Boyd Lake SEO @boydlake

When someone says: “We don’t need SEO anymore. AI Search means SEO is dead.” …. Good luck. See you in a few months 😏

I didn’t realize cookie factory tours were so dangerous… They had me sign a wafer.

@glenngabe What could go wrong? 😏

Very interesting timing for Reddit's post about fighting spam... That's because they have been scaling AI translations heavily over the past two years (tens of millions of AI translated urls across countries). That worked well and Google was rewarding that strategy. Until now. Reddit's AI translations have gotten hit hard with the May 2026 core update and the June 2026 spam update. I dug into the situation and published my fourth post in the series about the topic. No site is safe from algorithm updates if they push the limits... not even Reddit. You can see all the screenshots and info in my post. Grab a cup of coffee, and maybe a can of spam, and enjoy the post. :)

Glenn Gabe @glenngabe

2 weeks ago

I just published the fourth post in the series about Reddit's AI translations. They finally started to drop... -> Reddit’s AI Translations Finally Drop Heavily In Google And AI Search With The May 2026 Core Update and June 2026 Spam Update Reddit’s recent post about fighting

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So many posts about making your content "machine readable" for LLMs. CEOs of the prompt tracking platforms going on podcasts saying "for the first time we're not writing for humans, we're writing for machines" With the caveat that I recommend, as I always have, that content is well structured and clear (because that's just good writing), it's all backwards if you ask me. The whole point of LLMs is that they're very good at modelling natural language. They create structure from (and find meaning/patterns in) unstructured text. It's literally what they do. That was the breakthrough. That's why we're here talking about it. That's how you can talk to your computer. That's the "magic". Where there's a structure problem (if there is one) is literally at the retrieval/search/parsing layer. Since inference is expensive and context windows are finite, the LLM isn't going to see your full document in a wide retrieval (i.e. a web search). The bit you're optimizing for is making sure that what's retrieved from your document is relevant to the query (which is maths and heuristics before the LLM sees anything). But that's got nothing to do with the LLM not being able to "understand" and "read" your text. It's optimizing for retrieval. For search. The thing we've been doing for decades. If anything, there’s an argument that it’s easier now because the LLM can work with meaning, not just strings. And yes, sometimes there are real structure problems. Tables can be hard to extract. JavaScript-rendered content can be missed. PDFs can parse badly. Crawlers can be blocked. Markup can be malformed. Chunks can be selected poorly. But those aren't "the LLM can’t understand your writing" problems. They're crawling, parsing, extraction, indexing, and retrieval problems. Of course you want to make sure your text doesn't contradict itself, that facts and claims are consistent, and that you get your points across. Externally you want to make sure your brand messaging is consistent. But that's got nothing to do with optimizing for machines. You should have been doing that for humans anyway. Perhaps you get punished a little more for it now, but it was always a problem that you should have been working to solve. If someone tells you that you need to add schema for an LLM to understand your article, you should seriously question their understanding of how LLMs work. If someone tells you that to do "GEO" you need to split your content into chunks with headings, then go and tell them to read any SEO guide published over the past 30 years. We have always been optimizing for both machines and humans. We still are. But perversely, despite the ocean of LinkedIn infographics, the LLM bit is actually more closely aligned to the human bit. The machine bit is the retrieval. That's what you're optimizing. That's what we've always been optimizing. And that's what we'll continue to optimize.

@Lisapatb @glenngabe I believe it's the Digital Millennium Copyright Act copyright.gov/dmca/

Incredibly useful; one of the better ChatGPT AI search articles I’ve read. Nice work, Suganthan!

Suganthan Mohanadasan @suganthan

a month ago

Every SEO/GEO has the same advice for showing up in ChatGPT. Good content, listicles, post on Reddit. I wanted to know if any of it actually works, so I spent a few days reading ChatGPT's raw network traffic instead of taking it on trust. It tags every source as 1 of 4

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Sorry, thought it was a core update. The June SPAM update is rolling out. :) I hope it hammers all the AI spamming BS we have been seeing. I think we have already started seeing some of that. Brace yourself.

Barry Schwartz @rustybrick

a month ago

Google June 2026 spam update is out, will only take a few days but I feel like we have been feeling it earlier seroundtable.com/google-june-20…

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What's the worst that can happen, a manual action from Google? Yes, and that can be very problematic for the site. You could end up in a situation where you can't easily get out of it. That's what is happening here. Tough situation for the site owner. Sure looks like they need guidance. What they are doing isn't working.

“Optimize for Brave not Google if you want to be found in Claude” is one of the dumbest takes I’ve heard in a while and I’ve heard a whole lot

Heads up!

Glenn Gabe @glenngabe

2 months ago

Heads-up, two new updates from Google in their docs. First, Google just updated it's "Do you need an SEO" page in the documentation with mentions of "Optimizing for generative AI". It now contains guidance advising site owners to check if advice on optimizing for AEO/GEO aligns

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From this weekend, if you are using the AIOSEO plugin (like 3M+ sites are), be aware that they pushed an update that's ON by default. They are publishing an llms.txt file for your site and markdown files for every post. If you want an llms.txt file (not for SEO but for agents), then just be aware it's there. And if you don't want to publish many markdown files, then make sure you are aware of that too. It's easy to disable but my guess is most site owners have no idea. And... no plugin should be publishing files to your site without explicit approval from the site owner. If you had 10K posts, you now have 10K markdown files published too. Again, if you want that, fine, but the plugin should not have done that without your approval.

Glenn Gabe @glenngabe

2 months ago

I felt a disturbance in the SEO force this morning. It shook me a bit... I immediately knew that millions of sites started publishing llms.txt files and markdown files. And that happened recently. I knew I must reach out to Yoda... ;) OK, it wasn't the force... it's that I

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"Ranking #1 in Google is not enough for AI search" ...6 months later.. "The most strongly correlated factor with appearing in AI answers is ranking #1 on Google" lol

I felt a disturbance in the SEO force this morning. It shook me a bit... I immediately knew that millions of sites started publishing llms.txt files and markdown files. And that happened recently. I knew I must reach out to Yoda... ;) OK, it wasn't the force... it's that I realized the AIOSEO plugin used by 3M+ site owners now *automatically* creates llms.txt files and then markdown files for each post. Yes, that means tons of sites are publishing those files now and I would bet most don't even know it. The feature is ON by default. It's easy to disable, but again, most don't even know that's happening. Oof. aioseo.com/docs/how-to-cr…

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Yep, once again, the Jan 2026 unconfirmed update was very powerful for the sites it impacted. I think it's just the beginning as Google cracks down on "commodity content", self-serving listicles, and more. And like I've documented before, drop in Google and you can drop in ChatGPT. See below.

Lily Ray 😏 @lilyraynyc

2 months ago

One of the sites affected by the Jan 20 update (I call it the 'listicle' update because most of the impacted sites I've analyzed had excessive self-promo listicles) - the second chart shows their ChatGPT citations over time for the full domain

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Today is my last day at Ahrefs after 6.5+ years. Incredibly proud to have helped shape such an amazing product. I plan to do some consulting and build some things. Let me know if you need help. Potentially open to the right in-house opportunity. Likes / shares appreciated🙏

Ouch!

Glenn Gabe @glenngabe

2 months ago

It's not often you get to see a Google site migration. Google moved the Nest community to its own support system. How? Every page now uses a meta refresh redirect to the homepage of the new support area. Oof. 313K urls indexed. 🤦‍♂️

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Can scaling AI content be risky for SEO? I've been monitoring the impact across hundreds of sites for the past few months. Check out my recent research and findings in my latest Substack: lilyraynyc.substack.com/p/it-works-unt…

From an Anthropic engineer. HTML beats Markdown -> An Anthropic engineer argues HTML is a better output format for AI agents than Markdown, citing information density, ease of sharing, and two-way interaction "I’ve started preferring HTML as an output format instead of Markdown and increasingly see this being used by others on the Claude Code team, this is why." "But as agents have become more and more powerful, I have felt that markdown has become a restricting format." x.com/trq212/status/…

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Thariq @trq212

3 months ago

x.com/i/article/2052…

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Remember, Google rolled out passage-based ranking in 2020. Maybe Bing is just catching up now. :) "Passage ranking is an AI system we use to identify individual sections or "passages" of a web page to better understand how relevant a page is to a search." "With new passage understanding capabilities, Google can understand that the result on the right is a lot more relevant to a specific query than a broader page on that topic (L). In this case, our systems were able to highlight a featured snippet, but this improvement applies to how we rank web pages overall." developers.google.com/search/docs/ap…

Barry Schwartz @rustybrick

3 months ago

Microsoft Bing on search indexing vs grounding indexing (for AI) and how they are different - super interesting... seroundtable.com/bing-search-in…

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