The SEO Update by Yoast – June 2025 Edition

Chris
Hello everyone, welcome. Thank you for joining us today. I am Chris, the Senior Marketing Manager here at Yoast. Great to have you all joining us. So I’m broadcasting today from a reasonably sunny London. I hope the sun is shining where you are too.

I’m excited to be hosting my very first SEO update with Yoast. So yeah, very excited. Personally, this is one of my favourite ways to keep up to date with all the happenings and everything that’s happening in the ever-spinning world of SEO. This month is no exception. So we’ve got some particular highlights that caught my eye that ads are coming to AI overviews, which I think is an interesting addition. And Google AI mode, its reporting has come to Search Console, which I think we all agree is a welcome addition.

So time to hand over to the real stars of the show. We have Carolyn Shelby. She’s fresh from giving the keynote speech at Pubcon Pro in Austin. She’s the SEO powerhouse with decades of experience in news, technical and enterprise SEO. We also have Alex Moss, master of technical and structural SEO, and all-round digital marketing whiz. So as I owe you an excellent hand, I’ll be back at the end for Q&A. So without further ado, Alex and Carolyn, welcome to the stage.

Alex
Thanks for having us, Chris, and welcome.

Chris
Thank you.

Alex
It’s time for news. There’s quite a bit that’s happened, but we’ve been ruthless in doing less topics, but maybe discussing them more because whilst a lot’s happened, a lot of little things have happened as well, haven’t they?

Carolyn
They have. And one of the things that I don’t think, I don’t know if everyone knows that we do this, but we read all of the news that’s happened in the past month and just so that you don’t have to. And this month there were some, there was a lot that happened that maybe wasn’t as relevant to SEO and to people that are small business owners and doing their own digital marketing. So we’ve tried to prune it to make only the most important items make the list. And I hope that, uh, hope that you guys agree. Before we get started though, let’s go through some housekeeping real quick. If you want to ask questions, you know how this works. On the right-hand side of your screen, you’re going to see a Q&A, little, little icon. You can ask your questions there. And then if you have a question that someone else has already asked, upvote the question that you want answered. And we try to answer them in the order of the most upvotes. Sometimes there’s duplicates. We try to consolidate those, but that’s generally how that works. You can learn more about today’s topic. If you’re extra interested afterwards at, it’s, I never know how to say this URL. It’s yoa.st/update-june-2025. So it spells Yoast slash update dash June dash 2025 at that URL after the show, maybe not immediately after, but a little bit after. That’s where you’re also going to find the replay. And I know we always get asked. There will be a recording. You will receive a copy of the recording since you registered for the podcast. And you can also find it at that URL. Let’s see. And then finally, if you would like to continue the conversation later, you are more than welcome to join us at our, we’ve got a Facebook group, which is facebook.com/groups/yoast. And then we also have a subreddit, which is reddit.com/r/yoastseo. So we can continue the conversation on anything we discussed today. You can ask new questions. You can ask more detailed questions. And I just want to throw this out there. Sometimes during the Q&A, people try to ask us very specific questions about complicated issues. And we don’t have enough time to do the research necessary to give you a good answer. But if you go to the Facebook group or the subreddit, we can, it’s just a lot more, it’s a lot easier for us to dig into it and give you a reasonable answer instead of just a high level. This is kind of what it is. May or may not be applicable kind of thing. Anyway, I think that’s enough for the housekeeping. Alex, are you ready to dive into the SEO and AI news from June?

Alex
I am. Let’s do this. What’s gone on first?

Carolyn
Looks like Google expanded ads into AI overviews and added AI mode to the desktop. Have you, you haven’t experimented with AI mode in desktop because I don’t think you have it yet, do you?

Alex
No, we’re not allowed it on our island quite yet. But I’m sure we will soon. We’re usually the first guinea pigs outside of the US, the Brits. But I haven’t even seen AI mode at all. I’m going to double check as we’re talking on my phone.

Carolyn
Do you have it in the wild?

Alex
No. Hello, test. Can I see anything? Nope, nothing. Nothing yet. And I’m using my personal account and my other corporate account as well. And it’s not like it’s in some plus personal account from a very old Gmail before people knew really what Gmail was. I was definitely in the first quarter of a million emails in there. But no, I haven’t seen them. So therefore, I can’t really discuss what’s happening in context other than a screenshot that one person will have seen.

Carolyn
All right. Well, in the US, the users have seen this. The ads are now live in the AI overview. So within the AI overview that is siphoning off all of your organic traffic, now there are also advertisements. And we knew that was coming because Google has to monetize in order to continue functioning because they are not a charity. So I don’t know if it’s good or bad that you haven’t seen it yet. It’s coming. It’s coming outside of the US, but they just they roll it out here first. They’re doing some testing with ads in conversational AI mode. The conversational AI mode is where it’s more of a back and forth where you give it a query, but then you can ask further questions, refining questions about the thing that you asked originally. Like if I wanted to ask about. I’m going to go with coffee makers. Best kind of super espresso, super automatic espresso maker, and then refine it to after it gives me the first set of results, say, yeah, but what makes the least amount of noise? It would then just build on the previous answer, and then I could, based on those results, I could say, okay, what has the best milk frother? And it’s just going to keep, rather than starting a new query each time, it’s just going to keep refining from the results that it’s already gotten. So it actually is kind of a neat feature, but it does take away click-through rate from sites. It takes away a lot of the opportunity for users to do research on the individual sites. So we are absolutely going to see a decrease in the total organic traffic that people are getting to their websites, which is why our strategies for SEO need to kind of evolve as this rolls out. But I think it’s almost good that you guys don’t have it yet, because we can, we’ll be the guinea pigs over in the U.S., and you’ll be ahead of the game in terms of preparing yourselves and getting the new strategies in place before it fully rolls out to Europe and outside of the U.S. As far as the eligibility to be included in the ads, it looks like Google’s automatically approving everyone who’s already an advertiser. So you don’t need to do anything special to get included in this. And it’s meant to be assistive rather than interruptive, which means it’s not going to be jumping out in the middle of the answers and, you know, interrupting the conversation. It’s just there kind of subtly if the user would like to click through. So if we are having a conversation about super automatic espresso makers and I decide that I’ve now seen one that I like, I’ll be able to click through on one that matches that.

Alex
Which is very intrusive at the moment on some of the terms. I think I was doing a talk in Brighton and I did a term of how to teach my child how to tell the time. And the native SERP for Google was just selling me clocks and books. It wasn’t actually at first telling me how to teach my child how to tell the time. It was only after all the product placement that I could then see a video and an AI overview. Which, again, it might be a little bit better, but it’s already stealing some of these visits anyway. And then that end point is now going to be a paid ad. So it will make especially e-commerce, like you were saying, you’re using e-commerce, your example, even more important. But, yeah, that’s going to be an interesting one to float out into the world as it comes. But cool.

Carolyn
When you think about it, though, Google doesn’t make that much money, if any, on the educational types of queries we’re used to doing. The ones that wouldn’t spawn, you know, product feeds. So, you know, I just don’t think they care that much about improving those experiences or whether or not they’re depriving you of clicks. Because their revenue is coming from those product feeds and the commercial queries.

Alex
Yes. Interesting. And what else have Google got up their sleeve? AI mode in Google Search Console.

Carolyn
Yeah.

Alex
Well, they said they were going to tell us to do it. And then it got added in. Not on the 26th of May. It eventually got reported a little bit later to roll out. But there is one thing important to note for the audience, because it affects everyone immediately when it happens, is if it goes in, it doesn’t get separated. So it’s part of your web results. So it’s part of your native ranking. So if you were ranking, I don’t know, sixth for some term that you’re now being pulled out into an AI overview. Great. Okay. Well, it’s going to pull it out, but it’s going to think it’s position one. But so if you weren’t ranking on page one, you’re now going to be one. That looks great. If you were ranking position six, and now you’re in first place on the AI overview, it will say that you’re ranking third. So it’s meshing them all together. It’s not separating them. They’re probably not figured out how to separate them. So this is the only way that they can say they’re providing some data. But it’s getting put in with all the other mess of data that’s already hard to quantify now. So it’s going to be even harder to report. And then they’ll maybe figure out how to separate it, which means there’s going to be another timeline of weird data that you can’t compare to the past because of this V1 version of data. It’s going to be quite a mess, I think.

Carolyn
I think if you get good at normalizing data, that’s going to be like a job function for at least a little while because the technology and the advances are changing so quickly and coming so fast that nobody knows how to track it. And I don’t think any, I don’t, certainly Google doesn’t care that much if you’re able to track it because that’s not affecting their bottom line. So they’re not developing these things with the idea and the goal of tracking in mind. I think we’re just going to have to suffer a little bit and play catch up as best as we can, especially given how fast everything’s going. It’s nice that they’re trying, but I don’t think anything is going to be perfect or even really nice except by accident. And even then it might only stay for a month or two until the technology changes again. And then we’re back to square one. So I think this is going to be, this is going to be a struggle.

Alex
Yeah. And even what the trends may have not provided as well. Like we once had that data and then they took it away because it had no value to give that away to the organic folk of the world.

Carolyn
Well, it had no value to them.

Alex
Exactly. And this might be the same kind of thing, you know, give us the data now and hey, here you go. Here’s a bit of rudimentary. Oh, here it’s on. It’s gone. It’s gone now. But you can find it all in AdWords. I’m sure they’ll be just fine in AdWords to tell you which ad and conversion has come from where. So that’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.

Carolyn
Well, moving on. This is exciting. You want to tell me about this?

Alex
Yes, you will maybe be able to sign in with ChatGPT on other apps or websites or what have you. So at the moment you can connect with Facebook. You can connect with your Google account. This will just be another oauth process of doing things. But this is interesting in a couple of ways. A, it’s just another method of logging in and more people are going to ChatGPT. But as soon as you do, it will be able to know. There’ll be able to be more contextual history and memory about you and that connection. So at the moment it’s kind of just a basic layer of information that you can get when you connect with Google or Facebook, for example. But this is going to know everything about your previous chats. And maybe there’ll be a way of being able to serve content based on your previous conversations with ChatGPT. I keep calling them conversations. They’re kind of not, but they are. I don’t know what to call them. Prompt engagements? I don’t know. I guess they’re something along all of those lines. But it will be able to know all about that and then be able to enrich that. Maybe it’ll start knowing where you’ve been. And browsing, obviously, once you connect, it works both ways. And it will just be able to enrich data. The privacy buffs out there will hate this.

Carolyn
If you think about it from a shopping perspective, I have, I call them chats. You call them conversations. I call them chats. I have chats with ChatGPT about planning wardrobes for trips. If I can log into, you know, Nordstrom or Neiman Marcus with my ChatGPT account, and it’s able to see the things that I look at, the things I click through on, the things I hover on, it will then get a much better idea of the styles that I like. And it’ll know what sizes I filter for. It’ll have a much better idea about my style in general. And it will be able to tailor its advice to, you know, to that. I feel it’s exciting in that it’s like a personal shopper that knows you, but it is frightening in how much data it will have on you. So it’s, I mean, but if you think about it, Google knows all that already.

Alex
Well, I was saying in the chat, do they though? Because they know some stuff, but do they know everything about us? Probably not what you think. Do they know how you tick, how you react to things? It just kind of knows data, not feelings. If you want to think of a feeling or a trigger, a personal trigger as some kind of variable that will be able to be used later. How does it know I like a sunrise or a sunset? It may assume that about me based on, I don’t know, pictures I’ve taken, which maybe it should be looking into soon through Google. That’s going to be the interesting thing. Like, what have I been taking photos of for 15 years that you have now collected in Google Photos? And, you know, you can search for dog and it’ll just show me every picture of a dog. Now imagine how that can tailor around my lifestyle and then how it then serves when you’re trying to discover something. It’s going to be interesting how it plays with the mind a bit more and how marketing can have another level of manipulation.

Carolyn
Yeah, I’m pretty sure they know, at least between like Facebook, the Facebook and the retargeting things. I think they know, for example, that I tend to click on and will filter for green dresses more than I do red because I think I look better in green. And I’ve noticed that the ads that they show me now rarely include red, almost always include green or blue or a cooler shade like that. And it’s at first I thought it was a coincidence. I was like, oh, this is cute. And then I’m like, oh, they’re targeting me. They know what they know. They know. And now they’re going to work.

Alex
But it’s good in one way that it knows your preference, but also bad that you’re not exploring new options. But anyway, that’s all this is from a connect with ChatGPT button, eh? But it goes to show what you can do with it. Yeah. I don’t know if you watched the TechCrunch video or the one of many videos that Sundar interviewed many people and did a press run after Google IO.

Carolyn
He’s been doing this a lot lately. So there were a lot to watch. The interesting thing I took out of this is just that Google’s planning on expanding it. The ads aren’t going away. They’re going to get more integrated and hopefully better. And they’re not planning on selling Chrome. So they’re definitely going to put up a fight and try very hard not to have the U.S. force them to sell off Chrome. That was what I took away from it.

Alex
Yeah. And he was doing that a lot. And he, of course, was talking about AI overviews, insinuating that they’re just the start of changes that are going to come, which are just as dramatic. Even like this is just the beginning of even more dramatic stuff that will happen. But I will very quickly paste in here. This is one of them. This isn’t the only interview. I’ll paste another later. But that’s the The Verge’s view. And in there, there’s a good hour-long, long-form interview with Sundar if you want to check that out.

Carolyn
All right. Moving on, there was a Claude system prompt leak. And there’s SEO impact for that. So the neat thing about this is that now we can kind of see how Claude is functioning behind the scenes. It’s only going to show links if it has to do a search. So if it already knows your answer, your site’s not going to be shown. And this is, I think, pretty consistent across multiple LLMs. If it’s got the answer to the question in its training set, it’s not going to do a search and therefore not going to surface any additional links. But if it does need to go out, especially to your brand, it will then show those links, which is, I think, reinforcing that brand equity is going to be much more important going forward than just having the right answer. It’s going to go out. It’s going to go seek out your brand if the customers are asking for it. So in order to be more visible, you need to have your message be consistent across all channels and train the users to seek you out by your brand name.

Alex
So the same methodology, right? It’s still even just with a new technology wrapped around it. Although next, Gary Illyes. Is it Ilias?

Carolyn
Ilias is how I say it.

Alex
Ilias. So he’s been warning AI agents will create web congestion, which I don’t know where it is. There has been some sort of, I’m going to assume Cloudflare did some thing on it saying that there’s a lot more congestion now and a lot more of these LLMs crawling. Like it was 300 to 1, whereas now the same platforms are 900 to 1.

Carolyn
Yeah.

Alex
Normal crawlers are, what, 20 to 1?

Carolyn
There was an ex-conversation where the guy who runs Gun Dog Supply was saying that he blew through his hosting budget by $800 because of bots crawling and hitting his site really hard. What’s happening, you have to remember with the LLMs, they don’t cache or remember what they find at the live query level the way that Google does. So if you’re a very popular site and it’s a query that people have, it’s a query that’s not in the training set. So the LLM has to go out and get new information every time someone asks. Literally every time someone asks a question, they will go back out to your site and grab that information and bring it back and synthesize an answer. And they’ll do it fresh every time someone asks. It’s not like they’re getting that information and saving it so that the next time someone asks, they already have it. They forget it as soon as they get it. So they drop in like a crane at the, you know, the magic claw crane. They grab the information, they take it and they drop it. And what that’s going to do is if you have a particularly popular site or a particularly popular query, they will hammer your website. And it is going to cause problems for people that are paying for hosting in terms of bandwidth. It’s just going to become a problem.

Alex
So that’s one warning. And there’s, I mean, I guess you can block these, these LLMs if you want to, but then you’re at risk of not being discovered. There’s a, there’s a balance. And again, this is something that may not be a problem in say six months time and there’ll be a better process for these LLMs that will adopt fast. But right now it’s again, one of those things you’re going to have to take, not you, the website and the servers.

Carolyn
Yeah, yeah. So ideally, I think this is going to kind of play into the LLMs.txt proposed standard. Right now we know that the LLMs are frequently ignoring the robots.txt. So there isn’t necessarily a way to block them there. You can block them at Cloudflare. If the LLMs.txt becomes an accepted standard, you could conceivably figure out which pages the LLMs are hitting the hardest, create a markdown alternate of those. Keep the markdown alternates in a little subdirectory. Have the LLMs.txt point at that and then block them from all your real pages. And that would be, that would be a savings. I don’t know if it will 100% solve the problem, but it would be an improvement. But that’s something we can talk about. So we don’t want to spend too much time on it. This is just a reminder, if you have explicit questions, drop those into the Q&A, and we’re going to try to have more time today for Q&A than we normally have. Alex, have you looked into the Perplexity Labs thing? Because I have not. So please tell me what you know.

Alex
I haven’t tried it, however, this is on this week’s list of things for me to do, as well as another couple of things which are also in the news. Perplexity, for anyone that doesn’t know, is just another LLM agent that you can use, just like ChatGPT and Claude, which is another one that was mentioned before. And this has kind of been used more for creative and research purposes, or that was its kind of audience niche, if you want to call it that. But that’s what attracted them, is this is why it’s better than ChatGPT, which is kind of an all-rounder. But where Claude has the project management and the development strengths, and ChatGPT has the all-round strengths, Perplexity is now launching labs, which is kind of getting in Claude’s arena a bit, where it’s now becoming an all-encompassing task management, project management, does a lot more technical stuff, as well as all the cool stuff that Perplexity already has. Maybe next month I’ll have something better to say on what the results of what those things were. But I haven’t had much time to do competitor analysis. Do you know what I mean? I’ve only been using Claude and a little bit of cursor, but I’ve never used perplexity labs to then compare what the output’s like. But it’s exciting because Perplexity are doing a lot, and they’re doing more, again, in further news that we’ll be covering later.

Carolyn
I think I want to give it a try because I did test out deep research on ChatGPT, and while I loved the output and the formatting of the output, including the very extensive footnotes, it hallucinated half the footnotes. So I would love to have some help with that, but I would love for it to be slightly less hallucinogenic.

Alex
Hopefully. In time. In time. You would think that as time goes on, the hallucinations go down. Yeah. And tell us more about AI mode and page indexing, because we were talking about, you know, these LLMs causing more congestion, right? But then here, there’s different elements of indexing.

Carolyn
So Dejan did a big test and released the results here showing that AI mode isn’t using live web content to create its answers. It’s using a separate saved data set. So if you see that it’s getting bad answers or answers that you don’t like and you want to address, even if you find that on your site and you fix it on your site, it’s not going to immediately know that you’ve updated that data. At some point, it’s going to have to refresh its cache, but we don’t yet know how often it refreshes that cache. And this is, like I said, this is AI mode specifically with Google. Google does have caching and Google does remember things unlike the other LLMs. So knowing and keeping in mind that the AI overviews is not fetching real-time data. It’s just referring to something that it’s checked before. It’s very helpful in terms of strategizing how to correct misinformation or otherwise reframe the narrative. Just because you’re indexed doesn’t mean you’re accessible in AI mode. So a page can rank in search but still be invisible to Gemini in AI mode. I’m not 100% sure why. I don’t know that we know. We have a definitive answer to that. But it was interesting to see that that was one of the results of this study. The Gemini app is capable of accessing your full-page content outside of AI mode. And it responds accurately when the content is indexed. And then the other result of this was that the other AIs tend to hallucinate responses more often. So Claude will fetch live URLs reliably. Gemini, Grok, and ChatGPT may not. And I do know from personal experience, ChatGPT is not the greatest about actually reading content when it gets to the page. Haven’t figured out if there’s a pattern yet to that. But if you give it a URL to read, there is a non-zero chance it’s going to make something up about what’s on the other end of that URL.

Alex
Yes. And again, more on that and thinking in a second. But first, before that, I see that Meta has enabled AI ad creation. Oh, sorry. They’re going to by the end of the year. This is maybe good news and also bad news for paid social consultants out there. Because there may be some where the clients will go, oh, I can do this myself now. Or you’ll be like, oh, I can accommodate that client in 20% of the time that I usually do now because I can now get generated videos. What they’ll be like is another story because I know that YouTube, I think, that we’re not covering in another side. But I’m sure very recently YouTube did some, will do some shorts for you and they haven’t come out the best. And it’s just a bit meh and you would, again, prefer to do it yourself and edit it yourself. But let’s see what they’re going to do. I think the other thing to think about is how it’s going to go out amongst all the brands of Meta, right? Because this will be encompassing Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp maybe that are now starting to dribble ads into their platform as well. So it’s going to be interesting how far that spreads. But, yeah, not very SEO-y, but still something that’s happening in this world and is happening in the SEO world as well. But, yeah, tell us about the illusion of thinking because this has been an interesting one from a psychological perspective on how AI works.

Carolyn
It’s interesting in that there was a paper done that talks about how AI isn’t actually using reasoning and it’s not thinking like a lot of people think that it is. And it goes through to explain how the models reacted to different tests and when they broke down. And it used that to demonstrate how it’s just building on past experience and assembling things in probabilities. And it is true that as you build more variables into a sentence or a question or a conversation, it narrows down the options for what’s going to come next, which is how it fakes that it’s thinking. My argument here is not that the machines aren’t thinking like true reasoning would be explained in humans. My thing is that most humans aren’t doing that either. Therefore, to most humans, the machines do think as well as they do because that literally is how they think, if that makes sense.

Alex
Yes.

Carolyn
It’s interesting as we’re going forward, just in terms of how much we trust what they’re doing, the LLMs, understanding not just how the LLMs are thinking, but how other people, including our target demographics, are thinking as well. So that was why I found that interesting.

Alex
Okay. I like it. It’s interesting to know where it’s all going. I won’t spend too long on this because I know we’ve still got quite a few slides and it’s already half past, so let’s get to it. Sundar’s next one was an interview with Lex Friedman. I watched Lex Friedman’s stuff anyway, so I had already watched this before it was published in the SEO folks’ publications. I’m going to not go through everything, but one thing that he does make clear is that he says AI mode will probably, most likely in the years to come, be the default that you will see and that what we see as the native search results might be just a thing we talk about, like the cassette in years’ time, and that it was something that once was, or a search engine that’s like, we don’t like change, we’re going to do it the old way and keep it that way, but apart from that, it’s not going to be mainstream. And it’s an hour or so, I think it’s two hours long. I’ve just shoved it in the chat here that goes right to the point where they start talking about AI mode and SERPs in general. But he also said agentic or agentic or agentic web is coming, which is quite also important because if agents are going to be exploring things for us, again, as an SEO, we’ll need to consider that agents are out there as an additional audience that we have to target rather than the end user nowadays, because these machines will be doing it for us. And obviously, links still matter, which I kind of agree with. Again, the nuanced wordings of what Sundar says, they still matter, but he missed out just as much as they used to be, or even more so, you know, it may not be as important, but they still matter in some sense, right?

Carolyn
Absolutely. Yeah, as the agents start doing the shopping, we’ll have to remember that we can’t rely on images, pretty pictures, and human emotion triggers to reach those agents because the agents are a little bit less triggered by the same things that humans would be emotionally drawn to. So we have to make sure in all things that we’re building for the robots as well as for the humans.

Alex
Yeah.

Carolyn
Another study that came out very recently was what ChatGPT is citing versus what Google AI overviews are citing. This is fascinating because if you’re looking to get more visibility in a particular LLM like ChatGPT versus AI overviews, this is kind of a breakout of where you need to focus your efforts in terms of fixing your narrative, fixing the information that’s about you. So if you want to surface in ChatGPT, you have to focus on Wikipedia, Wikidata, and those types of entries, whereas Reddit is going to kind of dominate AI overviews. And if you have something unpleasant said about you in AI overviews, you could probably go to Reddit and find a way to mitigate that or offset it a little bit. So it was interesting to me that this was available to us. And there are two different… Actually, there’s several different graphs. If you were to click through and go to the full article, which we will make available to you, good stuff. I’d read it, especially if you’re looking at how to improve your visibility.

Alex
Yeah, I’ve just shared it now. Try profound.com. Cool. The next one is the browser company who did ARC, the browser, which I kind of was going to use, but I just could not get used to side tabs. I have to have them on the top. That was the breaker for me, but I know people loved it. Anyway, they’ve discontinued that and they said more things are coming. And this is what that thing is. It’s called Dia. I’m going to not talk about it too much other than the fact that it’s an AI-powered browser. And it does a lot of cool stuff and it understands the context of what you’re doing based on what you’re browsing and what tabs are open. So I’ve put in the link to the browser, which was on a wait list, but I believe if you had ARC, you can download it immediately. And I’ve also put in a nice three-minute YouTube video, which is a nice salesy head of product. Here’s some cool things you can do. But it is quite cool. I’m starting to use it this week and it’s nice and it’s Chromium-based, so it still feels like home if you’ve used Chrome or Brave or whatnot. So, yeah, it’s one to try out. And, again, it’s about getting experience of using AI right from the outset and not even being in part of a search. This is the interesting thing. A browser is going to cut out even the search. When I say search, the search engine or the discovery engine because it is all parts of one thing. But let’s see how it goes.

Carolyn
Absolutely.

Alex
AI is committing crimes, isn’t it?

Carolyn
Mm-hmm. Also, in the news is Disney and Universal are now suing Midjourney for copyright infringement. And I think we knew this was going to happen. I don’t want to get too far into it. Midjourney is getting really good, though. And Disney and Universal are the first two big companies to go after it. I think for people doing business and people with businesses that could be targeted, we all know better than to use copyrighted images in our advertising and on our websites. I think the people that are most likely to exploit this for fun and profit are the creator kiddies who are on the TikToks and the Instagram reels and just engagement farming for money. So it’ll be interesting to see where this goes and how this affects future legislation and rules around how you can advertise and what types of images you can put on your own websites. But I think as responsible business owners, which I know all of us are, we all know better than to engage in these kinds of practices.

Alex
Yeah. Oh, this is an interesting one. They’ve removed seven different structured data types from Google support. So their reasoning was it wasn’t useful. People weren’t using it, that kind of thing, which I guess if it’s true, it’s true. And there’s no point in processing those things. And I guess if you have done any of these seven and implemented any of them in the past, which includes book action, course info, claim renew, estimated salary, very niche, learning video, special announcement, which I know was deprecating anyway, because that was all COVID related, vehicle listing, then it’s not going to come out in the way that it once said it was going to. I don’t think many of them were old. In a way, I remember seeing some of them in the last two years. And that also doesn’t mean that if the schema is there, that means that it’s useless. It’s just not being used by Google search results to be output as something as a rich snippet. That’s all.

Carolyn
Yeah. Just to clarify, just because they’re taking something out of the out of the SERPs, the special SERPs, doesn’t mean that you need to strip it out of your website. If you already have it there, it’s not going to hurt anything to keep it. And it’s not entirely assured that adding it is going to, it may not help, but we don’t know that it’s not going to help. And it certainly won’t damage anything. So if you’re comfortable using it and you’ve already got a system that has these things, you know, integrated into it, you don’t need to make any radical changes. I would just acknowledge that it’s not going to be doing anything special for you in the SERPs, but continue doing what you’re doing anyway, because adding additional context is never a bad thing.

Alex
No.

Carolyn
Let’s see. Google softened their stance on automated translation using AI. This was coming. Go ahead and use AI translation all you like. It’s actually pretty good. It’s better than some of the Google translate. It’s better than a lot of the other translations I’ve seen. It’s not necessary to have all of your pages translated into other languages. I think the AIs are getting good enough that they’ll translate for you on the user’s end so that you don’t need to maintain eight different versions of your website in different languages. I think this was a natural progression and I’m not terribly surprised by this. I think the only useful information that’s coming out of it is I would be, if I’m building a new website, maybe less inclined to maintain all the different languages that I want to serve. I would have my primary language and then I would let Google or ChatGPT or whatever handle the translations for the users because that’s just not something I need to worry about anymore.

Alex
Yeah. Which is good news. It means you don’t have to mess about as much. We’ve still got a few, so let’s keep going. This is just a continuation of before, so Google IO introduced an AI mode and now from the 13th of June, it’s being rolled out to the U.S. a bit more. Again, getting a big time, but for people who are logged out and for everyone out there, which is going to be interesting. So maybe this time next month we’ll be chatting about how I’ve maybe got access to it. So let’s see what happens then. Let’s keep going. AI overviews.

Carolyn
That’s right. They’re launching audio AI overviews so that you can listen to it instead of have to read it. And that’s really the gist of it. And I don’t think the effect is going to be any more dramatic than AI overviews already are. It’s just interesting that this is now being added. And I think it’s exclusively the result of the fact that the AI language or voice generators are getting so sophisticated. So it sounds good. It reads naturally and it’s a nice service to offer people who are more auditory than they are visual.

Alex
Yeah. And helps, you know, visually impaired as well, which is going to be even better.

Carolyn
True.

Alex
Okay. So this was a graph by Satoshi Kimura, who did a little bit of study. It’s just a LinkedIn post, but he showed that 97% of URLs linked in AI mode appear in the top 10 organic results. What does that mean? It means that someone who asked us before whether SEO is dead. I think this graph shows the answer as to whether it’s dead or not. I will go with no. And the reasoning is, is because even though it picks stuff up in AI mode or whatever the other LLMs are, it’s still got to find something and give back something. So having that discoverability there, you know, just because sometimes a fan out query, for example, may go to a page three or four ranking, that doesn’t mean it isn’t doing one, two, and three to get to number four. It’s still doing that process to see what it needs to see to synthesize the answer to bring back. But it does go to show that us working on our sites and doing proper, good, best practice SEO will, again, get us discovered in all kinds of platforms, right?

Carolyn
I think it’s safe to assume that in order to be cited, you first have to be ranked. So you need to continue doing your standard SEO to get ranked, and then you might get cited. But you will, the odds that you’re going to be cited if you’re not in the top 10 are very low. They’re not non-zero, but they’re low. All right, let’s look at what else is coming. ChatGPT is updated to improve tracking analytics with more UTM parameters. I don’t need to go through all of this with you. The fact is, they’re trying to help you track the traffic from ChatGPT better. So if you’re interested in reading specifically about what they’re doing and what’s changed, we’ve got the URL for you later. The TLDR is you can watch for ChatGPT as the UTM code in your traffic to see if you’ve got any spikes coming.

Alex
Yeah. And one thing to note, if that wasn’t happening before, and then you just look, and then someone looks at a report at the end of July and goes, whoa, what happened here? It was because it was introduced today, not because you’ve had sudden visibility that wasn’t there yesterday. That’s worthy of noting for people who are doing reports. It was there the whole time.

Carolyn
So tell me about the rollout of the update to ChatGPT search.

Alex
Just that the capabilities are getting better. And it’s getting, I think essentially it’s just ramping up to make sure that Gemini isn’t going to take back any of this, any of this share of voice that ChatGPT in general has got. That and all of the competitors are in this very, very aggressive race. I mean, we’re looking at Perplexity before, and they’re doing a lot of stuff, and everyone has to run around and chase each other’s tail to make sure that they’re the winner. We just get to sit back and watch all of these people stress out and produce good products for us to mess around with, and we just get to see which one wins the tech fight, right?

Carolyn
Yep.

Alex
But it’s fun. It’s fun.

Carolyn
Google’s rolled out Talk and Listen, which is, it’s in Search Live in the labs. This is different than the audio of AI overviews. This is more of a, when you’re in AI mode, you can have a back and forth conversation rather than a back and forth typing conversation with AI mode. And that’s really all this means. They are going to add a camera-based version, so you can take pictures of things and then do analysis on, or just show it what you’re looking at and have it tell you what it sees or gives you some sort of analysis about the visual. So it’s just an expansion of what would be happening in AI mode anyway. And then let’s go through also in the news real quick, because I know we do have WordPress and Yoast news to get to.

Alex
Okay. Yeah. So xAI pay Telegram 300 million to integrate Grok into the chat app, which means that’s like a degenerate platform on another degenerate platform. So let’s see what that offspring gives. Google publishes guidance for sites incorrectly caught by SafeSearch filter, which I hope isn’t a lot of you guys in there. But if you’re in the very unfortunate circumstance of getting on some being flagged as an adult site, there’s now better guidance, more concise guidance on getting out. Data visualizations and graphs of finance queries in AI mode, which I’m sure that about one person needed inside Google. So they made sure that they had that so they could get to some target. Firefox quietly starts testing Perplexity AI as a built in search engine, which I find interesting because Perplexity is getting buddies with Firefox as a browser. But but then six days later, Perplexity announced that they’re creating their own browser called Comet. There’s a there’s a join wait list that you can you can all join. And I think that was it. Right. What now have we got now that we’ve done SEO and AI?

Carolyn
WordPress news. So let’s see. WordPress has shared that AI is going to play a stronger role in web publishing. WordPress has its own like AI team now that’s going to be focused on enabling AI integration without embedding the generative AI into the core. So that’s interesting. It’s just an interesting thing. But the goal is to make WordPress more AI accessible. I think there’s a lot of runway here for them in terms of making improvements to the product itself. So I’m excited to see where they go with that. They do want to build with open standards, which is encouraging. And they are asking for community involvement. And we’ve got links and information on how you can do that. There’s discussions at make dot WordPress dot org slash AI and the core AI slack. And that’s where they’re going to be shaping the roadmap. So if you’re a developer and you’re interested in participating, those are the places that you go to. Alex, do you want to introduce us?

Alex
Yes. So lastly, as WordPress news, we’re in the news this month because we released a version of Yoast SEO premium that had a small little bug in. And it seems to have blown quite out of proportion in some posts on social that it’s very damaging, which I can tell you right now it’s not. And I’ve asked a few people inside and outside of search engines who confirm that fact. But here’s what happened. We added some classes that we used as part of our AI optimize feature. And this only happened in one version of SEO premium and only happened in the classic editor if you went into that post and edited that post. So whilst someone on social may say this is what it’s doing and it’s a risk, it’s actually not. And all it was was a class inside of a P tag in HTML. What I can tell you is that we fixed it, the patch is out, and it’s also got a under the hood fixer to get rid of anything that might have happened. But all is resolved and all is peaceful.

Carolyn
This was a tempest in a teacup. There is a it was confirmed by many, many industry leaders that this is a not a big deal. B, there’s tons of different things that inject CSS classes into your content all the time. I performative rage in the form of engagement bait. Engagement farming is the way I look at it. But it’s fixed. Everything’s fine. Everyone can take a deep breath.

Alex
Yes.

Carolyn
Let’s go into some Yoast news real quick and then we’ll get to your questions. We, Yoast, launched an llms.txt generator. This is because AIs can’t see your whole site. They cherry pick where they land. The llms.txt is kind of like a treasure map to all the good stuff on your website. We’ve added a generator to the free version and to the premium version. It’s opt in, not opt out. So it’s not on by default. You do have to go into your settings and turn it on if you’d like to try it out. This is the early release of it. We’ll be iterating and making improvements. But there’s no tech skills required to get this turned on. That being said, these markdown pages are very easy to handwrite. If you would prefer to handwrite it, I invite you to do so. It’s not hard to do. But if you’re one of those people that doesn’t want to do it by hand and you’d rather have it generated for you, that’s why we are offering this service. So no coding required. And then can you tell me about the Google Docs add-on? Because I have not yet used that.

Alex
Yeah. So all the readability and SEO analysis that we do, we have to do that in post edit or page edit in WordPress or Shopify, right? But now we’ve got a Google add-on. So if you’ve got Yoast SEO premium, it comes as a part of it. If not, you can pay monthly just for this add-on access that does all that analyses inside Google Docs as your typing live, which I know has been the bane of quite a few creatives over the years that they have to make something in Google Docs, which they’re all collaborating on together. And then they put it in WordPress. Then something doesn’t pass in one of the analyses. You have to go back and forth. That’s all over now. And now you can do it all in there, all as one. I will paste in the nice little blog post about it. And that, I think, is it.

Carolyn
That is it. So just a reminder, we are celebrating our 15th anniversary. So if you would like a 15% discount on all Yoast products, you can use this discount code on yoast.com. And I believe this expires on the 4th of July.

Alex
Amazing.

Chris
Great. Thank you very much, both of you. Very thorough, informative update as ever. Let’s get to the Q&A. I know there’s a lot of eagerness to get to the Q&A, which is always also insightful. So we’ll start with the most upvoted question. So can Google track AI uses patterns, style, turn, structure, and downrank such content?

Alex
No.

Carolyn
I mean, okay. No, they could. But that’s not going to happen. They’re looking for garbage content that doesn’t provide any useful information. It has less to do with the delivery and more to do with the facts. So just make sure that you’re providing useful information that is helping someone answer a question, preferably in a unique way.

Alex
Hope it answers the question. Friends.

Chris
Great. Thank you. Next question. The next most upvoted. Also, another good question. So are Google… Let’s get this in. Are Google ads now less effective if more users are searching in ChatGPT?

Alex
Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s someone inside Google’s having a bit of a sweat this year over what’s going to happen because more people are moving to ChatGPT as their everyday search. Like we were even talking about it before, Carolyn. Like you’re now using it more than say Google. And nowadays, I’m not personally yet because of the searches that I may or may not do. But it is very interesting. But these ads, like we were saying before, are going to get a bit more high quality of a visitor at the end? Not at the end, but that’s what you’re going to attract as time goes on because it’s going to be more contextual to whatever conversation or chat’s happening. But from Google’s point of view, they’re going to want to make that attractive, which is why they’re going to be pushing out AI mode a bit more and Gemini a bit more and pushing the ads into there. And ChatGPT will just be another ad network for a paid consultant to have to master the day it comes out. But I would like to think it’s going to use the same technologies and stacks to read stuff so it can hit the ground running. Because we all know, we all know the day that ChatGPT say you can do ads and this is where to go. Like God help the server admin who’s looking at that that day because it’s going to be busy and people will adopt it fast. If not just to experiment, right?

Carolyn
So I had a conversation with a client just yesterday actually about this. I think if you’re using ads to generate leads, like you’re promising information in exchange for their contact information and that’s what you’re using the ads to get. I don’t think those ads are going to work anymore, to be perfectly honest. Because the information the user’s trying to get, they’re probably going to be able to get from the AI overview or from ChatGPT and the LLM experience. Where your ads are still going to be valuable would be getting the user directly to a product to purchase, getting the user to your brand. But if you’re using it for lead gen, based on the promise of data, that data is already going to be available. And I don’t think you’re going to be able to gatekeep that anymore. So I would personally shift budget into more product-based or brand-based ads and not, I think the money that you’re spending on lead gen is probably, depending on the type of thing you’re using to entice the user to come, I think there’s going to be diminishing effectiveness on those ads.

Chris
Awesome. Thank you. Next question. So do we offer any cheat sheets or similar to help new SEO folks get up to speed quickly? Perhaps our SEO check is a good place to start. Our new SEO check is a good place to start with.

Carolyn
Well, and we also have the, we have a bi-weekly webinar called Intro to SEO. And it happens, I think, every other Tuesday. And it’s a situation similar to this. But it’s all about getting started with SEO. And I think you might want to look into that.

Alex
I’m going to copy the event URL now for people. Yes. There you go.

Chris
And also, do check out our blog. We’ve got a lot of intro to SEO basics and also different sorts of categories.

Alex
And also to add here, don’t always trust what a ChatGPT says when it says, what’s the SEO 101? Because I did that as a test and it definitely forgot some stuff. Like one of them was canonicals. And I was like, and I even chatted back and said, what about canonicals? And it was like, wow, what’s a great observation. And part of me is like, no, no, no. You’re supposed to make that observation. Not me. Again, don’t trust the LLMs yet. Do a bit more reading than just asking it that.

Carolyn
I changed the slides so that people can see the question. So just so you know.

Chris
Good idea. We’ve had plenty of questions on generative search optimizations and everything that incorporates it. So, yeah, one that kind of covers. But general question. Please address best practice for generative search.

Carolyn
We have articles on that on the Yoast blog. There’s no way we could go through everything here. But I would recommend heading out to the Yoast blog. In fact, I will make a note to make sure that we have some recommended reading sent out in the summary email. How about that?

Chris
Yeah, great. Yeah, it’s a tough question to answer so concisely. But, yeah, we’re writing a lot about it on our blog. So that would be the best place to have a look. Okay, another popular question. How does Google evaluate experience in EEAT in AI written reviews, guides, or tutorials?

Alex
Hmm. Hmm. There. So. It’s not been super concise about it. Funnily, when they tell us to be concise themselves, they’re not concise when explaining everything. Right. But it does go with Internet history, doesn’t it?

Carolyn
So I think what they’re looking at in terms of experience is they’re looking for, they’re looking at your entities and they’re looking at how your entity is connected to things within that topic area. And it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s complicated. It’s largely unknown and is a complicated thing to try to explain in this context. Um, but you know what? Maybe that is a topic I could write about for the blog.

Chris
Yes. Thank you. And let’s have a look here. Yeah. Nice specific one to Yoast. So let’s have a look at this one. Um, how does the llms.txt update and where in Yoast plugin can we see it? How, sorry, how often does the llms.txt update and where can we see it?

Carolyn
I believe right now it’s updating once a week. However, I found that if you, if you make a change that you want it to grab, if you deactivate the feature and then reactivate the feature, it’ll generate a new one right away. So you can force it to update quicker. Um, and I believe if you go under settings, you know how you can tell how I, how I think, cause I have to shut my eyes and like move my hands. Um, if you go under settings, you know, there’s those tiles with the pictures. There will be a tile with a picture call for the llms.txt. And that’s where you turn it on. So you go to the Yoast part, then settings.

Alex
Yeah. And the settings within that. So you can actually, um, so you can actually make some choices as well. Some of it’s dynamic as well. So if you’re posting every single day, it will update. llms.txt will update the moment that you publish, um, a new post to make it fresh. Um, but it does a few little things under the hood to, um, curate the .txt file, which, um, which is quite cool. And there’ll be a new iteration of it in the next, I’m not going to say when, cause I don’t want to put pressure on the product team now. But soon there’ll be a new, there’ll be a phase two coming out that has some feedback from version one, and some extra enhancements, um, as well, which will be cool, which will be cool to do.

Chris
Yeah. And a follow up. So how likely do we think, uh, llms.txt will be up, will be adapted by the LLM’s.

Carolyn
So my hope was that by making this available to 13 million users, we could increase the adoption rate by the end users so much that the LLM’s would have a really hard time not paying attention to it. So it, um, it remains to be seen. I, I feel like there is value to this. So I, I think, I think the odds are good. Um, but I am not a, uh, a fortune teller. So.

Alex
Yeah, I would say that I would, you don’t know what the adoption is yet, but because, well, the, the argument from my side, the pros outweigh the cons of doing this. And at the moment it’s, as long as you’re again, white hat and you’re not trying to abuse the .txt file and you want to be honest, it’s just an honest overview of what’s happening. If a platform wants to take it, they can, if they choose not to, they’ll go in the other way and it’s free to make. It doesn’t take up much time. I mean, it takes less time to make one than, than today’s update, right? It’s, it’s not, it’s not hard to do. It doesn’t create any technical hurdles other than someone uploading the .txt file. If you wanted to make your own. So why not? Why not just, just have it there. And we wanted to make sure if it was adopted, that it’s, you guys are all sorted already.

Chris
That’s it. I’m afraid that is time. An extra one minute. How generous. Thank you very much for joining. Your hour of SEO is, is up. Um, I hope you, I hope you enjoyed it. I found it as insightful as, as I did and looking forward to seeing you in the next update in July. Thank you very much, everyone.

Alex
Yes. Yes. Oh wait, no, there isn’t, there isn’t one in July. That’s the one thing I’m leaving you with is that there is one more slide here, Carolyn, with the next, the next one. So next month, the end of July, we’re not around, so you can all have a nice summer holiday. And we’re actually here at the end of August on the 26th with my good self, Carolyn and Marina instead of Chris. Um, but I think we might send you something nice in the meantime at the end of July, because we’ll miss you.

Carolyn
Well, we’ll send you a postcard from vacation with some, with some recommended reading while we’re gone.

Alex
Yes. But thanks for coming everyone. And that was really good. There was lots of chatting in there. And so whoever thought that I had an agent replying in the chat, just know I’m, I’m that good. That’s me. I’m typing. Or is it?

Chris
See you soon.