The SEO Update by Yoast – February 2025 Edition

Hello everyone and very welcome to this February update of the SEO update.

So we’re on Monday, which is typically another day than we’re normally at, but I see that there are already many of you joining live, so awesome to see you all there.

Please tell us where you’re from and say hello in the chat right here below.

So my name is Florie van Hummel and I’m your host for today.

Before we dive in, let’s cover a few things about Crowdcast.

That’s the platform we’re using.

So in case you don’t know this program, I see a lot of you have already found the chat here on my right side.

But if you do have a question, make sure to go to the ask a question section,

which you can recognize by that question mark over there at the right side as well.

And there you can also upvote questions and make sure that your question gets answered at the end.

So in terms of recordings and resources, we’ll make sure that everything’s available after this webinar.

And you’ll get an email where you can also find some resources.

After all our news is discussed, there’s a Q&A.

So definitely pop in those questions.

So now let’s get started with the real SEO news of the day.

Let me introduce you to the stars.

First off, we have Carolyn Shelby.

Carolyn has been in SEO since 1994, if my data is correct.

And she’s been crushing it ever since.

She’s our first female principal SEO at Yoast and an all-around powerhouse.

So you’re definitely in for some incredible insights with Carolyn.

Secondly, we have Alex Moss.

And Alex is another of our principal SEOs at Yoast.

He’s a multitasker and is known for getting things done.

And for bringing cookies to the office.

Yeah, Alex, I said it again.

So today, Carolyn and Alex will cover a lot of things.

They will talk about Google AI overviews,

OpenAI and the introduction of deep research,

and using AI to decode language from the bring.

So without further ado, let’s get started.

Thanks for the intro, Florie.

And hello, Carolyn.

Here we are again.

Oh, you’re on mute.

It’s still Monday.

It’s fine.

It’s fine.

Here we are.

I just had my coffee.

I’m so sorry.

It’s very early here.

So yeah, here we are again.

It’s, I mean, February feels like it went fast.

January felt like it was the longest month in the universe lately.

I don’t know where the time’s going,

but I’m eager to get started there.

It’s been kind of a light month as far as news goes.

So hopefully we’ll have extra time at the end to do some Q&A.

Let us go to the slides.

As always, feel free to ask questions.

There’s, if you ask a question in the chat, we might miss it.

So make sure that you put your question in the little Q&A area.

If you put it in there, there’s a high probability we’re going to get to it,

especially if everybody likes your question.

The ones with more likes tend to get answered faster.

So do that for me.

If you’re interested in learning more about today’s topics,

it would be, you’re welcome to go get more information.

Here’s the link.

I don’t even know how to say this.

It’s like yoa.st/update-feb-2025.

There’s always a recording available afterwards.

If you’d like to, we’re welcoming everyone to continue the conversation with us after the show.

Anytime you want, really.

We have a Facebook group that you’re all invited to join.

And we also have a subreddit called Yoast SEO that we would love to chat with you in.

I answer questions there.

I’m sure Alex does too.

So we’re available if you’d like to continue that conversation.

As always, if you are new to SEO, this might be a little bit more advanced than you’re needing.

If you need a how to start with SEO webinar, we have those every other week.

The next one is clearly not February 11th.

I will get the exact date for you though.

But you can always sign up for those and they are every other week on Tuesdays.

I know we have one scheduled for tomorrow, I think.

And if it’s not tomorrow, it’s next Tuesday.

But now I feel silly and I will have to check on that for you.

I’ll get back to everyone.

Let’s get into the SEO and AI news.

I think this is one I’m handling first.

So details have emerged about Project Stargate as Meta discloses a $60 billion AI investment.

So if you’ve heard about Project Stargate and you don’t know what it is, Project Stargate is just an agreement amongst

a few big tech firms like OpenAI, SoftBank, and Meta.

They’re going to be committed to investing a certain amount of money.

I think the total was $500 billion to build these big technology data centers all over the United States.

The goal here is to make the United States an AI leader in the world and especially make sure that the lead and the

thought leadership isn’t ceded to China.

So this is kind of a geopolitical, you know, three-dimensional chess kind of thing.

The interesting thing to note, though, is they’re building all of these data centers.

Part of what’s going to go into the data centers in addition to jobs is they’re going to be given permission to build

things like their own water treatment plants and their own power plants.

So they’re generating their own electricity and they’re not going to be a drain on the general grid that everyone else

uses to charge their cars and air condition their homes, things like that.

It’s a neat thing.

I guess it was expected they were going to have to do this eventually if we wanted to stay a leader.

But it should be interesting to see how that shakes out.

I think what this is going to translate to for small business owners is that the AI advancements for building websites,

managing websites, writing ads, all of the things that AI is starting to do now, there will be more capacity to do

those things in the near term.

In the future, not that far away.

So, very exciting.

Did you want to say that?

I mean, I would say the only thing I kind of assume from it is that whilst this is happening, we’re not going, as end

users, are going to see the fruits of this labor for some time, right?

This is a big project.

Well, I think, I feel like we’re starting to see the fruits of the laborers because just because they need more, more

places to do the, the thinking for the computers doesn’t mean they’re not doing stuff now.

I think this will just accelerate.

We’ve got growth happening now and this is just going to make it go faster, faster and hopefully better.

And maybe cheaper as well for the end user.

So, you don’t have to pay $200 a month for the OpenAI, things like that.

That’s ridiculous.

But that’s, I think that’s in another slide too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I think that’s a good takeaway.

I mean, the other takeaway, it’s nice to know that this isn’t a project about a wormhole or anything like that.

Like the film was in the nineties.

I know I got all excited and like, we’re going to get a Stargate.

No, it’s not.

Finally, those are evil guys in that other side of the wormhole.

I’m not, I’m not, I’m not messing around with that.

But back to reality.

The big thing about HubSpot.

Yeah.

Tell us, tell us about what’s going on with HubSpot.

Yeah.

So HubSpot around the end of Jan, just before our last update got not penalized.

Would you say it’s penalized?

Demoted.

A lot of their content was demoted.

And they lost a lot of rankings.

Yeah.

And it was especially around the blog.

So to note, this isn’t the whole domain.

All the other parts of the domain, not a problem.

But the blog and the content within it, they took a big hit on rankings and therefore traffic.

But what’s important to know here is that even though they lost their traffic, they kept their key rankings.

They kept the ones that mattered to the business and to them and the bottom line, more importantly, the most.

So whilst it’s a loss of visibility on the blog content, is it a loss from the business as a whole?

Maybe not.

There may be arguments against it.

But that leads us to the next slide, right?

And Rand Fishkin doing a little bit of research, not just into HubSpot and other businesses that have got the same demotion.

Yeah.

So this is, I think this is a trend going forward.

The organic traffic doesn’t cause and isn’t necessarily correlative to the revenue for your business

when your business model is not eyeballs.

So websites that are making money on AdSense, websites that their entire business model is selling, getting traffic

in so that you can advertise to them.

Organic traffic is what they live and die.

This would be a death mill for a company like that.

HubSpot doesn’t make their money on it.

So their monetization model is conversions to buy into their product, right?

So the moral of the story or the lesson that small business owners would need to pay attention to is it doesn’t

necessarily matter that 100 people walk past your store.

It matters that 10 people come in and buy something.

So if you only get 10 people going past the store but all of them buy, that is much preferable than having tons and

tons of foot traffic and very few buyers.

If your business model is one of those where you need organic traffic to make your money, you’re going to be in

for a rough road, I think.

Because with AI and AI overviews and the way that it’s siphoning traffic off from especially these content aggregators,

because you don’t need to go to these websites to find information.

You’re getting information more from the source, or at least the AI is taking it from the source.

I think you’re going to have to rethink your business model.

But most small businesses sell something.

Most small businesses have a service that they’re selling.

So for them, I don’t think the general depression of organic traffic is going to 100% correlate to a reduction in

revenues.

So thank you for coming to my TED business talk.

Well, it might have been too, there were a couple of mentions that it was, maybe we were talking too technically or

advanced.

So should we do the, let’s explain this in a simpler way.

It’s kind of a message we’ve been also always saying, don’t write content just for search engines, right?

Don’t spread too far away from what your core business or, like, your core business products or

services are offering.

If you’re selling trainers and all of a sudden you’re chatting about ladders because there’s some very

faint ideology between the way a soul can hit the step of a ladder.

You may be going a little bit too far to try and rank for something like shoes and ladders.

Like that, that may be digging at the bottom of the search visibility barrel.

And that’s what the messaging is.

Keep to what you’re good at, which is the shoes, not the ladders.

Just remember, Google likes a deep well of information and authority, not a cookie sheet.

So we’re going for deep well SEO, not cookie sheet SEO.

And just in case you don’t bake, a cookie sheet is flat.

So not deep at all.

So.

All right.

Is this one new or is this one me?

I forget.

It is.

It’s kind of, yeah, it’s mine, this one.

This is about Perplexity deploying Chinese DeepSeek’s AI model into their own model.

There’s stuff happening after that that we’ll cover, but I’m sure you heard about DeepSeek in the last month.

I feel like it’s gone.

I feel like it was like an NFT launch.

It was like, woof, and then woof, and no one talks about it anymore.

It’s already old news.

DeepSeek whilst open source and perplexity used that, that was a bit of something that people were

concerned about.

They did make sure that whilst it’s open source, all the data that was going to be collected was in data centers

based in the US and Europe.

And it wasn’t going to send any data to China, which is what some people are kind of worried about.

But I mean, DeepSeek itself.

I mean, I’ve got, again, in other slides, there’s questions on how good it is compared to all the others out there.

And maybe it was a way of China sending a message to the world that they can make stuff cheap and fast.

I feel like we kind of already knew that already with, you know, tangible products as well.

They’re very good at doing that.

But that was the message they got.

And whilst Perplexity has used it, there’s still been doubts about DeepSeek as an LLM itself.

Yeah, and I’ve heard similar things.

I haven’t tried it myself.

I feel like the people that got excited about DeepSeeek were the people that have, you know, little server farms in

their homes.

And they want to play with it themselves rather than rely on using Grok or OpenAI and ChatGPT because it’s not

really like self-hosted.

But that’s far beyond the technical requirements of the vast majority of people.

So I’m not super concerned.

The use of it, and I don’t know if this is cultural indoctrination or what, but in the U.S. at least, I think we’re

slightly suspicious of anything that’s being released by Chinese companies because we’ve sort of been told that

everything that comes out of China has back doors into the communist Chinese authorities there.

So there’s always that, like, I don’t know if I want to do this.

But it hasn’t been banned.

I’m sure if Perplexity is acknowledging that fear and reassuring people that that’s not happening, they’re not

lying to us.

So it would not be in their best interest to lie about something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they say it’s the uncensored version, which I guess they kind of bricked it in a way and made it so it can talk

about things like Tiananmen Square.

But I’m not sure.

I mean, look, as I said last month, if I’m going to do my research on the history of China, that maybe I shouldn’t use

a potentially subjective LLM, such as DeepSeek, to find out objective opinion.

But that’s for, again, another slide because DeepThought is on its way.

That’s true.

So Google AI Overviews is now found in 74% of problem-solving queries.

We knew this was going to happen and this is going to continue getting, I don’t know, worth is the right word

I want to use, but more pervasive.

Anytime the AI Overview can answer a question for you, it’s going to try.

You have to ask some pretty specific questions that cannot be answered or so vague that it doesn’t know what it’s

trying to tell you.

Why is this important?

It’s important because it is pushing the organic results down the list.

And if you were number one for some term and now you’re basically not only well below the fold, but near the

bottom of the page and you’re not one of the citations, people probably aren’t going to find it.

People are looking for, you know, they’re looking for quick answers.

And if they get that quick answer from the top of the page, they’re going to take it.

If I need to know how to substitute something for the 2% milk that I do not have in my refrigerator right now, I don’t

need to go to a bunch of websites.

I just need to ask the question and it will tell me.

What we want to do as small business owners or brand marketers, we need to be optimizing in a way that we’re

going to be a featured snippet.

We’re considered an authority on our topic.

And, we want to be included in those AI overview citations, because if we’re in a citation, then we’re

in a position to influence the narrative.

And we know that we’re being our information is being incorporated into that overall AI overview.

So we can we can make changes.

We can slightly massage the narrative if we want to do that.

But this is our new reality and it’s not going to go backwards.

Speaking of, you know, I think people are a little a little unnerved.

You found this on online, I think, Alex.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was interesting.

Some Michael Glavac.

I’m going to go with Glavac.

It could be Glavac.

He found that Google.

Well, he found that Google AI overview can in his research looked at 61 different sites,

not pages, sites in collecting.

Collecting information that was provided into an AI overview.

And I found that quite interesting because the race to page one now isn’t necessarily a race to page one.

It’s a race to be cited.

And that can mean that in the native SERPs of one to 10, 11 to 20 and so on.

You may be ranking on page four for something two years ago that you would never have got any exposure on.

But now, actually, with AI overviews coming in, all of a sudden, if what you’re saying is actually relevant and

important and authoritative, it’s going to be brought in as part of the research for the answer.

Which means that whilst you’re still in a list of 60 other sites, you’re in that list as it’s being done.

And if someone’s reading that part where you’re cited into the answer, then you can get that click off page zero.

And that, I think, is quite a cool thing to know.

And it doesn’t, and again, doesn’t devalue content production or SEO in general.

It actually makes it more valuable because it’s not just a race to be above the fold on page one anymore.

But it’s content that’s unique and adds value.

And I think that’s what everyone needs to really focus on.

It’s not that building content isn’t going to be helpful.

It’s that the content that you build needs to be helpful.

The content you build needs to be unique.

And you need to be adding something to the conversation.

Just rewriting stuff that everyone else has written is not going to cut it anymore.

You need to be doing some research.

You need to have some deep knowledge and expertise about the thing that you’re writing about.

So I don’t know that this is. It says, the quote is, it’s frightening for sites that rely on content to attract traffic.

And this is what I mentioned earlier.

If your business model is just getting people in to read the content so that you can advertise to them and get that

incremental revenue,

give serious thought to your business model.

We’ll just leave it there.

Yeah.

So DeepSeek, tell me about DeepSeek because I think you were into this a little bit more than I was.

Yeah, I feel like DeepSeek, like I was saying before, I feel like it got this really quick peak and trough very quickly.

I feel like this has been the weird time at the moment where things are there’s a lot of different LLMs and AI-based

search platforms that are coming out.

And you’ve got to use them all.

There’s another one that Pitta was using called Jina as well.

That’s a free deep thought-based free LLM out there that you don’t even need to sign up for.

But what I was finding with DeepSeek is that even if topped all the charts, and I’m sure that being in the news,

and President Trump mentioned it in a speech in passing when he was talking about, I think, Stargate, actually,

that that brought it to the forefront.

But then we found that after some research, it was failing in a lot of tests.

And I’m not just talking about Chinese history.

I was talking about generally the accuracy of the answers it was giving was failing a lot compared to all the others.

So, look, if you can make something cheap and fast, it doesn’t make sure it’s good, right?

It doesn’t mean that at all.

And this may be, even though it’s an early version, it was maybe spun out quickly, still isn’t enough that the mass

market are actually going to use it.

I have a feeling there’s probably been a mass uninstall rate in the last couple of weeks, especially, because people

just aren’t using it.

And the likes of OpenAI and Grok and Gemini are all going to be beating it and will continue to do so, unless China

really does something really special.

It seems special, but I feel like it was a lot of shouting without action.

It was a lot of shouting.

And I feel like the launch was unnecessarily antagonistic to a lot of the big players in the U.S. industry,

which made them disinclined to promote it or to endorse it.

So I think the lesson there is don’t burn bridges you don’t need to burn.

Don’t make enemies unnecessarily.

No.

And always, and also, I don’t like installing things at V1.

I don’t like using something too early.

I always do that with Apple.

I never get less than V3 of any Apple product.

Because V1 and V2 is beta testing for people who will buy every single version.

You have restraint, though, that I think a lot of people don’t also have.

That’s also true.

I have some curiosity, but I like to wait for others to be more curious than me.

Well, moving on.

Google says links matter less.

They looked at a million SERPs to see if it’s true.

And this is from the Ahrefs blog.

So they say links still matter for rankings, especially for high-volume local and informational queries.

External links have a stronger impact than internal links.

And branded searches tend to have more links.

Google’s reliance on links has slightly decreased.

But they’re still an important competitive and low signal areas.

So I feel like the title is slightly misleading.

I wouldn’t say that links…

Don’t take away from this that links don’t matter.

Don’t take away from this that you don’t need to build links.

And that you don’t need to do internal linking.

The internal linking might…

Let me…

I don’t want to do this.

The reason we love internal linking is because we can 100% control the anchor text.

And there’s no such thing as over-optimizing your internal link anchor text.

So if you want to point, cheap cell phone links at your cheap cell phone page, you can call them cheap cell

phones all you want internally.

Point it at that page and everything’s fine.

If you get hundreds of external backlinks with the optimized anchor text cheap cell phones, that will get

you penalized because that looks like you’re buying links.

And to be honest, you probably were.

What they’re saying now is that the optimization of internal links may not necessarily carry the same weight that

it used to.

But none of this means stop doing it.

You still need your external links to build your authority.

And when you’re an authority, you get cited in the AI overviews.

You still need the internal links to move the…

Not only move users, but help move the AIs around your site so that they’re getting that supplemental information.

In fact, it’s probably more important now than it used to be.

But it was really important in the beginning when the search engines were first built to treat your internal links like

you would in an academic paper where you’re making that word a link to more information about that topic.

You’re not trying to help the user get more information if they need it.

It used to be back in 1994 that if you had a paper and you wrote something about…

Let’s say you’re talking about cats, but then you mentioned how calico cats are almost always female.

I could make calico cats are almost always female a link to a page about why calico cats are almost always female.

We’re giving the user and in a lot of cases the AI opportunities to get deeper information about specific things that

are on our page.

Don’t stop linking.

Don’t stop getting links.

Don’t stop internally linking.

It’s still very important that you’re doing that.

Sorry, I didn’t mean…

I mean, I like the anchor text as well.

Yeah, I like the whole anchor text thing because what I liked about SEO at the very beginning when I first started,

which was a couple of years after you, was the…

I like the idea of getting rid of the read more as anchor text because sometimes I…

Oh, have you lost me?

Sorry.

Something happened.

Oh, I’m still gonna yap.

That’s fine.

So I remember seeing a load of read more and because back in the day it was a normal blue tech.

And then the bold underline blue itself for the link was always read more.

And I found it annoying that I had to read around the sentence to see what the read more was about

if I was skim reading.

So I actually like the idea of sculpting anchor text because it actually added context to where that link was going.

I get that there are use cases like read more if you do a little bit of a blog post, read more here or click here now.

Things like that.

But yeah, this is still very good in the way that things still kind of need to be sculpted, but again, not in a way

that it should be abused.

And it also helps the LLMs understand what context may be on the other side.

But yeah, it’s still, it’s like word of mouth, right?

It always goes by…

I always compare link building or link acquisition to word of mouth and a high street back in the day.

The more people talked about you and your brand or what you’re saying, then the more it would spread and the

more you would gain authority as that brand selling whatever you’re selling.

That does kind of tie into, I’ve seen a lot of chatter lately that brand mentions, even if there’s no link, are very

helpful now, which is great because it’s a lot easier to get a brand mention than it is to get a backline.

So yeah, I don’t think any of this matters less.

I think there’s a little bit more nuance maybe in how things are being incorporated.

But we should definitely not take away from this article that you don’t need links anymore and links don’t matter

because that is not true.

Yeah.

I mean, I go back to the old school days of link acquisition.

You used to go to the big, big publishers and they were very editorially cautious about linking out, right?

And I get that because I must have been one of a thousand emails that day.

But I know some agencies said, there’s no point if we don’t get a link and went away.

I know me as an agency owner, we kept on going.

But like, you mentioned somewhere, right?

And I’m now wondering that that non-link but mentioned from 10 years ago is now is more

important than just trying to get a link.

And I’m now thinking that the agencies who rejected even going for that publication.

And now we’ve got a brand mentioned that’s years, years old, which again adds to the authority.

So it’s all about the long game, isn’t it?

Earned media is definitely way more valuable than pay to play.

So anything you can do to get that little bit of publicity is going to help, especially with the AIs ingesting all of

that information.

It’s all going to go into coloring and filling out the narrative and the information base that they have about your

brand, which, you know, unless you’re a really, really bad person, it’s still fair to say that there’s no bad publicity.

Yeah.

Unless you’re really right.

So what else has happened?

OpenAI has introduced deep research, haven’t they?

I feel like this month is the deep research month of AI.

It is.

Everyone’s doing it.

Yeah.

Everyone’s doing it.

Well, I’ve been playing around with it because I’m doing a research article for one of the journals.

So deep research is basically it’s not only is it going out and getting more information, more information from more

places and more citations for whatever it is that you asked about.

It’s providing the citations to you.

So it’s.

It’s more of an academic quality research paper.

It’s not just going to answer your question.

Like, how do you know, how do I how do I make hot dogs in the microwave?

Doesn’t need you don’t need footnotes for that.

Yeah.

If you need footnotes, though, this is probably what you’re going to want to do.

Let’s say you are a student and you’re writing a paper, obviously you would not cheat and you would not

plagiarize anything.

But if you need to do research, this will make your research go much faster.

This is this is akin to spending your entire weekend in the library, you know, pulling pulling research from all over

the place and then keeping track of it and building out your own footnotes.

This will do these things much faster and for you.

I haven’t encountered anything yet where it is grossly mistaken.

And if it is grossly mistaken, it’s because there was a misunderstanding in the prompt or the question.

Prompt being the question that I asked.

And that’s another pet peeve of mine.

I’ve been getting very tired of people saying, oh, I’m a prompt engineer.

I feel like that’s sort of an insult to real engineers because prompt engineering is really just understanding how to

articulate your question.

Exactly.

So you’re basically a question asker.

That’s it.

That’s it.

I mean, I can I’m very good at asking questions.

Whilst I know that you can make better prompts, that’s something you learn naturally over time.

Right.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

So that’s the deep research thing.

Part of the thing.

And I also think that there’s less hallucinations as well, because the more it’s thinking, the more it’s validating

what the answer may be.

Right.

Well, and if you ask better questions, if you ask detailed questions like you’re giving it.

I don’t know who’s bouncing the screen around.

It’s very confusing.

I give I ask questions and I give I give up a tomes worth of background information and try to explain the nuance of

the of the answer that I’m trying to get.

I don’t just say, you know, tell me how to bake brownies because it’s there.

There’s things that it needs to know in order to answer the question, provide the answer that I’m looking for.

So I always tell people the more information, the more data points you can put into your initial prompt or

question, the better the result is going to be.

And that’s that’s true for all of the AIs all the time.

The more you get it, the more you give it, the more it can get the more accurate the answer is it’s going to

give back to you.

Yeah.

Although here it’s like it’s you have to have a pro account, right?

It’s two hundred dollars a month.

So, yeah.

And I know that was there Chip mentioned Super Grok as well.

The he’s using or he’s using, which is much cheaper.

And it didn’t make it into the news, but it was really Grok three was released in the last week, which also.

I’ve been playing with Grok 3.

The big difference between Grok and like ChatGPT that I don’t particularly like, Grok’s

memory of your conversation resets every day.

Grok’s not going to take a long term view of conversations you’ve had in the past or things that you don’t like or

things that it knows that you work on.

It’s not tailoring that those things to whatever the question is that you’ve asked.

And I’ve also found that by default, it’s got to.

Did you watch Star Trek Next Generation?

Do you know who Data is?

I wasn’t a Trekker, but I’m knowledgeable enough to call that person a Trekker, not a Trekkie.

I knew that.

OK, that’s pretty good, actually.

So Data was the android, right?

And Data is known for being very emotionless.

Data had a brother who was older, actually built first, named Lore.

And Lore is obnoxious and he’s kind of a jerk.

And he had emotions.

And the whole reason Data doesn’t have emotions is because Lore was a jerk.

And they decided that the emotions were bad and it was better to have a Data than a Lore.

The thing I don’t like about Grok is that out of the box, it’s Lore.

It’s just, it’s got this, it’s obnoxious.

I don’t know what the problem with it is, but they have this tone of obnoxiousness that I don’t like.

So I’ve been using the deep research on Grok.

I haven’t found any problems with it in itself, but the tone.

I’m constantly telling him, like, can you moderate your tone?

I do not like this.

It sounds like you described Elon Musk.

At the beginning you said, well, there’s a conversation that resets itself every day.

And then I don’t like the tone that’s being brought out.

I mean, it’s clearly, it’s clearly a tool that’s been made for Elon and others get to benefit from it too.

Whereas the other one may be able to put out.

I do like feeling that I’m talking to myself and I’ve kind of trained my ChatGPT to be a me.

So maybe Grok was made to mirror Elon and that’s the, because that’s really kind of the tone I get from it.

But yeah, so.

If you need the deep research, the deep research is available at a not $200 a month option if you go with Grok.

And it still works.

But just be prepared for the conversation levels.

So let’s move on.

Tell me about the AI overviews with detailed comparison mode.

Because I haven’t seen this yet.

I haven’t seen it as well.

But obviously it’s being written about.

It was put on Search Engine Roundtable.

I’ll quickly shove it in the chat as I speak.

But of course, the day’s coming where they’re trying to put monetization into AI overviews.

We knew it was going to happen because that’s the only option for it to continue for the likes of Google at the

very least.

I would say for everyone watching and listening here would be make sure if you’re an e-commerce

retailer, store owner of any kind, to make sure you’ve got everything optimized.

Like you would with the traditional SEO practices, populate everything, ensure that those keywords, I’d say, words

that are describing the product or service that it is, very much descriptive in there.

So that it can be, again, pulled up into an AI overview.

But yeah, this is the direction that we’re going.

If you start looking for, I mean, I did it the other month.

I wasn’t trying to buy a car.

I knew I was renting a car.

And there were two that were very similar prices.

And I hadn’t been in either of them.

And I started asking questions such as which one’s better for me in terms of not fuel economy, but it’s my

wife and my kids.

So I need to think of luggage and space more.

And it was very honest.

But now I’m thinking if I start to think of me buying a new car, what is it going to start doing?

Then where is it going to get the information from?

And where is it going to get the products from for, say, accessories and things like that?

And that’s going to be interesting.

Upsell, cross-sell in AI overviews is going to be a huge thing, I think, in the next.

Maybe the latter half of the year as this gets pumped out a little bit more.

So get your merchant feeds very correct and optimized.

Make sure your product schema, which is in our WooCommerce and Shopify apps.

Get all of that set up and make sure it’s present in some form.

And you will start getting mentioned, hopefully, in some of these questions.

The more niche it is, the more of a chance you’ve got.

There you go.

All right.

Rolling on.

ChatGPT Search is more open.

So they’ve expanded it to more people.

More people can use it without having, like, a paid account.

Google’s expanded Gemini 2.0.

And then Microsoft Think Deeper, which is effectively kind of their deep research, is now in Copilot.

And Copilot is available.

Generally, if you’re paying for use of, like, the Office suite on your computer, you’ve got access to Copilot in a lot

of your Microsoft products.

So Gemini 2.0 has new options like Flash Pro and Flashlight.

And I have no idea what any of those things do because I haven’t really played with it.

I do tend to play with the OpenAI stuff a little bit more.

And I’ve been poking around a bit at the Microsoft because I’ve got access to it.

I didn’t find the responses any more thoughtful than some of the other responses that I’ve gotten out of Copilot.

But they’re okay.

I guess you really have to kick the tires yourself to decide how you feel about it.

And then ChatGPT is now a free service with no account requirement.

The difference is with the no account, I’m not going to remember anything about you.

I personally really like the fact that I can teach it things about me so that I don’t have to keep reteaching

it and retraining it every day.

So your mileage may vary.

Have you played with anything besides, like, do you even use ChatGPT?

I do use ChatGPT.

But I’m finding that – I can’t describe when it’s not accurate in my opinion.

But sometimes I ask it something that’s perfect for what I need at that time.

And sometimes I’m – I don’t know.

And then I actually go to Gemini as my choice number two.

And I ask the same questions and see what it brings out.

And I am finding that Gemini – and I can’t explain or verbalize what Gemini, in my opinion, is better at answering

than ChatGPT.

But there’s definitely a pattern starts to emerge.

I think – I don’t know what it is.

And I’m trying to remember what the searches are that I’m doing.

It’s nothing technical or, you know, SEO-y or engineering-y or anything.

It’s like normal, everyday searches, not even product-related.

Solve knowledge stuff.

And sometimes Gemini has a little bit more thought process involved.

I’m using the basic, free, not changing any options, not trying to do anything deep or not using reasoning

or anything like that.

But I found that there’s – this is maybe the year that people choose their go-to, I think.

This is the shopping year of – like we said, there’s loads out at the moment.

And then I think the dust will settle, and there’ll be clear leaders.

And there’ll be – depending on who you are, just like you’re a Mac person or a Windows person, right?

There’ll be the top three, and people will use it that way.

I’m really interested to see how this shakes out because it’s kind of a fun Wild West sort of time right now.

Yeah.

But I definitely have clear favorites.

All right.

You were telling me about this.

I haven’t been able to get this next thing to work.

So using Search Console and GA4 data for SEO.

I use GA4 all the time.

I use Search Console all the time.

It’s this Looker Studio thing that I haven’t quite gotten to work quite right.

So Looker Studio is just like visualizing any form of data beyond.

You know, it can be GA.

It can be Search Console.

It can be all other kinds of things.

And it just visualizes it.

Now, Google – I’ll put the link in here to where this goes and explains that you can use as an SEO, you know,

a mixture, a combination of both Search Console data and GA data and visualize things that you want to do.

So Looker Studio, they made – which is also a Google product, by the way.

They’ve created a template for people that you can use and you can connect your two properties.

And then it gives you more informed data from both sources by combining them and enriching them both.

So I like Looker Studio, but I’m not good at creating reports or templates.

I’m good at receiving them from other people and then reading them.

But I only had a few minutes on this one.

I couldn’t get everything.

I couldn’t get my Search Console property to connect at the time before here.

So we don’t have a nice, you know, screenshot of what it looked like for Yoast.

But feel free for people to go in there and make their own studio.

But you can browse and it does give some nice data on, here’s a keyword that got certain impressions.

This is the page they landed on and then the continuing journey of GA that tells you other things about it as well

and how may that may convert CTR increases and higher conversion rates and stuff.

But it’s free.

It takes two minutes to configure.

Well, not even that 30 seconds to configure.

So everyone check it out.

All right.

All right.

Another thing that came out of Google Search Central is options for reducing the Google crawl rate.

I think especially if you’ve got a bigger site, sometimes your server can start reacting very slowly and you look at

your logs and it’s because one of the search engines is just hammering your site.

You’re like, oh, my gosh, how do I have to?

How can I how can I stop this because my server is going to collapse?

So Google can adjust crawl rates, but sometimes spikes happen.

And when the spikes happen, it used to be that you would just say Google stopped crawling my site.

That’s fine unless you’re one of those sites that needs it to crawl on a regular basis for like news

and get new updates.

Google is saying is you can change the status codes on some of the pages of your site in order to temporarily

reduce the crawl.

But in a way that signals to Google that this is, in fact, temporary.

Everything’s coming back anytime now.

Please don’t take me out of your index forever.

So there’s information and I could go into it, but we’re short on time.

If you go to search Google Search Central, read this article, it will explain when it’s appropriate to use these

different status codes for temporary crawl reductions.

You can request a rate reduction if you need to through GSC, but it doesn’t take effect immediately.

It’s going to be faster to change these status codes if you need to achieve something quickly.

So that’s something if you’ve got problems with the load on your server from the search engines, which is a nice

problem to have, but not something that affects everyone.

So if you are affected, I think we dropped the links right there.

That’s how you do it.

Cool.

All right.

Tell me about the minority report.

Yeah.

So I call this minority report because the news item here is that Meta AI have taken some of their $60 billion

investment that they’re pumping into AI in general.

They got some people.

They put wires and stuff on them and started seeing if they could predict what someone’s thinking and

output it from those neural messages before they get a chance to actually say it or type it.

And they did it with 80% accuracy.

And the reason why I call it minority report, for anyone who’s not seen it, it’s an old film now.

I feel like it’s still new, but it’s probably a good 20 years old.

It’s with Tom Cruise and Colin Farrell.

The first Colin Farrell film I saw, by the way, I didn’t even know he was Irish.

He was that good at doing an American accent.

But anyway, that’s not the point.

The point is that the story is that they could foresee murders happening.

And Tom Cruise and Colin Farrell, I don’t know who the characters were, there was basically an investigation into a

murder that was going to happen.

Now, the closer it got to the actual event, it was as though it was unfocused view and you couldn’t see who it

was or where it was or what was happening.

And the closer it got, the better and more predictable it became to know what was going to happen.

And then they could hopefully stop the murder.

How do, why do I feel as though this is phase one into making that happen?

Because if they can do the short-term future, how long can they push beyond the boundary of what those

possibilities could be in the future and then come back to the present and then figure those things out?

I’m very interested to see what their end goal is with this.

But it’s crazy that they’re even looking at it right now already.

Answer the accuracy.

That’s crazy.

And I was watching on X over the weekend, Elon Musk had a thread where he was talking about that we’re on

the event horizon of the singularity, which was like, wow.

Singularity, by the way, in this context is artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence and then being able

to just, like, the flood of advancements and innovations are just going to be nonstop.

And everything’s going to speed up and human life will change forever and it will no longer be the same.

So, very exciting stuff.

Yeah.

Long times to live in.

All right.

So, this is from Kevin Indig’s growth memo.

He did a study.

He was looking at transactional AI traffic.

He looked at 7 million sessions.

He found that AI chatbot traffic has longer sessions and more page views than traffic that comes from Google.

And chatbots will send more homepage traffic than Google does.

And they keep the users engaged.

I’m not sure which person he’s talking about there.

The Copilot and Perplexity’s page views grew at a much faster rate than Google’s over the past month, basically,

that he was looking at this.

So, what I’m taking away from this is that while it’s harder to get into the citations, when you are cited, the quality

of the traffic that you’re getting referred to you from the AI-driven search is going to be better quality traffic than

that random traffic that you’re getting from regular Google.

So, I think this is another…

We’re not going to be able to avoid having AI-driven search because everything’s going that way.

But it’s interesting that the answers the AIs are giving users are kind of priming them to be more interested

and more curious.

So, that when they do click through, they’re spending more time on your site and they’re spending…

They’re just more engaged users in general.

They’re not accidentally coming to your site and then bouncing off when they realize this isn’t what we want.

They already know this is what they want when they make that click.

So, I think that’s valuable information.

You know you’ve got people who are more invested in your product or your brand once they hit your page.

So, you’re not trying so hard to sell them initially.

Now, we’re trying to win them over more, I guess.

There’s a difference there, but it might be slight.

But I think it’s an important difference.

You’re not quite so much shotgunning, you’re shotgun blasting your information all over the place.

You’re really now courting users that have already expressed a little bit of interest.

Yeah.

I realize because Florie has said, get your Q&A because it’s nearly there.

I realize, as usual, we get into the media stuff.

Yeah.

Well, probably, yeah.

But these ones aren’t as long, I’d say.

This is predictable.

Google market share slips.

AI referrals and regional searches engines rise.

But it’s important to note that whatever that rise is, isn’t even a drop in the ocean.

It’s like a sliver of a drop in the ocean for Google.

Whilst it would still, I think, cause people inside Google’s buildings to still have a bit of cause for concern

that their monopoly is no longer as much of a monopoly.

They’ve still got a lot of monopoly, right?

I mean, there’s no denying that.

But I mean, tables could turn this year.

I think this year and next year is the year that Google needs to prove that they’re worthy of that monopoly.

Otherwise, it’s going to go downhill quite fast.

Absolutely.

Perplexity has also introduced a deep research.

So everybody’s doing the deep research now.

But I don’t think everybody in our market especially requires the deep research.

It’s just useful to know that they are offering that.

Or if you’re planning on going back to school.

If you used to have problems with your papers, maybe you won’t this time around.

Good to know.

And then also in the news, just a few more things to blow through.

Google confirms alt text is not primarily an SEO decision.

I would file this under, yeah, I knew that.

Alt text is there to translate for non-cited readers.

What’s in your picture?

Can you use it for SEO?

Yes.

Is it primarily for accessibility?

Also, yes.

Google expands site reputation abuse enforcement to German sites.

All good things.

Let’s see.

GBP is…

Except if you’re a penalized site in Germany.

Oh, well.

Yes, there’s that.

You shouldn’t have been doing naughty things in the first place then.

No.

Google business pages, which is GBP, now offers chat via WhatsApp and SMS.

No offense, but I do not want people in my WhatsApp.

So I’m just not going to make that connection because I don’t want my phone blowing up.

And then if you’re getting traffic from AI-generated images, you might get hammered soon.

Maybe that’s a good thing because why are you getting traffic for AI-generated images?

Yeah.

There’s more.

This was only half the news.

There’s more on the next slide.

Yes.

I’ll go through these.

Absolutely.

OpenAI created a roadmap.

They’re going to be doing some stuff this year.

That’s all you need to know.

And just hold tight for when they make random product releases.

He did that on X.

The next one, Google updates product markups to support member pricing and sales.

At the moment, I don’t think it’s something we’re looking into as a priority in Yoast’s

offering, but it’s definitely schema you can use.

In the meantime, if you want to, you can use a schema API on WordPress’s solutions as well.

We did include Musk announcing Grok 3, but it’s just also in the news.

But if you’re a fan of X and you’re a fan of Grok, then do use it.

I know that he said it’s a standalone app that’s available everywhere, but I can’t get it in the UK.

And lastly, Google local update drops organic listing when the local listing is present,

which I think is quite interesting.

So if you’re a local person and you’ve got like, I don’t know, a pizza place and you search for pizza

near me and you had an organic ranking, that’s no longer going to be there.

So not in every single case and don’t take my word from it.

It might actually change again in a month’s time and we’ll tell you something else next month.

But right now, if you are in the local listings, it removes you from the organic,

which I think is actually useful, but also not useful at the same time,

because you weren’t that place to be in organic.

But let’s see how that actually works or doesn’t work in the next month.

All right.

So real quick WordPress news.

The roadmap to WordPress 6.8 has been released.

They’re going to be adding zoom out editing, performance boosts, accessibility API updates,

and a new write and design mode to enhance the user experience.

If you’re interested in that, you can definitely go to WordPress and read about it,

but we’ve got to get to the Q&A.

Real quick, Yoast news.

We’ve got two new AI optimized assessments, sentence length and paragraph length.

Yoast SEO for Shopify has a redesigned Webmaster Tools verification page.

And Yoast SEO for Shopify also has some enhancements to the bulk import and export functionality.

If you’ve got a Shopify site, make sure that you update your product and check out all those new features

that we’ve released.

Upcoming events and appearances.

I will let you read these for yourself.

Because you can read it.

If you’re at any of these events, please come by and say hi.

We’d love to talk to you guys.

And the next SEO update by Yoast is going to be on March 25th, which is, again, going back to Tuesday.

Starts at 4 p.m. Central European time, 11 a.m. Eastern time in the U.S., which…

Okay, that…

Sorry, I’m in Central time, so that’s not my time zone.

This all looks correct.

And finally, we are celebrating our 15th anniversary.

So please, if you have not updated or if you have not upgraded to premium and you would like to do so,

or if you would like to get on Yoast Shopify, you can get a 15% discount by using seoupdate2402

or scanning that QR code and you will get a 15% discount to celebrate our 15th anniversary.

All right, now we’re at Q&A.

I know that that’s…

Yay!

There are so many questions and there’s so little time left.

But, well, I hope this was a very, very nice update for most people.

If I’m looking at the questions, I think it was.

Lots of activity in the chat as well.

So let’s get started with these.

So first one, lots of upvotes from Mary.

She says, we’re a non-profit, just trying to get eyeballs on the info we’re putting out there.

What do you recommend for us?

I actually have a lot of experience with not-for-profits.

I wish I could talk to you.

It depends on if you’re local or national or global.

If you’re local, you’re in a great position.

And what you need to do is you need to send out press releases to your local newspaper, to your local outlets,

and announce things.

So don’t just put up a blog post about it.

You want to make an announcement in a press style.

So you’re writing a news article, basically, giving it to the newspaper and letting them put their byline

on it and publish it.

But those types of citations are going to help you become an entity.

When you’re an entity and people ask questions about your area of expertise, you will then get recommended

in the AI overviews.

But that is going to be the quickest way for you to get eyeballs and traffic into your website.

Put up QR codes on your ads as they go out if you do any advertisements.

That way, people can go to your website.

But definitely do the PR outreach and get the citations and get the links back into your site.

And that’s what I would recommend.

Thank you, Carolyn.

I see that a lot of people also responded that they’re in a similar situation.

So I hope this answer was helpful for all of them.

The next question is from Andreas.

And he says, making my website score 100 in every core web vitals category on PageSpeed Insights,

will that achieve anything?

Is it worth the effort?

I’d say no.

Pick your battles.

Pick the ones that are actually…

Is there a reason why you need to spend four hours to change this bit of CSS from here to here?

Because it might get you up 0.1 of the score.

The answer is no.

However, do look at what it’s saying.

Because there might be something…

There might be two things that are bringing something down 7 points or percent, however you want to put it.

There might be one big image that you’ve just got there that someone uploaded that you didn’t know about

that happens to be 700 KB.

And it’s just bringing everything else down.

Of course, replace that.

And it’ll go up.

But if you’re there going, I’m on 97 and I can’t sleep until I get to 100, my advice is to get more sleep.

Don’t worry about it.

I found that for Web Vitals especially, you have to look at who you’re competing against.

Because this isn’t necessarily you have to have the highest score of the class.

This is you have to be faster than the next slowest guy, than the next slowest antelope, I think is the phrase

that we tend to use.

Which means the slowest guy is going to get eaten by the lion.

And if you’re just faster than him, you’re fine.

So I don’t think you need to be perfect.

You’re not going to get an extra bozo button for being perfect.

You’re going to get rewarded for being good.

Just be good enough.

Don’t let the enemy of done.

All right.

Thank you.

The next one is about AI overview.

So Callum asks, with AI overviews in Google becoming more prevalent, have you seen this effect click through

or SEO be affected?

And can we find more data on the effect of AI overviews, which that could have for our websites and SEO?

You’re asking the wrong question.

It’s not affecting SEO.

It’s affecting your organic traffic.

And there’s a difference.

Your SEO is optimizing your website so that the AI chatbots and the search engines can crawl you, which is

going to benefit your visibility.

Are AI overviews and things like that taking away organic clicks?

Yeah.

But that just means that you have to look at what you’re doing with the clicks you are getting.

And if you need to be cited more so that you’re more visible, so that people are aware of you

and then coming to your site,

the SEO is going to need to focus on making sure that you’re being cited as a reference rather than just

ranking high and hoping to get those clicks.

I know that that might be a subtle difference, but it is an important perspective change from the way you

originally asked the question.

Yeah.

And there’s a bit more information just to add to this that’s SEER Interactive.

I think that’s Will, isn’t it?

Will Reynolds.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think it was him who authored this and how AI overviews are impacting CTR.

And there’s some takeaways there for you as well.

Okay.

Thank you.

So I do want to skip to this question since we’re also offering our discount, of course.

So what does Yoast offer to help create content that can be picked up by AI overviews?

And since we’re on the topic of AI overviews, I thought this was a nice one.

And what’s the difference between what Yoast gives us now to what a tool like SurferSEO offers?

I don’t know that they’re offering anything that’s going to help any differently than ours will.

Because getting picked up by the AI overviews requires having unique content that’s adding value

to the overall conversation.

And it requires being a recognized entity that’s an expert in the field.

So those are things that you don’t necessarily need a tool to do.

I mean, Alex, do you have any other?

My memory of Surfer also, because I’ve not used it properly for quite some time, is it actually helps

produce all the content.

And it has that magic button of click to generate and here’s 750 words.

Whilst I’ve heard that it’s good on what it does produce, it’s still not something that I would tell someone to copy

and paste and don’t look at it.

Yoast SEO doesn’t do that.

And we’ve always said we don’t really want to do that, at least for now, until the machines are better than us.

But I’m not seeing that day coming anytime soon.

But yes, I would say if you are going to use Surfer, do it cautiously.

And make sure you’ve got, again, you’re the last decision maker.

And there’s human intervention and editorial going through with anything.

And just don’t do something super on scale either, I’d say.

If you’re using machines to write all your content, you’re not really adding anything to, you’re not adding

anything new because the machines are only repeating things that they’ve heard other people say.

They’re not necessarily innovating.

And that’s what the AIs are looking for.

They’re looking for innovation and they’re looking for unique.

And you’re not going to get that if you’re letting the machine write it for you.

Similarly, if you’re using a content mill before, no one would ever say, oh, yeah, that content mill traffic,

that’s good stuff.

People are going to cite that all day long.

No, they’re not.

They’re just not.

Yeah.

You still need to add something to the web.

Oh, I see we’re already over time.

So I’m guessing this is the end.

So I want to thank everyone for asking your questions, for being active in the chat.

A huge thanks to you, Alex and Carolyn, for again presenting this full hour, giving us a lot of information.

And let’s make sure that next time we have a little more time for Q&A.

Thank you, everyone.