The SEO Update by Yoast – November 2025 Edition

Took place on 24 November 2025 - 4 PM CET / 10 AM EST

Hosts

Alex Moss

Principal SEO

Carolyn Shelby

Principal SEO

Topics & sources

Also in the news…

Yoast news

Site Kit by Google + Yoast

Transcript

Marina
Welcome to our monthly update for November. I’m Marina, a researcher and developer at Yoast, and it is my pleasure to be your host today. Before we bite into the real substance, let me quickly share a few notes for the newcomers. Firstly, a recording of the session will be shared tomorrow, along with subtitles and also for those of you who prefer reading to audio input. And secondly, at the end of today’s update, there will be a few minutes for questions and answers. If you’d like to ask more details about one of the topics we’re going to discuss or have any questions about SEO, please feel free to ask. And yes, now it’s finally time to invite the stars of the show. Curtains up for Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss, your SEO principles. They will guide us through everything that has happened over the last month that’s worth discussing. And all we have to do is kick back and enjoy. I’ll pop back up when it’s time for Q&A. Alex and Carolyn, the stage is yours.

Carolyn
Thank you very much. How are you doing, Alex?

Alex
Yeah, not too bad. It’s been a busy month, hasn’t it? Some with news, but also internally with Yoast, lots of stuff happening that some stuff we can talk about, some stuff we can’t. But yeah, those four weeks have passed quickly.

Carolyn
How about you? Just remember to not talk about the things we’re not supposed to talk about. That’s important. Yeah, I know. I know. Yeah, it’s just– I don’t know. The month was both long and short, But we’ve got Thanksgiving, at least I’ve got Thanksgiving this week. So it’s a short week for me. Kids are off school, which is very exciting. Hopefully they will stay quiet during during the show. Let’s try to get into it, though. I a few housekeeping things. If you have some questions, this is for the audience, not for you, Alex. If you have questions, please feel free to ask. We’ve got the little Q&A thing over on the side that you’re welcome to use. We try to get to all the questions. If you like some of the questions and you think that they’re relevant or close to what you are asking, I think you can still upvote them. So we will try to answer them as many as we can. And if we don’t get to all of them, maybe we will make a blog post out of it. Who knows?

The other thing that I wanted to mention is that you can learn more about today’s topic by going to our website. It’s yoa.st/update-November-2025. The recording will also be available there. So if we talk too fast, which I know I am prone to do, or if it’s too hard to understand, because Alex, let’s face it, you are hard to understand. All of that will be available later, hopefully with subtitles, and we’ll get to that. And then we have a, it’s a survey really. If you watch the SEO update by Yoast and you have opinions or thoughts on how we can do things better or different in the coming year, by all means, let us know. You can either scan that QR code or go to yoast/54M, M as in Mary, and let us know what you think. As we have done in the past two times before that, we have little icons at the top of the slides. If you see a little stopwatch, it means whatever the advice we’re discussing is, it has immediate impact. If you see chess pieces, it’s long-term strategy that hopefully will help you decide how you’re going to internalize what we’re telling you. And I think with that, let us get started. Alex, do you want to kick us off?

Alex
Yeah, so Google’s been doing a few things, mainly with cleanup at the moment of some stuff that they put in SERPs. So I don’t know if anyone remembers a year or two ago now– I know time’s moving fast– that they used to put in the FAQ snippets. And if you did a question on your website with the FAQ schema, it would bring it out, would output it right into the SERP. And then they took that away to the annoyance of some and then brought it back for other terms. And they do kind of a clean up now and again, what’s working, what’s not. I think a few months ago, they took away like the COVID-19 are we open kind of structured data as well, because it’s just not useful today anymore. Um, and they’ve been cleaning up a couple of those things. One of them’s like practice, practice scores or something, just stuff that just doesn’t add up when it comes to needing that right in the search results. But what’s worth noting to everyone else is that whilst those things aren’t used directly in a search result, that doesn’t mean, oh, well, I should get rid of it. Now you very much need to keep it. That would say even more so keep it there because it was valid and it was getting pulled into a cert at one point. But that means that they’re concentrating on other things within the SERP. I know they’ve got a lot more things to worry about maybe than one structured data type showing up in a native SERP, but it does show, um, where structured data is inside a native SERP right now. It’s still useful and they do come and go. I know that they, um, Gary Elias, I know did a speech or a, uh, did a post on LinkedIn about how things do come and go as time goes on and some stuff will get all come in in the next three months again. So we’ll have to wait and see.

Carolyn
I think if you, um, I mean, if you think back and if you said this and I missed it, um, I apologize, but we’ve had schema things taken away from us and then given back at a later date. So, I mean, look at what Google’s doing with the SERPs. AI mode and AI overviews are on almost everything now. They’re running out of real estate to have all of these extra features. So they just don’t need them. That doesn’t mean they don’t look at them and it doesn’t mean that they’re not still potentially useful. So, don’t judge your schema value by what’s visible in those rich results. It still matters for AI retrieval, even when those features disappear. And when I say that, there’s a caveat. No one is saying that the LLMs definitely absolutely read the schema all the time. Conversely, they don’t never read the schema. So the schema is still helpful to get into the search results. When the LLMs go out and do their grounding where they’re checking the answers for, and they’re checking the answers. They’re just checking to see what the new information is because their training data is like a year old, right? When they go do that search, they’re probably not going to see your schema. But how do they decide to check you when they’re making that initial decision? They’re looking at like the first 20 results in the search engine results and they’re getting it from Google or they’re getting it from Bing. So you do need to be in that top 20, at least, if you have any hope of getting potentially included in that citation pool. I think Google’s also doing some other things that have recently been changing, like they’re adding AI shopping tools across Search and within Gemini. So recently, it looks like about mid-month, November 13th, they rolled out a powerful new AI-guided shopping and agentic checkout feature. Basically, it lets the users ask really detailed product questions and they can get side-by-side comparisons without having to go to that website and get side-by-side comparisons of products from that brand or worse, have to go to different websites so that they can, you know, this tab open and this tab open and they’re trying to do all of that manual side-by-side comparison. What this tool now lets it do is Gemini can do all of that comparison data, do the comparisons for you and just explain it to you nicely. That does require you to have a website, like if you’re one of those products, you need to have a website where the data that it’s going to use for those comparisons is very easy for it to get to. Because if it can’t get to all of the important data, it won’t mention it. And if you find that you’re getting strange results, ’cause I test my own products, I’m sure you all do. You go into, you say, oh, compare this product versus the competitor product. And this product is my product, right? You’re watching it, you’re like, well, why is it saying that? ‘Cause that’s not right. When it’s getting bad information, it’s usually because it can’t find the information on your page. That’s when you need to go through and make sure that everything that you need for them to be able to see is visible text on the page and not trapped within a toggle or behind a tab, you have to make sure that all of that data is easy for them to read. So your takeaway here is that your product data and your structured markup need to be clean, complete and consistent. So those AI shopping tools can surface all of your products accurately. Have you tried this out, Alex?

Alex

No, I haven’t personally. I know that the agenda commerce isn’t coming out immediately. It’s something that they’re working on. And I know that, you know, that was that announcement was very close after chat GPT was doing all of that commerce stuff. So I know that there’s a bit of competition there, but actually

Carolyn
be honest, I checked in chat to BT. I didn’t check in Google.

Alex
Nah, you see, this is the thing that people are doing and it’s interesting, it is interesting though, that they go in the shopping route, because I do get when you’re exploring and you’re trying to compare different products, it might be hard to do. I still feel like I want to make that decision in the research, but I know that knowing all of those things. And all of the data will be easier to compare to each other, which actually goes back to the last story that we were talking about that actually structured data is really important, but they’re not going to bring any of this stuff, well, some of this stuff out into a native stir, but it’s a good example of FAQ, FAQ snippet is perfect in this scenario, even though it doesn’t get output in a search results page, it will get used to answer a question that someone may be asking about a different, about a certain products and it’ll come out right into the answer. So don’t negate, don’t, don’t neglect the structured data at all. If anything, it’s probably going to be more important in the future because it’s going to have to rely on data that is structured in some way to get, to give back and synthesize an answer in a, in an efficient manner, right. Which is what they’re all about.

Carolyn
I think, I think that product schema of all the schemas, I think product schema is still the most important of all of them because Google, Google product feeds, especially use it so heavily. I think, I think if you’re ignoring the other stuff, you’re probably. You know, you’re not going to die, but if you sell things, if you sell products, you really need to make sure that you’ve got that product schema buttoned up because I think, I think you will see a benefit and an improvement in your product feed if you do. – Yeah. – So some of the other things that Google has done recently that I guess this was at the end of October, they introduced query groups in Google Search Console Insights. So the query groups are where you’re, rather than just looking at a list of keywords, and then you have to go through and group them yourself, ’cause I mean, I’ve done that before. It’s not hard to do. If you can export things into a spreadsheet and you’re good with spreadsheets, it’s not impossible. A lot of people don’t like spreadsheets though. So this is going to group query terms by topic clusters so that you’ll be able to think more and less in terms of specific keywords and more in terms of themes and topics and clusters, which is going to help you with your writing and finding gaps, things you might not be targeting. It’s going to help you make better decisions about your content calendar and your editorial calendar. So you can use this in theory to validate what the searchers actually call things and adjust your headings and content phrasing to match. So I would imagine that if you write a lot about, trying to think of a good thing, let’s go with dogs. You write a lot about dogs and you find, when this groups it, you might find that a lot of your readers affectionately refer to their, oh God, I’m not coming up with good things today.

Alex

Walking, eating,

Carolyn

No, I’m talking about dogs and like things that people call dogs that aren’t really the word dog. Like they say doggo and puppy and there’s like, there’s slangy things.

Alex

Yeah.

Carolyn
I mean, there’s different words for dog and some people are more inclined to use that slang word

Alex
than just dog. I’m a fan of fur baby. I’m with Joseph here. That’s what I call my dog. It’s definitely a fur baby. Okay, so, but this will cluster those things because it’ll know that

Carolyn
every time someone says this weird word that is not dog, they mean dog. And because it’s clustering it by the topic dog, you’ll be able to see, oh, it looks like most of my readers like to call their their dog, their fur baby. So maybe I should start using fur baby a little bit more in my headings or mentioned a little bit more in my text so that my readers see it more often or more highly. And it tends to be more relevant to the things that my readers search for.

Alex
That’s– – And I think it also probably makes your brain structured, your creative brain in understanding what subject matter to speak about. And I’ve been doing it, We’ve both done this in the history of our jobs of doing keyword research. This was back in the day of keyword research. You get all the keywords, which is a lot of data. Then it was up to us to basically group them in queries because there was no good way of doing it. And doing that, I can tell when you’re a content– and I know handing it over to a content creator sometimes can be a bit overbearing because they’re like, “Here’s a spreadsheet of 3,700 keywords. You go ahead and you write what you need to.” But really it this is a lot more helpful to be able to creatively think of content or improve what you’ve got already or maybe you’re missing the ball with something that maybe you need to write more about because if we look at this screenshot, for example The I can’t even read Google core updates at the bottom Maybe you want it to be a bit more up so that you can you can not just try and improve One keyword at a time or group 20 together and try and find the averages and now you’re back in spreadsheets but this does it for you. And I think that’ll be much better when it comes to topical authority in general, which is where this is going.

Carolyn

Yeah, another thing Google did within Google Search Console is they added brand query filters, which is going to help you pick out searches that are branded versus searches that are not branded. It’s helpful. The, it used to be that we would really focus on the non-brand traffic for most of our customers. The reason being that if they’re searching for your brand specifically, you don’t need to attract them. You need to attract the non-branded searches because you’re trying to get your brand in front of these people that might not be thinking of you initially. So I think that’s going to be helpful just for filtering that out. I feel like you could filter it out before, but it was maybe not as intuitive or obvious. I know that filtering out the brand from the non-branded traffic is something that I do generally, but maybe that’s not something that everyone was doing. You’ve always done that,

Alex
right, Alex? I’ve always done that over time because as an SEO’s job, it’s our job to focus on non-brand. But actually, if you’re working within the brand department, it’s probably very important that you have the opposite of what we’re up to as well. Understanding that. Weirdly, misspellings. So Yoast is a good example. There are at least five versions of Yoast in my head already of how you can spell Yoast. Some are correct spellings, some are incorrect spellings. I mean, I own an agency called FireCask that if you were to type that in your phone, it would change it. It would auto-correct to forecast, which is quite annoying, but you need to think of those things. And most people don’t hear the K. If I say it to them, you might have just heard FireCask. And that goes far, like maybe I need to buy a new domain name called firecast.com and then 301. Those things for brand is quite important. For non-brand, you may find out that it’s considering something non-brand in Google that you believe is brand. So for example, I don’t know, Yoast as a name. Yoast is Yoast because of the founder, Yoast of Elk. And Yoast might now be annoyed that his results are coming up on his personal name, which is not spelt y-o-a-s-t. So there’s those different things, or maybe Yoast wants to piggyback off the other Yoast and the other way round. And that’s how one can look at gaining SERP attention, but that’s a good way of looking at it. And it also shows over time, when is your brand talked about at certain times of the year? So like if you’re John Lewis, your query brand mentions will be quite high right now, interfloras will be quite high at the end of January and the beginning of February and so on, you know, cars in the month of August and the UK anyway, because the new registration plate is in the September, all of that kind of nice stuff, but it’s a very nice to have, but Google haven’t been. Just making that, that was just two things in search console. They needed more custom annotations finally. So weird, weird how it’s come back in here because in the past, before GA4 existed, it was in Google analytics. The annotations, they got removed in GA4. I’m sure from memory now, they’ve now come back inside GA4, but no other in Search Console, which is all very good. I’m a big fan of anything custom annotation. Beforehand, I was using a Chrome plugin just so I could see what annotations I was doing. And again, one less reason to use a spreadsheet, which I think you can weirdly import ’cause I have looked in there and you can import a CSV and then it will import what the annotation is and the date onto the graph already, which is very nice to have Because some eagle-eyed SEOs might have been doing that all this time. It’ll be a nice way to do it.

Carolyn
So if you are not accustomed to making annotations in Google Search Console or in GA4, you’re probably not accustomed to reading change logs either. Your IT department, if you have an IT department, will keep a change log, which is literally a log of all the changes that they make to the software, to the site. annotations can serve as an SEO or a web development teams change log. If you make any significant changes, like let’s say you changed, you redesigned your homepage and the 15th was the day it went live. You would wanna annotate that on your Google search console and in GA4 and anywhere else where you might be getting results because if everything goes, if something tanks and it correlates to that annotation on the timeline, you’re going to know that maybe something didn’t go right. I need to look at that. It saves time when you’re diagnosing problems. You can either go through everything to try to figure out what went wrong, or you can correlate the change to something that happened around that time and reasonably extrapolate that something on this day changed, Therefore, I need to figure out what it was that changed on that day and go fix that. So you don’t have to dig through everything to solve problems. It’s, it’s a helpful thing and it’s honestly, it’s a really good habit to get into. So if you haven’t played with annotations yet, I think. I strongly recommend making that a new year’s resolution. There’s one more thing that Google’s been working on. They are letting you add shipping and return details without a merchant center account, which confuses me how you can do that. But they are claiming that that is a thing. Have you, have you tested this Alex?

Alex
No, I haven’t tested it. I haven’t seen it in any of my profiles yet.

Carolyn
It’s only like eight days old.

Alex
Yes. Yes it is. But sometimes it comes out quickly. Sometimes it takes a good month, but it is good. Cause it’s just another place. I feel like some people won’t. Merchant sense is quite overbearing. Isn’t it? some, you know, there’s a lot, there’s a lot to do in that. It’s it, obviously they have enough data to know that maybe it’s missed inside merchant center and people are focusing on other things and I know it has a merchant center, those you need to do one of five tasks to get, you know, to a hundred percent efficiency or whatever, obviously people aren’t doing it. And maybe they’re also seeing a correlation with people looking at, um, at search console, because that’s where they need statistics on what’s happening with the site and how people are finding it. I guess it’s a good thing to do. But yeah, it does seem a bit weird. I feel like at least you could just send them to Merchant Center and tell them to do it there. But I don’t know. Maybe there’s a grand plan here.

Carolyn
Well, I know– so I’ve had some weird problems with Merchant Center where when I tell it to just retrieve the data from WooCommerce, it retrieves it and displays it weirdly. WooCommerce pushed me to bundle a product instead of making a new product that had a bunch of component pieces in it. So it’s like, “Oh no, you want to bundle this.” I’m like, “Okay, I’ll bundle it.” The problem was the cheapest item in this bundle was $10. The other part of the bundle was 50. And it lists the least expensive price as the starting at price when it displays your ads or pulls them into the product feed. So people were like, this advertised as being $10 and it was 60. It’s like, well, I didn’t do that. I don’t know why it did that. And then I went into Merchant Center, I’m like, oh, I don’t know where you’re getting this from. This is, oh, that’s where you’re getting that from. So I think being able to give it specific instructions is best, because when you leave it to its own devices to pull in data, I don’t know that it’s always right. And sometimes it can really upset the customers. Like in my case, when I got really nasty emails from people about the $10 product that was in fact 60.

Alex

Shipping and returns can make or break the life cycle of a customer big time. And I know that John Mueller somewhere, he said somewhere that consistency is best when it comes to SEO for AI. And I’m hoping that Search Console and Merchant Center will somehow have some reconciliation so that it knows that if you updated something in Search Console, maybe it should tell you to do it in Merge in the Center, therefore creating consistent, or maybe that connected now, hopefully. Let’s see, I need to dive in.

Carolyn

Hopefully. Have you read anything about this new Microsoft OpenAI partnership?

Alex

A little bit. I mean, it was great piece of press release content. Whoever made it, bravo to you. But in short, I mean, we know that Microsoft and OpenAI have been very, very close up to, Does one of those Microsoft own part of it, or they have a very major shareholding? I don’t know the exact amount.

Carolyn
I see it like a consortium kind of deal where I feel like all the major players are kind of within AI right now. It’s like, everybody owns a piece of everybody. They’re all kind of, it’s very incestuous and I’m very confused.

Alex
But this one, there’s more information in the Microsoft’s press release. But I mean, I think open AI actually restructured that business in a, in a way that it now allows for Microsoft to be a longer term thing. So I think it’s less of a consortium now. Anyway, the business, the business part is irrelevant for all of us. I guess all we know is that Microsoft and open AI are going to have a very, very close relationship for quite some time. Um, and that’s maybe a good thing so that they can piggyback on each other, um, and support each other. And I wonder what happens with Google as a result as well. But yeah, there we go. Edmund said, Microsoft apparently, as of months ago, owns 49% of open AI. So I don’t know. Maybe they’re doing this pre-Monopoly deal and maybe trying to do something that is also– so they don’t get in the trouble that Google’s getting into at the moment with Monopoly and court cases. And I don’t know.

Carolyn
I mean, to be fair, they’re just not having trouble already. A couple of decades ago, they were working through that for a while. And really their problems with the monopoly situation enabled Google to take the place that it’s got now because they were really hamstrung during the nineties in what they could do and what they felt safe doing because they were under these restrictions that were applied by the Federal Trade Commission.

Alex
And another thing here is that Bing may have benefits in the future as well. Again, don’t know how all the business organization structure goes, but things that help Microsoft will inherently help with Bing as well, which will inherently help Microsoft back again and then open AI. So it’s a nice little love triangle between these two companies.

Carolyn
Well, speaking of their competitors. So Google’s Robbie Stein, who does a lot of their, he seems to be doing a lot of their media right now. gave an interview where he’s talking about SEO for AI mode and AI overviews. Basically, I mean, the TLDR is they reiterated that AI mode and AI overviews do rely heavily on clear, direct, structured content. Now, note that they did not say structured data. They said structured content. So this is the visible text on the page. They said SEOs should focus on making information extractable. You’ve got your headings, your lists, your definitions, your summaries. They’re using words that the machines are trained to recognize, like key findings, in summary, then, first, things like that. You know, I know it seems obvious, and sometimes you’re tempted to mix it up a little to be creative, but don’t be so creative that the machines don’t understand what you’re talking about. Literal language matching still matters for retrieval. We’ve been saying this. Entity clarity, which is your brand, your author, your product, your topic, strongly influences inclusion. I’m actually working on a paper about this, which I think is going to be incredibly complicated to explain in the next five seconds. But I will make sure that I share that around when I get it done. But essentially, if you think about, Rather than keywords on a two-dimensional plane, if you think about the space of the topics as a 3D space, and maybe the individual topics are clustered like stars in a constellation. Some of the stars are bigger and brighter, and some of them are smaller and denser, and they all have different gravitational poles. I tend to think about entities in that manner, And it helps me, it helps me visualize arrangements a little bit better. Um, and if that gets to astrophysics weird, let me know. Um, basically

Alex
a good way of thinking about it, about all, all of the way in which things hold together. Um,

Carolyn
the guy from Anthropic when, um, at this one talk I was at a couple of months ago, literally described the way, the way that the query decides what it’s going to pick up as it’s traveling through three-dimensional space. As it gets close to certain nodes, they light up and it activates nodes. That activation path determines what information it’s going to grab, and how it’s going to assemble it. That really struck me as being like, if you’ve got a trajectory through space, the density of the stars and the planets, they all have their own gravitational pull, right? The gravitational pull will bend the trajectory in certain ways, and that’s really kind of what’s happening as it goes through. I could probably spend an hour talking about this. I find it to be a very good visual though.

Alex

It is, but it’s a good way of thinking about the path of how topics and queries come together to form whole agendas. And the way in which he said, rely heavily on clear, direct, structured content, is I mean, that’s something we’ve been blurting out for a good few months, even in your posts as well, about how to structure content. But like, as we say, like what we do sometimes, if you find you’re waffling too much, you’ve said too much, and that maybe you just need to say what needs to be said and nothing more.

Carolyn

Saying what needs to be said and nothing more, I think is a good point. B, this last bullet says, “Google emphasized that SEO for AI mode is still SEO, but more clarity focused.” Do not fall into the trap of, “I must write 1500 words.” If what you need to say can be said in 500 words, then you say it in 500 words. Do not pad your writing to meet artificial word counts. It’s not necessary, and it’s becoming less necessary as we progress. So our primary takeaway here was you’ve got to prioritize for clarity and structure, which we’ve been saying all along. AI mode is pulling from content that is easy to extract, not content that is just well-written. So you can write very, very well, but if you trap it in too many words, too verbose, not easy to understand, they’re not going to choose that. they have a very short attention span, be very clear and make sure everything is very extractable. And I think you’ll be in really good shape.

Alex

Fine, sounds good. Let’s do it. Oh, there’s more of companies getting together. We should have put this straight after the OpenAI Microsoft one, but this is-

Carolyn

Yeah, it’s kind of like the dating games. Like who’s gonna pair up.

Alex

It is, but these are like, you’ve got to lock in right now. I mean, if these guys break up, you know, it’s pretty bad breakup from a technical level to disconnect from these things. But here the story is Apple is going to progress Siri with the help of the technology of Google and Gemini, which is interesting because it seems like Apple and Google both have a common enemy, if you wanna call them that. Let’s not call them a competitor, let’s call them an enemy ’cause it is really open AI versus the likes of Google and Apple together. So if you put, it’s a good little battle. And weirdly, it keeps everyone on their toes, right? Maybe all of this competition is good for us, the end consumer who sees things ship out faster as if it wasn’t fast enough. But maybe better. You know how Google core updates, they said that they’re going to be bigger but less often? Maybe that’s what’s going to happen to these kind of LLM solutions that we’ve all got. Because at the moment, I feel like four tools will have come out by the end of this SEO update that we’re going to have to look into in the next week. But then a year from now, is there only gonna be like one a month because that’s all that’s needed ’cause we either reach a plateau of innovation or because the standard of what we need to release isn’t just the, “Hey, here’s a mini feature, “let’s market it as much as we can,” rather than we need to do bigger steps to make sure that LLMs are better and progressing.

Carolyn

What was the Sylvester Stallone movie where he was frozen in time and then he thought out, and when he thought out, there was all the restaurants were Taco Bells.

Alex

Demolition Man, what a great film.

Carolyn

Okay, like I feel like we might be getting close to all tools are the same tool because they just don’t everything.

Alex

Yes, yes. I think there’s another one, what’s it? Equilibrium is also kind of a human version of mediocrity, but Demolition Man, that’s weird because I think the future is now the past for us now. So like, it’s already been in gone And I’ll never be able to know what the three seashells are for. But anyway,

Carolyn
we’re getting really philosophical today, aren’t we? I have to tell you, I don’t like the, the, the, the takeaway is optimized content for direct spoken style answers on this slide. And, um, that makes me cringe a little bit because the spoken style answers. Spoken style writing is how we get that breathy hyperventilating. random paragraphs that are really just a rhetorical question that starts with a conjunction, it makes my skin crawl. And I really don’t like it when people write like that. But optimize your content for direct spoken style answers to your heart’s content. And I will just sit over here and cringe by myself in the corner. >> Yeah, yeah, right. We need to be more concise,

Alex
don’t we? Because there’s still quite a few slides to go to. So what’s the next one? Google AI gains three new agentic capabilities. In short, they keep on adding stuff, and they’re doing a lot of PR around every little addition that they’re doing. But why is this important to us? It’s multimodal. In short, there’s a lot of multimodal aspects going. And I know they said that they brought it in, but it’s getting even more– it’s getting even more agentic and less human input in those multimodal searches. So with that, you said that you found in the data– Is it this one or is it another story that people aren’t just doing long tail prompts anymore? And that what people do is they’ll do a short I’m gonna call them short tail long tail prompts because I’m just used to that they’ll do a short tail prompt I’ll ask kind of a specific issue which they know already Will probably lead to a follow-up and a follow-up in the conversation rather than trying to get everything That they need to know out in one prompt and this is a way of doing that, right?

Carolyn

I tend to be far more verbose, and I know that shocks everyone when I write my prompts, because I will just brain dump all of the specifics that I need for a thing right away, because I know what it’s going to ask, and I know that if I’m looking for a stove, I need something that will sit in an island, I need it to be exactly this wide, I need it to be gas and electric, I need all of these things. It doesn’t have to ask me as many follow-up questions, but most people are like, I need a new stove. And then you’ll say, OK, well, here’s all these stuff. No, I don’t like those. I need one for an island. Oh, OK, well, let me narrow it down more. Mm-hmm. So that’s the most common style of communication for the average for people, and it’s building for that.

Alex
Yeah, yeah. By the way, sorry, everyone. We went offline for two seconds, Carolyn. You weren’t unnoticed because you’ve not got the Wistia page in front of you because you’re controlling the slides. But we went off, but that doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter. But, Christy, I will take your comment of clicks definitely dead. Yes, that is kind of right. They’re dying-ish. I wouldn’t say they’ll die completely, but that doesn’t mean that your conversion’s dead and that actually a click is not– in today’s day and age, it’s not the be all and end all now. clicks anymore or only clicks it’s about what’s actually the angle which is an SEO you should be focusing on in the first place what’s making money right is that bag gonna sell and if it and if it sells via a visit or then later a conversion does it matter that the visit happened in the first place as long as

Carolyn
the conversion happened absolutely and the only people that I think are going to truly truly be hurt by this are the sites that only offer information and we’re monetizing off of page views, they’re going to have to pivot, because I don’t know how they’re going to come back from this, because this whole process right here is another step down the road of AI is going to steal all of our clicks.

Alex

Yeah.

Carolyn

Because it is.

Alex

OK, next. Next, we’ve got 10 slides in 10 minutes. Let’s go through this. So, ChatGPT have created– they had a Dev Day. They created an SDK, which not everyone in here will need to know exactly what that is, but that helps devs create apps within ChatGPT.

Carolyn

Site development kit, or software development kit.

Alex

Yeah, yeah. So it’s like a– yeah, it’s a nice little way of developing native apps on their platform. Why is this interesting to us? That means that devs have now got an easier option on to connect their site with the ChatGPT app, or connect whatever it is, not just a site, but whatever they’re up to. That means there’ll be more apps and more connectivity between the chat GPT response and what needs to be done externally. Why is this important to, say, an SEO? They may want to look into– if you’re in a bigger company, maybe look into the way that chat GPT apps and connectors can work with your site so that creates a more seamless, agentic experience. But I don’t think everything– stuff won’t be as fast this month. We’ll probably hear more about the benefits and the use cases in the months ahead.

Carolyn
Sounds good. Let’s keep rolling. Google AI Overviews drive 61% drop in organic click-through rate and 68% in paid. I remember when everyone was freaking out that AI Overviews has caused a 30% drop in click-through rate. Now we’re up to 60%. Not the direction I think most people were hoping for. The data is showing that AI overviews is significantly reducing both your organic and paid CTR. Organic CTR dropped 61%, paid dropped 68% in affected queries. Indications are that users are satisfied by the AI summaries without needing to click. And it reinforces that content needs to be AI extractable if you want to appear in those summaries. Even if you appear, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to be clicked. The advantage to appearing is that your brand name seen and you’ll get a little bit of that mental real estate in the minds of the consumers. The impact of course varies by your vertical. Information heavy categories like I said earlier are going to see the steepest declines and it’s going to be the most difficult for them to to adjust their business model to compensate. So if you want to focus on being included in AI overviews which is at this point becoming the goal, visibility inside of those AI answers matters more than the click-through rate. So focus on your extractability, focus on your structure, and make sure that you are easy to extract and therefore citable.

Alex

Yeah. I feel like– I don’t know why I had the comparison in my head of going to a concert in the hopes that the person that you’re seeing will see you in the crowd and bring you up to the stage. The possibility of being chosen is so minute, but you have to go to the concert in order to get selected. So even though you’re a host–

Carolyn
You have to go to the concert. You have to go to the concert. It helps to sit in certain areas, right? It helps if you wear something that is going to get their attention, or if you have something that’s going to attract their attention.

Alex
Is it unique? Is it unique? That’s maybe– I don’t know how people choose who the audience member is, but I don’t know. We can’t get philosophical. There’s not enough time. – Oh, that’s true. Okay. Next time.

Carolyn
We’ll talk about it next time. Tell me about this one.

Alex

Yes. I was debating putting this in because to me it’s just a very good thought piece by the guys from WordLift, which is run by Andrea, but it’s not Andrea who wrote this. I’m sorry. It’s also got the name of the lady who did. But this, I mean, we’re big fans of structured data entities. you were explaining stuff about the entity graph and all the galaxies and space, like when you were describing that, I was picturing what we’re seeing here on the slide, like the way in which things are brighter in the center and the way in which things are connected to each other. But what WordLift is saying is that the population of all of this structured data and the connections within it is really important because when it comes to LLMs, they have to connect all of these things to understand the best context on them. There’s a lot more reading. I’ll put it in here. There’s no point in us discussing how important it is. It’s important. Do it. Populate it. Yoast helps you with those things. But yeah, if you want to talk, if you want to read more about entities when it comes to SEO, this is a very interesting piece. And also anything that Dixon Jones writes.

Carolyn

Well, let’s move on to this tool that Google came up with. They got done telling us that they don’t want us scaling our content with AI radically. And then they built a tool to help you scale your content with AI. So–

Alex
I don’t know if it’s irony. I don’t know. Have they realized that they can’t actually identify AI-produced content from an algorithmic point of view? So they’ve lost the battle. If you can’t beat them, join them attitude.

Carolyn
I don’t even know if you can’t beat them, join them. I think it’s they can’t stop the floods, so they’re going to attempt to control the flow of the water.

Alex
Yeah. I mean, people aren’t gonna stop being lazy and scalable, right, on things like this. And if it works, it works. So I guess if you go back to the concert, it’s like buying tickets for all your friends. And then if that person selects your friend, they’ll go, “Actually, I’m okay. Go with this person who bought my ticket.” You know, I guess it’s a weird way of doing it, but it can come at an expense.

Carolyn

Yeah.

Alex

So yeah, I wouldn’t say try it unless you are experimental or again, use it for inspiration. Let it create something. and you be the editor, but do it in a way that it’s not robotic. Sorry, let’s go. WordPress 6.9. They’re doing a few things, aren’t they? I know that they’re releasing it. I don’t know when. In the next three weeks, usually it’s the first half of December. You’re going to stay to the word. And I assume it will be either just before or just after that gets released. But in short, they’ve got an Abilities API. And in short, that kind of acts as– I call it like a translator between devs. So it makes it easier for different assets within WordPress to connect with each other and to work with each other in a more standardized way, not structured, standardized way. And it also improves security a lot as well, or minimizes weaknesses.

Carolyn
I think the fact that it’s supposed to enable safer, more complex plugin capabilities could factor into setting up these LLM agents that, with N8n, where you can connect a bunch of different things to perform a sequence of actions that could include either pulling from your WordPress database or writing to your WordPress database. And I think that improving the API is going to make all of these new connections that people are going to start creating when everyone starts playing with these LLM agents better and safer. So I think that was probably the gist of it. And I do have a suspicion that this is going to get rolled out a week from tomorrow, because that is when state of the word is. And that seems like it would be a good time.

Alex
Yeah.

Carolyn
All right. And I think this is our last content slide.

Alex
Three more.

Carolyn
Google says, no company is going to be immune if the AI bubble bursts. And what you were saying when we were doing our run through was that if he’s saying this, then it’s for sure gonna burst.

Alex

Yeah, I just don’t know why he would say something like that on the BBC, where you know that that’s very, very global. A lot of people watch that stuff. And I know that he’s been on the PR-y bandwagon, he’s been on the circuit, but normal people don’t look at TechCrunch, for example. That’s for us lot. My parents watch this, for example, and then they start asking me questions about it, which is very interesting. But it does show that, like, is he disclaiming himself? Like, so if, let’s say the bubble bursts. And when I say the bubble bursts, I don’t mean from a tech point of view. I think from a new innovation point of view, investors, Silicon Valley kind of level. Like, is he preempting difficult conversations in that time? Because now we can say, did you not watch my BBC News interview? Or like, there’ll be another company who will have the same troubles, and they’re like, not see that Google interview on BBC News. And then it’s a reason to say– and if it doesn’t burst, great. Then he can say, well, look, I was just being cautious. If it does burst, he can say, I told you so. I don’t know what it is. I kind of think that there’s a bubble that– is it going to burst, or is it just going to be like bubble gum, where it will just get to a certain point, and you just know it can’t go any further? And it will just kind of go, bzzz, rather than burst.

Carolyn
I’ll try to make this quick, because I know we’re running out of time. But I think of these hype layers as like the foam on top of your cappuccino. Eventually, the bubbles deflate, the bubbles pop, and the air goes out. But what happens is the milk that was in that foam becomes part of the espresso, and you can’t take it out. So the technology itself is the milk. The air is the foam. The foam is eventually going to just settle into the espresso. And then you can’t separate the milk from the espresso anymore because they’re integrated. So the technology itself is here to stay.

Alex
The foam is going to collapse. I think we’re on a competition of different analogies. I think we’re doing well today. Okay, we’re only a couple left. There’s three more, but they’re not that long. So talk about three. Gemini 3 has launched. Another new version. Lots of improvements on stuff you’ve been doing already. I’ve tested it out and it still couldn’t do everything I wanted it to, but you know it depends at the beginning there’s lots of people doing AI slop and having Elon Musk and and Jack Bezos smoking a cigar in front of a rocket together. Very nice it can it can do some of that but I don’t know if it’s doing anything um you know that’s improving humanity right now. It’s just more features and more shiny shiny stuff right. Yeah so they launched that but then they

Carolyn
also launched Anti-Gravity. It’s an experimental project that is going to push physics inspired computing concepts. Early stage initiative, similar to DeepMind’s long horizon research efforts. It’s not going to affect SEO now, but it’s indicative of Google’s long-term research and development direction. So it’s interesting. More changes to come. The really exciting announcement is that Adobe has acquired SEMrush. Just real quick, it’s interesting to us in SEO because if you look at Adobe’s pattern of acquisition, once they acquire something, they tend to reposition products towards enterprise-level users, which could affect their pricing and packaging. And that would have effects on small guys, individual users, small shops. I would keep an eye on that. I know I am. But it’s very exciting for the people at SEMrush. I’ve got a lot of friends there, and I’m very happy for them and for their stock prices. So very exciting. Let’s buzz through also in the news real quick, and then get to the Yoast news. You want to read this?

Alex
So OpenAI launched a browser, probably to take on Comet. I tried it, but I just went back to Comet. But I’m sure that’s like Mercedes or Volkswagen. It’s just you choose, you make. Reddit sues perplexity over search data scraping. I’m sure how well that will go. probably not very well. Claude has released something for financial services, which means you can make nice graphs within prompts, which I’m sure is useful to about one person, two people here. Merchant Center for Agencies is quite good. Google have made an area where if you are an SEO agency or some other shopping ad agency, you can manage multiple different Merchant Center accounts under one HUD. Sam Altman raises the possibility of ads on ChatGPT, which we’ve actually also– time to do it, but over the weekend I saw Barry Schwartz also report that ads are showing up in AI mode as well. So this is the beginning of the end of complete organic responses. Google clarifies review schema nesting in reviews. You don’t really need to know much about that unless he’s highly technical, or if you’ve got Yoast installed, then you don’t need to worry about a thing. AI launches Grok 4.1 so again you can you know make a picture of a frog surfing on the beach and Jeff Bezos creates an AI startup where he will be co-chief executive making transportation like cars and spacecrafts. I know that Elon Musk made a tweet congratulating him and then made a copycat emoji at him and that’s also in the news. All right so for our Yoast

Carolyn
news tell me about our site kit. Well with site kit is a plugin if anyone

Alex
doesn’t know it’s another plugin not by us it’s by Google it connects search console and Google Analytics we have done some integration with that that started a few months ago when it was first launched and the news basically is soon everyone who has premium will have access to it soon free users as well will be able to have access to some things but not everything we need to sell you on something. But that’s all being rolled out with a few nice little integrations and iterations.

Carolyn
So the TLDR is I won’t have to separately log into Google Search Console or GA4. I can just see this in my WordPress back end?

Alex
Exactly. And it uses some Yoast data as well. So it enriches site kit data and Yoast data on the back end. And it lets you do informative things.

Carolyn
Nice, because I don’t like to have to log into 80 different sites to do my work.

Carolyn
No. So good to know. We have our Black Friday sale coming up. If you want to get notified about our biggest sale of the year and play our video game Yossi Runner to win some awesome prizes, which I’m pretty sure include LEGOs, you can scan that QR code, or you could go to– I’m trying to read it– yoa.st/54n, as in Nancy.

Alex
Yeah.

Carolyn
There you go.

Alex
Yossi Runner. And that is everything. And we are over time, I’m really sorry Marina, don’t shout at us, but we can go straight to questions I reckon. I reckon we can go through them quickly. You see how fast I’m talking now?

Marina
Yes, incredibly fast. I hope people are able to process your speech. Alright, then I’m not going to waste any time either. I’m going to start with the first question that we received, fair is fair. and let me add it to the stage. It’s about the latest Yoast product, the AI Brand Insights. And what it does, it tracks the visibility that your brand has in AI, generated answers. So what do you do? You get your answers. For some questions, your brand is there. For some, it doesn’t appear. What do you do then?

Alex
think of a jeopardy, you know, like you’ve got the answer. You have to think of the question that’s being asked and answer that question. Like that’s a good way of doing it. Also AI business insights, brand insights, sorry, it’ll tell you things that you may not be covered on. So make sure you answer the questions that you may not have answered already. And maybe I’m taking from this question also, stuff that we said before, populate as much as you can. That’s also part of structured data. don’t be too detailed and use different methods of content. So when I say content, I mean imagery, videos, as well as content– wording, sorry.

Carolyn
Images, I don’t know that they’re going to be as effective as maybe the alt text behind those images. But do make sure that anything you’re writing to answer a question is in that structured content, not necessarily structured data, the structured content. so that the LLMs can read it. So stick to the standards. You’ve got your headings that are clear and use keywords. They’ve got your one idea per paragraph. Be clear when you write so that if you’ve got the information the LLMs will find it. Right.

Marina
OK. So a related question. So once you get into an AI answer, I guess, ASMR, what are the tips to keep that placement?

Alex
You can’t say it depends anymore for this, right? Because it doesn’t–

Carolyn
You say I have no idea.

Alex
Well, there is no concrete answer for that quite yet, because things change too much. And the dust of that change has not settled whatsoever. I don’t see it settling still for another year, at least, of all of these new things that are coming out, and the way it places those things, and the new things that people are going to do to try and get into that area. Again, back to the concise, structured content. You know?

Carolyn
We do know that there tends to be some favoritism towards more recent content. But my suspicion is that is more related to the fact that newly updated articles are at the top of your RSS feed, which is an easy to ingest text file, then it has to do with the actual date. So I would, I don’t want to tell you to make lots of content just to make content, but if you can goose things up to the top of your RSS feed, if they’re very important, I would maybe consider testing that, but I can’t guarantee that’ll work.

Marina

Right. Thank you. Yes, let me quickly move to the next question. OK, the next one is quite specific. So it’s about having digital PDF products, a lot of them. What would be the most important point to start optimizing them when looking at the sites or the product descriptions?

Alex
Get them out of PDFs and get them into the site. No, no. However, I know that–

Carolyn
He’s selling the PDFs.

Alex
Pardon?

Carolyn
He’s selling– or she’s selling the PDFs.

Alex
They’re products. There’s some ways of doing gated content. I forgot the name of the Google offer. Was it called Offer Wall or something like that? Do you remember? We covered it last month as well, where you can gate some content and not gate others. So you can kind of give people teasers. Like the outside of the back of a book before you write.

Carolyn
If you have an HTML product page for each of these digital products, that would be a great place to start, just making sure that those teaser pages basically are crawlable and contain all the information you need and you can buy from those pages. It would basically be like populating your WooCommerce site with the products are just downloadable digital products. that seems like the most logical way to do it to me.

Marina

All right. Okay. And then there was one more quite specific question as well. So for schema markups, What can be used for SEO optimization for hotels?

Carolyn
So I believe there are– I think there’s a hotel set of schema.

Alex
There is. There is a hotel schema, which I’m going to add here. Wacim, I’m going to assume that’s how you pronounce the name. And then there’s hotels as well, which has different– this is actually more of documentation here, which shows that there’s differences between a lodging business accommodation and an offer as well so you can use the hotel schema I wouldn’t say use location the basic location schema because those people will those hotels will claim it themselves as the first that’s supposed to be first-hand perspective but yeah they you should have the hotel ones in a

Marina
list and then and then use your schema that way right sounds good all right we We are out of time, but we managed to answer all the questions that we haven’t managed to get a reply to. So please have a look if your question wasn’t mentioned. I think we replied to everyone who asked for more information. Another thing I want to add is that our next SEO update will be in one month on the 15th of December, again from 4 p.m. Central European time. And yeah, that was it for today. I hope you all enjoyed it, I certainly did. Alex, Carolyn, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks everybody. See you in a month.

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