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Today Google's Quality Rater Guidelines updated September 11, 2025 with some minor changes. I think some of these are worth noting however! Three examples were added to the guidelines that I believe are significant as they all instruct the raters to assess content that is an AI Overview. An example was added of an answer […]

If you missed it, earlier this week I published a piece on everything we learned about Google’s search algorithms from the DOJ vs Google trial. Boy, there is a lot! In this article, we’ll focus on AI. Key Takeaways: -Google's AI trains on the Google Common Corpus (GCC). -A Gemini version called MAGIT fine-tunes AI […]

The DOJ vs Google trial has finally wrapped up. The closing document is full of interesting insight into how Google’s algorithms work. While the final verdict of the trial is a separate story, the documents released gave us an unprecedented look inside Google's ranking systems. In this article, I’ll share what we learned. It is […]

Let’s take a look at some sites and pages that saw nice improvements following Google’s June 2025 Core Update. We’ll look at specific queries that improved and see if we can determine why Google’s new systems found them helpful. Is MUVERA behind the June core update changes? Updated Aug 5, 2025: I previously speculated that […]

Grok 4 is impressive. Elon says that Grok 4 is performing at or beyond PhD level in nearly all academic fields. Last night’s demo showcased some incredible scores in AI benchmarks. The most impressive of these was Grok 4’s score on “Humanity’s Last Exam”. Humanity’s Last Exam is a challenging AI benchmark created by the […]

As I write this, the June 2025 core update is rolling out. I highly suspect that this update will implement a new advancement Google has made in search called MUVERA. Update Aug 5, 2025: Google's Gary Illyes said he could not confirm MUVERA was being used in Search but that "we might have something like it." […]

You know that I love talking about vector search. I've had good success optimizing for vector search. Often though, that success does not last. I think I've realized why, and if this thought is true, it may turn out that doing a great job at optimizing for vector search could possibly do more harm than […]

This morning I had a notification that as a Pro user, I can connect ChatGPT with Google Drive, Gmail and more. This service will be incredibly useful.  You can summarize things from across your Google Drive, do deep research across your Gmail and more. Let me share my experience in using these connectors. Searching across […]

It does seem that Google's plans are to eventually give us more and more AI Mode features in the traditional Search results. A user on X commented that AI Mode should become the default and Google Product Manager Logan Kilpatrick replied with "soon 🙂". However, Logan clarified that AI Mode is not likely to replace […]

Many SEOs are noticing that Google is indexing less content since late May, 2025. I have access to a bunch of sites in GSC and thought it would be interesting to see what patterns I could find. In most cases, there is a drop in inedexed pages that starts on May 27, 2025. These are […]