Technical SEO news, research and tools

Google Business Profile posts now allow verified contact details

Google's posts policy no longer bans every phone number. It now removes unverified phone numbers, emails and social handles from Business Profile posts.

Sep 26

Google documents creator for VideoObject structured data

Google's video structured data docs now list creator, or author, as a recommended property and name the four interaction types it supports.

Sep 26

Google's September 2026 spam update: the fourth of 2026

Google started the September 2026 spam update on 24 September. It is the fourth spam update of 2026, 37 days after August's, with a two-week window.

Sep 26

What to do after a Google core update: Google's recovery steps

Google's own recovery steps after a core update: wait a week, compare the right dates, size the drop, self-assess and avoid quick fixes.

Sep 26

How to tell which Google update hit your site: a 5-step method

Match a Search Console drop to confirmed Google update dates using 7-day windows, search types and a manual actions check, then rule out overlaps.

Sep 26

Structured Data Markup Helper: is Google's tool still available?

What Google's Structured Data Markup Helper does, whether it still works, and what Google recommends for writing and testing structured data.

Sep 26

SearchPilot: adding 'The Best' to title tags lifted traffic 10%

SearchPilot split-tested putting 'The Best' at the start of an editorial site's title tags. The variant pages gained 10% more organic traffic.

Sep 26

AggregateRating schema checker for review snippets

AggregateRating schema checker: test JSON-LD against Google review snippet rules for ratingValue, counts, scale and item type. Free, runs in your browser.

Sep 26

Google algorithm update checker: overlay updates on your traffic

Upload your Search Console clicks and see every Google-confirmed update on the same chart, with a week-before and week-after comparison for each. Free.

Sep 26

humans.txt generator

humans.txt generator: build a humans.txt file with TEAM, THANKS and SITE sections from the humanstxt.org template. Free, runs in your browser.

Sep 26

Organization logo structured data generator

Logo structured data generator: build Organization JSON-LD with logo, url, name and sameAs, and check Google's logo rules. Free, runs in your browser.

Sep 26

Reading age calculator: Flesch-Kincaid grade level

Reading age calculator: get the Flesch-Kincaid grade level of your text, the reading age it implies and its longest sentences. Free, runs in your browser.

Sep 26

Bing tests another expandable sitelinks interface

Bing is testing a sitelinks variant that reveals a description under a sitelink only when the cursor hovers over it, per a 24 September 2026 report.

Sep 25

Google Business Profiles tests setting your hours automatically

Google is testing a Business Profile tool that reads a plain-text description of opening hours and fills in the schedule, per a report on X.

Sep 25

Google tests AI Overviews in the hotel side panel

Google is testing AI Overviews at the bottom right of hotel results, under the knowledge panel, not at the top of the page. Google has not confirmed it.

Sep 25

Ranking volatility hits September 23-24, spam update confirmed

Search Engine Roundtable tracked broad rank-tool spikes on 23 and 24 September 2026, and its report carries a note that Google confirmed a spam update.

Sep 25

Search Console splits web results into text and multimodal

The Performance report now has a Web: Multimodal search type for image-based searches, separate from Web: Text-based, and it has no query data.

Sep 25

Pages with no backlinks and Google traffic: Ahrefs' 14B-page data

Ahrefs found ~20 million indexed pages with no referring domains, and only 2,997 of them earn over 1K monthly search visits.

Sep 25

Search engine market share, August 2026: Statcounter

Statcounter puts Google at 91.02% of worldwide search in August 2026, ahead of Bing at 4.55%, against 90.37% across the prior twelve months.

Sep 25

Median home page weight 2025: 2.86 MB desktop, 2.56 MB mobile

The 2025 Web Almanac puts the median home page at 2.86 MB on desktop and 2.56 MB on mobile, with images and JavaScript the two largest parts.

Sep 25

SEO reports

All reports

Recurring data reports on search volatility, AI answer coverage and index behaviour.

What to do after a Google core update: Google's recovery steps

Google's own recovery steps after a core update: wait a week, compare the right dates, size the drop, self-assess and avoid quick fixes.

Sep 26

How to tell which Google update hit your site: a 5-step method

Match a Search Console drop to confirmed Google update dates using 7-day windows, search types and a manual actions check, then rule out overlaps.

Sep 26

Pages with no backlinks and Google traffic: Ahrefs' 14B-page data

Ahrefs found ~20 million indexed pages with no referring domains, and only 2,997 of them earn over 1K monthly search visits.

Sep 25

Search engine market share, August 2026: Statcounter

Statcounter puts Google at 91.02% of worldwide search in August 2026, ahead of Bing at 4.55%, against 90.37% across the prior twelve months.

Sep 25

Median home page weight 2025: 2.86 MB desktop, 2.56 MB mobile

The 2025 Web Almanac puts the median home page at 2.86 MB on desktop and 2.56 MB on mobile, with images and JavaScript the two largest parts.

Sep 25

YouTube citation share across AI search platforms, BrightEdge

BrightEdge measured YouTube's citation share in Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity and ChatGPT from May 2024 to September 2025. Here are its figures.

Sep 25

AI shoppers now convert 54% better than non-AI traffic, Adobe finds

Adobe's May 2026 data shows AI-referred retail visits converting 54% better than non-AI traffic, a reversal from a year earlier.

Sep 24

Mobile vs desktop request share: Cloudflare Radar 2025

Cloudflare Radar's 2025 Year in Review puts mobile at 43% of global requests, up from 41%, with mobile ahead in 117 countries and regions.

Sep 24

Google AI Mode adoption and zero-click rate, Semrush 2025

Semrush clickstream data on Google AI Mode's first two months: usage grew about 4x to just over 1% of sessions, and 92-94% ended without an external click.

Sep 23

Google Discover now drives 67.5% of Google traffic to news sites

NewzDash's analysis of 400+ news publishers shows Discover's share of Google traffic rising from 37.03% in 2023 to 67.51% in Q4 2025.

Sep 23

Which SERP features sit next to AI Overviews, per Semrush

Semrush's refreshed study: Related searches (95.32%) and People Also Ask (90.03%) almost always appear beside an AI Overview, and ads now reach 25%.

Sep 23

Shopping Graph grew from 45 to 60 billion listings in 19 months

Google's own disclosures put the Shopping Graph at 45 billion listings in October 2024, 50 billion in January 2026, and past 60 billion by May 2026.

Sep 22

Whitespark's 2026 local ranking factors: what actually moved

Whitespark surveyed 47 local search experts on 187 ranking factors for 2026. Here is the verified top 10 for the local pack and what changed since 2023.

Sep 21

Which AI crawlers do news sites block most? CCBot tops 75%

A robots.txt scan of 100 top UK/US news sites finds CCBot blocked by 75%, ahead of Anthropic-ai, ClaudeBot and GPTBot. Google-Extended is blocked least.

Sep 20

Portent: 1-second sites convert 2.5x higher than 5-second sites

Portent's aggregate analysis of 100 million page views across 20 sites found B2C conversion falls from 3.05% at 1 second to 0.67% at 5 seconds.

Sep 19

AI Overview trigger rate by query type: comparison queries hit 95%

Seer Interactive tracked 49,358 queries and found comparison searches trigger an AI Overview 95.4% of the time, versus 27.3% for single words.

Sep 18

Canonical tag adoption, 2025: 68% of desktop pages set one

The 2025 Web Almanac SEO chapter puts rel=canonical on 68% of desktop and 67% of mobile pages, up from 65%, with mismatches under 1%.

Sep 18

AI training now drives 52% of crawler requests, Cloudflare says

Cloudflare reports AI training made up 52% of identified crawler requests in June 2026, up from 22% in Spring 2025, with search crawling shrinking.

Sep 18

Where desktop Google searches end: Datos Q4 2025 data

Datos and SparkToro's Q4 2025 clickstream shows 24.5% of US desktop Google searches ended with no click in December, versus 25.1% a year earlier.

Sep 18

INP in 2025: 77% of mobile sites pass, but the top 1,000 lag at 63%

The 2025 Web Almanac's INP data: 77% of mobile sites have good INP, popular sites trail at 63%, and mobile home pages beat inner pages 80% to 69%.

Sep 18

Original research

All research

Method-first investigations with a stated hypothesis, sample and published limitations.

Structured Data Markup Helper: is Google's tool still available?

What Google's Structured Data Markup Helper does, whether it still works, and what Google recommends for writing and testing structured data.

Sep 26

Ahrefs 600,000-page study: AI content and Google rankings

Ahrefs checked the top 20 Google results for 100,000 keywords with its AI detector and found almost no link between AI share and ranking position.

Sep 25

Title tags, H1s and content grade: what Backlinko found

Backlinko's 11.8M-result study found exact-match titles and H1s common on page one but unrelated to rank, while Clearscope content grade tracked position.

Sep 25

Does Google use Analytics bounce rate to rank pages?

John Mueller said on record that Google does not use Analytics bounce rate for ranking. What that statement covers, and what it leaves open.

Sep 25

Mobile vs desktop parity in the 2024 Web Almanac SEO chapter

HTTP Archive's 2024 Web Almanac SEO chapter compared mobile and desktop crawls. Titles, canonicals and word counts nearly match; a few gaps remain.

Sep 25

Subdomain vs subfolder: what Ahrefs found in Mention.com

Ahrefs checked Mention.com's January 2016 move from subdomain to subfolder in Site Explorer. Traffic shifted, and only new content produced growth.

Sep 25

Did sites recover after the HCU? Amsive's 400-site tracking

Amsive tracked about 400 sites hit by the September 2023 Helpful Content Update and found no known significant recoveries by late March 2024.

Sep 24

Does adding JSON-LD schema raise AI citations? Ahrefs test

Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD against matched controls. Here is the method, the citation changes by platform and the limits.

Sep 24

HTTPS adoption in the 2025 Web Almanac: 97% of homepages

HTTP Archive's 2025 Web Almanac measured HTTPS on 97.3% of mobile homepages and 98.8% of requests. What the crawl method can and cannot show.

Sep 23

How old are the pages that rank in Google's top 10?

Ahrefs checked the age of top 10 pages for 1.3 million US keywords: 72.9 percent are over three years old, and the average number one page is five.

Sep 23

URL length and rankings: what the Backlinko study found

Backlinko's 11.8M-result study found shorter URLs correlate with slightly better Google rankings. Here is the method, the numbers and the limits.

Sep 23

Does anchor text type actually correlate with Google rankings?

Ahrefs' 384,614-page study isolated exact, phrase, partial and random-match anchor text and found every correlation with rank was weak.

Sep 22

Page weight and rankings: what the Backlinko study actually found

Backlinko and Ahrefs analyzed 11.8 million search results and found no correlation between page HTML size and Google rankings.

Sep 21

A year of SearchPilot split tests on adding FAQ schema

SearchPilot's aggregate split tests found FAQ schema was positive 67% of the time, with organic traffic uplifts of 4-15% while the rich result existed.

Sep 20

Does faster backlink growth move rankings faster?

Ahrefs tracked backlink growth for 200,000 pages across 10,000 keywords and found no observable link between acquisition pace and ranking movement.

Sep 19

What correlates with AI brand mentions? Ahrefs' 75,000-brand study

Ahrefs correlated 12 metrics with brand mentions in ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews: web mentions beat backlinks, and it warns of no causation.

Sep 18

How accurate are sitemap lastmod values? Bing's study

Bing's own study of sitemaps found 18% of lastmod values set incorrectly, usually to the generation date, and Google says it only trusts accurate ones.

Sep 18

How you chunk a page changes whether AI retrieves it at all

A 36-method academic benchmark found paragraph-based chunking nearly doubles retrieval accuracy over naive fixed-size splitting across six domains.

Sep 18

Do AI assistants cite fresher content than Google? Ahrefs data

Ahrefs compared the age of 16.975 million URLs cited by AI assistants against organic Google results. Here is the method, the numbers and the limits.

Sep 18

Reddit's top-3 share after the May 2026 core update

SE Ranking tracked 100,000 keywords in 20 niches and measured Reddit's share of Google's top three results. This piece reviews its method and limits.

Sep 18

Case studies

All studies

Documented before and after work on real sites, with the measurement method attached.

SearchPilot: adding 'The Best' to title tags lifted traffic 10%

SearchPilot split-tested putting 'The Best' at the start of an editorial site's title tags. The variant pages gained 10% more organic traffic.

Sep 26

Backlinko content relaunch: one post, organic traffic up 260.7%

Brian Dean reports a 14-day content relaunch of Backlinko's White Hat SEO post: organic traffic up 260.7% and the target keyword from 7th to 4th.

Sep 25

BODYBAR Pilates: unique studio pages lifted organic sessions 116%

Oneupweb rewrote 17 duplicate franchise studio pages for BODYBAR Pilates. Organic sessions rose 115.9% and conversions 198.1% year over year.

Sep 25

NFON merged its country domains into one gTLD, and Austria grew

searchviu's client case: NFON merged nfon.at into nfon.com/at/ and saw Austrian organic traffic up 90% in five months, with a Germany dip.

Sep 25

Brafton's accidental sitewide noindex: a six-week recovery

A sprint pushed noindex onto every Brafton page in August 2019. Search traffic fell 33.2% at the peak and took six weeks to return to baseline.

Sep 25

Rootly's AI citation rate rose from 3% to 30% in AthenaHQ case

AthenaHQ says Rootly's citation rate across tracked AI prompts rose from 3% to 30%. Here is what it reports, and what a vendor case cannot prove.

Sep 25

Digital PR case: 12 links, 143k visits in 6 weeks, per OneLittleWeb

OneLittleWeb reports a six-week Canadian digital PR campaign earned a finance blog 12+ editorial links and 143k+ new organic visits. What the case shows.

Sep 24

Product schema on a B2B store: +111% clicks, per Simplified Search

Simplified Search reports Product markup on one unnamed B2B ecommerce site lifted impressions 119% and clicks 111%, with no control group.

Sep 24

One publisher's Discover-driven traffic and revenue, per Adsterra

Adsterra's case study of an independent Indian publisher: 8.45 million impressions, 703,948 clicks and $6,976.06 in revenue, about 95% from Discover.

Sep 23

On reports +67% Google traffic after prerendering its JavaScript site

On's Prerender.io case study reports +67% Google traffic and +98% Bing traffic after prerendering a JavaScript front end instead of building SSR.

Sep 23

Pillar pages lifted an agency's organic traffic 744% in 13 months

Campaign Creators reorganized six years of blog posts into three pillar pages and reports organic visits rising from 1,091 to 9,214.

Sep 23

Italiaonline: 841% video click growth after schema fixes

Google's case study on Italiaonline reports an 841% rise in video clicks and 353% more impressions after fixing VideoObject structured data errors.

Sep 22

Silly Santa's 7-country hreflang rollout: a Skalum case study

Skalum's case study on Shopify brand Silly Santa: hreflang across 7 ccTLDs, with UK organic users up 297.5% and Norway's local traffic share up to 93%.

Sep 21

Valery Real Estate: 324,580 404s, then a 1,379% traffic recovery

Croton Content's audit found 324,580 broken URLs after a rebrand with no redirects. Fixing them took weekly organic sessions from 974 to a 12,276 peak.

Sep 20

REI cut 34 million crawlable URLs to 300,000 by taming facets

REI's technical SEO team told Botify's Crawl2Convert summit how it cut crawlable URLs from 34 million to 300,000 by reining in faceted navigation.

Sep 19

GBP overhaul at an auto detailer: calls up 471% in five months

A Map Ranking case study on CDC Detailing LLC in Pitman, New Jersey: Google Business Profile calls rose from 21 to 120 a month after five months of work.

Sep 18

Merchant Center feed fixes and three click gains, per Uproer

Uproer's published case study reports feed-level Google Merchant Center changes lifted clicks 130%, 116% and 3,500 for three unnamed ecommerce brands.

Sep 18

JunkCarsUs: HCU recovery from 30-50 to 400-500 clicks a day

SeoProfy's case study on JunkCarsUs: after the September 2023 HCU, pruning pages and rewriting templates preceded a rise to 400-500 daily clicks.

Sep 18

Log analysis cut a jewelry site from 16M to 730K crawlable pages

A JetOctopus case study: log files showed Googlebot spending crawl on filter, sort and pagination URLs, and closing them shrank the site to 730K pages.

Sep 18