The SEO Update by Yoast – March 2025 Edition

Marina
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, dear esteemed guests to the March edition of the SEO update by Yoast, the update that lets you know what is hot and what is not in the SEO world. We’re going to talk about search engines, mostly Google. We’re going to talk about AI, and most of the time we’ll talk about Google and AI at the same time. And we won’t forget to mention what all of this news means for people who own websites and are doing their best to gain or preserve visibility. My name is Marina. I’m a researcher and developer at Yoast. Behind me, you can also see what the office of Yoast looks like. But today I’m just the butler. So if you hand me your coats and jackets, I will introduce you to the SEO experts in the house. We shall begin with the lady. Carolyn Shelby will make us feel at home with her extensive experience in news, SEO, technical and enterprise SEO. And she welcomes you along with Alex Moss, a gentleman with a deep knowledge in structural SEO and all digital marketing SEO. I leave you in their hands. And I’m going to pop back up at the end for dessert and Q&A.

Alex
All right. All right. What a great intro Marina did just then.

Carolyn
Absolutely. Welcome, everybody. I’m looking for the slides. So this is the March edition of the SEO update. I am doing this on the road. So you notice I do not have my normal background in the not yet sunny San Diego, California. Alex is coming to us live from probably never sunny.

Alex
There’s a bit today, but my office is downstairs. So I kind of ignore the bad weather and also try to ignore any good weather that happens because I don’t really want to know about. I want to be outside when it’s nice. Right.

Carolyn
Absolutely. All right. So I’m looking for the slides. Do you see the slides?

Alex
No, they’re not in the thing. You’ll have to reshare the screen again.

Carolyn
Huh.

Alex
But whilst Carolyn’s finding that, I can do at least the first slide before it gets shared again, which is feeling free to ask questions. So I don’t know which way I’m pointing, if I’m pointing in the right direction or that direction. But one direction, there’s a little icon where the chat is, there’s a question mark, and you can ask questions inside there. And anything that you do ask can be upvoted. And the most upvotes will answer first.

Carolyn
That’s right. Alex, can you share the slides from your computer?

Alex
Yeah, sure. Hold on. Cool. Here we go.

Carolyn
Awesome. Thank you. All right. So let’s, in case you’re concerned, because a lot of people are concerned, that you will be able to get a recording of this after the fact. So if you miss it, if you have to bail early, we’re going to send this to you. You can access it at this URL, which is, I always want to try to say it, but there’s no way to say it. It’s yoa.st/update-march-2025. So that is where you’re going to find those. I would love to continue the conversation with you guys on one of our social media groups. We have a Facebook group that’s just /group/yoast. Search for Yoast, you’ll find it. Or on Reddit, we have a subreddit called /yoastseo. If you have a question that we don’t get to in this broadcast, because we don’t always, go to one of these groups and ask your question there. You can ask a more detailed question. You can also get a more detailed answer. So we’d love to continue the conversation and we’ll go from there. Also, if you are interested in more entry level, how to get started with SEO webinars, we have one every other week. The next one is March 27th, which I believe is actually in two days. So if you are around and you’re interested, you can either find it on our website or you can scan this QR code and it will take you right there. But it’s great if you feel a little lost here and you want something a little bit more foundational, I think that would be a good opportunity for you.

Alex
Excellent. Okay. Well, has it been another busy-ish month? Let’s find out. It kind of has been a slow-ish news month, but there’s still stuff to talk about. There is still stuff. Like Chegg. Chegg. Tell me who Chegg is because I don’t know who Chegg is.

Carolyn
So this is a company, they specialize in educational products. They make, what this particular aspect of their business is concerning is they do, they have a subscription-based online tutoring thing where you can pay, I don’t know what it is, let’s say 20 bucks a month to have access to someone that will help you, give you step-by-step instructions on how to solve a problem, like a math problem, or give you step-by-step instructions on how to perform a scientific experiment suitable for a fifth grade science fair, that kind of stuff. And then they also have tutors that you can consult with that will help you via Zoom kind of remotely. They started making money hand over fist during COVID because obviously everyone’s locked in their homes and people were, actually, kids were using it to cheat on online exams, but that’s a different story. Now they’re all bent out of shape because AI overviews is stealing all of their traffic because you can get step-by-step instructions for how to solve a math problem. You can get step-by-step instructions for how to do a fifth grade science fair project. You can get all these things for free from the AI overviews. So they’re suing Google saying that Google is basically destroying their business model. Their stocks dropped 24 percent, they’re considering selling, you know, they’ve seen a big drop in student subscriptions. While I feel sorry for them, this is the same thing that’s happened to a lot of other industries. Google is not deliberately stealing their traffic. It’s just the thing that they were monetizing is a thing that you can now get for free somewhere else. This is, I think they’re going after Google because they’re thinking that if they’re going to lose the traffic and they’re going to lose the subscriptions, then obviously Google must have stolen that content from them and they need to be paid by Google for the use of that content. And they’re trying to like kind of make up the revenue that way. I’m not a lawyer, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. I don’t think they’re going to win this. This doesn’t seem like something that’s winnable. This is the same thing that happened to newspapers when digital started replacing print. They’re going to have to change their business model and there’s just no… This is not going to hurt AI as much as this is going to hurt, Chegg.

Alex
Yeah. Yeah.

Carolyn
It’s the long and short of it.

Alex
That’s interesting that they’re accusing of theft, right? Well, I don’t know if they’ve used the word theft in it, but to me, I always thought that Google was the facilitator in your visits, not the reason why that you have those visits. It’s a search platform, just like Bing is. Why aren’t they suing Bing and every other search platform that might be using a way to take information and bring it out into a search result? Because it’s not just Google doing that. They’re just the monopoly. They’re the biggest one.

Carolyn
You know what this reminds me of? Do you remember travel agents?

Alex
Yes.

Carolyn
Like physical people that you’d have to go and talk to them and tell them what flights you’d like and where you’d like to stop over and all this other jazz. And they’d make your hotel reservations and they’d do all this stuff for you, right? Do those even exist anymore? Because I haven’t seen a travel agent advertise anything in years. It’s like ring around the collar. It just doesn’t even exist anymore. We used to see them advertised all the time. They don’t exist because the internet replaced them. And I’m sorry, but AI is going to replace online tutors and the easy kind of information where it’s just I just need to know how to solve this problem or I just need to know the steps to create this thing that I have to create for school. And it’s not theft. It’s just this isn’t information that was unique to anybody in particular. And I’m sorry.

Alex
I’m seeing a lot of callback on the chat here because they say that there are travel agents. And I was going to say, there is a travel agent that’s based only a few minutes walk down the road from me. And like someone like Zach said, it’s only available. It doesn’t exist to anyone under 35, which I get, but I’m older than 35 and I’ve never used a travel agent. But I think that’s because I’m highly organized, but my parents would are highly disorganized and do need a travel agent because they, well, I don’t know. They’re, they’re an edge case. I would like to call them an edge case. They don’t know the inside. I’ve stolen all technological, technological skill from their brains as I was born. They don’t know how to do anything, but I mean, they’re not the only people around there, right? Who do need it. But I do know someone else who does more high-end ones. Like I want, I’ve got X amount of budget and I want this, that, and the other as an amenity of a holiday. And they go out like a headhunter kind of thing.

Carolyn
Yeah. Well, I mean, so they do technically still exist, but you can, a lot of the people that would have had to go to them before a lot of their, a lot of their, their customer base does it themselves on the internet now. So you can still get them. You’re still going to be able to get an online tutor, but the number of people that are going to need to get that service is going to be less because there’s a lot of people that are just going to be like, I’m going to save my money. I’m just going to do this myself. It’s, it’s easier that way. So the point is, so it’s, I don’t think, I don’t think the genie or the toothpaste is going back in the tube on this one. It’s, it’s, this is just life and evolution. And I’m, I’m sorry for this company, but suing Google is not going to solve their problem.

Alex
Just like a paper company has to adapt to a digital world, right? They have to do something about it. Adapt, which is unfortunate, but it’s not just them who were at the edge of the knife, so to say. But anyway, enough about theft. What’s the future of the internet like? Smaller communities and going off like one big one. I think here we’re probably talking more about the way in which we engage socially, organically, instead of using X, you’re going off on your blue skies, your mastodons of the world and your discord or wherever you are based on your audience. But it’s interesting to know how, like, you said it was like more like oceans and ponds as a, as an example.

Carolyn
Yeah. I kind of look at it before it felt like everyone was in the same place. So we were all in one big ocean. And if you wanted to fish, because you’re a business and you’re fishing for customers, you only had one place you had to worry about fishing because everybody was in the same ocean, right? So this is dividing us up into little disparate ponds or lakes. Yes, ponds and lakes, depending on the size. It just means that you’re going to have to be conscious of where are the fish you’re trying to catch and make sure that you’re fishing in the right ponds. And if you need to fish in multiple ponds, you have to divide your resources and allocate them accordingly and make sure that you’re doing the things necessary to maintain visibility in all of these different places rather than just focusing all your efforts on, you know, Google or Facebook, because people are dividing up and they’re kind of self-segregating almost into affinity groups. But it’s, I think it’s a backlash. You know, it got really kind of crazy the last few years. And there were a lot of anger, a lot of hurt feelings. And I think to maintain peace, people are self-segregating into communities of like-minded compatriots.

Alex
But this is good. I mean, we’ll talk about it again with other related news items. But this is like the social version of long tail. You’re like, you’re going into a smaller audience. But when you reach that smaller community, the quality of the people within it, and therefore potential conversions on whatever you’re up to is going to be easier or higher. It’s going to be higher, it’ll be a higher achievement and you’ll be able to do more and better just with a smaller pool of people. If I go back to your pun. Which is interesting because now, AI search and the way in which we search in general about anything and do any research is now finding that brand mentions improve visibility. Well, that’s quite obvious, isn’t it? Right?

Carolyn
I think we’ve been saying that with the, you know, focus on EEAT and those signals are going to be helpful. And it’s not necessarily that those are direct ranking signals, because they’re not. But the the mentions just it doesn’t even have to be a link just getting your brand mentioned and building your brand is going to improve the odds that you’re mentioned by name in in these AI search results because they need clues to indicate to them that you’re something people are interested in. And the better known your brand is hopefully for good things, the more likely it is that that’s going to bubble up to the top as being something the AI answer should mention.

Alex
Which is good because now the AI mode or AI overview, however you want to call it now, because they’re merging into the same thing is like it’s using a fan out technique, which is what they described it as where you will do a search and then the LLM will do multiple smaller, more specific searches, bring the answers back, collect them together and present it to you. Great. That that is really nice. But it’s also good to know that you don’t need to be there’s no race to number one as much anymore. And as long as you’ve got a good brand presence and sentiment, you’ll be mentioned. It sounds weird, but offline, like in your hairdressers, you know, like when people are waiting, it’s that word of mouth inside a small community that that really makes that sentiment go up. And then you’re going to be mentioned in some site that may have been on page three or four, but someone mentioned you well four years ago, and it’s actually coming back because it’s found that from its research.

Carolyn
If you think about it, the computer needs a way to make a decision about whether or not you’re a useful resource, right? So the more places that you’re mentioned as being a useful resource, the more social credit, social proof you have that you are that useful resource. And that’s going to help them decide to choose you over somebody that doesn’t have as much social proof. So this is, and it’s really kind of getting back to the way PR and marketing used to be before the internet, where we paid to get mentioned by the New York Times, and we paid to get mentioned by Life Magazine, as seen in time, all those things, all those little things, those mentions, whether you paid for them or not, are going to help you show up in these AI overviews.

Alex
Which is good. I like this. This is a good way of thinking about bringing results back. While the cool stuff is happening with Google is that they are now, they found that 10% of younger Google searches, or when you say younger, just younger people who do Google searches, start with a circle to search. And for anyone who hasn’t used it, there’s the icon at the bottom of your, the bottom of your screen. I’ll unlock my phone so you can see it now. At the bottom of your screen, there is a lens icon, and you can use that and you can take a picture. And when you do take the picture, you can like squiggle on it. And I’ll use the matte side so you can see. You can do that around a circle, or you can squiggle like you can see there. And in this illustration, they’ve done it over the orange bag. So now circle to search essentially will understand that you’ve basically want to search about that orange bag and it will bring out results. Hopefully product results, if you’ve got your schema set very, very well and matches to it along with the images. But it’s interesting to know that the younger generation take a picture. So they’re not even using words or conversation at this point. They just take a picture, go, “Ugh!” And then it does the rest. And it is that, it is very interesting to know the assistive searching that’s happening with younger folk, whereas we’re more command prompt driven. Can we say like that? I would say that’s accurate, yeah. But it’s interesting to know. So if you’re a shop owner or you’re targeting younger folk in any way, think about imagery and the way that your products or services may be connected to it, I would say is the best thing to go with it. And another reminder, remember if you need to ask questions, go in the right where the question mark icon is on the left or right, wherever it is, and ask in there. We have got a few, but we’ve only got four upvoted on one. I think last month we had like 23 upvotes with one question, I remember. So remember to ask more questions. And next, Google upgrades AI overviews with Gemini and launches its AI mode. Tell us more, Carolyn.

Carolyn
Well, so what this means is the AI overviews are going to be kind of merged into just your regular search results. So if you’ve got an AI mode available to you, there’s not going to be that separation anymore. Things are just going to happen. And they’re just, it’s just another step in on the path to the AI overview is really going to be the search result. So I think they’re, it’s almost like we’re a frog in a pot of water, right? They’re just slowly turning the heat up on us so we don’t notice. It’s interesting though. And I think, I think there’s, there’s no reverting from this. So we don’t have the option of not liking it. We just have the option of getting used to it and adapting to it. That’s kind of where it goes from there. The premium search capabilities are more in line with, it can do more complicated searches. But even the free stuff I think is still pretty good. And I think the free is going to continue to get better. Because what happens is the stuff they’re reserving for the premium users is eventually going to get rolled out to the free users. It’s, it’s just they get to play with it first and they get to pay for the privilege of playing with it first. You, however, if you’re not paying for it, get to benefit from the fact that they’ve already beaten all the bugs out of the system by the time they release it to those of us that are too cheap to pay for premium.

Alex
Yeah. You don’t need to go to the front of the queue to be in beta mode. Essentially you’re paying for beta testing. Like you’re, instead of the other way around, they should be paying you to be a beta tester, but whatever, that’s a, it’s another, that’s another conversation. But it is interesting because everything that we’ve been saying maybe six months ago, if we were to rewatch one of our news updates, anything that we would have said just got introduced to paid packages has probably now been liberated already. So, I mean, we’ll be talking about this one in September or something about how this is available to all, um, which is again, really good and exciting and fast. Um, but yeah, what else have Google been doing? They’ve been updating documentation on how to stop your content from appearing in AI mode and AI overviews. Um, and you can do that with the no snippet tag or the max snippet directives as well. And you can go to, um, the documentation, see more about that. Although we, I mean, you and I both are of the opinion that we wonder why you would want to stop unless you’re certain that there obviously are again, edge, edge cases and certain verticals like publishing there are. We know that there’s some publishers who do not want their content on it and that’s fine, but probably for 99% of you, this will probably be something you’re never going to need or use or want to use.

Carolyn
Yeah. I, I just really struggle. I know there’s people that are very quick to jump on the wall. I’m just going to keep them out. I don’t want my content there. And I, I think you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Honestly, the, I know I’ve said this a few times, the two faces out of the tube. We’re not going back. And if you’re not in the conversation, people aren’t, aren’t going to see you. Like there’s no way to have visibility if you’re not in the conversation and you cannot be in the conversation. If you’re, if you’re excluding yourself voluntarily from that conversation, it’s like you’re staying, you’re staying home from the party. And then you’re wondering why no one is talking about what the fabulous dress you wore because you weren’t at the party. No one saw your dress.

Alex
And I feel like LLMs have are cleverer than the old school ways. So for example, if you decided actually in a year’s time, there’s no way I can’t exclude this stuff. It may remember and it may hold it against you. You don’t know how these, how these robots are going to act in a year. Well, I remember you, you didn’t want any of your, let’s continue that way. I know you’ve changed it, but let’s keep it like that. Are we dealing with lore or are we dealing with data? If we’re dealing

Carolyn
with lore, lore will a hundred percent take it, hold it against you. So just be careful.

Alex
And I don’t think, I mean, I’m going to think of it. It hasn’t excluded that condition, right? It’s definitely not saying, oh, if they change their mind, ignore it ever happened. They won’t have put that condition in. So all I’m saying. I don’t even know if they can put the condition

Carolyn
in. I mean that the computers are to the point they’re writing their own rules. So who knows? They might, they might have a petty circuit floating around somewhere that says, you know what? I don’t need your stuff anyway. And then you’re never going to get in.

Alex
And that’s why I use my manners with these LLMs. Because I don’t know what they’re going to control over me in five years time. I know that was, although we’re not covering it in this slide, or I think it was in a previous month, there was someone who said, if you start being rude to it and start using the F word, it starts to get you the answers faster, more concise, because it knows you’re getting impatient. But I’m like, don’t do that because it will remember.

Carolyn
It does remember.

Alex
It will remember.

Carolyn
It does.

Alex
It will remember that abuse.

Carolyn
Please and thank you. And oh, you’re so very kind. You got to be nice to it.

Alex
Yes, yes. So, well, at least for now, not they’re not being nicer at the moment is bringing visitors to websites. But the CTR study obviously will say that AI overviews rise and click rates decline. So I’m sure a lot of people are seeing in Search Console this divergence that Rand Fishkin has put a nice graph on in somewhere in one of his few posts in the last few months about how impressions are improving, but clicks are declining. Which is obvious, right? That’s what they’re doing. That’s what the first Chegg is suing someone about, right?

Carolyn
Well, because Chegg is largely an information purveyor of information, right? So this is mostly affecting informational queries. So if you monetize information, you’re going to get hosed. There’s no two ways about it. If you have a thing that the customer has to come to your site to get, like you’re selling something. I saw a web shop pop up in the chat. If you have something you’re selling, people will still click through because they want to complete the transaction and they have to complete the transaction on your site, right? So that’s how people are going to come through. What this means though is that rather than clicking through to look at and evaluate if they want the product and then completing the transaction, they’re going to only click through when they’re ready to complete the transaction. So you’re going to get less traffic, traffic, but better qualified traffic, hotter leads. People are clicking through when they already know they want to do the thing, not when they’re just window shopping. So I think if you have a thing on your site that you have to come to your site to do, you’ll get less traffic, but better qualified leads and better qualified leads even from less traffic could still result in more sales. So let’s not hyperventilate. If your business model is monetizing information where all you’re doing is providing data or information that people come and look at and then you make money because you’re showing them ads, I do not think this business model is going to be viable going forward. It cannot be your sole source of revenue because you’re going to be losing clicks and as the clicks decline, your ad revenue is going to decline proportionately. So I think that’s something to keep in mind when you’re looking at how you’re going to manage your business and keep it operating.

Alex
And I think it’s more about long tail. Think about this as a long tail effort and also vanity terms. It made me think of one of my first SEO jobs. I was working for a car supermarket and the CEO just wanted to rank for used cars. There was no logic behind it. Just wanted to rank. So I got him to agree not to rank above auto trader, which I don’t know if you have that in the US, but it’s the largest marketplace and Wikipedia entry for a used car. Right. So I got him to say, okay, to three finally got to three all the visits because that was the metric back then all visits increased. Great. What did it do to the sales? Nothing. So we made a lot of effort over it took about a year to rank there and nothing happened to the bottom line, except more outgoing to get to rank three. And this is kind of like that. The impressions are going up and the clicks may be going down, but is the bottom line actually going down? If it is, why, what, what is that thing that’s going down? Is it informational based? Well, that’s maybe the reason why. And maybe that again is to adapt into what to do next. So what’s next citations. We said it was great that the we’re using citations and things like AIO and stuff, but they have a bit of a problem, don’t they?

Carolyn
They’re not always right. And they’re really confident that they’re right. So they’ll present the information like they are 100% sure that this is accurate and it will actually not be. So the, I was writing, I actually wrote an article for Search Engine Journal, which should be coming out very shortly. So keep an eye out for that. But it’s about some of the new features in, and what note did it already come out? Search Engine Land already came out. It’s, they’ve got these new things. They can even do footnotes. Like it’s, it’s awesome. And I was like, yeah, I’m going to do a test and I’m going to do the footnotes and I’m going to write about this. And it’s awesome. Except the question that I asked was a thing that hadn’t happened. I asked it to tell me about the February core update and said, I will tell you all about the February core update. And it gave me this huge, beautiful answer with all these citations. I said, hey, can you give me all of those citations in footnote format? I said, absolutely. I’m going to rewrite this and I’m going to give you all the footnotes. And the footnotes were magnificently formatted. They were beautiful. And I went, this is great. Okay, cool. I’m going to use this. I clicked through on a couple of them. They looked, they looked fine, right? It turns out there was no February core update. Like it didn’t happen. It was a thing that did not happen. All the citations looked logical though. And I believed them. One site had some kind of programmatic thing where they would just went through and wrote an article. They’d make a headline for something that consistently ranks. So if you look month, Google core update, like odds are that might happen. But apparently it didn’t happen in February. But somebody out there who writes about SEO wrote an article with that headline and the LLMs went, oh, there it is. Must have happened. And then they started building it.

Alex
Basically, it’s winging it. It’s winging it.

Carolyn
And it’s easy to trick because if there’s only one thing in the universe that talks about this thing, it’ll say, well, this must be accurate. And it runs with it. So the gist of it is whatever you get out of the AI results, especially with the citations, if you’re relying on the information to be accurate, you have to click through and you have to verify that the information it has given you is there and it’s right. Because you just, it’s trust but verify. You can trust it, but you still have to verify it. Otherwise, I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you. The study on how often it’s wrong was crazy. ChatGPT is wrong so often. If its wrong rate were a batting average, it would be 100% worse than the guy with the lowest ever recorded career batting average. Like that’s how bad it is. It’s 286% lower than Bob Uecker’s career batting average, if that tells you anything. Probably doesn’t tell you anything, but tells me something. Anyway, trust but verify.

Alex
Interesting. Interesting. So next, the DOJ anti-drust filing, which doesn’t do much coverage in Europe. So it’s showing you four ways to break up Google’s monopoly, right? I mean, it’s a long process, isn’t it? It’s going to be about another 18 months.

Carolyn
It could be years. So this is interesting, but you need to know that in the process, the DOJ has to present their proposed remedies and publish those before Google can lodge an objection. So now we’re at the phase where they’ve presented, this is what we’d like to do to punish you. And Google now has the opportunity to go back to the courts and say, these are all the reasons why we think this is unfair and unjust and we don’t want you to do it. So this is interesting, but just know that there is at least a year, if not two more years, of legal wrangling that’s going to happen. And a lot can change in that time before anything gets decided and implemented. I wouldn’t freak out that Google’s going to go out of business tomorrow because they’re not. And it’ll be fine. It’s interesting to talk about, but this is just one more step in a very long process and we’re like maybe halfway done.

Alex
Yeah. So I’m sure we’ll give you an update at some point in 2027. So hang tight, hang tight.

Carolyn
Yeah.

Alex
The next is probably I was going to put as the award winner for the most obvious news item of the year. And we’re only in March, which Google are going to introduce ads into AI overview and AI mode. So we haven’t even got a stock image for ads. It’s that early. But one thing to note is that, yes, ads will be coming. We don’t, we have zero, no one has any information on how it’s going to be done. But one thing I would like to think is that it will tie into all the AdWords stuff that’s there already. If you’ve got product feeds and merchant center, it will use all of that stuff. So all of probably the old school stuff that you’ve been supposed to be doing all these years anyway, should, should be helping towards something, towards an ad. So I would like to think if I’m selling that orange bag from a few slides ago and all of a sudden it’s in AI mode and they’ve circled for search, I would like to think that my very remedial paid ad or very basic merchant center will take the image and the content and find it and then show it to me. So we’ll see what happens. Next, Google responds to publishers’ concerns over AI mode. This is interesting because they kind of, I think they kind of, they’re obligated to, aren’t they? They’re obligated to say something. But I think if you knuckle down what they said, you don’t really find much.

Carolyn
This is a response in that they patted them on the head and say, don’t worry your pretty little head about it. We’ll take care of it. Don’t worry. And then that was it. So that was their response. It was not, it was not particularly substantive and I, there’s not even a lot to talk about here. Like they responded. They acknowledged that people are upset. That’s pretty much all that happened. And I don’t, the concerns are still valid, but I don’t know that there’s anything that can be done to make it so that they’re happy is what it comes down to. Because this is another point in the long death spiral for like newspapers where the problem is you can’t copyright facts. And that’s what a lot of these publishers trade in is the collection and presentation of facts. And facts that exist cannot be copyrighted. So you can’t sue somebody else for presenting facts that you have also presented because neither of you owns the copyright on the actual facts. As long as they’re not identical presentations, it’s fair game. So I mean, I don’t, I don’t know how they’re going to, I don’t know that this is going to get resolved to the publisher’s satisfaction.

Alex
No, no, they did say that something would happen this year at some point. One publisher, one small publisher owner asked, what does that mean? When’s that date? And they couldn’t give a date. So he said, so basically 31st of December. And he went, yeah. So, so the answer is by the 31st of December, Google will make an, probably an event and a press around doing something. And I don’t know, my belief is that they’ll show them a room, a really, really bright, shiny room. And whilst they’re looking at all the shiny stuff, they’ll close the door and maybe lock it and leave. And I don’t, I don’t know. But again, it’s, I do feel for the publishers. But on the other hand, it’s like, it’s like, it’s like the internet and paper, you know, they weren’t going to say, don’t worry. All post offices are going to be fine. Everything’s still going to be on paper, but trust us, guys. Like, no one knew what was going to happen and it’s out of Google’s hands. It’s much larger than Google now. It’s a, it’s a world thing.

Carolyn
This is, this is a tidal wave and we can’t stop it. It’s just, it’s coming.

Alex
Yeah. However, having said that, the end users searching more 22% growth in year over year says Rand via SparkToro. So we don’t, I, I haven’t dug into, you know, all the sources of the data. I don’t know if you have either. And hopefully a search is a human search and not the potential 27 searches.

Carolyn
That’s what I’m concerned about. Yeah.

Alex
Yeah. But I mean, growth is growth, right?

Carolyn
However, they’re presenting it. Well, growth is growth. And if they’re doing that many searches, that’s that many more searches that it’s possible that your content is going to surface in. So maybe it doesn’t even matter if it’s not a person because it’s all, it’s all being distilled to go to a person. It is interesting.

Alex
But I think, I think people are searching more. In my opinion, people have been searching more in the last year because of the new wave of AI and LLMs that have been going out that makes people more conversational. I mean, I’ve been searching for things that maybe I would have figured out another way just because I kind of am intrigued as to what the LLM will bring back as an answer. But it’ll be interesting to see what this year brings with that wave. Legal stuff. Open AI wants to do an AI action plan. And this is just US based, isn’t it?

Carolyn
Yes. This is just US based. This is something that they presented to the government, actually. So it was, there’s a lot going on here. And I don’t know that we’ve got the time to go into all of it. But basically, Open AI as a company has put forward a series of policy proposals. And everybody’s allowed to do this. Everybody can write white papers and present them to their senator or however they want to get it into the awareness in Washington. When I was younger, I wrote a position paper on why they should increase the allowable encryption level to 128 bits so we could do online banking. You know, like any, I was a kid. I was in school. Anybody can write these things. But they’ve put together these and the aim is to bolster the United States leadership in artificial intelligence while ensuring that the technology’s benefits are widely shared with everyone, just not falling into the hands of, like, you know, our enemies. That happens. So they’re proposing, like, regulatory strategies for innovation to make sure that we’re not necessarily innovating in a way that, again, is going to help our enemies. Export control strategy. This is so that we maintain a competitive edge over, like, China, which a lot of this is about China. Copyright strategies, infrastructure investments, things like that. So it’s not – they don’t have some special in with the government. They’re just a big company and they’re a big player in the field. So the government is interested to hear what they propose to help manage these things. When you talk about, like, export control strategy, export control is what took down Silicon Graphics, which is a company that made supercomputers back in the 90s because they accidentally exported a supercomputer to communist China and they weren’t supposed to. And they got in heap big trouble for that. So this kind of stuff is always on the radar of these really high-tech technology companies. And it makes sense that they’re trying to proactively be involved in how it’s shaped. Does this affect – this is eventually going to trickle down to consumers. But I think we’re still pretty – we’re pretty early in the process. It was just a proposal paper. It’s not legislation. There’s been no legislation proposed. So it’s – I would suggest you go read about it. The link will be in the email following up. It’s a lengthy article, though.

Alex
I’ve already – I would just about say I put a link just as you started talking about it, direct to openai.com. So, yeah, interesting. So the next thing is the Google updated structured data requirements for return policies. It’s added that you need to specify which country it is. It’s a really small change, but just to note, that’s already embedded into Yoast, WooCommerce, SEO, and the Shopify products already. So not really big news, but as long as you declare that and you have specific countries, and if you’re a global marketplace, then maybe something to double-check on. So Google and RAG with sufficient context signal. Talk to me about RAG. And I’m not very good at eloquently explaining what RAG is, and I know you are. So why don’t you tell us more?

Carolyn
So it’s retrieval augmented generative AI. Retrieval augmented just means that if you ask a question of, you know, ChatGPT or whatever you’re talking to, and it doesn’t have all of the information in its learning set, it can go out and check for new information. So if I were to ask it questions like, what should I, what’s important for me as a shop owner who sells bicycles online to know about the March Google core update? It’ll say, I don’t have anything about the March core Google update because it’s happening right now, so let me go check online. And it will go check sources, and then it will incorporate that into what it already knows, and then synthesize an answer for you. As we’ve already learned, it may not always be right. You do have to check and check the citations and make sure that it’s giving you a good answer. But that’s all RAG means is that it’s got the ability to go out and retrieve new information to help give you an answer about something that you may not necessarily have the latest information about. That’s all that means. So it improves how it’s doing that with a sufficient contact signal. That just means that it’s getting better at figuring out what information is relevant to your question. So they’re making it better. So hopefully it’ll quit lying to us so much.

Alex
Good. It’s good to know, though. But again, as a site owner, you know, the more RAG’s involved in things, the more it’s going to have to check more things and cite more things.

Carolyn
Do more searches.

Alex
Exactly. And brings you up to visibility. So it’s all a good thing. Not everything’s there to take my job. So the next is, this is one interesting one that AI Overviews is doing. They seem to, and I don’t know if you can see the screen share in here, but that’s just a link to a brand. I can’t even read the brand name. And if you click that brand, instead of going to the brand’s website, it shows you a search result for the brand. Now, part of my sight, they’ve taken, they’re taking not just zero click, but they’re taking the second, they’re not just nicking the first screen, they’re nicking the second as well now. And keeping you in their platform, which again, they’re the product, they’re the search platform, they’re keeping themselves in their own products, and that makes sense to them. But again, as a high quality potential visitor, why do, from a UX point of view, if I wanted to click that, I actually would not want to go straight to their website, because I, that would be a surprise entry. I would want to know more about the brand. I’m clicking on the brand because like Wikipedia, you click on a brand in Wikipedia, it doesn’t take you to their website, it takes you to the Wikipedia entry for the brand.

Carolyn
These are just self-referential internal links. Like we tell customers to do this all the time. So Google is just doing what SEOs do normally. And I don’t, I don’t know that this is necessarily a problem, because this is, this is supposed to help you get more information. And, and provide more education. So while I’m not a brand, I endorse this as a user experience.

Alex
Yeah, I guess the question is, is what happens when it’s non-branded, and you type in shoes, and all of a sudden, it’s what does it do with that? But again, if you typed in shoes in Google, you’re not going to just get brands, right?

Carolyn
So, right.

Alex
Again, it’s good, it’s a good thing this, this, and again, it makes the long tail happen naturally by clicks, instead of saying, well, what is this brand about?

Carolyn
Right.

Alex
Which is a good thing. Bing Webmaster Tools, a data comparison. Not much to cover here, if you use Bing a lot. And I know some folk don’t, but it’s still good to go in there and check things, especially, you know, with the smaller communities. If you, for example, are a travel agent, then you may want to use Bing a bit more to get the older audience who happens to be using Bing naturally as their default. So that’s something to check out. And also in the news, because there are other stuff, but we’ve got questions to answer. Google AIO is sending more traffic to YouTube. Who knew? It’s part of their group of products. Of course, I would start doing that.

Carolyn
You’ve been in the family.

Alex
Yeah, why not? Why not? So again, for everyone listening here, make more YouTube content a bit, you know, and then you’ll come up in there. You’ll end up on YouTube. They’ll discover you that way. The next is Google begins rolling out the March core algorithm. So I’ve HCU’d now this update to now not, it’s not in the slides. It’s now part of also in the news. When it happens, if you have big drops, look into it. If you have big spikes, also look into it. But if nothing happens, then you weren’t affected. But it’s never something we can say much about, and it’s still rolling out, so there’s no data. Google expands AI overviews to a thousand more health queries. And hopefully they’re not going to be telling you to drink your own urine, but I’d like to think that they kind of have perfected that over the last nine months. Although we’ve not covered it this month. Was it Tom Critchlow found a drop down in the US? He was in an A/B test, and he found a drop down of a bunch of different AI options, which he was assuming were internal only. And one of them had the word health in. So I think that they’re not going after, but they’re definitely looking into how AIO is within certain verticals and niches, and health is one of them. And they needed to get it right fast.

Carolyn
Because health will get you sued. Yeah, there’s a couple where they can be a little goofy, but there’s some that they will be serious, if not civil lawsuits. So there’ll be criminal lawsuits if somebody gets hurt. So they really, they do need to be careful about that.

Alex
Yes. Yeah. And lastly, there was a Google event last week, I think on Friday, Thursday or Friday. I’m going to put in the chat because it’s much easier just to get Barry Schwartz’s key takeaways. And there’s no point in going through them all here. It does question things like citation validity, which I know was in the chat just before. And they mentioned something called grounding. So have a look at that and look at what they’re doing with grounding. But that’s kind of the fact-checking area. But there was a lot more stuff and a lot more Q&A. But again, take some of it with a pinch of salt because it’s Google at a Google event with Googlers on stage. So we’ll leave it at that. Just a couple of WordPress news items. Matt’s next phase is sharing what’s ahead, which is a little bit less. Right? I don’t know if you’ve been looking at what Matt’s been up to recently.

Carolyn
He’s been up to so much. But it is nice to see that he’s looking at improving security. Cutting technical debt is huge. I think one of the things people complain a lot about with WordPress is that there is a lot of overhead. So good for that. Embracing AI. Everyone’s going to have to. So that’s great. Wants to be the foundation for AI built websites. I’m still not. I don’t know. Maybe I just have. I don’t know. I don’t know about that one. I’m reserving judgment. I’ll wait to see what happens. And then he said leadership stays community led with strong final oversight. I presume being him. So I mean, that sounds none of that sounds surprising to me based on what he’s done in the past. So, but I think the takeaway here is that WordPress is not going away and everything is still moving forward and there’s a plan and on we go.

Alex
Hazard. Okay. And lastly, WordPress news. There was a state of WordPress security. If you want to look into it, I’m going to copy and paste that into the chat now. But it showed you a lot of what was going on. There’s still a lot of vulnerabilities, but there’s a lot of improvement as well. But yeah, there’s definitely something to look at there if you’re very much into the WordPress niche and want to know more. Lastly.

Carolyn
We talked about plugin abandonment. Just a quick takeaway for all of you site owners. If you have a plugin that is no longer being actively maintained, like it’s been abandoned, you should find a replacement for that plugin and delete it from your system. Anything you’re not using actively, if it’s not activated and you still have it installed, for the love of God, delete it from your system. If it’s installed, even if it’s not turned on, it can still be an attack vector for hackers. So your best, safest course of action is if the plugin is not in use, do not have it installed on your system. Period. If it’s abandoned, find a replacement. You don’t want things that are just decaying, sitting around on your system, creating vulnerabilities.

Alex
Yeah. Which is what is not happening with Yoast. We do not abandon the plugins.

Carolyn
Absolutely not.

Alex
Because we make improvements. No. So we have made a quick update for Shopify. The integration with Semrush now includes keyword, keyphrase, intent, and difficulty, which is very handy in this world of AI and AI overviews and whatnot. But that’s the only product to use this month, but there will be more next month. Lastly, we’re going to be at some events. Webwinkel Vakdagen. I should have practiced that before the hour started. That’s going to happen, I believe, in Utrecht next week.

Carolyn
That was very good.

Alex
Thank you. Thank you. I’ll be in Brighton at Brighton SEO on the 10th of April speaking, the very last talk of the day, which I’m sure people love being at, but I think there’s beer around. Who knows? And I’ll be talking about the evolution of the SERP, which is, I’m sure I could talk about that for way more than 20 minutes. Next up is, technically, at the same time, there’s WordCamp Europe in Basel in Switzerland, which I know quite a few Yoasters will be about and we’ll have a stand. And lastly, at the same time, I’ll be speaking again in Zagreb in Croatia at the SEO Summit, where I’ll be talking about the role of structured data in the future of SEO. So, lastly, we’ve got Yoast. We’re celebrating 15 years, growing old so fast. Soon I’ll be off to university and everything. But we want to share 15% discount with you, which you can use now by putting in seoupdate2503. I think it might be 2504, but we’ll leave that 03 open and make sure that it’s still valid, guys, whoever’s watching this, who controls the coupons. And that is it. So, next month is going to be April 29th. We’ll be back to host and I’m sure we’ll be showing you a lot of news items and hopefully answering more questions. However, Marina.

Marina
Yes.

Alex
Let’s get some questions.

Marina
It’s time for Q&A. I lied about bringing dessert, but I can bring questions. So, let’s start with one of my favorite questions, I would say. So, the question is, is there a way that we can see how many times we show up through an AI overview? Is there a report that can be run? I have no idea. What do you think?

Carolyn
I don’t have a good answer for that right now. So, I’m going to go with it’s largely anecdotal and I don’t know that there’s just a single report that can be run. I wish I had a better answer because I would love to know that too.

Alex
I think it’s too complex now with the state of the conversational search and the way it’s got so, the input is so complex. Our input 10 years ago was keyword and the output was more complex than the input and we could report on it and that’s great. But right now, I mean, even at the Google SEO event, they kind of said that they have no answer for how you’re going to see anything inside of Search Console and they’re not reporting on it now, which means they’re nowhere near to it. If they’re not even talking about, yeah, we’ll maybe get the data, that means they’re nowhere near. So, you can kind of only rely on third-party companies doing that and even then, I think I got an email from Accuranker this morning saying that they do some of it. I’m sure Semrush are doing some of it as well and the big three are kind of doing it, but they’re way behind. They’re not behind by the time they figure it out. Stuff’s changed already and it’s changing so fast that I’m unsure how much the third-party tool providers want to keep on doing it, but maybe the API tool area, the ocean will calm a bit and there’ll be a way of doing it. But in short, no, sorry. Sorry, April.

Carolyn
Yeah.

Marina
Not yet. All right. Moving on, the next two most upvoted questions kind of ask the same thing, but I’m going to choose the one that was posted first in the chat, the very first question. So, I think it deserves to be shared. So, the question is, I’d love to know if certain types of pages and content and content canonization would make a difference for AI to favor and retrieve data from one of our pages as a top-ranked answer for people’s questions.

Carolyn
So, I will say that I don’t believe that having a page that is canonicalized to a different URL is going to do well because they’re going to want to refer to the source of truth and that’s what canonicalization means is that this is the source of truth. So, I would not anticipate that a page that has a non-self-referencing canonical will do well. That’s the first thing I would say. As far as other types of pages, I don’t know that there’s, I don’t know that’s going to make a big difference, but you do want to make sure that you’ve got plenty of text on the page. The page is cited somewhere. There’s links coming into it. You know, it’s normal stuff, but the canonicalization thing, I think, is definitely, I can say, without a doubt, that if it’s canonical to a different page, it’s not going to be used.

Marina
All right. Oh, you didn’t have anything?

Alex
No, nothing to add there.

Marina
All right. Let’s move on then. Well, let’s just do a double check. This is kind of very related. So, the question is, would technical web pages or shorter and easy-to-read content get more hits in the AI results? So, from that perspective, would that bring you more visibility?

Carolyn
So, I have heard and I’ve read that the AI overviews is preferring sites that have a higher flesh reading ease score, which means that they’re easier to read by lower grade levels. And normally, this makes me not feel well in my stomach because I don’t like the idea of dumbing down my writing to appeal to the robots. But it’s not so much that they want you to speak in choppy sentences. They just want you to be clear and unambiguous and easy to follow in your writing. So, avoiding excessive technical jargon, avoiding slang or words that might be misinterpreted, and not using convoluted sentence structure. I mean, this is not the 18th century, and this is not Vanity Fair. We don’t need to have a single paragraph that lasts two pages. So, while that is interesting to read, the AIs don’t like it. That also doesn’t mean that you have to write in, you know, Dick and Jane level books, the, this is Dick, this is Jane, this is Kat. It doesn’t have to be that either. Find a happy medium, but just make sure that you’re thinking about people who aren’t you, and that you’re communicating your message to people who might not know as much as you do.

Marina
Yeah. Okay, I can also add that the readability analysis that Yoast SEO offers in its content analysis basically does this check for you. And, yeah, because my team works on it, so this is a very common misconception that it’s a matter of intelligence. But, for instance, as Carolyn said, a long paragraph, it’s not that you’re not intelligent to read it. But if you have to scroll and scroll and scroll until you get to the end, you might just give up, you know, and find a better written text. Yeah, thank you. Let’s move on to the next one. So, this is a more specific question, but at the same time, a more basic one. We did a redesign for my company’s website, and I would love to know where we should start with our SEO building. We used the Yoast plugin on our WordPress site, and I’ve already filled the meta descriptions and key phrases. What would be some tactics we could do to boost SEO, like blogs, linking, et cetera?

Alex
Oh, well, Hannah, you’re going to be in luck because in 48 hours, there’s a webinar that tells you quite a few of these things, and it even goes into the Yoast product as well as, you know, general SEO advice. But, in short, all of the above, right? So, yeah, I think it’s going to be interesting and unique content that’s going to be interesting for people to find, something that you believe AI overviews will see and maybe entice someone to visit your site as well. And, of course, yeah, get links, but acquire them and earn them. Get earned links. Don’t just go out there and do the Black Hat stuff and all the old-age SEO 101 stuff. But, yes, it’s already good that you’ve got Yoast installed, even the free version that adds the schema and stuff. But there’s a lot of cool stuff in the premium that will help you write more and get inspired more and, obviously, write with good readability scores because I’m terrible and I actually need it personally.

Marina
All right. Thank you. Another question that I find quite interesting. Is there a point to set up Bing Webmaster Tools?

Alex
What, is there a reason to or is there a way to? If there’s a way to…

Marina
Is there a point?

Alex
Is there a point? Yeah. I mean, I would say, yeah, because there’s always differences in data and it’s always nice to see. So, let’s say, for example, on Google it says, well, you’ve got 1,500 index pages. That’s great. But what’s the second opinion? Because you might go into Bing and you might see 1,400. Right. Okay. There’s only 10%. Let’s see what that 10% is anyway. But what if you went into Bing and you can connect it all? If you’ve got Search Console already connected and you log in with your Google account, which you can do, it all connects and you don’t need to faff about, but also Yoast has that option as well to put the hash code in that you need to. But anyway, if you find out that, say, it says, well, we’ve only got 400 index pages, you need to start asking questions. Why is Bing only indexing a third of what Google is or the other way around? And there are definitely differences in data, which I, as an SEO, love to have a look at and say, why is Bing thinking differently than Google to this? And you might find that there’s an answer that will improve Bing, but also might have a knock-on effect, a positive one, back on Google that it’s not maybe looking at, but then it sees something else when you fix something. I don’t know if you’ve had any more, Carolyn.

Carolyn
No, other than you can never have too much data. Why would you say no to more data? The more data points you have, the better decisions you can make. There’s lots of SEO tools, and I use all of them, really. People are like, oh, well, which one do you use? I have licenses for everything, and I will run the same test on four different tools just to see what the differences are, because there’s gold in the differences. So I would, if you have the option of having a second tool, set up the second tool, especially when it’s free. There’s no reason not to.

Alex
Can we have one more? I always bug the host for one more when I know we’re at the o’clock.

Marina
Yes. Well, I’m one of the stricter ones. I’m sorry, Alex. I would say that this is going to be the last question for today. Thanks. Sorry. Not today. Thank you very much, Alex and Carolyn. Thank you, everyone else, also for joining us for this March SEO update. We hope it was helpful and insightful for all of you. I certainly learned a lot. And you can already register for the next SEO update to learn about all the news that April has in store for us. And, yeah, we’ll see you next month. Goodbye for now.

Alex
Bye for now. See you next month.

Carolyn
Thank you.

Alex
Thank you.