The SEO Update by Yoast – October 2025 Edition

Took place on 21 October 2025 - 4 PM CEST / 10 AM EDT

Hosts

Alex Moss

Principal SEO

Carolyn Shelby

Principal SEO

Topics & Sources

SEO & AI news

Also in the news…

Yoast news

Transcript

Chris
Hello, everyone. Very warm welcome to all of you from around the world to the monthly Yoast SEO update. It’s great to see where you’re all joining from today, all from around the world. So I’m Chris, and I’m a senior marketing manager here at Yoast. I’m broadcasting today from a fairly bright London, which is surprising given Halloween’s just around the corner. Good to see the weather’s just about holding up. Very excited to be your host today. So for newcomers, this is a brilliant way to keep up to date with what’s happening across the ever-spinning SEO universe. It will save you loads of time reading, researching, as Alex and Carolyn have done it all for you. That’s personally why I enjoy these sessions.

Here are some highlights from today’s update: You may notice all your impressions are dropping in Google Search Console. Well, don’t panic. Alex and Carolyn will explain why this is happening, and it’s probably not your fault. WordPress and Shopify have set up a pretty interesting collaboration, so look out for that as well.

So, some general housekeeping to kick off. This session will be recorded. Sources for the updates we mentioned can be found on the website at yoast.com/webinars. And there will be time for Q&As at the end. So make sure you submit your Q&As and questions to the side panel, and we’ll have some time at the end to go through them.

Now, it’s time to hand over to the real stars of the show, our SEO principals here at Yoast. We have Carolyn Shelby. She’s the SEO powerhouse, with decades of experience in news, technical, and enterprise SEO. Then we have Alex Moss, master of technical and structural SEO and all-around digital marketing. You had excellent hands. I’ll be back for the Q&A at the end. So, without further ado, Alex and Carolyn, welcome to the stage.

Carolyn
Thank you. Very excited to be here. It feels like we were just here. I think that’s because it’s only been like three weeks since the last SEO update. So hopefully we will be able to get through the slides with blazing speed and have tons of time at the end for Q&A, which is, I know, not the way it usually goes. Alex, you’re muted

Alex
I would say that’s probably for the best that I’m muted. I forgot to unmute myself. I forgot that it was only like three weeks ago. That’s why it seems like it’s so close, but we always do say I have faith that we’re actually going to have more time for Q&As, but we always say that, don’t we? Let’s see, let’s see what time we get through today, all right, well

Carolyn
So you already see that we’re happy to ask, answer your questions. If you want to know more about today’s topic, as always, you can go to https://yoa.st/update-october-2025. The recording will be available later. We have an SEO survey that we would love for you to fill out. I don’t know if you can grab the little QR code right now, but if you want to go directly to the URL, it is yoa.st/53a, all lowercase. So if you could fill that out for us, we would be super happy and very appreciative. We also have some, these aren’t new this time. They were new last time, but just in case you’ve forgotten, we’ve got little icons at the tops of the slides now. So if you see the little stopwatch, that means that the advice is of immediate interest and impact. And if you see chess pieces, it’s more of a long-term strategy. But that will help you make decisions about how you’re going to integrate the information into your brain and your neural filing system. Are you ready to get started, Alex?

Alex
I’m ready, yeah. Well, let’s see what happened in the previous episode of the SEO update by Yoast. Tell me. So a few days before, well, the one that was three weeks ago, we told you about how num=100, which is a UTM parameter, this little thing that adds at the end, where, in short, you could see 100 positions, 100 rankings, all on one page. Now, what happened there is that a lot of third parties were using that to their advantage, using it to, you know, scrape different data as much as they could. And whilst they did that, Google was giving it to them, there was nothing official. And that included a lot of rank trackers out there. It also included a lot of LLMs out there, some of which, like ChatGPT, were crawling a lot of different positions. Google just took that away. And now that’s kind of skewed some data, including Google Search Console and other third-party tools, some of which have actually stayed okay. But weirdly, Google Search Console seems to have shown you the bigger skewed data, and everyone else has kind of stayed steady, which is nice to know. But if you do see anything like less impressions in GSC, and it happened mid to late September, this will be the reason why.

Carolyn
I think the important thing, or the most visible thing that people might be noticing in Search Console is you may remember that everyone was talking about the crocodile and how the impressions were going up, but your clicks were going down and it was making a little crocodile face on your Search Console. What’s happening is that because the impressions are better now, it’s less skewed and the crocodiles kind of matched up again and your little crocodile face is gone. So if you see that, that doesn’t mean that everything is magically better and your click-throughs have gone up. That just means that the impressions have gone down, but they’re more accurate and they reflect reality a little bit better. So you will be seeing that. And the reason we’re bringing that up and refreshing your memory on that is because there was a concern that Google ads reporting has also been impacted by the num=100 removal change. Because it was causing inflated data in Search Console, PPC experts said they don’t expect similar impact in Google ads. Vanessa Fox, who used to work at Google a long time ago, raised concerns that ads keyword volumes might have also been inflated, but the community is saying they weren’t and that one problem isn’t related to the other. The most likely reason for this is that Google Ads has been filtering out scraper-related activity more effectively than Search Console. You might ask, well, why would they be better at it for Google Ads than they would for Search Console? Likely because there’s money involved. Because with Google Ads, you’re paying for impressions, you’re paying for clicks, and there’s like money changing hands, Google has much more of an incentive. I don’t know why the screen’s doing that, just for the record. Google has much more of an incentive to make sure that everything is completely accurate. So the num=100 change, it’s affecting SEO reporting. It’s not affecting your paid search. Your organic data is going to look different. Your ads data is going to be, is going to probably look the same as it did before. Don’t panic. This is the organic adjusting to better reflect reality. The ads, because it was a money situation, was probably always fine. So if you’re running paid ads and you have some concerns about that, that’s what’s going on there. But we wanted to make sure that everybody was, everybody understood what was going on and there was no panic. Let’s talk about Sora 2. I know this isn’t directly SEO related. Well, I mean, it kind of is because I’m seeing a lot of it in my feed. Alex, have you had a chance to play with this?

Alex
Only a little and it’s good. Simple prompts. It does what it needs to do. But what I am seeing on social is, is it called AI slop? Just produce videos of politically incorrect stuff to try and make you laugh. Like, I don’t know, it’s web spam, in my opinion. But, there’s that part. Whilst I don’t think it’s going to create an award-winning movie right now. What it can do is maybe give you sort of site owners and optimizers out there, something to add in a video that best represents a blog post that you’re writing or a landing page that you’re on where you could actually do a simple look at look at this waterfall in a forest in the middle of a forest, Wouldn’t that look cool? But it doesn’t actually mean that you’re trying to take over the wording itself with the video. Don’t make the video the primary, but it’s a good complementary thing to do with your online marketing. And like we were discussing before, if something’s real or not, does that make you want to click in? Which, I guess, is a good question.

Carolyn
I saw someone complain on LinkedIn that if he sees an AI-generated hero image attached to your blog post, he is 100% unlikely to click through and read your blog post because he will assume that everything that you wrote is also garbage and that he would much rather see stock imagery as the featured image or stock photos. I have, I think, the opposite opinion. I would much rather know that you spent some time and you made an effort to make an image to go along with your blog post than grabbed stock photography. Stock photography can show up anywhere; it can be anywhere. Anyone can use it. You’re not paying for exclusive rights to that photo. It’s not unique, and it’s flat. Like, there’s usually no, it’s not custom or bespoke to that article. So it just seems like it’s really low effort. And in my mind, it’s more low effort than AI. And if you’re, if you’re that lazy, then I have to assume that your writing is also lazy.

Alex
So, yeah. I mean, it’s a good point. If you do, I’m thinking of news items and let’s, it’s not in this, the SEO update, but there was the big AWS outage that happened in the last 24 hours. And all I’ve seen is just pictures of the AWS logo and like a graph going down. Or, you know, if someone hacks something in the news, there’s always some unidentified hooded person lurching by a keyboard. And those are the stock photos, but maybe a simple Sora 2, you know, video that describes that thing happening, maybe adds a bit to the animation, and again, adds personality. At least some thought has been put into it.

Carolyn
If I was going to make something to illustrate the AWS going down, I would remake a scene in Star Wars when Anakin becomes Vader. Is it Anakin? Yeah, I don’t. I’m not a Star Wars person, more of a Star Trek person. That’s another conversation. When he killed all the younglings and they said there was a disturbance in the force as millions of voices were snuffed out all at once. It’s kind of what happens when AWS goes down, right? There’s a disturbance in the forest because all of these sites went down. I would probably try to find a way to get AI to remix that section of the movie into something more AWS related. And I would think that was pretty clever.

Alex
Exactly. With a story.

Carolyn
Creativity. But, you know, I would do something like that. That would be far more interesting to me than just a picture of the logo and an arrow going down.

Alex
Yeah.

Carolyn
I think the other interesting thing is TNG is the best Star Trek, Jason. I agree. The fascinating thing to me about these videos is how good they are and how much better they’ve gotten in 12 months. So if they’ve gotten this good just in the last 12 months, what do you think next year is going to be like? It’s wild. I’m not going to lie. There were videos of animals in the middle of the night coming and jumping on trampolines. I swear to God, for the first week, I thought those were real. I was like, that’s really cool. Look at the bears having fun on the trampoline. And then someone’s like, no, those are AI generated. And I was very sad.

Alex
Oh, well, now we don’t know what’s real and what’s not.

Carolyn
We don’t.

Alex
That’s the ethical stuff of AI. That’s not this month. That’s maybe another webinar.

Carolyn
Maybe we’ll put that on the ringer. You’re going to see a tsunami of this AI generated video coming into your feeds and you’re going to be finding it everywhere. And if you’re asking yourself if you should be integrating it, if take advantage of it, I don’t think it’s going to hurt to try. You should be prepared for this influx. If your previous strategy had revolved around maybe producing real videos, you might have to find a way to produce your real videos faster and differentiate them from the AI generated videos. Do things that can prove that it was real, I guess, is the best way to phrase that.

Alex
But you can do video production for cheaper. But anyway, away from video, let’s talk about e-commerce a little bit more because Woo have announced that they are working with Stripe to have a more agentic commerce experience. What does that matter to you? If you’ve got Woo, this eventually should in core because we’ve got no more detail about when this is going to happen when it’s going to be released is that one can assume that because we already know that OpenAI have brought in seamless e-com is that there’ll be a way of looking for a product within a chat dialogue, you find out that that’s something you want to purchase. And without leaving the ChatGPT, even that session, you can purchase something using your card that’s already connected, that kind of stuff. So this is a nice way of saying that all WooCommerce sites are going to have this, it’s already going to be something that’s enabled, you don’t need to do anything quite yet. And even if you did need to do something, Yoast will have probably accommodated for some of that work when it happens. So don’t worry, everyone, we’re on it. But from a site owner’s point of view, you may not get all the visitors you want. But think of the internet or your audiences splitting into agents or robots and humans. And both of them will want a different experience. And both the human will use a robot to potentially convert. And whilst they’re not converting on the human side, they’re still converting. So it’s best to have both areas covered.

Carolyn
I’m looking forward to this. It’s going to be helpful that there’s a means of making things AI native discoverable, and it won’t involve the site owners scrambling to retrofit their sites and undo a lot of like the tabs and the things that we’ve been working into our sites, because we thought that was a better user experience that we now have to unroll to make sure that the agents can see all of the texts that they need to see. So this is kind of making all of those changes easier for the site owner. So I’m looking forward to it. And whether or not I trust the computer to make purchases for me, I might be a bit of a troglodyte in that aspect. I like to put my own credit card into the machines I like to I like to have that that visual experience where I know that

Alex
We say that what about wallets what about wallets on your phone and contactless you know 15 years ago that may have been like the technology could exist if it really needed to be but people were still wary now we’re all accepting of it now is it going to be weird in 15 years that like anyone even has a physical credit card you know um that’s true it’s just one way to look at it. Okay well from e-com to local. Bing updated their business manager their location manager for local businesses and you can do lots of cool neat stuff the UI’s been updated so go and check it out um what would this be the takeaway for you guys to know I’d say well Local is very important. There’s still very local-based searches, even in ChatGPT and all the other platforms out there. Interesting to see Bing, as a search engine, are looking at this when they’re also working on AI-focused products and solutions, right? So I don’t think that if this… This wouldn’t be released in such a big way. And be such a big update with more options and more things populate if there wasn’t something else down the line that it may help with and contribute towards.

Carolyn
Something that you can’t talk about right now?

Alex
No, of course not. I’m keeping poker faces, but I mean, I would just say, check it out, maybe have a look and maybe make sure that everything’s populated because soon it might be needed more so than other platforms to offer local business citations like this, not citations.

Carolyn
I would say that a good reminder here also is that not everything is about Google. And even though Google does dominate the market still, there are other search engines that are developing other agreements with the LLMs and the AIs. So there are other markets aside from just Google. Don’t focus on Google to the exclusion of everyone else. There might be other opportunities. You’re never going to get all of the market share from Google anyway. So you have to take the customers where you can find them. And it might be that some of your customers are spending more time on Bing than they are on Google. So it could be an untapped opportunity for you as a business owner. All right, let’s move on to what AI mode user behavior studies reveal about the future of search. So Kevin Indig did a study where he looked at how users are interacting with AI mode. And this was such an in-depth study, it required two slides to complete. So this is another long-term strategy type of deal to just sort of absorb the information. We know that AI mode is sticky. 75% of those sessions never left AI mode. 88% of those first interactions were with the AI text. People are dwelling, they’re sitting there and they’re reading it for more than a minute. I mean, 50 to 80 seconds. That’s a lot more time than they normally spend scanning something and then clicking. When the clicks do happen, they’re considered rare and transactional. So people aren’t clicking on something unless they’re looking to do something else. It’s not, I’m going to gather more information. They’ve got the information from the AI mode and they’re clicking when they’re ready to make a purchase. The site type is matching the intent. So the comparison surface, like review sites, broad shopping goes to marketplaces, decisive buying lands on a PDP is a product description page. So when people are making a decisive decision, it’s taking them directly to that product page where they can complete that task and get all the information they want about it. Local tasks are on Google assets. So if it’s something that you’re trying to do in your local environment, it’s going to stay entirely within Google. It’ll stay within the maps or something like that. There are many product description pages inside of AI mode. So product previews are getting pulled into AI mode, and those are appearing in about a quarter of the sessions. They get a lot less attention than that dwell time in AI mode overall, but 45% of the users stop after previewing. So they’re previewing that information, and then they’re not moving on from that. What this is all telling us is that people are spending a lot of time in this AI mode. They’re not going to these websites as often as they were before. So that initial decrease in click-throughs that we were all panicking about because AI is going to steal our clicks, AI is 100% stealing our clicks. So I think the click-through rates are going to continue to go down and there’s, we don’t own Google, so there’s nothing we can do to stop that trend. I would treat AI mode as a destination and not a doorway to your website, which how we treated the search results before. People would find them and they would move through them to your website. That’s why we wanted to rank highly. Now they’re getting to AI mode and that’s where they’re going. And they’re not moving on from there unless they have a very strong reason to do so. You want to make sure you’re engineering that content for citation and extraction. And we’ve got lots of information. Oh, this would be a good place to put that, drop that link to the article, Alex.

Alex
Yes, I will do that now. I’ll put Kevin’s in the chat, but I’ll put yours within yoast.com here now.

Carolyn
Cool. So you want to make sure that you’re structuring your page correctly and that you’ve got the right type of intent and you’re optimizing everything with the understanding that people aren’t going to come through and land on that page. You’re making all of these data points available for Google to use in AI mode. If you can start tracking those AI citations and the coverage along with your regular SEO metrics, I think you’re going to find that to be useful information as well. And I think we have something that can help with that that we’re going to talk about at the very end. So remind me to circle back to that.

Alex
25 minutes, I’d say. We’ll mention stuff, won’t we? Hopefully.

Carolyn
Okay. So can you tell me about the Microsoft stuff?

Alex
Microsoft did a little a little presentation on how to do things I don’t need to get too deep into it’s the same messaging that Google have been giving you and Microsoft for years. Just make sure that things are concise. Things are unique and value added.

Carolyn
I’ve been saying this for years why is this suddenly new it’s not

Alex
I don’t know I feel like um at the moment when it’s come to this is this is a new thing AI based LLM SEO, whatever you want to call it, GEO and everything. It’s all that’s partly causing confusion that makes the search engines themselves have to like go back and go, remember everything we’re about to tell you is everything we’ve already been telling you for a generation. The foundations are exactly the same. And maybe let’s, as soon as you think of GEO and LLM SEO or whatever the acronym is, then you automatically think, well, what special, unique kind of work do I need to do for that? And the answer is the same, the same stuff. Make sure things concise, structured, make sure your schema is populated. All of those things that you were doing prior to ChatGPT coming out is stuff that you should be doing now. And more so maybe warnings about not filler text or, you know, keyword stuffing and you’re just making words for the sake of words. Think of tokens and how things are synthesized and brought back into a platform. If they have to read 1,000 words, but you only needed 600, make that landing page 600 words or as close as possible. Because the other 400 words is just a waste of time for a machine. And therefore, as well as a human as well. So we should be, again, catering for both. But in short, the takeaway was something we would have told you months and months and years previously. So nothing new.

Carolyn
All right. So this was, if you’re a developer or if you’re a very technical person, you might find this keynote by Sam Altman interesting. But it was at their Dev day. So this really is targeted to a very technical audience. There were some interesting takeaways. And we summarized it so that you don’t have to go watch it because my eyes glazed over a little bit at some points and I don’t want to subject anyone else to that. So the things that I think would be really interesting to the general public Knowing that the AIs are making plans to and making tools for converging all of the ecosystems end to end so that there’s AI everywhere from where you sit down at the computer to everything you’re doing on the other end. they want the AI to be able to do that for you or at least go along with you and help you make decisions. So there’s faster development cycles. They’re using AI to program things. Products are going to come out faster. Testing cycles are going to be shortened. There’s going to be more, when they say multimodal content in search, that means there’s going to be not just text. There’ll be videos. There’ll be audio. There will be pictures. Multimodal just means lots of different types of data. The shift towards AI native apps that integrate directly into user conversations means that they’re going to be trying to put the AI into, like, we’ve got it in our emails, they’re going to be putting it into our chats, into Slack, into everything. It will be like, what is that food additive that’s literally in everything?

Alex
Not oil, something oil. Palm oil. Is it palm oil?

Carolyn
Something like that. It’s going to be like one of those food additives that no matter how hard you try to not engage with it or consume it, it’s there and you just can’t help it. So I think that was really the important takeaway. I do invite people to check it out on YouTube if you’re interested, but if you’re not interested, there’s the summary for you.

Alex
Yeah, and I’ve also put a link to the full 52 minute. Oh, thank you. If you are interested to watch it. So the next one is, Shopify have done something quite interesting a couple of weeks ago. Was it 10 days ago? Yeah, 11 days ago. They have created a plugin so that if you have a WordPress installation, you can sell your products using Shopify’s platform. So it’s kind of like using both at the same time. It’s too early, in my opinion, to tell exactly what the implications are from an SEO perspective, because it hasn’t been tested that much. We didn’t even know about it until after it was announced, and we’ve still got some testing to do. A couple of things to note. Firstly, if, well, the very first thing is, is do not just change and use this immediately. That’s not to say don’t explore the idea. If you’re using a WooCommerce installation and you just don’t like it and you’ve been hoping and praying all this time to get onto Shopify somehow, but you don’t want to leave your WordPress installation, this is the potential solution to do that that’s official from Shopify and its first party made. The other thing to think about is also if you are a Shopify owner and all of this time you’ve been limited by some of the things that Shopify as a CMS do outside of the e-commerce feature set that it does. And you want to do things like extend it a bit more, be more creative with your templates and so on. This is an opportunity to still operate within Shopify and everything that it does that’s magic in there that you like about Shopify. But on the front end to the customer-facing side and agent-facing side, you can still use a WordPress site. But we will be digging in deeper in the next month. And in the next SEO update, I would like to think that maybe they’ve created an update because it is literally version 1.0.0. And we’ll have a few more answers to if you did want to do it, then here are a few things to consider. But lastly, don’t do anything before Black Friday, please. And thank you.

Carolyn
I was just going to say that. If you saw this and you said, oh, I want to try this out, I’m begging you, please don’t try it until after the shopping season. One month out from the biggest shopping event of the year is not the time to change platforms. You should be in code freeze right now. You should not be making… This is like cutting your hair two weeks before your wedding. Just it is not a good idea. It could go fine, but it could go spectacularly badly. We don’t know yet. So we will do some investigation and we will get back to you in the following months with better information and updates. It’s an exciting prospect, though, especially if you like the bloggy aspects of WordPress, but you like the shopping aspects of Shopify. Being able to merge those two in a more seamless fashion, I think is going to be a game changer for a lot of people, but we don’t want you trying that this close to Black Friday.

Alex
Well, we did warn that in our coffee chat, didn’t we? In our part one. Neringa, if you’re about, can you please dig up our part one and put it in the chat here so people can watch it? And at the end, we’ll be advertising part two, which is on the 4th of November. But anyway, more news, more news. This one, oh, can we chat about this, please?

Carolyn
Yeah, we can chat. So this was a LinkedIn article where I forget exactly who said it. Google’s testing AI generated descriptions for some of the results. And the way the article was phrased was that this means that Google is going to stop using your meta descriptions and it’s going to be pointless to write them. Oh no, whatever shall we do? So I disagree with that. Google tested AI generated descriptions on Reddit threads, which do not have meta descriptions by design. So there’s no meta description. How are they going to provide a meta description if not to generate it? I don’t think they’re going to do this for every page on the planet because it takes tokens and processing power to do it. And they don’t want to spend that. They want to do this economically, and economically it’s only required for things like Reddit threads that don’t have descriptions. I don’t think you should stop doing your meta descriptions. If you don’t have your fallback or default meta description configured in your Yoast plugin, you should go do that. In the first time configurator and in the settings, you can set up variables as your defaults for things like your meta description. So you don’t have to set it on the page every time you make a blog post. It will default to taking the first 150 or so characters from your content and make that the meta description. So it’s like percentage sign, excerpt, percentage sign. You drop that into the description that will magically fill in your meta description. Now, if you write in an inverted pyramid style, which is what journalists do or they’re supposed to do. It’s the way we were taught 100,000 years ago when I was in journalism school. All of your important information is at the top. So the first couple of sentences basically are the most important things about your article. If you write in that style, it will naturally pick up a great meta description that you didn’t even have to write. It’ll default to it automatically. And you don’t have to worry about Google writing a meta description for you because yours will be good.

Alex
Yeah. And it’s also worth noting because, you know, while you were chatting, Simon Lewis beat me to it. And so did Megabit is the first thing is, is that meta descriptions were never a ranking factor. Just know that this is the elevator pitch for a human to increase CTR. We also know that CTR has been going down in value over the time with the influx of AI mode and all the LLMs out there. However, like Carolyn said, don’t just neglect them. Make them because these agents and other methods and search engines are still going to at least reference that thing. And if you’re honest and true to the content that’s inside, then it will still potentially either use it or use parts of it in order to generate it.

Carolyn
I agree. Walmart’s doing something fun. They’re creating an AI first shopping experience. How do you even feel about this, Alex? Because I’m not sure I want AI to be my first shopping experience because I rather enjoy shopping.

Alex
I don’t know. I mean, the weekly shop’s good, but then again, I don’t know what it’s like in America. In England, there is quite a lot of grocery online shopping, and we’ve got Tesco and Asda. Walmart owns Asda as well, so I would also see in the past. It was a good few years ago now, but it was within the last 10, 15. But I also see, well, if they’re doing it with Walmart, maybe I’m going to experience this soon with Asda, right? But if we know that, let’s again just use ChatGPT because it’s OpenAI here. They have my card details. They’re starting to know what things I like and don’t like based on history and conversation. It will be able to access previous shopping through either my email or my Walmart account. It will be able to make suggestions and it can form some part of a weekly shop with me and have a chat about the weekly shop. Or I want to make spaghetti bolognese and it just finds things for me. And maybe even the brands that I like. It knows I like Dolmio more than any other brand. Maybe it only goes for that. I actually like this idea. And again, you don’t have to leave the chat dialogue. I don’t think Walmart’s going to care because here, I think this is a great opportunity because as soon as I said, make me ingredients for spaghetti bolognese, Walmart’s like, yes, I’m going to make sure that everything is in there. You know, add celery, carrots and all the things that you may not have done beforehand. And then it’s up to you to opt out of that item. I think it’s going to be really, really good, but also really convenient for us because you can connect. When it connects to things like, I don’t know, Trello or other random note items, the grocery apps, all of those things, this is going to be huge.

Carolyn
Samsung has refrigerators that have cameras inside of it that can see what’s in your refrigerator. Could you imagine getting your refrigerator talking to some AI app that talks to the shopping and automatically knows what you’re low on and what you need and what you don’t have? Oh my gosh.

Alex
Crazy. Although I don’t like the concept of a smart fridge. I saw a random short on YouTube about someone talking about it and they brought up two very valid things, right? So first of all, ads. Am I going to have to watch an ad before I select something? And then he went, well, hold on. What if it’s tiered pricing and you end up in a position where you’re not allowed to open the fridge until you’ve watched this ad?

Carolyn
No.

Alex
I don’t know. Anything’s possible. Maybe it’s a way of, well, maybe you can buy a fridge. Maybe the fridge is free, right? And in exchange for having a free fridge, you have to look at Walmart. If you’re listening to this and you take the idea, this has been recorded live. Thank you very much. That was a good idea, but not a good idea for them. Not a good idea for us, but it’s, it shows the possibility of the connections or you’re, you’re on a diet. You’re not supposed to have that chocolate bar and therefore and I don’t trust you either because as soon as you open the door I know you’re going to go to the chocolate bar

Carolyn
Well it’ll know if you’ve took a chocolate bar because there’s a camera and it will know if it’s gone or what if it decides you’ve got too many calories in your in your refrigerator right now and then start showing you ads for the fat jab or something yeah but again clearly you need a GLP1

Alex
Yeah but maybe if you think about medical stuff Maybe it’s valid. Maybe actually you’re, I don’t know, a diabetic, I don’t know which one it is, that’s not allowed to eat any chocolate. And maybe that person doesn’t want to listen to health advice and is stopped from eating that chocolate bar. For all we know, someone will argue that it saves lives. But either way, this is how everything’s getting connected together. This is just stage one of this seamless experience into our actual lives and it making some decisions for us. Hopefully it won’t.

Carolyn
Skynet’s not going to annihilate us with nuclear war. It’s going to starve us to death by not opening our refrigerator.

Alex
Exactly. More immersion into our lives.

Carolyn
More. So direct messaging is going to soon let you talk to humans in chat GPT. I’m not even sure how this is going to work. It’s part of everything now. The takeaway from this article is that they’re trying, OpenAI is trying to evolve ChatGPT into being an everything app where it blends this AI assistance and guidance into everything, including into your human-to-human communications, which is supposedly a move that could reshape how people collaborate and socialize through AI platforms. I do use this when I write professional business emails, because sometimes my initial response is not the most corporately response. And it’s helpful for me to maintain professional dialogue in my communications. You would be losing a lot of your personality if everything you wrote and communicated to people went through that AI filter. Like your personality would disappear, wouldn’t it?

Alex
It depends. It depends on the scenario, I guess. I keep on thinking of customer relations of, you know, a very disgruntled customer where actually, it doesn’t stress out the customer service advisor and this automated way or integrated way can cool the fire down at least and settle the customer. But there needs to be a few use cases for this.

Carolyn
All right. Well, that’s depressing me. So let’s just move on from that. ChatGPT’s mobile app is slowing down in growth and daily usage. I think this was kind of to be expected. I think the fun and the novelty is wearing off. So the honeymoon period’s over and people are starting to settle into how am I using this to actually be useful rather than, you know, let’s just play games and make stupid videos with it all day. You were telling me earlier that you read that 95% of young people are using Gemini and they prefer Gemini over ChatGPT?

Alex
Yeah, I have been because I’ve been watching and reading so much in the last few weeks, especially on catch up, because I was away for 10 days, and you just watch everything in one day. I don’t know where it was said, and I forgot to write the note down. But I saw somewhere that there was a statistic that only 5% of people using ChatGPT are on a paid plan. And that’s interesting, because I actually thought it would have been more. And it also shows that maybe I don’t know when that number was from. Is it today? Was it 20% six months ago? You know, and now people have been trying it out, going on to other platforms, testing Perplexity or Claude out and now they’re stuck there because they prefer that that’s going to be quite interesting but that was one bit. The other thing was that the young people. Someone was speaking to a young person or to a group of young people and they said that no one they know uses ChatGPT as though ChatGPT is the Facebook you know how all the people use Facebook and everyone else is on TikTok and their TikTok is Gemini They use Gemini a lot because they find it better. And they use Notebook LM because it’s a great tool that ChatGPT do not have. I feel like ChatGPT is more. I don’t know. I think we’re older than that now, aren’t we? I don’t even know. But it’s very interesting to see how we were talking about this over the months of like, the dust isn’t settling yet. We don’t know if ChatGPT in three years is going to be the dominant, let alone exist. We don’t know. Look at MySpace. That’s a great comparable to everyone thought at the time that MySpace was the only thing that was going to be around. Then all of a sudden, Facebook appeared and took it down because of its great feature sets and seamless user experience.

Carolyn
That’s true. And, you know, and I’ve spoken to a lot of, I think they’re Gen Zs, who won’t use AI at all because they feel like it’s inauthentic. It’s just cheating at everything because you can’t use stupid machines who are guessing the next words to do your work. So they just don’t do the work. So I think we’re going to experience a lot of growing pains, I think, as this continues to evolve. Let’s keep rolling, though, because I do want to make sure we have time for questions. We talked about this a couple slides ago. ChatGPT has an app for Slack now. I do think this in particular will be interesting because what it lets you do is it helps you, it can read through all your previous slacks and help you find things and summarize really, really long chains. Like if you go to catch up on a thread and there’s 100 new messages, it can summarize. It’ll tell you basically what you need to know without having to go through all 100 of those messages. It can also semantically search. Iinstead of saying, I was talking to someone in marketing about this color blue that I didn’t like, can you go find that for me? You don’t have to know exactly the shade of blue that you were looking for. You don’t have to know exactly who you were talking to. It knows that it needs to find a conversation between you and a person who is also in the marketing team discussing a negative sentiment about a shade of blue. And it’s smart enough to know that there’s lots of different names for blue. And there’s lots of people in the marketing department. So it can find those things for you. I think it’ll just make, it’ll make things a little bit quicker. You won’t have to do as much searching. You won’t have to do as much reading. You can, it’ll just help you with your Slack.

Alex
Good, because I haven’t been a fan of the AI capabilities inside Slack. You know, I do want to, I want, you can only do one thing at a time, but I don’t know. We’ve been told by Louis or Louis that there may be too many questions for time. So I chat challenge accepted because we’ve kind of finished the news items here, but also in the news. I’ll shoot through these. AI mode’s expanding. Big surprise. Google is testing an analytics advisor inside GA4, which is okay. You just chat to her and may give some advice, but I’d probably advise maybe to use an MCP if you’re technical enough and chat directly inside the likes of Claude or Perplexity. The next thing is someone spotted in the wild that in AI overviews, they are doing a lot more enriched content answer version of a summary of a recipe. And they’re showing a lot more and a lot more rich data on the outputs. But again, we’ll put that in the mailing list and on the page. And lastly, Sam Altman announces that he’s sorting out adult and erotica content within ChatGPT had huge backlash. Crazy. I don’t know why he’s doing it personally. Um, you know, I do not, I’m sure that a lot of people have been asking for it. It’s probably data driven inside the usage in that.

Carolyn
What kind of people are asking for that? I mean, I know what kind of people are asking for that.

Alex
Too many, too many people, but just because the data says that a lot of people are doing it doesn’t necessarily mean you need to pivot towards what the data says if you’re trying to do something great in the world. Now he’s trying to cure cancer and sort the environment out. And now we’re like, now you can have erotica.

Carolyn
What are we doing? About our new product that’s out.

Alex
Yes.

Carolyn
So Yoast SEO AI+ is a bundle and it includes our AI Brand Insights, which is what you see on the right there in the screenshots. So that’s available. Very exciting. If you get the bundle, the AI+ bundle, you’ll get the Brand Insights plus Premium plus I think, is it also WooCommerce?

Alex
I believe so. But I put every, all the details are in the link I’ve just put on there.

Carolyn
Yes. It’s all very exciting. Do test it out. It’s great. And then also we added pronouns that’s in the standard and we want to make sure that we’re keeping our schema up to date and current. So you’ve got that available to you now as well, but very excited. Please do read about our AI Brand Insights if you are interested in tracking those mentions. And then also join us on November 4th for the second installment of Brewing Up Sales, which is where Alex and I will have a coffee chat or tea chat about last minute optimizations for Black Friday. And then of course we’ve got the Thanksgiving edition of the SEO update by Yoast on Tuesday, November 24th, which is hopefully before you leave for the holidays. And that was it. So are we ready for Q&A?

Alex
Yes. Let’s get through the Chris. You’ve got a challenge. Yes, I do. 12 minutes.

Chris
Thanks for the updates, team.

Carolyn
To be fair, 12 minutes is more than we usually give you.

Chris
It is. We should get through all of these. So let’s kick this one. So using AI-generated images in posts, is an understanding that sites using them won’t be crawled or pages won’t be crawled? Is that true? Is that still the case?

Carolyn
I don’t think they were avoiding posts that had AI images.

Alex
No, I don’t remember hearing that. However, that being said, maybe treat the image like how we were describing Sora before. Don’t make it the thing, but make it something complementary. And don’t just make it better than a stock image and not maybe as good as a human-produced one. But also think about if it’s going to change, what that might do to that image? Are you going to have to go back? Think about it.

Carolyn
So here’s what I think the problem might have been if you were using AI-generated images as your hero image. Hero images appear at the top of the page. They’re going to encounter the alt text and the file name before they encounter the headline and the body copy. So if you’re not updating the, if it has a gibberish file name or a file name that has words in it that are related to the prompt that you used and not necessarily related to the headline or the content of the article, it’s going to confuse the bots and dilute your relevancy. And that’s true of any image that you use. It just happens that it’s automatically being set by the AI generation when you save the image. So I don’t think it was ever a problem with being AI generated. I think it was a problem with the surrounding context that you were providing that the bots were reading. And they were reading it and it was confusing them on what the topic of the article or the relevancy of the content to what the question that they’re trying to answer was, if that makes sense.

Chris
That’s it. Perfect. Let’s add, let’s have a look. So where are we? So if I’m looking for human engagement with my website, how concerned should you be about the ethical stuff? I guess this is up to you, isn’t it?

Alex
Yeah. Depends what you mean by ethical stuff. Are you thinking of ethics and disconnecting a human experience with the agentic experience? I think that, weirdly, in some of the items we’ve been covering before, like direct messaging within ChatGPT by humans might solve some of those things where if they’re not actually navigating onto a website the way we have been in the past that this agendic area might have that there will be some connection and again we were talking weirdly Carolyn about how authenticity is going to become more valuable and more important to people as time goes on as more and more stuff gets synthetic and production like. I think we oh it was when we were talking about Sora 2 during the run-through, we’re talking about maybe if I see Niagara Falls in a video, maybe up till now, I’ll just assume very rightly that that’s a real video taken by a human or controlled by a human. But now if I saw a video of a waterfall and they said it’s Niagara Falls, if I’d never seen it before, technically I couldn’t confirm whether that was true or not. And was it edited? Was it completely fake. I think those ethical things of don’t make fake stuff trying to hide something that should be real in the first place. Maybe that’s a good way to answer it. If you want to be real and you want to connect human to human, then maybe keep it that way and keep it human to human whilst secondarily looking at an agentic audience.

Carolyn
I’m just trying to figure out what could you possibly do that’s unethical that would increase human engagement? I don’t know, people If you’re being receptive that would decrease engagement because people wouldn’t like that because it ventures into that uncanny valley where people feel uncomfortable Don’t be unethical as my general rule of thumb

Alex
Unless Mario we got it all wrong and if so please find us on Linkedin and DM us and we’re happy to chat further

Chris
What topic that’s been covered kind of weaved in throughout the webinar but I feel it’s a huge topic that a lot of people are interested in so no harm covering it again. What key steps need to be taken for a freelancer to get cited in ChatGPT put for them to get small businesses as cited in chat to you to your Copilot?

Carolyn
I would probably do some reach out press release style and try to get an article where the business is mentioned and quoted picked up in a publication that is relied upon as a feeder for the AIs. So if I want to get mentioned, I would have an article that quotes me published in one of the search industry journals. If I wanted my business mentioned, I would try to get an article picked up by our local newspaper that’s connected to the AP. The AP would then disseminate it out to the other AP websites. And those tend to be bigger newspapers and those get picked up and cited by the LLMs pretty frequently. So it might be more off-site, old school marketing than it is things that tactical things you do on your website to increase those chances.

Alex
Yeah, and just to add, if it’s bricks and mortar, again, go back to our news item, look at Bing Business, local business stuff that’s just been revamped, go into the Google Business listings as well and create one if you haven’t already, or populate it trying to track more third party reviews from your customers, because that’s all going to get fed in, even more so in the future, as again, we look at authenticity from third parties more and more valuably.

Chris
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, PR is certainly having a bit of a renaissance at the moment. Interesting, simple one. Probably needs a bit of context, but I’m sure it can be discussed. Is it worth keeping paying AdWords for a small business?

Alex
Yes.

Chris
Answer this in yes or no. There we go.

Alex
Yeah, if you are, I mean, I would have gone with the classic, it depends. But if you are already and it’s working, keep on doing it. It’s also worthy to note that, again, these search engines, business models are based over AdWords advertising, right? What Google have zero interest in is getting rid of AdWords or making it any less valuable. So if it doesn’t have as much value maybe today as it did in the last 12 months, it will have more value in the next 12 months. They’re just figuring out a way and they kind of, and we didn’t share the story where someone supposedly from Google shared that AdWords were coming to AI mode. And then Google said, no, we never said anything like that. But even if they didn’t, it’s probably going to happen.

Carolyn
They didn’t say no. They said, we never said that, which is entirely non-answers. They have to make money and have a financial incentive to make sure that the people that give them money are happy.

Alex
So continue to be.

Carolyn
If you’re already paying for AdWords, I would continue what you’re doing at the very least, unless you’re making zero money and it costs you a ton. Like if you’re actively losing money on it, then maybe stop losing money. But I wouldn’t abandon it altogether because I still think it’s useful.

Chris
Okay. So when we were back to speaking about copywriting and a bit of Star Wars came in, someone was asked, Scott’s asked, isn’t stock imagery used to avoid copyright violations? So would using something like Star Wars be a violation?

Carolyn
Using Star Wars is probably a copyright violation. And stock imagery is used to avoid copyright violations. There are different levels of copyright violations. There are, if you are a business and you are using it to make money, then you probably do not want to violate someone’s intellectual property or their, their trademark or their copyright. But if you’re just doing it to be funny and you’re not going to do it, to make any money on it, you would still be violating it, but you’re unlikely to be persecuted because there was no financial gain. If you are a business, the assumption in the law is that anything you put out is an attempt to make money and therefore it’s something you can get in trouble for. So I don’t like stock photography. There are fair use doctrines that could be employed If I make a direct knockoff of Star Wars, I am probably going to get in trouble for that. You could make a conceptually knocked off video and just not use the likeness of the stars. I mean, there’s ways to get around that. I still think stock imagery is devoid of personality and lazy, but that’s just me.

Alex
Yeah. And also there are ways of getting free stock imagery. as well. There’s like Pexels and Pixabay. There’s loads of places like them, but I know that they’re the leading ones that do free stock imagery. And look, if Star Wars is the mission critical part of making that image, either expand the content so it isn’t or pay for the license. But, or feel Disney’s wrath, of which I hear they have the wrath. They created a W in wrath.

Carolyn
But there’s different, like, you can look at Spaceballs. Spaceballs is very clearly a knockoff of Star Wars, but they changed enough. They kept some of the imagery, but they changed enough of it that they wouldn’t get in trouble. So just be creative. You can get your point across in a creative way without violating people’s copyrights.

Chris
Perfect. Probably last question, but let’s see how it probably will be.

Carolyn
No, this family lady cannot sue every company that echoed the story because that was a public event and she made herself a news story. So good luck with those lawsuits.

Chris
So back to the sort of PR offsite optimization for LLM optimization. Do LLMs rate mentions on websites or verticals of our industry the same as mentions of news sites and publishers?

Alex
That’s just like a normal ranking system, I guess. It will depend on how your search or prompt is going to be. We’ll give it you in the most conceptual and contextual way. But no, I don’t think it’s going to necessarily rate things. And if it does, it’s not doing that in a really sophisticated manner. Google has been shaping that system over so many years.

Carolyn
It’s getting that list of things that it’s going to mention from Google or from Bing. Like it’s getting mentions from the SERPs that it’s getting from the search engines. These LLMs are not doing their own searches. They’re getting searches from somewhere else and they’re using that as a list of things to scan through and choose from. But they’re not, if I’m understanding the question correctly, they’re not doing their own rankings and making their own judgments about things. They’re just getting a list of SERPs from Google, effectively.

Alex
And then I don’t think it rates things. It will just decide on what’s contextually relevant to the answer, like it does with a fan-out query and long-tail results, right? If what you’re asking may be a news item, if you’re thinking about the quality of the actual writing compared to the New York Times and some small local newspaper, again, that’s going to be harder to say. It depends on too many things. But I don’t think they’re literally saying, and the New York Times is clearly bigger and more global. So therefore, it should automatically have more authority. It will look at them both and in a more sophisticated way, decide if both are contextually relevant to the answer.

Carolyn
I think that’s probably fair.

Chris
That’s it. Okay, one last bonus one because it’s related. Does Wikipedia influence AI bots talking about getting coverage?

Alex
Yes, that’s your answer. Absolutely.

Chris
Nice and quick. Get on Wikipedia. Excellent thank you. That’s your 60 minutes of SEO done. Thanks everyone so much for joining. I hope you found it a useful discussion and we’ll see you all in November See you all soon

Alex
Bye.

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