The SEO Update by Yoast – May 2025 Edition

Marina
Hello everybody. I believe we are live. Let me know if you can hear me well, if you can see me. I can see a lot of hellos in different languages in the chat. As a linguist, that’s great to hear. Okay, thank you, Taco. Good to hear. Good to see you. Right, so let’s do the formal introduction. Hello, everyone.

Welcome to the May edition of the SEO update, where we bring you the latest and greatest in the world of SEO in the last month. This edition is particularly special because we are celebrating Yoast’s 15th birthday. So we’re almost an adult now. And I’d like to take just a minute to congratulate all the hundreds of people who have worked on the Yoast products throughout the years. I want to express sincere gratitude to Joost de Valk, the founder of Yoast. And of course, most of all, to all of Yoast users with whom we’ve grown alongside through 15 years. It’s kind of hard to believe. And because we want to celebrate the occasion with you all, we have prepared a really fun surprise.

But I’ll leave the reveal to our SEO experts. Who are those experts, you say? Well, they are Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss, who together make for staggering amount of experience and know-how in all things SEO. So let’s see what they have prepared for us today. On to you, Alex. Carolyn, welcome to the main stage. I’m going to join you at the end of our updates. On to you. Thanks for having me.

Carolyn
All right. Well, welcome, everyone. Happy. Well, do we say happy birthday or do we say happy anniversary? I’m not sure.

Alex
I would say it’s, oh, I don’t know. I’m going to go with birthday. I would say birthday. I would say birthday. But yes, it feels weird because I kind of remember using Yoast from day one.

Carolyn
Which just means you’re old.

Alex
Yeah, it’s showing our age. But it’s nice to know that, you know, it’s been there this whole time. And, coincidentally enough, now I’m working for the company that I used to use back in the day, even before it was in premium version. It was crazy. Getting good times. Good times.

Carolyn
All right. Well, let’s not focus on how old we are. Let us get into things. We do have a busy, busy show today. So we should probably dive right in. Let us start out with, if you have questions, as per always. I don’t know what’s wrong with my voice today. You can ask questions and then you can go in and upvote questions and we will strive very hard to answer the most upvoted questions. So you know how to do that. So you know how to do that. You can always learn more about today’s topic on our website. It’s yoa.st/update-may-2025. That would be the year. And also, as always, if you’d like to continue the conversation, you can find us on our Facebook group, which is just slash Yoast or on Reddit. Our subreddit is r/YoastSEO. And then we have bingo today. So if you would like to play along at home, you can go to yoa.st/bingo. There are different, every card’s different. They’ve got unique words. The way we’re going to do this is you’re going to collect all the words on your card as the news items scroll through because the news items contain the words that are mentioned or on the bingo cards. When your bingo card is full, you can email it to community@yoast.com. And apparently, if you send it in first, you can win an all Yoast WordPress plugin subscription for a whole year free of charge because that’s your prize. But anyway, it’ll be fun to play along. You know, we’ll try to make sure that we work in all the words. That’s not true. We will work in all the words.

Alex
Everyone loves a bit of bingo, right? Plus, as a participant, I’d already have an email already in draft. So the only thing I have to do is to copy and paste the URL I’m on and quickly hit send the moment that that slide comes in. But yeah, we’ve added that to the chat on what to do, where to go to get it. And hopefully, you’ll be a prize winner here. But enough of prizes. You know what is a prize that keeps on giving?

Carolyn
What?

Alex
The recognition of AI and its technology and what it’s doing to our SEO each and every month.

Carolyn
I don’t know if that’s a prize. It’s something that keeps giving, that’s for sure. Why don’t we dive into it? Because I know we do have a ton of news today. So let’s start with our SEO and now, as always, AI news because AI is quickly inescapable, right? The first big thing is that apparently, according to sources, Pinterest is emerging as a go-to search engine. I don’t know that I agree with this, probably because I am not of this demographic. But it seems that the Gen Zs, who are not the Gen As, the Gen As are the ones who say Skibidi and stuff like that, right? So the Gen Zs are the group that’s one generation older than the Skibidi toilet people. They’re going to Pinterest as a search engine first. And not all of them, but 39% is a pretty big number.

Alex
I don’t know what the 39% of consumers are. I don’t think it’s just about what this was a search engine. Yeah, we’d need to know more maybe about the market research that it was done. I know that when it comes to the younger generation who like image-based searching, especially at an entry point, and you’ve got anything that’s visual-based, such as, home decor, things like that, are always going to win when it comes to, you know, image-based inspiration on what’s by next. You can see that they’re kind of touching on that with multimodal already. With Google, using Google Lens to take a picture of anything, and then it will, you know, search for it based on that.

Carolyn
So for inspiration, 100%. But what I found when I searched Pinterest is that I’m not going to say 90%, but I’m comfortable saying 80% of the images I click on thinking, like, let’s say I’m looking for a dress. Pretty dress, like the dress, let’s find this dress. Almost all of the results I click on don’t have a link to go buy it. Or they’re using, like, a designer picture, and the link takes me to an Alibaba site. So that’s, I mean, that’s a frustrating search experience for me. If this holds, if the pattern holds so, and they get their act together, and they get more people, like, better results, they’ve got to find a way to filter out the garbage results, I think is the problem. If it doesn’t have a link to go buy it, I don’t want to see it. You know?

Alex
Yeah. I mean, Steve. Hi, Steve. From Sistrix. He was saying that he uses design ideation for his searches, but still goes for, what, 0.1% of his searches. So I still get it. But I don’t know. Maybe we’re still all a too old where we would think that’s something that should be done, but maybe isn’t as much anymore. But Aita, if that’s how you pronounce your name. Recipes. That’s interesting for me. So maybe you would use the search engine to see the end result, right? The end result image. And then maybe you go in there and it has a recipe of that. I didn’t even know that Pinterest was used in that kind of a way where you would get information with that picture, which is interesting.

Carolyn
I think they do have too much garbage, though, in polluting their results. And if they want to be more widely adopted and be more useful, they need to clean up their act. Because it’s just, it’s full of a lot of detrius that I don’t want to have to wade through.

Alex
Well, I’m surprised it’s actually being called a search engine here. Because to me, it’s kind of in the same way as TikTok and Snap, right? I think Pinterest is kind of like a social, but it’s not a social network. But for me, in my head, maybe I’m picturing it as a social publishing platform where…

Carolyn
It was categorized as social media in the beginning. I remember doing many talks where we mentioned Pinterest because it was considered social media. Because it was supposed to be like mood boards and you were sharing your mood boards with people. And there really wasn’t a lot of drive to attach those images to something else, like a website or a shopping experience. So if that’s what they’re moving towards, like I said, I think there’s a lot of runway there.

Alex
That’s true. I mean, Taco saying it’s good for children’s birthday parties, someone in the funeral industry, Kate. Not many people search Pinterest. You don’t know what inspiration people are going to find in searching for an urn. You know, there’s always a niche somewhere, right? There’s always a product to be sold in those things. But anyway, instead of Pinterest, let’s go to more pressing stuff that’s been happening.

Carolyn
Absolutely.

Alex
Google’s ad revenue, which has been going up. And everything’s been going up. And AI overview’s being served to 1.5 billion users monthly. I mean, it’s clearly the tests are going wider and wider and wider.

Carolyn
Google is going to continue making money. I really don’t think, I think the losers here are going to be the websites that we’re counting on that traffic. So I think we’re just really going to have to, we’re undergoing, you know, a seismic. This is, people have been saying this is a seismic shift. People have been saying this is, you know, groundbreaking and it’s changing the landscape. This is what we call, it’s not a storm. This is a cataclysm. Cataclysms come through and they leave the earth fundamentally different than it was before. And that’s what we’re going through now, I think. This is, this is our cataclysm. And things are not going to be different. They’re not going to be the same. I don’t even know if they’re going to be recognizable once we’re on the other side of this.

Alex
No, which is weirdly what AI is, what I’m seeing as AI overviews. I kind of see them as some kind of bridge between the native SERP and the new conversational platforms. And this is the way to maybe get them to adopt it bit by bit. So we’re going to show you some searches in some areas about certain things. It gets wider and wider and wider as we’re seeing here. And eventually AI overviews will be AI mode and there will be no traditional SERP.

Carolyn
There’s not going to be anything else, yeah.

Alex
But let’s see how long it takes to get to that point.

Carolyn
Well, think about it. How long did it take to get here? Maybe a year?

Alex
I’m going to go with nearly two. I’m going with the ChatGPT has launched, which was in the fourth quarter of 23, 23, 23. Yes. Yes, 23, right? So it’s a bit over a year, but we know that things are shifting quicker and adopting faster and the pace is growing. So we can see that.

Carolyn
It was only 12 months ago that AI overviews was maybe a little bit more than 12 months ago. AI overviews started testing.

Alex
Well, that was actually a year then, wasn’t it?

Carolyn
Yeah. Like we’ve gone from testing to it’s going to replace everything in a remarkably fast amount of time.

Alex
Yeah.

Carolyn
So it’s stay tuned. Buckle up.

Alex
Mm-hmm.

Carolyn
ChatGPT, on the other hand, is gaining shopping search features, which is not ads, but it is the ability to actually do some shopping from ChatGPT, which is really interesting considering a lot of people are saying, and we’ve got some studies cited later in our slideshow, actually. ChatGPT is becoming the default search engine, like search experience, for a lot of people. They’re not going to Google anymore. They’re just going straight into their ChatGPT and they’re having conversations about things they’re interested in, rather than just, you know, wandering about aimlessly searching. So adding the shopping search means one more reason you don’t have to leave that experience to go back out to Google, which means all that work that we’ve done to optimize for Google might, you know, it was useful when we did it, but that utility is waning.

Alex
And I just have another point. He beat me to it saying no ads yet. I mean, this to me, this to me is A/B testing market research to find out where ads are going to be best placed. So some things that you might see may end up being an ad placement area, if you want to call it that, or ad real estate, and others will just disappear in favor of the test that won, right?

Carolyn
Well, and also, like, you have to look at how businesses operate. When you’re coming into a new market, the best way to take market share is to, is to lose money at first. Because what you’re trying to do is get people to adopt your technology and get comfortable with it so that they’re so attached to it, they don’t want to leave. And after you put everybody else out of business, then you start driving your prices up. I mean, that’s pretty, that’s centuries-old business strategy. So it’s a matter of time before they start bringing in their monetization model to make some money on this.

Alex
Oh, yeah.

Carolyn
Yeah. Their latest patents, speaking of OpenAI, point straight to semantic SEO, which is interesting. So a lot of this information, I feel, is stuff we’ve been discussing for the past month or two. We know that they run on vector embeddings, which is, it just means that they’re looking at chunks of text rather than individual keywords. So they break things up into bigger phrases, I guess, is the better way to explain that. You have, the content you provide needs to be provided in a way that they can then break up into chunks and do stuff with. So if you have things that are trapped in JavaScript, if you have things that are trapped in images, if you have it so that it’s just not like a Lego structure that they can break and then pick and choose which blocks they want to play with, you’re going to have problems. The two new patents reveal methods like embedding, we know that, the scoring, how they stitch the content together from trusted sources. That’s interesting to know. If you’re interested in reading this, we do have a link to the study. And also to the patent in the resources. So if you’re into that stuff, which I know I am, you might find that interesting bedtime reading.

Alex
Yeah. And I’ve just added a link to another resource of Mike King’s from iPullRank, who goes heavy into vector embeddings as well. If you want to understand more about vector embeddings, think of it as keyword research and analysis V2 or V20.

Carolyn
Have you seen this new thing that Google’s doing with the local pack? I don’t do a lot with local businesses. But I have heard that they’re testing, replacing that entire local pack with the AI overviews. I don’t know if that’s just in the US or if that’s going global.

Alex
I haven’t seen it in the UK. I mean, I’ve heard about it happening, but I’ve never actually seen it in the wild. And that’s not just from a client perspective, but searching, doing normal searches as a consumer. Not yet. But again, this is to me an AI overview test is an AI overview. Them testing anything is just a prelude to what they’re going to put in AI mode, which is going to be something.

Carolyn
I feel like I’ve seen a couple of these and they were related to searches that were like plumber type stuff. So I need a plumber near me. And it’s like, you should be aware that some plumbers don’t do X, Y, and Z. And this is the kind of plumber that you might be, you might be considering, you might want to narrow it down. So it was, it was on the one hand annoying because I really just wanted a list of plumbers. But on the other hand, I could see where if I was not, if I was too vague in my initial query and it felt like I needed more information to get good information, I could see would be helpful. But I also have a hard time. I’d have to think about it more to figure out how they could apply this really broadly. So I don’t know that this is going to end up ultimately replacing those local packs.

Alex
Yeah, this might be a data collection exercise as well to see how best AI can synthesize whatever the knowledge will be. So you can understand what kind of plumber you need. I’m also assuming that because of multimodal search, and I’ve actually done this before where the cistern in my toilet broke. And all I did was take a picture of the cistern that I opened up, I opened it up, took a picture and I was able to navigate myself with a little looking into it, a little bit of human intervention. Ended up at Amazon and I found the matching cistern and I ordered it and replaced it myself. Now, I know I’ve just saved $75, right, on getting a plumber out here. But if I really did need a plumber, I know that there’s some plumbers that won’t touch a toilet, for example, or they have different skill sets beyond just being a plumber. And that’s stuff that’s really going to help and give you those personalized results right from the outset. Because sometimes people won’t even know that they need a plumber at the beginning. They might just go, my toilet’s flushing more than it should and it won’t work. And that’s where it begins. And you want that beginning of that interaction to end up with, hey, chat to Dave the plumber over here because he knows.

Carolyn
Yeah. So we’ll just have to keep an eye on that. This one, I think we’re going to need to spend some time on Google’s updated rater guidelines target fake EEAT content. So I think that’s pretty, pretty interesting. Google is aware that people are doing things, applying things to their website to generate a false appearance of expertise. And they’re really trying to crack down on that. So some of the things that they’re adding to the list, ways to sniff out fake authenticity or faked authenticity, deceptive design. They’re luring you in with the promise of one thing, but then they’re popping up ads and interstitials and things that aren’t even on the page content itself to trick you into doing other things, which is where these human quality graders come in because they’re going to experience that. Whereas it might be possible to hide those things from the, from the crawlers. And it’s just a general shift in enforcement where it used to be somewhat easy to kind of cheat on the EEAT. And now they’re really trying to crack that crack down on that, make it difficult to do. So if you’re asking, what does it mean to cheat? It means creating writers that don’t exist and giving them pretty impressive resumes. You know, fake, fake degrees, fake, fake credentials, fake, fake physicians. Just generally anything that’s not real. They’re, they’re trying to be really good at sniffing out nonsense. And we used to be able to slide things by them because they were robots and not everybody can check everything. And they’re saying, you know what, we’re going to get good at checking.

Alex
Because even better, they’re going to get even better that, I don’t know, just black hat in general is going to be not just a dark art, but it’s going to be nearly impossible to do. It’s like, at that point, you’re going to try and short an LLM into thinking something different. And it’s just not going to be able to be manipulated that way anymore. And this is key, right? It’s like, I feel like it’s kind of like getting a speeding fine. If you’re speeding on the road and you know you’re speeding, but you take that risk anyway. And you see the camera. And then as soon as you see the camera and you get flashed, I don’t know what it’s like in the US, but you get flashed from behind. And as soon as you do that, you slow down. It’s too late. You’ve already been caught, right? But you still kind of caught. Oh, no, no, no. I wasn’t really going. In fact, you knew what you were doing. It happened. You’ve now been caught out. And now you have to kind of pay the fine. And if you keep on driving more, your fine’s going to get bigger and eventually you’re going to get banned. That’s a really good analogy, actually, of a bit of black.

Carolyn
You should write that down.

Alex
But it is kind of like that, right? You know when you’re doing generative AI content for the sake of making pages. In that moment, when you’re hitting produce and publish, you’re speeding. You know what you’re doing. So don’t expect to be complimented for it later by these systems.

Carolyn
Speaking of generative AI, people are not checking what the AIs are generating for them. The Chicago Sun-Times, I used to work at the Tribune, so I’m not going to say they’re a major newspaper because, you know, competition. But they ran an article with the top 10 reads for the summer, and it came up with real authors, but it made up the titles of the books. So whoever the guy was who turned this in as his work didn’t take the time to double check and make sure that it was recommending real books. And that can’t even be that hard. Because when you go through to drop in your links, which I assume you’re doing because why else are you writing that article? Because you want to get affiliate money for that. You have to find the books and then put the links in.

Alex
Yeah.

Carolyn
That’s peak lazy. So don’t be lazy and check the work. Make sure that nothing’s fake or a lie. And you’re probably more than 50% of the way there.

Alex
Exactly. Exactly. Right. Back to AI overviews. Semrush did some research showing what… I don’t know. I feel like we could go through all of these bullet points, but I feel like you kind of already know what it’s going to say. Right? AI overviews are taking over informational-based search. I’m not even reading this, by the way. One-click searches are going up. You’ll find that the only winners are going to be store owners, so ecom-based sites, and anything where you can’t get the answer just by asking the question. How close was I? Oh, multimodal. Multimodal. So images. Yes. Oh.

Carolyn
Yes. Basically, if you’re in one of those industries where they can answer questions pretty reliably, so you’re in an industry that’s very well documented, and people tend to have technical questions that have absolute answers, like science, health, law. A lot of those, you’re going to get replaced by the bots. You know, the entire body of legal decisions for the past 100 years is in that training data. They don’t need your junior lawyer who’s making $200 an hour to go look that up anymore. They can just have the machine do it, and the machine is going to be pretty darn accurate. If it’s in training data, and it doesn’t have to guess or generate anything, all it’s doing is retrieving, you’re cooked. So it’s sad. It’s just, it’s a warning, I guess, of what’s to come. But it is a good article. It’s a good, thorough research paper. And if you’re interested in reading more about it, there’s a link to it. So I would, it’s a lengthy read, but I think it is worth it if you’re interested in what the state of things are.

Alex
I haven’t read it in full yet, because it only came out yesterday, but I’ve also had Ahrefs. Well, no, this was a couple of weeks ago, I think, Semrush, but Ahrefs have made another one, which I’ve just added into the chat. That was the last 24 hours. That looks at a brand correlation with AI overviews as well. Okay, next, Cloudflare CEO. It’s breaking the web’s economy, and that search is broken. I don’t know if I agree with him completely. I don’t think search is broken. I think that the way in which people discover things is now not the way in which it is done before. So because of that, that kind of deprecates some business models. So he says here, the open internet’s at risk. It is, but I disagree that it will just be AI regurgitating AI personally. And that actually goes in turn with us as marketers, as SEOs. That’s the opportunity right there, is to not be in the AI regurgitating AI.

Carolyn
Well, I think there’s a slight misinterpretation of what’s happening. And I think it’s maybe on his part. The AIs aren’t scraping the sites necessarily. They’re retrieving information at the point that it’s asked. And they come back and visit more often because when they’re answering information based on a query at the point of the request, right, they go out and they look at websites and they look for the answer and they fan out from where they land to surrounding pages looking for the answer. And then they take that back and they go back to the user and they generate their answer. But none of that in that process is added to the training set. So they forget it. Unlike people where we go and we see one thing at a site once and we remember that it was there, they don’t. So not only are they hitting a site and doing multiple searches every time a question is asked. So where we would hit it once, they’re going to hit it 20 times within the span of a couple milliseconds. They forget as soon as they come back. And if we ask another follow-up question, they have to go back and do it again. So I think they’re just doing a lot more searches than people would. And where Google would go through and Google scrapes and remembers because it’s crawling your site and it’s taking everything back to the mothership and it’s remembering everything that it’s scraped and then sorting it for future use. The AIs right now, the way they’re built, every time you ask it a question, it has to go do all these searches. So I think there is absolutely a disproportionate amount of searches happening initiated by the chatbots. But I don’t know that it’s necessarily breaking the economy as much as this alarm bell is saying.

Alex
No. I mean, it’s part of, I don’t want to say an echo chamber, but again, it reminds me, this is like people with pitchforks in the paper industry saying that the internet must stop so that paper production can continue. Right? It’s at the same level. No, because there’s more opportunity and what’s going to happen with the, it’s more than paper. Going digital. It’s so much more than that. And I think this is one of those things. And whilst I do feel for some, you know, open web based business models, that’s just in a time that’s now becoming harder, more challenging, either go over the challenge or you have to think of what else to do with that business model. And also you’ve been at the behest of these search engines all of these years, knowing that any day they could have switched anything they wanted for any reason. And this isn’t a business decision. This is something that’s happening to everything and everyone everywhere all at once. And you can’t just say blame Google for what’s happening. This happening without Google.

Carolyn
This is, this is remodeling and investing in a rental apartment and then getting mad when the landlord decides to sell to somebody else and they tear the building down and turn it into a mall.

Alex
Yeah. Depends what the mall’s like.

Carolyn
I don’t know. Who knows? Anyway. Still, if you spent money on it, it was wasted money. That’s the point. Yes.

Alex
So Google searches fall for the first time in 22 years.

Carolyn
Google searches in Safari fall. So Apple was reporting that Google searches fell. Google ended up issuing a statement after this and it’s like, no, no, no, it’s fine. Apple’s full of it. But because.

Alex
Did they have the gif with the dog and the fire in that press release?

Carolyn
Did they? No, they did not.

Alex
Say nothing’s going down.

Carolyn
I don’t. They literally did say that though, but no, they did not use the dog and the fire in their press release. I think that would have been a little bit beneath them.

Alex
But they should because I don’t know. It is going down. I haven’t met anyone now who hasn’t said in the last. Six months at some point, even the really not technophobes, really non-technical people. They haven’t not heard or used ChatGPT. And I was even at someone’s friend’s house this weekend and they hadn’t. I was talking about other LLMs. I was like, have you used Claude or Gemini? And they hadn’t heard of Claude, right? Which is, I guess is fine for a normie, right? But the normie has been not just hearing of ChatGPT, but they were using it daily for their normal, normal tasks. And they’re not technical in, you know, project management and all of that. And that, to me, implies that maybe the share is actually falling and whatever metric Google may be giving you may be something that makes it look better than maybe it is.

Carolyn
Or if Google’s response, because we’d have to kind of clintonianly parse exactly what they said in their statement. But if their response was, no, no, no, searches are going up. Well, the number, like the Cloudflare guy just said, the number of searches are going up, but they’re being initiated by the chat bots.

Alex
Yes.

Carolyn
So, I mean, technically they’re right, but directionally they’re probably wrong.

Alex
It’s very interesting. It is very interesting to see what, how, and the fan out approach, you know, what, what is and what’s a token to these searches, but they’re never going to tell us that anytime soon. But yeah, is this, so, so Marky Mark’s telling us that we’re not going to have any friends soon.

Carolyn
Hey, all of my friends are AIs.

Alex
I mean, it could be true that all of our friends, not all of our friends, but there’ll be a lot of friends that are replaced with AI agents. And I don’t know. This is now going into her territory.

Carolyn
Kind of. Well, one of the things that Mark Zuckerberg said in this interview was that not everyone can afford to go to a therapist. And the, the chatbots are there. They’re not judgmental. And they have all of the information that the therapists are trained on in their training sets. So it’s not like they’re guessing and they’re really good actually at making medical diagnoses based on uploaded scans and things like that. So it’s just from the therapy kind of point of view, having, having someone that you can talk to instantaneously who doesn’t have a hidden agenda in theory and is going to be nonjudgmental also in theory and impartial, or at least, you know, on your side, because I think they’re kind of programmed to be on your side, could be very helpful to a lot of people who might otherwise struggle, especially with the, the inability to get appointments to go see in-person therapists.

Alex
See, I disagree with these points where I agree with that’s what can all happen, but I disagree that it, it should. So whilst it could be a good psychologist, right? You made points to actually go against psychology, which is if we both have the same problem, we shouldn’t have the same advice because we’re two different people.

Carolyn
I don’t know that it’s going to give you the same advice.

Alex
I know I wouldn’t. Sorry. It uses the same information to provide the same output. And whilst I may have, you may resonate more with positive reinforcement, I may react more to negative reinforcement and it doesn’t know that yet. So whilst it might tell you that, you know, oh, well, things could be better. Why don’t you just do this? Whereas I may want to get up off your seat, do this now, and actually don’t be on my side in that sense, psychologically. And that’s where these LLMs can’t quite get, they don’t know what us as people yet. They know the information around us, but they don’t, they don’t know what, they don’t know anything about us.

Carolyn
The ones that have memory though, they remember things about you. And if you mention something, they’ll, they’ll file that away and they use all of those things to kind of cater how, or.

Alex
Yes.

Carolyn
Curate how they, how they answer you.

Alex
Well, there’s more on this on the last story before also in the news.

Carolyn
So let’s. Well, let’s keep going.

Alex
There’s still stuff to get through.

Carolyn
One slide.

Alex
Yeah.

Carolyn
So there was, there was a big SEO week in New York. So Lily Ray was one of the speakers. She had a, a key list of, well, she had a, a tome, which I’ve reduced to four bullet points, but initially there were like 20 that wouldn’t all fit on the same slide. So if you would like to read her lengthy article on the takeaways from SEO week in New York, we do have a link to that. But here are the four highlights of the 20 highlights that I originally came up with. And, but again, a lot of it is stuff that, you know, we’ve been saying over and over again, SEO is shifting from clicks to citations. Optimizing semantically is necessary to, to maintain visibility. Your content has to be structured, right? It has to be accurate and it has to be helpful. And if you cheat, you’re going to get penalized.

Alex
Sounds like the old school rules, right?

Carolyn
For the most part. Yeah. So what’s old is new again?

Alex
Interesting. It’s the same, but different.

Carolyn
Well, that’s, I mean, that’s history, right?

Alex
Yeah.

Carolyn
That’s how the world works.

Alex
Well, but although it is, it’s also nice to know that there isn’t so much of a shift in all the things that we do and changes that we do. It’s like, it’s kind of, it’s, it’s kind of being backwards compatible with the ethics that we’ve been given or supposedly been adopting all of these years. And that the the stuff around marketing and the processes and executing is still kind of the same. Kind of.

Carolyn
Yeah.

Alex
Just have to think more. So yeah. So there was a lot happening in, in SEO week, but there’s more, there’s more.

Carolyn
They’re testing recipes. Google is in the interactive AI overviews, which is interesting. So they’re taking the information that you’re giving them and they’re using that to find better matches. Um, and I think, I think part of this is just using Gemini and natural language processing to make sure that they’re understanding your restrictions and requirements for a recipe better. Um, it used to be that if you would say, I would like a recipe for pizza, um, no gluten, it would, the word no, and the word gluten wouldn’t necessarily be put together and, and they would come up with, Oh, you mean gluten free. No. So there was some confusion there. I think the, the natural language processing with Gemini is getting much, much better at helping this, the engines come up with better responses to your specific queries. And then once you get into interactive mode with like AI mode, you can ask for a recipe and then start making clarifying requests. So I would like, I’d like a recipe for a pot roast that I can cook in the crock pot. And then it comes up with recipes. It’s like, okay, I have a picky eater who won’t eat onions. Can we, do we have a recipe that doesn’t include onions? Oh, but he won’t eat carrots either. So find me one that also doesn’t have carrots. And it’ll just keep like iteratively refining what it’s, what it’s presenting to you.

Alex
Well, that’s interesting. Also Pinterest. That’s a threat for Pinterest. Isn’t it? Like we were saying before, it’s being used for recipes. Interesting. But it’s good to, it’s good to know that at least they’re using that information to then get new recipes and a more confined.

Carolyn
At least with Google, they’re all, they’ve all got recipes attached to them. Like they all actually have recipes attached to them. They’re not just pretty pictures. So I would still, I would still default to using Google for this just because I don’t like it when I see a, you know, a picture of a pretty pot roast and I click on it. It’s like, oh, we had this last Thursday. I’m like, I want to know how you cooked it.

Alex
Crazy. Right.

Carolyn
All right.

Alex
I feel like this is really obvious and short.

Carolyn
I feel, I agree, but we should probably read it.

Alex
Yeah. So Google updated image SEO best practice. You must use consistent URLs that that’s pretty, how do I go into this? If you’re using WordPress, it’s all going to be put into a nice, a nice URL structure anyway.

Carolyn
Oh no. But you know what the problem with WordPress is? People will upload the same picture over and over and over again, every time they do a new article, instead of just going back to their library and using one that they already have. And that’s going to waste your crawl budget because you’re going to end up with 50 copies of relatively the same image for no reason at all. Because there are some people who think that you have to have, that by having a new image in your article, that that somehow makes it more relevant. And it, it does not. So if you’re using WordPress in the audience and you are doing that, stop. It’s okay to use images that you already have. It’s okay to go back to your media library and reuse images. What you do not want to do is reuse captions if those captions are not relevant to the current article. So just make sure that you’ve got a caption that is relevant to the article that you’re inserting it in. And you’re fine. You don’t need to keep re-uploading the same image or slight variations of the same image just to get a fresh URL or a fresh caption.

Alex
Yeah. And to quickly answer Charlotte Soto or Soto’s answer, what about alt image text? Well, Carolyn mentioned caption image text should be different each time, but not necessarily alt images. I would, I would say you may have a different, a different reason.

Carolyn
It depends on how specific you got in your alt text.

Alex
Yes. I, I, well, I’ve always gone with alt, alt text is always the description of what is inside the image. And that could be the same context in two different posts, but the caption of which may not be.

Carolyn
So yeah, it depends on your application, but in general, you just need to make sure that whatever it is you’re including is relevant to the article that you’re putting it on. If you write, if you write an article about cats, but the image that you provide is a dog, the dog needs to be relevant to, to that article somehow, because you’ve got alt text surrounding it. That’s going to say it’s a dog. It’s going to look irrelevant. It’s going to throw off the, um, the mixture of the recipe for your, uh, for the relevancy. All right. So moving on.

Alex
Yeah. 10 minutes and eight, eight slides left. So let’s do this.

Carolyn
Okay. So, um, this is a, this is actually a Reddit article. ChatGPT apparently last year was the 15th most visited site. Now it’s the fifth. So it is, it’s growing rapidly. Um, other top tens are losing traffic. Wikipedia fell 6%. People, people don’t need to go to Wikipedia anymore because ChatGPT will give you the answer. Um, they’re not surfing the web. They’re going straight to ChatGPT. And I must admit, I’m one of those people that I’ll do that. It’s, um, it helps me refine what I need to, what I’m looking for. And, and I spend less time wandering around or searching aimlessly. And I’m much more targeted now with how I use it. Um, anyway, it’s an interesting article. It had an interesting chart that showed winners and losers. So if you’re interested in that, we do have a link to that for you.

Alex
Yes.

Carolyn
Moving on.

Alex
Quickly looking at that table. It’s interesting that every single other entry has gone down, but only one has gone up is ChatGPT. And all the others have been falling at least by 1%. The smallest is 1.65 by Instagram, but everyone else is like 2, 3, 4. And the growth in ChatGPT is 15%. And whilst 5.1 billion on Google’s 81 billion doesn’t seem like a lot. Oh, that’s making for very awkward meetings inside, inside Google’s buildings, I would say. And it’s going to continue, right? Because this is more, this is just the beginning of people figuring it out.

Carolyn
It’s always hard when you’ve worked at a company or been involved in a situation where you’ve never experienced a lack of growth. Like, no one knows how to deal with that. Like, it was, it was similar with the stock market in the U.S. Kids that grew up in the 80s went through, you know, back-to-back stock market problems. And when the crash finally happened, no one knew what to do. Like, their world was ending because they’d never seen the stock market go down before. But older people who’d experienced multiple corrections in the stock market were like you’re going to live. It’s still very scary if it’s something that, you know, you’ve just never experienced in your lifetime.

Alex
It’s crazy. Someone did ask how to link to an article where we should be doing with our websites to ensure we care showing up in AI tools. So I’ve put your post from last month in there.

Carolyn
And I do have a similar article on the Yoast blog about how to use Yoast tools to ensure that you’re writing in a way that the LLMs will understand. So I think reading those two together would be very helpful for people if they’re interested in doing that.

Alex
Yeah.

Carolyn
Let’s keep going. So top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google’s AI experiences on search. Again, this is pretty much repeating what we’ve been saying. Prioritize unique and helpful content. Meet the technical and structured data requirements. Use your preview controls wisely. So nosnippet, noindex will affect how your features can appear in AI overviews. If you don’t want them there and you say nosnippet, noindex, you’re not going to get cited. So you might feel like you’ve won the battle, but you’re losing the war in general on visibility. And you do have to think beyond just raw clicks. You have to think about conversions. Think about less about just getting people’s eyeballs onto your site and more about how when they do arrive, you close the sale. You know?

Alex
For me, the thing that stood out was the structured data requirements. That is great. You know, it validates the fact that all of these LLMs are still using structured data to make it easier to interpret and contextualize content and data.

Carolyn
To be fair, they use the structured data, like the JSON and the schema, when the rest of your website is a dumpster fire and they can’t find the content that they want. So it is a mitigation tool to allow developers to be lazy. But that’s a different lecture.

Alex
Okay. Okay. Last week, there was lots of stuff about Google I/O, which is a great piece for Google, talking about how Google’s doing stuff at Google, and that you can Google things with Google. So there’s lots to do. But the main crux of it is they’ve now enabled AI mode for people in the US. Again, I tested it just before here. I can’t see anything in the UK, but Carolyn can see things, which means I’m next. And that it’s using a lot and they’ve improved a lot of stuff in Gemini and AI overviews, doing stuff with multimodal a lot more, isn’t it? And, of course, they’re bringing in good old ads, which has probably been their top priority, but had to mask it three bullet points down to make out as though it wasn’t the most important thing that was being focused on that month. But, yeah, have you tested it out? Is that any good?

Carolyn
Well, actually, that screenshot that I grabbed, I literally just popped over to Google, I typed in boo, and I got an AI overview for boo.

Alex
Okay.

Carolyn
So just to kind of illustrate how aggressive they’re being about providing AI overviews for absolutely everything, I literally typed in the first word that came to my mind, and I got an AI overview for it.

Alex
Scary.

Carolyn
Boo. Boo.

Alex
Okay. Now, the last thing. No, Sam Altman isn’t getting married to some guy called Johnny.

Carolyn
It does kind of look like that, doesn’t it?

Alex
It does look like a wedding invite, save the date picture, and I’m sure it’ll be a lovely wedding. But they are getting married in business, aren’t they? Sam has… Did he acquire the company? But they created a new company called IO, and for anyone who doesn’t know who Johnny is, Johnny is the person who basically invented the design of both the iPhone and the MacBook. And it was kind of a thing where they kind of let him go. And if they just kept him, maybe these two wouldn’t be having a wedding right now. And what’s more interesting is the 10-minute video that they’re in and was very nicely produced about what their plans are. And what it seems to be is that they are saying that they’re going to be inventing or creating a third core device, right? So for you and me, the first and the second core devices are our laptop and our phone. So what they’re implying is that there is going to be a third device that everyone is going to own. Everyone. And now I’m coming back to her. And what is this device? Because in my head, I pictured an Apple tag with a camera and a speaker. That’s basically what people are saying. It’s a device that you just put on your desk. It’s not got a screen, but of course it’s going to be recording you, your surroundings, and maybe interacting with you if it has a speaker. And now I’m thinking of the recipe. So maybe this is all, if you want to go multimodal and proper conversational, you’ll be talking to this device. And it will be on the fly. Instead of you typing anything like command line, you’ll be talking to it. And it will be, so, oh, I just forgot. Carol doesn’t like carrots. Can you sort this recipe out? And it will do it in front of you. And if it’s got a camera, it will see your progress. So it will know. And no, no, no. Don’t put in the carrots. Remember. Like, there’ll be those things, which is very interesting.

Carolyn
Even better. So I’m working through a recipe. I got it with me in the kitchen. I open up the fridge. I’m like, what kind of mustard did that call for? Oh, it wants Dijon mustard. I don’t have Dijon mustard. All I have is, you know, plain yellow mustard. Oh, but do you have this? No. I literally only have this. Can you adjust the recipe? Sure, I can adjust the recipe. Here’s what you should do instead. And there it goes. So, I mean, that would be super helpful.

Alex
Let’s see. Because it’s like Meta have got the Ray-Bans. They’ve got the wearables going, right? And Steve was saying it could be a watch, but I’m like, I don’t think that’s good enough. It’s not good enough. That’s something you wear and take off. I’m thinking this is something you do. It does not leave your person. Ever.

Carolyn
They did say that they don’t want it to be a wearable, but how could it not leave your person if you’re not wearing it?

Alex
Because a watch and a ring is something you wear and glasses is something that you wear. A tag is something that you carry on you. I don’t know. Maybe semantics, but I don’t know. To me, it’s a companion. It’s not a wearable. I don’t know. Let’s find out. Let’s call it.

Carolyn
It would technically be something you wear because it’s like…

Alex
I don’t know.

Carolyn
I don’t know.

Alex
I don’t know. But let’s see. Let’s see. But that’s the end of our very, very fast-paced month that’s happened. And I had 10 days away. So coming back to all of that was quite a bit of a brain hemorrhage for me. But yeah, there may be questions. There’s already quite a few. So I don’t even know if we’ll have all the time. And lastly, also in the news before we get to very quick news and Q&A, because I know Marina is going to be gagging. But in here, Google updated the latest guidelines. Oh, we already covered that, didn’t we?

Carolyn
We did that one, yeah.

Alex
Yeah. OpenAI has acquired a coding platform, Windsor, for $3 billion, which if you’re in Microsoft Copilot, I’d be looking at a lot. It might be its new competitor to get into the dev space. Also, if you clawed users, something to look into. The Mail Online reports 56% decrease in CTR, even in position one when AIOs are present. I mean, it’s obvious. And I don’t think Mail Online are playing a very big violin to the masses because people

Carolyn
Also, Mail Online’s layout is painful to look at. And I can’t blame anyone for not wanting to read it.

Alex
Unhelpful, one may say. Unhelpful. And also, Sam Altman has said he plans to release an open source model, which might or might not be connected to Windsor stuff up there. Google Search Console tends to add annotation in performance reports. Hallelujah. That’s taken a while, but I feel like there’s other problems they have that they need to focus on more than annotations in Search Console. And lastly, Claude 4 has been introduced by Anthropic. If you’re technical in any way, do use Claude. It’s quite cool. I’ve been using it a bit more for product development. And that’s it. There are no WordPress news items. Slow month for WordPress. And we have one news item for Yoast.

Carolyn
You have something for Yoast. So just released today, you can get Yoast AI Optimize now available in the Classic Editor. So that means you can use the AI to fix a number of SEO and readability issues in the Block Editor, which is Gutenberg and now the Classic Editor, which some people greatly prefer to the Block Editor. So if you were sad that you did not have that available to you before, now you do. Happy. Well, I was going to say Merry Christmas, but happy anniversary. Happy Yoast-iversary. Happy Yoast-iversary.

Alex
Yes. We’re in a few places, aren’t we?

Carolyn
We are. So you’re going to be in Zagreb at the SEO Summit.

Alex
Yes, I’ll be there talking next Friday. I’ll be there from Tuesday evening. If anyone’s about, do send me a DM. We’d love to hang out. And if you’re not and you’re in the area or can be in the area, use the Yoast 15. Get 15% off. And that’s next week. I’ll also be talking on the role of structured data for modern SEO, which, based on even today, is going to be a bit fun as well. You’re not going to WordCamp Europe, are you? I’m not either, because I’ll be in Zagreb. Right. But Yoast will be out there in a lot of force. We’ve got a stand. I’m sure there’ll be gooders and swags and so on. And are these your two?

Carolyn
Yeah, these are my two. So I’m going to be doing a site clinic at SMX Advanced in Boston, if anyone is going to be there. And I believe for my particular site clinic, you only need a trade hall, exhibit hall pass. You don’t need a full session pass to get into my session. So it’s a little bit cheaper than if you do that. Also, I have 20% discount coupons as a speaker available. So if you are in the Boston area and you want to go to that conference, feel free to hit me up and I’ll see what I can do for you. And then at PubCon Pro in Austin, Texas, June 19th and 20th, I am giving the keynote address, the opening keynote address. And then I have a session that I’m doing later. So if you are in Texas and you are interested in talking, that is where I will be. And then Yoast is celebrating its 15th anniversary. Happy Yoast anniversary. So if you would like to claim your 15% discount on all Yoast products using the discount code, you can go to Yoast.com to use that. The code today is seoupdate2705. And you can scan the little QR code to make it go. That code is only good until June 6th. So if you have any purchases to make and you would like your 15% discount, use it before June the 6th. And then our next show is Tuesday, June 24th. Same time, same place.

Alex
Oh, can we go back one so people can see the discount code and the QR? We might as well use the Q&A on that window, right? It’s better than seeing our faces next to our faces.

Carolyn
Sure.

Alex
We went five minutes overboard. I’m so sorry, Marina. Let’s not do small talk. What are these questions?

Marina
Yes. Firstly, I would just like to introduce, to, well, to announce the winner. We’ve got a winner from the bingo card. The name, I’m sorry, I’m sorry to everyone else who didn’t manage to do it on time. But our winner is called Annette Rem. So congratulations. You’re going to get access to all yours products for a year. And yeah, we’re going to contact you by mail for all the details. Woohoo. All right. Five minutes for questions. Let’s see. So we have a lot of questions about, basically, SEO in the AI age. And there is one which is quite specific. So I’d like to start with that one. And the question is, is it still true AI gen search is using schema as a strong ranking factor? And do we know if this is likely to continue to be worth the efforts long term in this ever-moving landscape?

Alex
I thought you were answering this one there, Carolyn.

Carolyn
I’m looking for the question again. Where’s the question?

Marina
I will. Yes. I kind of lost it for a second. But yes, here we go. Is it true the AI gen search?

Alex
As a ranking factor, what is ranking now is another question. But go on, Carolyn.

Carolyn
So when we talked about this during the show, it’s not a ranking factor. It’s a crutch, really. So on the off chance that your site is poorly constructed or poorly architected, what the schema does is it sort of bundles up all of that data that if your site were architected better would be discovered. And it jams it into the head. So it’s not a ranking factor. It mitigates any damage or poorly constructed stuff on your site and just sort of helps the AIs find that content better. So it is absolutely not a ranking factor. And I don’t know that it ever has been. But what it is, it’s like a tool that helps you get around the fact that you may not have a perfectly constructed website.

Marina
Right. Thanks. That’s an important distinction. All right. So let’s move on to the most voted question. And it is, would love to hear some specific B2B SEO tips in the AI era. So we already shared the article that Carolyn posted on news.com about, well, what’s important in this AI era in terms of SEO. But is there anything specific for B2B?

Carolyn
You have to make sure that you articulate your value proposition and all of the aspects of the benefits of the products in all of the fields that you have available to you. So don’t skip fields. Don’t not configure things if you have fields available to configure. And make sure that you’re using very descriptive terms. Just don’t ever, if you have the opportunity to say the name of your product, don’t call it my product. Call it the name of the product. So it’s not, my product is the best. It’s my acne cat flinger. It’s the best. You know, you have to, you have to say the names of the, say the words that you want to rank for. And I know that sounds like very 1997 SEO advice, but again, what’s old is new again. And that’s kind of where we’re going to. So that would be, I think, the quickest advice I could give.

Alex
Yeah. I would just say, keep doing what you’re doing is the best practice. Just keep on doing it because it’s these LLMs and the platforms are there to use data that’s already out there and has been there for years and years and years. So it has to still adopt those, not old hat techniques, but the best practice that you’ve been doing all this time. Also worthy of adding, I’m going to add a link in here. Carolyn and I are going to be guests on a podcast called Winning Room with Shopify that’s going to be on in the next week where we discuss ecom-based stuff in the era of AI overviews and AI taking over search engine results. So that might be an interesting listen or watch for you guys as well.

Marina
Right. Excellent. Okay. We’re out of time, but let’s do one more question so that we round it up to three. And there is one that I personally found interesting myself. And it’s, does Cloudflare impact how AI engines see your content?

Carolyn
No.

Alex
If you want it to.

Carolyn
Yeah. Like, no.

Alex
It doesn’t need to if you don’t want it to, but it has AI audits, which is quite good. It gives you insight on like what chatbots are serving your site somewhere. Kind of like a search, a mini search console just for these LLM platforms. And it may give you insight onto things to do next or what to optimize or what to not. What is it accessing? What do you want it to access that didn’t do already? You know, again, like the old school SEO stuff that you’d be looking in Google Analytics. You’re now looking in there. If there’s stuff you really don’t want it to hit, you can actually add rules specifically for specific LLMs to not hit certain areas of your site if you don’t want it to. So, yeah. And, if you want to use LLMs.txt anywhere you want to to help a platform that do use LLMs.txt, you can try and guide it a bit more.

Marina
Right. All right. Well, I’m afraid that’s all the time we have. But, yeah, it was very interesting for me. Thank you very much, Alex and Carolyn. Thanks to everyone who joined all your questions and discussions and comments in the chat. And, again, congratulations to our winner, Annette Rehm. I hope I’m pronouncing your name correctly. And you can follow Yoast in the Crowdcast, our Crowdcast account. We’re going to have another update the following month. But this is it for now from us. Thank you.

Alex
Bye, everyone.