The SEO Update by Yoast – December 2025 Edition

Took place on 15 December 2025 - 4 PM CET / 10 AM EST

Hosts

Alex Moss

Principal SEO

Carolyn Shelby

Principal SEO

Topics and sources

SEO & AI news

Also in the news

Yoast news

Transcript

Alright. Hello, and welcome to the December Yoast SEO update. And this is actually the final update for 2025, so it’s an extra special presentation because we’ll be doing a a wrap up of the SEO news for the year.

My name is Mike, and in addition to being the host for this SEO update, I’m a support team lead at Yoast, and it’s my absolute pleasure to introduce our two speakers today.

So they are Alex and Carolyn who work at Yoast as principal SEOs. And in addition to this year’s SEO news wrap up, they’ll be sharing and discussing relevant stories and developments in our industry. Now first, I’m gonna bring Alex up on stage. Here he is. Now he has over fifteen years of experience in every aspect of the SEO industry. That’s from working in house to being a freelancer to agency employee and to agency owner.

Cool. And next, let’s bring Carolyn on stage. Carolyn. Carolyn Shelby. Now she also brings years of experience in the search industry, helping craft online strategies and user experiences that meaningfully grow businesses.

So let’s get going. Alex and Carolyn, the floor is yours.

Thank you so I enjoyed that you didn’t give a specific year number for me.

We’ve just been in it for a number of years. That’s all we need.

A number of years. That’s right.

Yeah.

Okay.

So welcome everybody. This is our last episode for the year, but we will be back in January. So please never fear, we will not abandon you and we will be happy to see you after the first of the year.

As always, we would love for you to ask questions. If you have a question off, I believe it’s that way, maybe, there is a Q and A little tab. You can ask your questions there, And then everyone else has the opportunity to upvote your question if they like it. So we do try to answer questions in the most upvoted fashion.

But if there are multiple questions that are the same, we might collapse those and aggregate the votes. So it what you see might not always be the order that they go in. That being said, ask your questions with we’ll get to as many as we can. Alright.

If you would like to learn more about today’s topics, as always, you can go to Yoast’s website. The short link is yoa.st/update-december-2025. There is no way to pronounce that phonetically.

And as always, there will be a recording available afterwards. We get asked that all the time. There is always a recording available afterwards, so never fear.

As we’ve been doing for the last three episodes, we have new, helpful icons at the top of each slide that either show immediate impact in terms of the information we’re providing or long-term strategy. Just so, if you’re like me and you see little icons that help you immediately categorize the information that you’re getting. And I think that is everything for housekeeping. Are we ready to get going?

We are.

We are. But first, before we go through the news update, we thought we might do a 2025. That’s right.

SEO year-end review, because it seems like a lot has happened, hasn’t it, in these twelve months?

It seems like a lot, especially since I remember I don’t think it was this last year, but at December, well, it might have been December last year that we were looking back at 2024 and we thought 2024 would be like a nothing burger because 2023 was kind of a nothing burger for AI. And we’re like, oh, there was this worry that everybody’s jobs were going get taken away and that didn’t happen. So everybody should chill. And then 2024 was a little bit more of that. We started seeing a little bit more encroachment, but this last year really kind of, it’s everywhere now. And I think there are starting to be some job losses and there are the recovery that some people were seeing from like the helpful content update.

Those gains have been reversed for some people.

There are deals being made now by the big engines to prop up like publishers and replace that revenue stream that they lost. So everything that we’ve been kind of worried about for the past couple of years happened in 2025. And it’s going to accelerate, I think going forward in 2026.

Yeah, very true, which might be worrying for some, also an opportunity for others. But what I guess, what can we take away as SEOs? So I guess the first one is it kind of shifted from ranking to retrieval, but let’s delve more into that. I mean, rankings themselves, are they becoming less valuable or just as valuable? I mean, it’s debatable, right? Because I still think ranking for reporting to clients, for example, is still very relevant because I think we’re talking in a previous edition about the Alexa rank, if we wanna pull our age, that we don’t say how much experience we have, but Alexa rank for anyone who’s newer to the scene was this just ranking in a number of any website on the web from one to, I don’t know, tens of millions. And we didn’t it wasn’t a ranking fact, but it was the best gauge we could tell to see the state of a site amongst all of the sites with all the metrics blown into one thing.

You mean but the problem with the Alexa ranking was that it was highly gameable. So if you knew how to manipulate it, you could. So I don’t know about that. As far as rankings still being relevant and valuable to report to clients, I don’t even know about that.

The way that retrieval is working in terms of impressions because Google is being taken over by AI mode, that everything is going to start being AI overviews and AI mode. Getting the links is going to start dwindling. And even so, so much of that real estate at the top of the page is taken up by the AI overviews and the AI mode that you’re it’s going to be more difficult to get your average consumer to scroll down to interact with those links. I think impressions have gone way up, and impressions might be more indicative now of are you in a position to be cited, Not necessarily looking at the pure rankings because the retrieval, they’ll look at more than just the top ten. They’re not taking one, two, three in order. They’re looking for things that are most relevant and also fast and easy for them to grab.

Pure rankings, I don’t think is rankings. Rankings in the traditional sense, no.

Directionally and in general, still somewhat useful, yeah.

Yeah, one hundred percent. I mean, you’ve got fan out queries, for example, which takes a longish tail, makes it even further longish tail. They get all the, well, would say at this point, ranking citations, they collect all of it together and give you out as a synthesized answer. I mean, when you think of clients or even us as brands, you just think, how can I be cited? Where am I visible inside ChatGPT? We’re not saying how are we visible first? I mean, some may be, but being mentioned alone is good enough in this kind of ecosystem now.

So I will say, if you are tracking rankings and you’re reporting rankings to your clients, I would I would get away from these are the keywords that we’re tracking, so these are the keywords that we’re reporting on, and look more at Google Search Console will show you a list of all the phrases grouped by topic that you’ve got visibility for. Semrush, I know, will show you all of the things that your site ranks for whether you’re tracking it or not.

It’s not as easy to put into trackable little up and down graphs, but that is far more useful information than just saying, I track puppies and how did I rank for puppies this month? So I think you need to be more open to looking at what the feedback is that you’re getting in total rather than focusing on cherry picking specific keywords that you want to keep tabs on. That’s going to be ultimately more useful for you.

Of course. And like we have that and brand insights, which can sign up to by the way, everyone. So this is that’s that’s the first thing that we can see. The second thing I guess is about retrieval logic itself and depending on literal phrases. And I guess this goes back to what we’ve been saying over the year about structure of content, for example, which I know we’ll delve a little bit more into. But retrieval is done by relevance and not not just is it this or that. So how can we how can we explain this to the layman?

Well, the reason we have this the reason this is this gets its own slide is because I do not personally want to see people think I don’t have to do keyword research anymore because it doesn’t matter.

Keyword research and the language that the searchers are using to find your product is still very important.

Does it mean that the LLMs are not capable of understanding or interpreting synonyms or related topics? No. But when there is a ton of results that they’ve got to sift through that are all basically equally weighted in terms of context, the differentiator there will be which one literally matches the query better. So if you think of it like, I think Olympic swimming is my favorite analogy to use here.

The difference between first place and third place is like one one hundredth of a second. So they’re both excellent swimmers. Right? There’s one teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny little difference that makes one a touch faster than the other one.

And in this case, it might be literal phrasing. So the example I gave here was that I did a search within one of the LLMs for an article that I wrote and the query I gave it was literally like a sentence that I knew appeared in that article. And I was not brought back as one of the citations or results.

And when I looked at everything that was brought back, the only logical explanation was I didn’t use LLM in my headline and every single other article did. I called it AI driven or AI search, I think is what I used.

Just that headline difference made me not come back for a query that I knew I should have come back for.

So it’s I just think it’s an important reminder that keyword research is incredibly relevant still. Knowing how your how your target audience articulates queries is important.

You know, when I was when I was with the newspaper, I would tell the journalists, you don’t want you don’t want to use language that isn’t common to your readers. So if the Pope is coming to visit, you say that the Pope is coming to visit. You don’t call it a papal visit because nobody outside of maybe some really hardcore Catholics would say that. They’re not going to search for it like that. You want to make sure that you’re using the language that your users use when they search.

That’s a good little TLDR for everyone there. That’s another point. The next point, structured data is helpful, but structured content is mandatory.

I mean, we don’t need to talk about how important structured data is. We already know that, of course.

I feel like we kinda beat that horse a lot.

Yeah, yeah. But this to me, I don’t know, I feel like it’s like an old, it’s an old, not an old fashioned piece of advice, but it’s just native. It’s just been there the whole time. And even away from SEO, I would say this is just basic linguistics and writing and editorial in general, have clear headings, have short paragraphs, so it makes the content digestible. Again, that was something for the human as well, especially in long form writing, where there’d be lots of short sentences depending on what the topics are. But if you were to cluster it together, then it may be a longer it may be a longer paragraph.

But there’s lots of stuff that you can do in structure, tables, bullet points, numbered lists, all of those things that I think front loaded answers, front loaded articles, I think is an important concept that people aren’t really grabbing onto.

In journalism, we call it inverted pyramid where all of the important information is first.

So the mediest information is at the top. And then as you go down, it’s less important.

Originally, was because if you needed the column inches on the paper for actual printing, you could just chop things off to make things shorter. But in practice, it gives people the information they want without making them dig for it. You don’t want to bury the lead.

McKinsey, I believe it’s McKinsey. There’s a business principle where they actually call it pyramid thinking, so inverted pyramid thinking, which confuses me because I think of that as being backwards. But the point is you lead with the point and then you fill in the background information. It’s like when my kids call me on the phone randomly, I have trained them to start out the conversation with, I’m not dead.

I’m not dying. I’m not hurt. I’m not fired. Everything’s okay. Here’s what I need.

Because if they just start with the, hi. What you doing?

I know there’s something else coming, and I need them for my anxiety level just to hit me with the with what they’re calling about first, and then we can have the the chitchat and background later. Same thing with your writing.

Provide all that information up top and don’t make them dig for the, you know, the gold.

So essentially, our audience is time anxious.

I think everyone’s time anxious and they just maybe don’t know it.

Yeah. And what else do we have? We’ve got new relevant signals driving AI visibility, which we’ve kind of alluded to before, but I mean, doesn’t it go into the old school of white hat SEO? Just make sure you answer questions, solve knowledge, unless you obviously have something to incentivize them for. Make sure you get incited organically, not even necessarily linked to anymore, that kind of stuff, which is just the normal white hat piece of SEO, which is weirdly something we’ve been saying for years and years and years, but kind of each year, it kind of the same things explained in a different way, but here now for LLM use.

Yeah. Yeah. It it’s just I would say it’s common sense, but it you know, sometimes common sense bears repeating.

It does. Just like EEAT, which I know has been something of discussion for when did EEAT kind of launched by Google? It was maybe two years ago, eighteen months.

No, it was longer than that. Way longer than that.

Before LLMs, the LLMs.

It was before the pandemic, it was in the before times.

That long, wow. Time’s moving quickly. But I I remember EEAT and just understanding it from a, you know, just a normal authority word-of-mouth kind of point of view. Does that person have authority?

With that, do they do they become trustworthy? And can you trust them with products or services that they’re selling or information that they’re giving? This is even more important. And I think it goes again to editorial.

It breaks away the mediocre, you know, this user has just been guest posting on loads of sites doesn’t make you an authority.

It’s I guess even someone like I think we kind of did the test of if someone like Trump wrote something and didn’t get cited, but naturally got cited elsewhere, how fast would that become an authority on that thing because he knew who it was? And if they didn’t put their name to it, how trustworthy would it be? I think that’s a big question. It’s, you have to attribute yourself to that piece of work, and then I guess the, entity graph, which will become more connected as the years go on, will make it even more important to know that I’m gonna be chatting about SEO for years to come and therefore it should know historically that I’m hopefully someone to be trustworthy when someone’s reading about the things that I write. I think that I got everything in there.

Well, yeah. And EEAT, I think people think it’s a thing you can do to your content, and it’s really more guiding principles and how you structure your operating framework.

It’s consistency in terms of taking credit for your work, making sure that you’re writing about a similar or at least a cohesive topic.

It’s a lifestyle, I would say, not necessarily a tactic.

That as well as from a technical point, make sure that everything’s linked together. We were just talking about structured data there and the person entity is a perfect example of that if you’re writing in different to connect all those dots.

So this is the one main problem with AI systems and LLMs that we were chatting about is that they’re confidently wrong to the point that they exaggerate correct answers even though that may not be the correct answer.

It kind of gives you compliments where you don’t necessarily need compliments in your thoughts?

It is confidently wrong many times. I got in an argument with ChatGPT last night.

I was restructuring some things on a WordPress site.

And it said, oh, just change the permalink structure or no. It wanted me to leave the permalink structure the way it was, but move some categories to be a child category of a of a different umbrella category. And I said, if I do that, it will change all of the URLs. And I said, no.

It won’t. I said, yes. It will because instead of having one category and then the post name, it will have parent category, then child category, then the post name. No.

That’s not how it works. I am 95% sure that’s how that works. Like, nope. Nope.

You’re wrong. That’s not how WordPress normally works.

I’m like, alright. So I did it. I’m like, oh, look. I was right.

So I went back and I said, hey. It in fact did change the slugs, and you were wrong. He goes, oh, thank you for catching that. I appreciate you calling that out.

You liar, you don’t know.

No, what’s a wonderful observation that you have just observed about my downfall, but also thank you for that downfall. And they don’t take anything on board or learn, but maybe that’s next year’s. Hopefully, that might be a one good prediction is they’ll actually understand your personality. You know, again, we were saying, you know, not everything’s a great idea.

I think I put something into Claude or one of them, I don’t know which one and I just said, I want to create a WordPress plugin. Didn’t even say anything about, I didn’t elaborate further than that and it was like, what a great idea. I’m like, I haven’t given it to you yet. Why are you you don’t need maybe it’s terrible idea.

You know when it does stuff like that, you don’t believe what it says after that.

Yeah, which I guess while we’re talking about EEAT, about human entities, then maybe this is something else you need to think about because you have to trust this middleman really or the messenger.

Well, I think you also need to be, you need to be educated and confident in your own skills.

And remember that it’s got access, instant recall and more access to data than you do, but it’s not smarter than you are and it’s not capable of being not necessarily capable of being judicious about the data that it selects to cite.

So you do need to use your own intelligence to utilize these tools to their fullest capacity.

That’s what people don’t wanna do. Wanna let go.

Everybody wants a shortcut.

Yeah, yeah. We’ll wait a few more years. What else should we be doing then? I mean, this is a good little list.

Optimizing for retrieval, restructuring legacy content. It’s always good to do a content audit regardless of whether LLMs were enforcing this as us as a job. Strengthening EAC, linking everything together, getting a knowledge graph entity out there and monitoring AI visibility with tools such as ours. But I mean, I always want to add in structured data and I’ll then put in good points in the chat.

You know, the more you populate structured data and the more granular you go, the easier it will be for an LLM to understand what that is.

That presumes that they can read it, but that’s probably a different argument for a different day.

Yes. Yes. Not today though. So in one sentence, it must be SEO has matured into AI visibility management, and you must be the clearest answer and the most credible source.

One hundred percent.

Sounds easy, sounds easy, right? But then we’d all be out the job.

It always sounds easy.

Yeah. Well, that was it for the twenty twenty five year in review. Let’s crack on with SEO and AI news. It was a shortish month, but still probably gonna fill all this time.

So let’s get through it. The first thing, Gemini 3 is now going into the AI mode itself. So they’re kind of blurring the lines between, you know, gemini.google.com and google.com. And, you know, is this just a matter of time where Gemini is the search engine?

I don’t know. Or are people do people still like this choice of seeing, you know, at least some organic rankings and, you know, giving us something to research ourselves as well as be handed it.

I don’t know if it matters what people like and if that’s going to I don’t think that’s going to affect I don’t think that’s going to be enough to change the trajectory of the product rollouts at this point. So I think we need to make peace with the fact that this is going to become the new search interface.

Yeah. I mean, the good thing is is that, you know, Gemini, whatever the version is, you know, this month, next month, they will be three point one. Whatever whatever those upgrades are each time, you know, they’re doing improvements. They’re going to make things better.

Kind of like how Core and any other algorithm update has been working through a twenty year period. They’re doing this in a a two year period, I guess. But it’s good to know because Gemini, a lot of I’ve had a lot of good feedback. I’m starting to use it more.

I’m starting to use ChatGPT less and Google assets a little bit more at the moment.

So some people that I really respect have also said something similar, and I’ve been I’ve been dipping my toe in that pool just to see how I like the difference. My concern is that I’ve spent so much time training ChatGPT that it’s going to be hard for me to make that move.

But for coding, I’ve heard good things about it. And I’m trying to experiment and get out of my comfort zone. But it is one of those things where you’re used to it. Becomes habit.

Might have bonded with the personality there a little bit, but. That’s interesting that because I feel like ChatGPT haven’t had enough time to be that default.

You know, I know people are using it as a verb, the way in which you Google something that that got introduced. And at the moment, you ChatGPT it. And I have they owned it? Is that it? Is it set in stone? I still don’t still don’t quite know.

You know, that South Park episode, I think did a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of making ChatGPT the attractive default for a lot of people that aren’t necessarily the early adopters like we might be. Seriously, if you make it into an entire episode of South Park, is a sign in terms of your relevance and your popularity in the general knowledge base.

I think it’s also interesting, don’t if I mentioned it in a previous one, but my parents use Gemini on a daily basis.

Really?

My parents don’t know anything about anything technical. They still they only just finally trusted Amazon with putting in their credit card. They still call laptops machines and printers copiers. Like, they’re proper old school.

They’re old school, but yet, my dad’s using Gemini for everything and he just literally like, it’s kind of like what Taco’s saying. Hi, Taco, by the way, in the chat about how these new answers are still answering the question actually a lot of the time, and it does understand what you’re trying to do a lot more than what my dad doesn’t like and what my mom doesn’t like, which is the, oh, I don’t wanna go into this website. What’s this ad over here? You know, the just the let the least technical person this is more friendly for.

And maybe that says something about what we’ve been playing with so far. But anyway, enough enough of this. There’s more there’s more news that’s happened. Google Ads in AI mode, which is interesting. I haven’t seen any. Have you?

I feel like I have, but I I think I have like ad blindness at this point because I I know I know how I know what to skip and I know when it feels artificial. So I I just like, yeah, I’m not I’m not shopping. I don’t need your ad.

But do you see a lot of sponsored results within the AI mode? So I guess that that would be the ad that they’re talking about. It doesn’t look like an ad. It just looks like a PPC.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, hopefully, it won’t be too much of a thing. But, like, as again, we’ll go into it a bit more, but they’re doing more other than ads at the moment.

Yeah. Now that I think of it, though, the the sponsored block did chew up at least half of the my screen size. So it was not an insignificant amount of space, and I did have to make a point to scroll past it to look for things that were not sponsored. So I could I mean, they gotta make money. Right?

Yeah. Well, I mean, if this is maybe isn’t the only way they’ve got to diversify within their own platform, see what happens. I know that I don’t know if it’s a whole other slide. I know it was also in the news that someone also said that they saw leaked images of ChatGPT adverts as well, but someone within OpenAI on x said that that isn’t what they’re up to. So interesting that people are seeing things in the wild on the same month from the, you know, the clashing LLMs. So let’s see what what’s to be seen in the first quarter.

Do we wanna talk real quick about what we talked about off off air regarding monetization and, like, warehouse clubs?

Maybe later because there is another item. There is an item that might be more relevant to it. But in the meantime, John Mueller Mueller, he kind of said something which I enjoyed. Don’t know where it was. I don’t know if it was on a LinkedIn post somewhere on Blue Sky. But long story short, if there’s a large background video that I know some of us may have dealt with, you know, this massive fifty meg video that can’t be compressed any more than it is, and people have just opted not to do that because that would render a very large web page. This actually doesn’t matter as much anymore to SEO, and obviously, they’ve done what they need to do inside Google to figure out the the reason why this page is fifty megs is this video and maybe ignore that and go for everything else.

So that’s actually a good thing that even though no one ever said it was a ranking factor, it was also got always got attributed to poor performance, slow loading page, and therefore that’s a ranking factor in general.

Right. I think people confuse sometimes people look at just the large sizes of the videos and go, oh, that’s the problem. The problem is when it it’s the time it takes to the the first the first available interaction.

So if it’s blocking, that’s a bigger problem than if it’s just huge. If you can make it load in the background or lazy load so that everything else appears and the page is still interactive, you’re you’re going to get around that being a big a big blocker.

The non blocking is the bigger issue, not necessarily the size of that video. So I think I think people just kind of collapse that into big video bad.

Yeah. Yeah. So it’s good. And that’s gonna help like videographers and, you know, all anyone that’s like game developers, you know, that need a lot of potential visual resource that sits in front of you on a landing page. That’s good.

So, yeah. Oh, this is what I was talking about a second ago. I didn’t realize we had this whole slide. So someone somewhere has leaked something that says the ads are going out. What do we need to care about?

Probably that if you’re doing any kind of ads to make sure that again, you’ve got as much populated information as possible, especially when it comes around e-com, which is always gonna happen. If ads are coming out, it’s always gonna be e-com first, and then they test the waters and then everything else later. And what we do know is that these synthetic cancers are very specific. Your your interaction with them are very specific, and as such, the information that you need to provide in order for it to interpret needs to be super, super specific as well.

So that’s, I would say, the the takeaway from me about this. But we haven’t seen anything, so we’re not going to before Christmas, I don’t think so. Let’s see. Let let’s see next next edition.

I would say, though, that even even without the ads, if you’re selling products, you do need to make sure that you have in plain text and easy for the not Google, not Bingbots to see our product specs, product details, and use use names for colors that exist in the wild. Don’t make up a name and assume that someone’s going to recognize that. I I know I’ve used this example before, but if the color is ivory or off white, don’t call it pristine. Pristine doesn’t necessarily map to with the cosine similarity of pristine doesn’t doesn’t go with white or off white. It’s just conceptually, I can sort of see why you would say that or like angelic. Yeah.

That create associations in your head, but it’s not going to be strong enough to get that color to return if someone asks for a specific dress in white.

Think about it this way.

When people describe white as being bridal white, they still add white to the end of the phrase. So you do still need that additional qualifier to make sure that the bots understand what color you’re talking about. Think colors are probably the biggest problem. I don’t think there’s a lot of people that are doing weird things like providing measurements in toilet paper squares instead of inches or centimeters. But don’t get too creative. You can be clever, but don’t be so clever that no one knows what you’re talking about.

Yeah. Because something needs to understand it. That’s Okay, what’s next? So OpenAI, this is actually quite timely because in the chat we’ve got several people talking about Google and Gemini being a plus and that people are using them a bit more and finding better results. Well, that may have had a knock on effect inside OpenAI’s offices because here’s Altman saying that this code red, we need to get ship out more stuff. I know that they’ve shipped GPT five point two, was it, over the weekend?

So is this just shipping out new versions for the sake of shipping out new versions? But or or are they in real trouble? And this may be, I don’t know, a rough twelve months ahead for Altman and, you know, investor relations and so on just to get stuff moving. And what what does that mean for us as the end user? Does that mean that stuff’s actually gonna get, I hate to say the phrase, less good, you know, more of less rather than just, like, waiting for something a bit more impactful?

Well, I know the update that they pushed over the weekend did have it did change behavior because they increased the context window fairly significantly. So instead of answering the question that you just asked in a in a long conversation, it starts looping back and answering, like, the last three questions that you asked in sequence.

Even if you say, retelling me that answer.

I don’t care anymore. I now I want we’re we’ve moved on. Let’s focus on this. And he’ll say, Oh, I’m sorry.

I won’t do that again. And then it proceeds to do it again. So I think every time there’s personality upgrade, which is basically what they’re rolling out, it gets a little goofy. So if you’re really into a and you can’t stop it, that’s the worst part.

You can’t say, please don’t upgrade it. I’m happy with where it’s at. They’re like, no, upgrades are coming. So it’s annoying, but it is probably only going to accelerate.

That’s a good thing though. I guess it keeps everyone on their toes because we’ve got, again, Google testing and blending AI mode into AI overviews. I’m seeing a little bit. I can’t really where where from where I’m logging on, not really seeing a rhyme and reason. Again, e-com seems to be the only pattern that you use where you have a bit of everything, anything that can make a purchase more seamless.

But other than that, I’ve not seen too much of a change, but this is all just UX testing right now, isn’t it? For the next few months is, right, well, we’ve maybe perfected the way that things are being output from an information data point of view, but now visually and, you know, from a customer experience point of view, we just need to do a little bit of tweaks. So we’re we’re just testing the waters for some UX team that have to look at every single session and see what’s best for us in different countries as well.

You know, and the takeaway is they’re going to be doing a lot of testing, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to react and change every time they run a test.

Keep making your content scannable and structured so that Google can service it cleanly in these AI generated summaries. If they’re changing the user interface, that doesn’t change their needs from your site.

It still needs to be scannable. You still need to be focusing on that structured content and the structured data. So don’t just because they’re doing stuff, don’t let that don’t let every little thing Google does mean that you have to stop what you’re doing and react. You will first of all, it’s not helpful. Secondly, you’ll go crazy. So if you don’t wanna burn out or go nuts, my suggestion is to slow your role and focus on the fundamentals.

Yeah, yeah. I apologize, by the way, went to the next slide. I clicked inside the slide instead of the side. But the next one was about llms. Txt, which is a feature that we have in free by the way, where you can just turn it on and it creates an llms. Txt.

So it found that Google have some GitHub repos and they all had llms.txt files. And the reason that that was newsworthy is because John Mueller a few months ago said that they were useless and they were like the meta keywords, which we, of course, disagreed with.

Which they’re not at all, but whatever. But he did at Google Search Central live in Zurich. Was that last week now?

That was last week now. Yeah.

He changed his tune, and he they he and Martin both said that Google treats the llms.txt as a text file and treats it like a text file. That’s their implication was, therefore, it’s useless. But the words that came out of their mouth were, we recognize it as a text file, we treat it like a text file.

And John said that it’s not harmful. And if you have time and somebody really wants it, it’s it’s going to take less time to just make one than it will be just to explain to them why it’s not necessary. So I contend, side note, robots.txt only became an official standard, like an official official official adopted standard, like within the last year.

How long have we been treating it like a standard? Very long time. So just because something is not a standard yet, and this is very early in the adoption cycle, doesn’t mean it’s not going to get adopted. It’s not going to interfere with things.

It’s not going to hurt your site. It can’t be gamed. I know there’s people that say it can be gamed. If you game it, it’s going to screw up other things.

I would not recommend gaming it.

It’s an easy thing to do. So it’s dangerous.

No, it’s not. No, it’s not. I mean, did say it’s just a text file to which I remember thinking, is robots.txt, tell that to that file.

But I mean, I guess he did say the exact phrase he did say is what what do you want to do? Have a two hour management meeting about implementing it or implementing it in fifteen minutes. And we know the answer to that. So Right.

Wait. We don’t need to talk more about llms.txt because by the time we finish this one slide, you could have already logged into Turned on. Turned it on.

So yeah, let’s go to the next one.

Search Console have introduced a couple of things over the last month. And their first one was an AI-powered configuration, which I don’t have access to, which is really annoying. But for you guys in the audience, once you do have access to it, if you haven’t already, go and check it out, kind of just works with insights and the data to maybe let you ask questions rather than just show me data, which sometimes can be a bit overbearing. So you can ask very specific conversational questions.

And when I say you can ask it, this isn’t a chat interaction. This is think of it as Google have pre populated some questions and prompts that you may want to ask. It’s thought of it before you you click the prompt, then it gives you that information as it would inside Search Console. So that’s a nice thing to do.

I don’t think there’s much more to really discuss on it, but it’s just a way to look at your data in a bit more of a nice way, because we know that they’re not as as further away from technical you get or analysis, the less you’re going to understand this stuff. And that’s what Google wants. They want you to do something about the data, not just go, here’s a bunch of data, which is kind of a hard thing to do shop by shop. But but yeah, that that was that one.

What next? They’ve also introduced social channels to search console, which we also don’t have access to, which is quite annoying.

So we can’t show you anything other than this one screenshot that Yeah, I haven’t seen it yet, so.

But this is good, I think this is good. This is giving you at least more direct attribution to something that’s happening on another layer within search console. So it’s only going to give you potentially more insight and it should hopefully with any luck help the social media manager or social media manager may be in trouble. Don’t know.

I know you were able to add YouTube channels specifically into GA4 a while ago.

And I know that you could integrate social channels into the monitoring in tools like Semrush. So it’s nice to see that Google is making this available to Search Console because Search Console is free and many, many, many more people have access to it now. That’s a positive thing. That being said, I have not personally witnessed this. So, I’m eager to have access.

I can’t wait. I don’t know when it’s going to be rolled out. They just said it’s rolling out soon, but it is gonna be good. They also didn’t mention which social channels. They just said a few. And, of course, in this screenshot, they’re gonna show YouTube because why not? They own it.

So Well, they they have a they have a contract with Reddit too, so I would assume Reddit’s going to be in there.

X would be interesting because they don’t they don’t like Elon.

Threads is Facebook, so it probably won’t be threads.

What which social channels? Oh, they have what’s that?

LinkedIn. Yeah. Quora. You know?

Who owns Quora?

Don’t know.

Obviously not obviously not someone they’re at battle with. Otherwise, we’d have known that answer straight away, wouldn’t That is true. Although we didn’t do a slide for it, I know last week when we were in Zurich, they, Google also mentioned that they’re doing weekly and monthly views of graphs now, which I do see inside Search Console. That’s another one.

Another added bonus. So that’s alright. Three different things inside Search Console. No.

I mean, it’s it’s automatic it’s an automatic thing. I I’ve always done that, but I would just set custom dates.

So Yeah.

But you can separate the lines by week. So, know, like like, you’re if you’re a business which is Monday to Friday and your graph is basically like that every week, At least it’s it straightens that out a little bit. We’ll see. But, yeah, check it out because that if I’ve got it, that means everyone’s got it. Right?

So the next thing was something you said, can I talk about it now? But this is now the time. So this was on the tenth, so only a few days ago, Google have announced a deal with large commercial publications in order to get content out in a bit of the best way rather than being accused of appropriating all of these visits and impressions and so on. So maybe you can now delve into what were saying before.

Yeah, this is, I’m sure you all know that the newspapers are are suing actively going after, like, Perplexity and some of the other LLMs for for stealing their content even though it’s very difficult to steal facts because facts can only be presented in so many ways. And that’s why I don’t think those those lawsuits would be ultimately successful, but they will probably get settled because people like money. The publishing world lives and dies on on their on their their views because all of their ad or their revenue models are built on ad exposure, which is why most of the publishers are just slathered with ads.

Like no offense, Alex, but the UK newspapers are horrific examples of that. Like, you can’t read two sentences, two solids, continuous sentences without having giant ads interrupting. It’s gross.

But this is how they make their money.

With with impressions and click throughs dropping like a stone, they’re all going to go out of business. So there’s there’s an effort being made to almost prop up the publishing industry so that we can at least maintain the facade of having independent journalism in this world. And that’s what they’re doing. It’s interesting to me how they’re going about it.

I probably would have found an easier route to take to to make this happen, but it’s good that there’s an effort being made to calm the publishers down and keep them afloat. So that’s good.

The other thing I was talking about when we were offline is how I don’t know that there’s going to be I don’t know that for things that are not Google and Bing like ChatGPT and Perplexity and the others, I don’t know that they care so much about their paid subscribers because you were saying that, oh, people aren’t, you know, what are they going do with their paid subscribers? They can’t possibly be making enough money. I don’t think that’s where their money comes from. I think they’ve got side deals with big organizations and there’s money flowing that way. And the the users are just.

You know, they’re just icing on the cake. When I was at Disney and ESPN, the website at ESPN, even though it’s very similar to a newspaper, it makes money. It makes a lot of money, but compared to what they make on cable TV deals, it’s literally a non factor in their budget. They they don’t care. So there are other places where their money is coming from. I think I would wager that it’s more likely that the paid users are being treated like wholesale club membership fees.

The reason that Costco and, like, Sam’s Club I don’t know if you guys have Sam’s Club. The reason they don’t have to do a lot of the gimmicky annoying things that regular grocery stores do is because they make so much money charging that annual membership fee that they don’t need to mark up their margins. They don’t need to don’t need to run crazy sales. They don’t need to do a lot of advertising. They’re they’re making whatever they would have been making on a per per user basis, like the newspapers, whatever the newspapers make on a per user basis from showing ads. If they were to charge a monthly membership fee, which would be a subscription fee, they wouldn’t need to show the ads because they’d be making more money that way. There’s just something.

They’re just somehow absorbed with the idea that they need to show ads in order to to turn a profit.

That was long and rambling, but it’s it’s fascinating to me to try to figure out how these how these businesses are operating and where they’re getting their revenue. Because if we know where they’re getting the revenue, we know how they’re going to how they’re behaving and what they might be doing next, which helps us figure out how we should tailor our strategies.

Yeah. And it’d be interesting to see what the results of all this is in the next few months. But right, we’ve got three minutes, but four slides. So let’s do Let’s do this.

We’ve got one more story, which is kind of big, but not so but not in terms of the explanation. So Shopify, they do a couple of years, twice a year or so, they do something called an additions. I’ve just put in the link here for their winter edition. In that edition, they always release what I like what I think is a lot of cool new features, but the one that’s got the most attention is called SimGym.

And SimGym is a completely agentic free plugin from Shopify that emulates buying behavior and then gives you insight based on it. So in short, it’s like having a UX team report back to you completely automatically, which would if you’re a really, really good UX designer or or consultant, I would it would excite me, but everyone else who is in UX, who is not absolutely stellar at their job, I would find this as a threat.

But I would say use this stuff now and understand these agentic things because someone’s got to read and do something about what reports it gives out. But it also said it doesn’t it doesn’t like ruin or skew data. It doesn’t ruin traffic and think you’re a bot in a crawl. It doesn’t act it it’s it’s completely it’s completely invisible inside things like Google Analytics and of course, Shopify’s own statistics.

That’s just one of the other cool stuff that there’s no point in going into. I suggest that you have a look at all of everything that they’re offering in here, because Shopify are doing a lot. They are doing a lot. It’s not always about WordPress, but it’s it’s interesting to see what they’re doing because they really a lot faster.

This good stuff, and this feels like something that’s really gonna be useful to the the users, especially the users.

CRO agencies are expensive, and and it’s difficult to to necessarily bootstrap yourself into being an expert. So any tools that help, especially the smaller businesses, I think, great product feature.

Yeah. Yeah. And that was all the news from around, except these things Also in the news, I’ll just read them out. So Google post, it can now schedule and publish posts across multiple locations. That’s Google My Business or Business Profile, whatever they call this month.

Cloudflare outage returns. I’m sure you all had four hours off the internet.

I’m sure it was sheer hell, but that happened a couple of times, but I’m sure it was lovely for some.

And what, you didn’t have any downtime?

No, I didn’t, but my husband did. My husband was like, can’t work today. Okay, cool.

Oh no, oh no. Google disputes report claiming ads are coming, which is what we were covering before, same as what OpenAI said, but one doth protest too much. Let’s see.

New features for Galaxy XR and future devices. So I know that they’re having a lot more wearables in Samsung and they’re going in for it. And I know that not only Meta and Google are also looking at a wearable device like glasses, smart glasses. What else? Walt Disney have secured a deal with OpenAI. It’s a three year license deal. So within Sora, you can like basically do anything with any of the well, not anything, but lots of things with all the Disney characters so long as the license agrees to it.

And also I’m there’s some limits on what they can make those characters do.

Definitely be limits. But on the same day, that Disney secured the deal with OpenAI, they hit Google with a cease and desist. So I wonder whose side they’re on. Let’s find out who wins that. Also note it’s a three year license. So maybe they’ll fight Google for two and a half years and reach an agreement. Let’s see what happens.

Totally random side note.

I used to have a a podcast where it was audio only, and I could do a Mickey Mouse voice. So I deliver some of the SEO advice as Mickey Mouse, and it was hilarious.

But anyway I heard Cameo.

You should do Cameo if they’re still around.

What else has happened? Google has released a core update, which John Mueller alluded to last week. He said maybe before the holidays, but they always kind of do one in December. So it’s starting to roll out and that’ll probably complete rolling out just as we get back from the festive period.

And lastly, Gemini are up in the game on translation by letting you do live translation from your headphones even. You just open Google Translate. Again, don’t have access to that. Stop advertising these things that I can’t get immediately.

And then you can just have live translation with you and whoever. There’s a nice video out there that Google have done.

It’s so Star Trek universal translator. It’s it’s really cool.

It’s gonna be good. It’s cool. So I wonder what that means for people who are multilingual. Is there less of a need?

But no. No. No. There’s no time for that because we’ve only got eight minutes. And there’s Yoast news very quickly.

The brand performance has now gone beyond ChatGPT into Perplexity. We are building other platforms soon, can’t say which ones or when the time of arrival is. But we’re doing it, don’t worry about it. But at least you don’t just get track ChatGPT data in there, you get Perplexity too.

Okay. The next SEO update is the first one of next year, the 27th of January at 4 pm Central European Time or 10 am Eastern Standard Time.

And those are all the slides.

Mike, quick with the Q and A, I’m sorry.

Lots lots of stuff to get through today, Mike, isn’t there? There’s quite a few Q and As.

Yeah, I’m looking through and I’m seeing let’s just go ahead and get started because I know we’re running out of time. Do you see any that you want to promote to the stage?

Don’t know, Mike. Which one’s best to read out today or should I do it?

Should we stop? Oh, here’s one. Should we stop using background images? Here, let’s do this one.

Add to stage. I clicked add to stage. Am I not allowed to?

You can add to stage, can’t you?

I tried. It did not work.

Which what does it begin with?

It’s should we stop using background images on product pages so they load faster? It’s under public.

Got it, right, okay. Should we stop using background images on product pages?

I say no, basically from what John Mueller said before about videos as well. So I would still say optimize as much as you can, if you can compress, But background images, it depends how visual your brand is as well.

If you don’t have to, if it’s I don’t know that it’s necessary.

I think as we move forward, I think people are gonna spend less and less time on your website and more and more time making decisions outside of your website. I don’t know that it’s necessary to have all of the the bling and the glitter that we’re accustomed to having. Is it truly making someone more likely to buy your product? If the answer is no or even I don’t know, I would experiment with trimming things out and making them lighter. But if it is truly a background image, it probably isn’t grossly affecting your page speed.

But yeah, my inclination would be anything I can trim out to make it more streamlined and fast, would do. Less clutter is better to me.

Okay. What’s the next one that we should do? Should we make significant changes to on page elements when Google’s core update is ongoing?

Like now is a great time to make big changes when traffic is low, but Google started three weeks long, blah blah blah. Right? Okay. Okay.

I would say no. Act as if there is no core update happening. It’s not like you have a deadline to get all your changes done before the core update happens. It’s forgot the word.

It’s not dynamic, but it keeps on it keeps on iterating in a way. So I wouldn’t consume yourself with working round Google’s core update schedule.

Yeah, I would, if you need to make a change, make the change and Google’s gonna Google.

I don’t know that there’s anything that you can do about that.

Would say the on page elements are only, The ability, our ability to just tweak on page elements to regain the rankings that we had before.

What rankings even mean anymore? Honestly, if impressions tank, that might be something to be concerned about. But I when impressions go to basically zero, my assumption is I’ve done something that has caused the bots to not be able to crawl the page anymore rather than some single element on on the page has is no longer fully optimized.

Short of short of not doing anything that’s going to break the crawl.

Make the changes you need to make if they’re necessary.

Yep. Okay, cool. Next question.

I heard FAQs are super important. You’re right, Florence, they are. Should we have specific page for FAQ or should we include FAQ on every single page?

It depends of course, but I would say both. And it also, I guess it does depend on what the questions are. So if there is, let’s say you sell lots of the same kind of products that you have a shared question that kind of covers all of them or a large majority of them, then yeah, you can have a central FAQ area. One where you ask about your brand and you call all of that kind of stuff that go with it, that’s generic to your company or brand, then yeah, of course, you can have that one page.

But if we’re talking about something that you have a very big range of products where you’re gonna have FAQs for each and every product, there’s gonna obviously be unique, which you want them to be, of course, because the more unique they are, the more susceptible they are to having unique FAQs and therefore getting pulled in with some search that you’re doing. I would say do both, but make sure the granular ones are in the When I say every single page, I don’t mean literally every single page, every page that one would assume or require to have an FAQ on it. What about you, Carolyn?

FAQs.

So two things.

Number one, we know that we know that the non Google, non Bing LLMs aren’t aren’t expanding toggles. And I know I bring this up a lot, but they’re not.

So make sure that if you have FAQs that you’re not collapsing the answer inside a toggle because if it’s not visible on the page on initial load, they’re not going to read it anyway. But you treat the FAQs as it’s information that if someone read the whole article, they would learn, but you’re anticipating them being too lazy to read the entire article. So you’re pulling out the really important things. It’s almost like if you leave with nothing else from this article, these are the points I want you to have. And that doesn’t necessarily need to be phrased as a frequently asked question. It could be key takeaways.

But those kinds of, you know, a list of these are the really important points that I want you to take away from this page are great because it’s isolating them. It’s making them easy for crawlers to grab, and it’s helpful. Don’t put FAQs on a page that are unrelated to the content of the page, and don’t do it gratuitously. If there really isn’t if there’s no reader centric reason for that to be there, don’t include it.

We’re not including junk. We’re not we’re not we’re not padding keywords. We’re not doing things that are unnecessary to try to attract readers because what we’re really doing is we’re preparing the data that’s on the page for the LLMs that we get cited and for Google even so we get cited. But you don’t want to dilute your signal with extraneous or unrelevant information.

Good. I still see fifty nine minutes. So we’ve got time for one more question, which I like this one. Does length matter as much on a page since people want clear answers and more authority? So Laurens, go on, Caroline. I know you No.

Length does not matter. The answer the question.

If you can answer the question in two sentences, answer the question. If answering the question requires five paragraphs, answer the question. Answer the question. Explain the topic.

Do the thing.

Don’t add extra words. This is not high school where it has to be a five page essay. And if it’s not five pages, you get an F. That’s not how this works anymore. Answer the question.

There we go. I think there are there are more on here. Maybe Neringa afterwards, we can collect a few and add it to the blog post or add it to the thank you email afterwards.

But I think we might have run out of time for this month and for this year.

It was great to have everyone and hope you found our insights not too rambly, but actually useful. And we will see you again in about six weeks where we’ll tell you how busy everyone has been during the festive period.

I hope everyone has a very merry and happy set of holidays, whatever they are. I hope you all have a wonderful new year, and we’ll see you next time.

Bye for now. See you on the other side.

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