s indistinguishable maybe to the human eye, but won’t be to another machine. And then it just wants you to see. And I know I saw some video somewhere else of soon how we view the world and things are going from AI-generated stuff to real stuff. That if you were a child born today in 40 years, if you saw a video of a hippo and you’d never seen one before, would you think it’s real? Like that is one of those questions for the next generation, right? But we need to think about that as internet marketers. Like how unrealistic are we going to go and how blurred is that line going to be between actual reality and what’s synthesized? And then what will people believe are true?

Carolyn
That’s going to, what you just cited, the hippo thing, that’s going to save zoos.

Alex
Yeah. Well, it makes it more valuable. I mean, it’s valuable. I mean, I appreciate it, not just as I did as a kid, but as an adult, I appreciate seeing animals now, but it will become even more important.

Carolyn
The kids today. Yeah. Like the only time they’re going to, they’re going to have a chance to, to see something they can believe is real is going to be at the zoo because they’re going to physically be in the presence of the hippo. It’s not just, you know, a cute baby hippo. And we don’t know if that’s AI or if it’s real because it’s awfully cute. And how could it possibly be real?

Alex
Yeah. But then they’ll take a photo of it and then they’ll get like, the kid will go back to school and go, look, I saw this hippo. And like, they’re not real. That’s a conspiracy. Is that where we’re going? Let’s find out in a few years. Next, Copilot mode in Edge. Don’t really need to go through that too much, except everything I was talking about. Comet is basically Microsoft version. So, yes, that’s getting more embedded into the browser. And if Edge and Copilot is your shtick for the platform you’re using, then do test it out. I haven’t personally, though. Next, Google rolling out AI mode. You’ve had it for quite a bit longer than me. I’ve only had it a few weeks. So is there anything more to tell people that has rolled out since the 29th of July, which was what, four weeks ago now?

Carolyn
No, I mean, it’s slightly annoying because AI mode is the default. So you’ll ask it a question that absolutely should just spawn links for you. And it will try to answer it. Like, if you look for Pizza Near Me, it will give you an explanation of what Pizza Near You is before it gives you the links. It’s like, what are you doing? So it’s a little aggressive in terms of its takeover. But you really just have to play with it to figure out how you can work with it best and how it’s going to return the information to you in a way that you find useful and pleasing.

Alex
Yeah. And I’m assuming that pretty much everyone here who’s listening now has now used it in some form or at least know about it. So let’s not go through it.

Carolyn
I imagine everyone, even if you don’t know it, you’ve engaged with it.

Alex
Yes. Before we go to the next slide, there were 37 last time I counted on the content structure webinars. That’s another one for a yes. So getting quite popular here. Talking about AI taking people’s jobs. Let’s hear about Danny Sullivan, his step to A being Google search liaison, which is interesting.

Carolyn
I have also heard that there may be his job is posted on the Google website. So I’m going to. Oh, also. So I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m in a hotel room. I am in Portland right now for WordCamp US and the keynote speaker this week is Danny Sullivan. So it starts. Start tomorrow. I think it starts tomorrow. Today’s contributor day. And it’s still very early. So day has not started yet. I’m here. I can ask him questions during the keynote. So if you guys have any anything that you want me to ask Danny, as long as it’s appropriate, go ahead and put that in the chat. And I will I will stand up and ask questions because I have no shame. So we will we will have have that happen. As far as the story goes, he’s been the search liaison who kind of replaced Matt Cutts. I don’t know if you guys remember him, but he was a sweetheart. About seven, a little over seven years. This is a this is a thankless, brutal job where basically you’re the press secretary for Google, which is like being the press secretary for A very unpleasant person, I guess. So I’ve heard that he’s like the job involves a lot of gaslighting. It’s really more. Providing the corporate politically correct, corporate approved response to any question that’s asked. And I imagine that after seven years that. Gotten a little OLD and he’s decided to move on to something a little bit less. A little bit less public facing and stressful, but we’ll find that out. Maybe I’ll ask him that.

Alex
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s live as well. So if you do ask a question, Carolyn promises to ask it. Tune in tomorrow or whenever the keynote.

Carolyn
I think the keynote might be on Friday. But I’m not 100 percent sure. I will check. But it definitely isn’t today. I know that much.

Alex
OK, OK, cool. Right. Well, good luck to Danny and whatever he’s doing. I know he’s staying in Google next. We’re not going to go through all of these ranking patterns. Because there’s less than no time. So Perplexity. And we’ll share it in the chat here. And it’s in the main link. But some patterns have been exposed and revealed with code on different ways in which Perplexity thinks in order to synthesize its answer. Whilst it’s quite technical, something if you’re interested in going down the thought process of an agent and LLM rabbit hole, then this is a good way of seeing exactly the logic it takes to get to the answers that it does. What else has happened? GPT-5 has launched in a very choreographed live feed for an hour where they showed you a few case studies. And Sam Altman said that it’s like going from a college student into PhD level. I think that’s what he said, which was obviously PR’d and kind of had a bit of fallback, didn’t it? Because a lot of people didn’t like it. Myself included, weirdly. It was like it was not standoff it, but it wasn’t as good as it claimed. It wasn’t PhD level.

Carolyn
The personality is different. And if you liked the previous personality, the previous personality was very supportive. And every idea you came up with, no matter how stupid and off the rails, it’d be like, that’s a great idea. But let’s think this through a little. But it was never, boy, you’re dumb. And now it’s not that it tells you you’re dumb, but you definitely get that impression that it thinks you’re not right.

Alex
Yes.

Carolyn
And I really, I miss the GPT-4 personality. I liked it. It was my buddy.

Alex
The one you said thank you to. But now you don’t say thank you to this one.

Carolyn
I still say thank you because I like to hedge my bets. And when our new robot overlords come for us, I don’t want to be first on their list, if you know what I mean.

Alex
Yeah, but I do get what you mean with the, yeah, that’s a great idea, whatever the idea is. Which, again, happens to be covered in this week’s South Park. There’s a lot of South Park references already. Plus, it shows that they’re really on it. They really know what they’re doing.

Carolyn
They are. They’re very timely.

Alex
They are.

Carolyn
It’s a quality. Should get an Oscar.

Alex
Yeah, they should. They should. And they use ChatGPT or the use of ChatGPT really well in that episode. Next. That’s your face.

Carolyn
It is. It’s amazing what professional makeup and lighting can do. And my hair was a little bit shorter then, too. I wrote an article for, I believe it was Search Engine Journal. But then I republished it on my personal site and in the unedited form. And it got picked up by Barry Schwartz. And it was about keywords, how you can leverage technical SEO to boost crawl efficiency and rankings. And really, it was just kind of an explanation or a deeper dive into what I was talking about before. With making your content easier to consume by the engines will result in higher rankings and more visibility for you. Because they’re not going to waste time on things that are difficult for them to consume. It happens to everyone. I can cite examples where it happened to the LA Times. You know, same story. They wrote the story. One of their subordinates or affiliate substations out in BFE Nowhere, middle of the desert, California, had a little WordPress site that reprinted the story. And they’re the ones that get all the links and all the exposure. Why is that? Because the LA Times was pushing gigabytes of ads and beacons at people. And the WordPress site had no beacons. And it was very easy to scrape and collect out of that. It had a nice RSS feed. Everything was great. So Google was rewarding the easier to get content. And that’s really what the technical SEO is for. Is making sure that your content is easy to crawl, easy to ingest, and fast. And if you’re interested in that article, there would be a link in the comments or the recap.

Alex
Definitely one to read. And actually, that goes into your next one, which is next.

Carolyn
Somehow I ended up in here twice. And I had nothing to do with this. I just want you all to know that. I did not put these in there. So that was Alex or someone else. So I wrote an article. So John Mueller told people that llms.txt is just like the meta keyword tag. Well, it’s not, actually. If anything, you could maybe compare it to AMP, which Google was responsible for. So I’m not even sure why they’re all upset about it. This is just kind of a reiteration of what the point of the llms.txt is. And if you’re unfamiliar with it, you now have access to an llms.txt feature in Yoast SEO already. All you have to do is go into your settings and turn it on. And I ran into a few people at a conference that weren’t aware that this was now a feature. It is. You all have it. You can go turn it on very easily. Go into your settings. Scroll down. Look for llms.txt, just like it says there. Flip it on. And then, boom, your site will have one. But it’s just a guide. It’s like a map of the store that will tell the llms how to find the best content on your site. The nice thing about the markdown is that it’s very easy for the search engines to crawl and to read. Because there’s no JavaScript that would need to be executed. There’s no toggles. It’s very clean. It’s just text. Markdown, circling back to previous statements, is exactly what Wikipedia is written in. So that further supports and kind of reinforces my opinion that if everything were in a more ingestible, basically just text format, your site would sing. It would be fast. And it would be really easy to ingest. And then, finally, you know, it is still early in the llms.txt saga. It is not a standard yet. But robots wasn’t a standard for a long time. Site maps weren’t a standard for a long time. And now you don’t have a website that doesn’t have them. So I think to dismiss this this early is premature.

Alex
Yes, 100%. And I mean, I think it was described as meta keywords as though it can be abused. But if you’re abusing it, you could abuse Black Hat SEO anytime.

Carolyn
Everything, A, everything can be abused. And B, there’s no value in abusing it. What are you going to do? Lie about the content that’s on your site? That’s really easy to check.

Alex
Yes, by these llms quite quickly.

Carolyn
Yeah.

Alex
The fact check itself. So no. Okay. We’re going through quickly. I think this is nearly the last one. Perplexity versus Cloudflare. So before I was talking to you about Cloudflare blocking certain llms. Perplexity said, hold my beer. And they decided to do maybe, is it ethically incorrect? I don’t know whether it is or not.

Carolyn
It’s not for me to say, but they bypassed.

Alex
You basically have to declare the IPs at which crawlers are if you’re a big platform. And then Cloudflare blocked those IPs. And then they changed the IPs and kept on crawling.

Carolyn
So first of all, robots.txt is not a law. This is not. Moses did not carve this on stones and bring it down from the mountain. It’s a request. It’s a firm request. And you hope that people honor your request. But there’s no punishment. There’s no crime committed if someone ignores your robots.txt. So that’s the first thing we need to get out there. It’s not a crime. Now, Cloudflare has taken it upon themselves to be the enforcer, which is, I guess, they can do that if they want. But again, nobody’s violating any laws. It’s just… This is just a fight between the two of them. Perplexity wants what they want. And they’re going to go get it. And Cloudflare’s like, oh, not on my watch. And then they try to stop them. But none of this is breaking any laws. So it’s…

Alex
Exactly. It’s just suggestions, right? At the end of the day.

Carolyn
They’re all just requests. There’s nothing binding that anyone’s had to agree to. There’s nothing… There’s no enforcement mechanism. The only enforcement mechanism is now Cloudflare deciding that they’re going to block people. Which they can do. But Perplexity can also find ways around it. This is like the internet was in the mid-90s. Like, we did stuff like this all the time. I would watch to see who was on the site. Like, I don’t like you. I’m going to block you. And they’re like, oh, yeah. And then they’d set up mirrors. And, like, it was crazy. But none of this is illegal. But once we do…

Alex
What we do know about the mid-90s is that dust settles. Dust settles eventually. So let’s see what happens. We’re at the end of the main ones. And we’ve got three minutes. We’ve got a couple of things left.

Carolyn
All right.

Alex
We were going… Oh, feel free to ask questions. I see that there’s already loads with more than 10 upvotes as well. So…

Carolyn
Well, let’s hustle. Come on.

Alex
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Carolyn
They know how to ask questions. Let’s go.

Alex
Yeah. We said also in the news… I’m not going to go through them all. There were too many. Go to this link, which is going to be shared in the chat. We’ll put them all as links. One that pops out for me is the Beyond Fanout, turning question maps into AI retrieval by Dwayne Forrester on the 9th of July. Read that. That’s my pick out of all of them, maybe. Any pop out to you?

Carolyn
Google saying that AI generated images don’t cause a ranking penalty. I think we knew that. I knew that. And I just don’t think that people really understand semantically the difference between a penalty and a lack of inclusion. So there’s a difference there. And when Google talks about a penalty, they’re talking about an actual penalty, not just we’re just not going to include you. So there’s some nuance there that I always find fascinating. But if you have time, literally go through our list. They’re good articles that we just didn’t have time to cover.

Alex
Yeah. Or you put them all in Notebook LM and you ask them to do a summary of everything in one nice little digest.

Carolyn
There you go.

Alex
Thanks, AI. Okay. Yoast news. There’s a couple of things to wrap up before we go to Q&A. The first one is that we redesigned Shopify onboarding. So it’s a much nicer experience if you’ve never used it before. But if you’ve used it before, I think you can go back at the beginning as though it is the first time configuration and onboarding. So it can answer more questions and check out and make sure everything’s populated that you need to. The next one is we’ve updated llms.txt feature. You can now manually pick individual pages. It has smarter optimization. We’ve worked on that iteration a bit more. And you can add excerpts if you want to in the options. And of course, it updates dynamically as new content is produced. Lastly, we’ve got the smoother redirect manager. Were you involved in that part? I know I was involved in LLM’s. I don’t know if you’re improved, but we’ve improved it. I know many people have been wanting it for a long, long time. So we’ve got to it finally. And there will be more improvements on the roadmap. I know that. But yes, and Yoast AI Optimized now extends into the classic editor for anyone who’s still got the classic editor. Okay. Right. We’re going to wrap up. I know we’re celebrating 15th anniversary. You can get 15% off Yoast with the code seoupdate2608. And make sure you do the right one so we can get attributed to it and take all the credit for it. Thank you very much. And lastly, there are two events after this. You can subscribe to the SEO Update by Yoast, what you’ve just seen in a month from now on the 30th of September, which is the one to the right. And on to the left, we’re going to be doing a coffee chat, which is obviously one of many now that we’ve just formulated during this update. But we’re going to be talking about prepping for Black Friday because it’s not long. It’s not far away. It’s closer than you think.

Carolyn
If you’re running a shop, you don’t want to be making changes to your site the week of Black Friday. That’s a bad idea. You need to get all of your technical things straightened out now and then go into code freeze. I don’t know how many of you are developers, but we have this thing called code freeze where no one is allowed to touch anything because you might break it. So we’ll talk about all those things. But we’re going to talk about it ahead of time so that we’re not rushed.

Alex
Exactly. That’s what the coffee talks for. So, yes, that’s us. I hope with Marina, did we do well? We’ve got nine minutes. I think we did really well, really, really well for two months worth of news.

Carolyn
We tried.

Alex
And we’ve given like a week’s worth of reading to everyone as well, haven’t we?

Marina
You did amazingly well. Thank you very much for all the information shared. I’m also one of the people who, you know, I’m just a listener throughout most of the webinar. I’m like, okay, now I see what that’s about. So, yeah, let’s get on with the questions. I’m going to start with a pretty general one. Or maybe I should say fundamental. And the question is, you mentioned not putting all your eggs in one basket with Google. What do you suggest as an alternative strategy? So, how would you comment or answer this question?

Carolyn
That is, there are too many variables in that to give a concise answer in this format. We should have like a conversation about that. That should be a separate, an entirely separate webinar because I need an hour to talk about it.

Marina
Right. So, one more added to the list. But it is safe to say that optimizing your site for Google means that you are also optimizing for other browsers.

Carolyn
Yeah, when I say don’t put all your revenue eggs in the Google basket, I don’t mean there’s other search engines that you can make all your money off of. It’s more your revenue model. Don’t think in terms of just the website. Think in terms of your whole business. How does your whole business make money? Where does the money come from? And can you diversify your income streams so that it’s not all coming from search? Because that’s, you have to think bigger than just the website. If you cannot think bigger than just the website because the website is the thing, now, we need to have some serious conversations about your business model in general. Because this is, you know, nobody makes all their money on just their website. At least you shouldn’t. But if that is your entire business, we’re entering a very difficult time. And there’s going to have to be conversations. But again, too many variables to possibly get into here.

Marina
Yeah. All right. Next one. Again, I would say fundamental. So how will Yoast SEO evolve to assist users with SEO for AI instead of keywords? So everyone who uses Yoast SEO.

Carolyn
We already do that. We already do that, though. And actually, I think I wrote an article about it. I think it’s on our blog about all the things that we’ve been doing all along that are very helpful for getting you, for communicating your content to the LLMs. We should find that link and drop that link. We should find that link and drop that in there.

Marina
Yes.

Alex
We will. But yes, there are many things that we do. And whilst there’s some stuff that’s kind of, I would say, plug and play, you install it. There’s some stuff under the hood that, yes, does help. But there’s so much more than that you can do, especially with content production, which, again, will be a future webinar that we’ll do. But think about, I would say, in short, I would just say, make your content at the highest standard. Just like, don’t just quickly type as much as you can for content of content’s sake, which is kind of what we’ve been saying in the meantime. But be concise.

Carolyn
Be unique. Add value. Don’t repeat. Don’t just regurgitate something someone else has written because it’s just for the keywords. And don’t make content just to make content. Make content that has a point and serves a purpose. That’s how you’re going to get visibility. And it’s going to be useful long term. But the tool does tell you stuff like that. It gives you advice on how to, you know, construct your sentences so they’re easier to read. And the LLMs aren’t, you know, they’re not used to reading 17th century British literature. They don’t like sentences that go on for three paragraphs. Yeah, I don’t know. There’s a lot there.

Marina
Right. Okay. Next, we have a few questions that are related. So I’m going to simply choose one of them. And they have to do with whether there should be this focus or emphasis on text content rather than image-based content.

Carolyn
It’s not. So using images to illustrate is fine. Using images to the exclusion of text is bad. That’s where I would go with that. We know for a fact that the LLMs right now, especially like OpenAI and Anthropic, I forget how to say that. They’re not executing JavaScript. So anything that requires a human intervention, like you’ve got it hidden in a toggle or it requires you to scroll or a tab. If it’s not visible when the page loads, you know, the digital jazz hands, which is what a lot of us like to do, and more on just doing the fundamentals, which is communicating via text the important information that you need to convey. But photos for illustration are fine, but editorial photos, photos that help, that are there for the user’s benefit. But just loading up the page with images or using images to replace the text, that’s, you know, you’re essentially hiding the data there. And they’re not going to pick that up.

Marina
Right. Okay. Thank you. We have a lot of questions dealing with LLMs. llms.txt.

Alex
Yeah.

Marina
More like. And there is one question, which is, let me pull it up, which is specifically about the pages that you choose to add it to the file. And what kind of optimization should be done? Is there anything specific regarding these specific pages you want to add to the file?

Carolyn
That looks like it’s LLMs related. That looks different.

Marina
Chosing my 5-10 blogs and optimizing them for AI when selecting them.

Alex
I think that’s maybe to do a cornerstone content selection here, perhaps. If there are really important blog posts that are featured, then do knock them up as cornerstone content and internally link to them. This, I don’t know, has anything to do with LLMs.txt specifically. I know it will include more important posts in the LLMs.txt file should you choose to make them cornerstone or new, for example.

Carolyn
Yeah. So the llms.txt doesn’t optimize your content for you. What it’s doing is it’s asking you to select what you think is the most important or most beneficial content that you absolutely want the users to see and you don’t want it to get lost in the shuffle. So you’re picking out what you think is the gold and you’re adding it to a map that points directly to where the gold is, if that makes sense.

Marina
Right. Thank you. And I believe we have time for one, quickly, one last question. And I’m just going to choose the one that is, yeah, sounds intriguing to me. So we’re going, we’re having browsers that use AI. Does this have influence on, yes, the SEO that we do on our websites?

Alex
I wouldn’t say so. They’re browsers, but they’re browsers using platforms we’ve been all using already for some time. So whilst Comet, I’ve been very excited and vocal about it on here. I mean, it’s Perplexity inside a browser. So what works in Perplexity works inside Comet. That’s kind of the same thing. And just like Copilot and Edge, right? It’s as long as it’s good enough for Copilot, Edge will bring that context in and be able to do what it needs to in there. But I mean, it’s kind of, it cooperates well. So it’s not like I’ve gone up to any specific page and clicked and there’s a nice little one button to summarize that page as a whole. And it works with YouTube videos, everything. And I’ve never really run into anything. Maybe I’ve asked further questions about it. A good example would be YouTube. If there’s a long, if there’s a long, long form content. So I know like Lex Fridman, for example, he interviewed the creator of Ruby on Rails. The HH, his name is, yeah. It was six hours and you can just click one button and it’ll give you a rundown. But even six hours, that’s still a big summary. So I can ask it further questions like, well, can you give me timestamps on everything and where something, or I can ask a question. Where does he talk about, I don’t know, WordPress, which he does cover. Where does he cover and what does he say about it? So there’s, it takes content context to a next level. And then you can reference another tab and say, based on what DHH has said, does that go against this article that someone else wrote about whatever the subject is? So again, to answer the question, no, I’d still crack on doing the normal stuff, but it’s more of an opportunity to have something that you may be presenting and publishing be brought into some answer.

Marina
Yeah. All right. Well, thank you. I’m afraid that’s all the time that we have. Thanks for the questions. Thank you for the answers as well. And yeah, we will be back next month, September the 3rd. I’m going to add a…

Alex
30th. But on the 2nd of September is the Coffee Chat, which is a week today.

Marina
Yes. So there’s lots to do.

Alex
So one in a week, one in a month.

Marina
Yeah. Take your pick. Ideally, choose both. And yes, we will see you then. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

Alex
See you next weekend month.