Pew Research Confirms Google AI Overviews Is Eroding Web Ecosystem via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Pew Research Center tracked real web browsing behavior and confirmed what many publishers and SEOs have claimed: AI Overviews does not send traffic back to websites. The results show that the damage caused by AI summaries to the web ecosystem is as bad as or worse than is commonly understood.

Methodology

The Pew Research study tracked over 900 adults who consented to installing an online browsing tracker to record their browsing behavior in the month of March 2025. The dataset contains 68,879 unique Google search queries, and a total of 12,593 queries triggered an AI summary.

Confirmed: Google AI Search Is Eroding Referral Traffic

The tracked user data confirms publisher complaints about a drop in referral traffic caused by AI search results. Google users who encounter an AI search result are less likely to click on a link and visit a website than users who see only a standard search result.

Only 8% of users who encountered an AI summary clicked a link (in the AI summary or the standard search results) to visit a website. Users who only saw a standard search result tended to click to visit a website 15% of the time, nearly twice as many as users who viewed an AI summary.

Users rarely click a link within an AI summary. Only 1% of users clicked an AI summary link and visited a website.

AI Summaries Cause Less Web Engagement

In a recent interview, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai pushed back on the notion that AI summaries have a negative impact on the web ecosystem. He said that the fact that there is more content being created on the web than at any other time is proof that the web ecosystem is thriving. He said that

“So, generally there are more web pages… I think people are producing a lot of content, and I see consumers consuming a lot of content. We see it in our products.”

Pichai also insisted that people are consuming content across multiple forms of content (video, images, text) and that publishers today should be presenting content within more than just one format.

However, contrary to what Google’s CEO said, AI is not encouraging users to consume more content, it’s having the opposite effect. The Pew research data shows that AI summaries cause users to engage less with web content.

According to the research findings:

Users End Their Browsing Session

“Google users are more likely to end their browsing session entirely after visiting a search page with an AI summary than on pages without a summary.

This happened on 26% of pages with an AI summary, compared with 16% of pages with only traditional search results.”

Users Refrain From Clicking On Traditional Search Links

It also says that users tended to not click on a traditional search result when faced with an AI summary:

“Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits).”

Only 1% Click Citation Links In AI Summaries

Users who see an AI summary overwhelmingly do not click the citations to the websites that the AI summary links to.

The report shows:

“Google users who encountered an AI summary also rarely clicked on a link in the summary itself. This occurred in just 1% of all visits to pages with such a summary.”

This confirms what publishers and SEOs have been saying to Google over and over again: Google AI Overviews robs publishers of referral traffic. Rob is a strong word but given the context that Google is using web content to “synthesize” an answer to a search query that does not result in a referral click, the word “rob” is what inevitably comes to mind to a publisher or SEO who worked hard to create the content.

Another startling fact shared in research is that almost 66% of users either browsed somewhere else on Google or completely bailed on Google without clicking a link to visit a website. In other words, nearly 66% of Google’s users do not click a link to visit the web ecosystem.

The report explains:

“…the largest share of Google searches in our study resulted in the user either browsing elsewhere on Google or leaving the site entirely without clicking a link in the search results. Around two-thirds of all searches resulted in one of these actions.”

Wikipedia, YouTube And Reddit Dominate Google Searches

Google has been holding publisher events and Search Central Live events all around the world to listen to publisher feedback and to promise that Google will work harder to surface a greater variety of content. I know that the Googlers at these events are not lying, but those promises of surfacing more high-quality content are subverted by the grim facts presented in the Pew research of actual users.

One of the biggest complaints is that Reddit and Wikipedia dominate the search results. The research validates publisher and SEO concerns because it shows that not only are Reddit and Wikipedia the most commonly cited websites, but Google’s own YouTube ranks among the top three most cited web destinations.

The report explains:

“The most frequently cited sources in both Google AI summaries and standard search results are Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit. These three sites are the most commonly linked sources in AI summaries and standard search results alike.

Collectively, they accounted for 15% of the sources that were listed in the AI summaries we examined. They made up a similar share (17%) of the sources listed in standard search results.”

The report also shows:

• “Wikipedia links are somewhat more common in AI summaries than in standard search pages”
• “YouTube links are somewhat more common in standard search results than in AI summaries.”

These Are The Facts

Pew Research’s study of over 68,000 search queries from the browsing habits of over 900 adults reveals that Google’s AI summaries sharply reduce clicks to websites, with just 8% of users clicking any link and only 1% engaging with citations in AI answers.

Users encountering AI summaries are more likely to end their sessions or stay within Google’s ecosystem rather than visiting independent websites. This confirms publisher and SEO concerns that AI-driven search erodes web traffic and concentrates attention on a few dominant platforms like Wikipedia, Reddit, and YouTube.

These are the facts. They show that SEOs and publishers are right that AI Overviews is siphoning traffic out of the web ecosystem.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Asier Romero

Google Says It Could Make Sense To Use Noindex Header With LLMS.txt via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller answered a question about llms.txt related to duplicate content, stating that it doesn’t make sense that it would be viewed as duplicate content, but he also stated it could make sense to take steps to prevent indexing.

LLMs.txt

Llms.txt is a proposal to create a new content format standard that large language models can use to retrieve the main content of a web page without having to deal with other non-content data, such as advertising, navigation, and anything else that is not the main content. It offers web publishers the ability to provide a curated, Markdown-formatted version of the most important content. The llms.txt file sits at the root level of a website (example.com/llms.txt).

Contrary to some claims made about llms.txt, it is not in any way similar in purpose to robots.txt. The purpose of robots.txt is to control robot behavior, while the purpose of llms.txt is to provide content to large language models.

Will Google View Llms.txt As Duplicate Content?

Someone on Bluesky asked if llms.txt could be seen by Google as duplicate content, which is a good question. It could happen that someone outside of the website might link to the llms.txt and that Google might begin surfacing that content instead of or in addition to the HTML content.

This is the question asked:

“Will Google view LLMs.txt files as duplicate content? It seems stiff necked to do so, given that they know that it isn’t, and what it is really for.

Should I add a “noindex” header for llms.txt for Googlebot?”

Google’s John Mueller answered:

“It would only be duplicate content if the content were the same as a HTML page, which wouldn’t make sense (assuming the file itself were useful).

That said, using noindex for it could make sense, as sites might link to it and it could otherwise become indexed, which would be weird for users.”

Noindex For Llms.txt

Using a noindex header for the llms.txt is a good idea because it will prevent the content from entering Google’s index. Using a robots.txt to block Google is not necessary because that will only block Google from crawling the file which will prevent it from seeing the noindex.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com

Google CTRs Drop 32% For Top Result After AI Overview Rollout via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

A new study from GrowthSRC Media finds that click-through rates (CTRs) for Google’s top-ranking search result have declined from 28% to 19%. This 32% drop correlates with the expansion of AI Overviews, a feature that now appears across a wide range of search results.

Position #2 experienced an even steeper decline, with CTRs falling 39% from 20.83% to 12.60% year-over-year.

The research analyzed more than 200,000 keywords from 30 websites across ecommerce, SaaS, B2B, and EdTech industries. Here are more highlights from the study.

Key Findings

According to the report, AI Overviews appeared for just 10,000 keywords in August 2024. By May 2025, that number had grown to over 172,000.

This expansion followed the March core update and was confirmed during Google’s full U.S. rollout announcement at the I/O developer conference.

These developments appear to contrast with comments from Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who said in a Decoder interview with The Verge:

“If you put content and links within AI Overviews, they get higher click-through rates than if you put it outside of AI Overviews.”

CTRs Shift Downward and Upward

While top positions saw notable declines, the study observed a 30.63% increase in CTRs for positions 6 through 10 compared to the previous year. This suggests that users may be scrolling past AI-generated summaries to find original sources further down the page.

Across positions 1 through 5, the study reported an average CTR decline of 17.92%. The analysis focused on approximately 74,000 keywords ranking in the top 10.

Major Publishers Report Similar Trends

The findings align with reports from major publishers. Carly Steven, SEO and editorial ecommerce director at MailOnline, told attendees at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress that CTRs drop when AI Overviews are present.

As reported by Press Gazette, Steven explained:

“On desktop, when we are ranking number one in organic search, [CTR] is about 13% on desktop and about 20% on mobile. When there is an AI Overview present, that drops to less than 5% on desktop and 7% on mobile.”

MailOnline’s broader data showed CTRs falling by 56.1% on desktop and 48.2% on mobile for keywords with AI Overviews.

Ecommerce Affected by Product Widgets

The study also highlighted changes in ecommerce performance tied to Google’s Product Widgets.

Widgets like “Popular Products” and “Under [X] Price” began appearing more frequently from November 2024 onward, especially in categories such as home care, fashion, and beauty.

These widgets open a Google Shopping interface directly within search results, which may reduce clicks to traditional organic listings.

Methodology

GrowthSRC analyzed year-over-year data from Google Search Console across clients in multiple industries, focusing on changes before and after the full rollout of AI Overviews and Product Widgets.

The dataset included queries, clicks, impressions, CTRs, and average positions.

Data was segmented by content type, including product pages, collection pages, and blog posts. Additional keyword data from Ahrefs helped determine which queries triggered AI Overviews or Product Widgets.

What This Means

Mahendra Choudhary, Partner at GrowthSRC Media, encouraged SEO professionals to reconsider traditional performance benchmarks:

“With lower clicks to websites from informational content becoming the new normal, this is the perfect time to let your clients and internal stakeholders know that chasing website traffic as a KPI should be thought of differently.”

He recommends shifting focus toward brand visibility in social search, geographic relevance, mentions in LLM outputs, and overall contribution to revenue or leads.

This shift may require:

• Tracking engagement beyond clicks, such as on-site conversions, branded search growth, or assisted conversions.
• Diversifying content distribution across platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit, where users often bypass traditional search.
• Investing in high-authority content at the top of the funnel to build brand awareness, even if direct clicks decline.

These strategies can help ensure SEO continues to drive measurable value as user behavior evolves.

Looking Ahead

The decline in organic CTRs for top positions highlights how search behavior is changing as AI-generated content plays a larger role in discovery.

Adapting to this environment may involve placing less emphasis on rankings alone and focusing more on how visibility supports broader business goals.

As zero-click search becomes more common, understanding where users are engaging, and where they aren’t, will be essential to maintaining visibility.

Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock

Potential SEO Clients May Want To Discuss AI Search And Chatbots via @sejournal, @martinibuster

There was a post on social media about so-called hustle bros, and one on Reddit about an SEO who lost a prospective client to a digital marketer whose pitch included a song and dance about AI search visibility. Both discussions highlight a trend in which potential customers want to be assured of positive outcomes and may want to discuss AI search positioning.

Hustle Bro Culture?

Two unrelated posts touched on SEOs who are hustling for clients and getting them. The first post was about SEO “hustle bros” who post search console screenshots to show the success of their work.

I know of a guy who used to post a lot in a Facebook SEO group until the moderators discovered that his Search Console screenshots were downloaded from Google Images. SEO hustle bros who post fake screenshots are an actual thing, and sometimes they get caught.

So, a person posted a rant on Bluesky about people who do that.

Here’s what he posted:

“How much of SEO is “chasing after wind”. There’s so many hustle bros, programmatic promoters and people posting graphs with numbers erased off to show their “success”.”

Has Something Changed?

Google’s John Mueller responded:

“I wonder if it has changed over the years, or if it’s just my (perhaps your) perception that has changed.

Or maybe all the different kinds of SEOs are just in the same few places, rather than their independent forums, making them more visible?”

Mueller might be on to something because social media and YouTube have made it easier for legit SEOs and “hustle bros” to find a larger audience. But I think the important point to consider is that those people are connecting to potential clients in a way that maybe legit SEOs might not be connecting.

And that leads into the next social media discussion, which is about SEOs who are talking about what clients want to hear: AI Fluff.

SEOs Selling AI “Fluff”

There is a post on Reddit where an SEO shares how they spent months communicating with a potential client, going out of their way to help a small business as a favor to a friend. After all the discussions the SEO gets to the part where they expect the small business to commit to an agreement and they walk away, saying they’re going with another SEO who sold them with something to do with AI.

They explained:

“SEOs Selling AI Fluff

After answering a bunch of questions via email over 3 months (unusually needy client) but essentially presales, it all sounds good to go and we hop on a kickoff call. Recap scope and reshare key contacts, and tee up a chat with the we design agency. So far so good.

Then dropped.

Clients reason? The other SEO who they’ve been chatting with is way more clued up with the AI technicals

I’d love to know what crystal ball AI mysticism they were sold on. Maybe a “cosine similarity audit”, maybe we’ll include “schema embeddings analysis” within our migration project plan to make sure AI bots can read your site. Lol cool whatever bro.”

John Mueller responded to that person’s post but then retracted it.

Nevertheless, a lively discussion ensued with three main points:

1. Is AI SEO this year’s EEAT?
2. Some potential clients want to discuss AI SEO
3. SEOs may need to address AEO/AIO/GEO

1. Is AI For SEO This Year’s EEAT?

Many Redditors in that discussion scoffed at the idea of SEO for AI. This isn’t a case of luddites refusing to change with the times. SEO tactics for AI Search are still evolving.

Reddit moderator WebLinkr received eight upvotes for their comment:

“Yup – SEOs been like that for years – EEAT, “SEO Audits” – basically people buy on what “makes sense” or “sounds sensible” even though they’ve already proven they have no idea what SEO is.”

Unlike EEAT, AI Search is most definitely disrupting visibility. It’s a real thing. And I do know of at least one SEO with a computer science degree who has it figured out.

But I think it’s not too off the mark to say that many digital marketers are still figuring things out. The amount of scoffing in that discussion seems to support the idea that AI Search is not something all SEOs are fully confident about.

2. Some Clients Are Asking For AI SEO

Perhaps the most important insight is that potential clients want to know what an SEO can do for AI optimization. If clients are asking about AI SEO, does that mean it’s no longer hype? Or is this a repeat of what happened with EEAT where it was a lot of wheels spinning for nothing?

Redditor mkhaytman shared:

“Like it or not, clients are asking questions about AIs impact and how they can leverage the new tools people are using for search and just telling them that “Nobody knows!” isn’t a satisfactory answer. You need to be able to tell them something – even if its just “good seo practices are the same things that will improve your AI citations”.”

3. AI Search Is Real: SEOs Need To Talk About It With Clients

A third point of view emerged: this is something real that all SEOs need to be having a conversation about. It’s not something that can be ignored and only discussed if a client or prospect asks about it.

SVLibertine shared:

“Battling AIO, GEO, and AEO may seem like snake oil to some, but…it’s where we’re headed. Right now.

To stay relevant in our field you need to be able to eloquently and convincingly speak to this brave new world we’ve found ourselves in. Either to potential clients, or to our boss’s bosses.

I spend almost as much time after work staying on top of developments as I do during the day working. …That being said… SEO fundamentals absolutely still apply, and content is still king.”

Uncertainty About Answer Engine SEO

There are many ways to consider SEO for AI. For example, there’s a certain amount of consensus that AI gets web search data from traditional search engines, where traditional SEO applies. That’s what the comment about content being king seems to be about.

But then we have folks who are using share buttons to raise visibility by getting people to ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity about their web pages. That’s kind of edgy, but it’s a natural part of how SEO reacts to new things: by experimenting and seeing how the algorithmic black box responds.

This is a period similar to what I experienced at the dawn of SEO, when search marketers were playing around with different approaches and finding what works until it doesn’t.

But here’s something to be aware of: there are times when a client will demand certain things, and it’s tempting to give clients what they’re asking for. But if you have reservations, it may be helpful to share your doubts.

Read about Google’s ranking signals:

Google’s Quality Rankings May Rely On These Content Signals

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Asier Romero

Why It’s Okay To Not Buy Or Obsess Over Links Anymore via @sejournal, @martinibuster

There are many businesses relatively new to SEO that eventually face the decision to build or buy links because they are told that links are important, which, of course, links are important. But the need to buy links presupposes that buying them is the only way to acquire them. Links are important, but less important than at any time in the history of SEO.

How Do I Know So Much About Links?

I have been doing SEO for 25 years, at one time specializing in links. I did more than links, but I was typecast as a “links guy” because I was the moderator of the Link Building Forum at WebmasterWorld under the martinibuster nickname. WebmasterWorld was at one time the most popular source of SEO information in the world. Being a WebmasterWorld moderator was an honor, and only the best of the very best were invited to become one. Many top old-school SEOs were moderators there, like Jennifer Slegg, Greg Boser, Todd Friesen, Dixon Jones, Ash Nallawalla, and many more.

That’s not to brag, but to explain that my opinion comes from decades-long experience starting from the very dawn of link building. There are very few people who have as deep hands-on experience with links. So this is my advice based on my experience.

Short History Of Link Building

Google’s link algorithms have steadily improved since the early days. As early as 2003, I was told by Google engineer Marissa Mayer (then at Google, before becoming CEO of Yahoo) that Google was able to distinguish that a link in the footer was a “built by” link and to not count it for PageRank. This crushed sites that relied on footer links to power their rankings.

• 2005 – Statistical Analysis
  In 2005, Google engineers announced at the Pubcon New Orleans search conference that they were using statistical analysis to catch unnatural linking patterns. Their presentation featured graphs showing a curve representing normal linking patterns and then a separate cloud of red dots that represented unnatural links.
• Links That “Look” Natural
  If you’ve ever read the phrase “links that look natural” or “natural-looking links” and wondered where that came from, statistical analysis algorithms is the answer. After 2005, the goal for manipulative links was to look natural, which meant doing things like alternating the anchor text, putting links into context, and being careful about outbound link targets.
• Demise Of Easy Link Tactics
  By 2006, Google had neutralized the business of reciprocal links, traffic counter link building, and was winding down the business of link directories.
• WordPress Was Good For Link Building
  WordPress was a boon to link builders because it made it possible for more people to get online and build websites, increasing the ability to obtain links by asking or throwing money at them. There were also sites like Geocities that hosted mini-sites, but most of the focus was on standalone sites, maybe because of PageRank considerations (PageRank was visible in the Google Toolbar).
• Rise Of Paid Links
  Seemingly everyone built websites on virtually any topic, which made link building easier to do simply by asking for a link. Companies like Text-Link-Ads came along and built huge networks of thousands of independent websites on virtually every topic, and they made a ton of money. I knew some people who sold links from their network of sites who were earning $40,000/month in passive income. White hat SEOs celebrated link selling because they said it was legitimate advertising (wink, wink), and therefore Google wouldn’t penalize it.
• Fall Of Paid Links
  The paid links party ended in the years leading up to 2012, when paid links began losing their effectiveness. As a link building moderator, I had access to confidential information and was told by insiders that paid links were having less and less effect. Then 2012’s Penguin Update happened, and suddenly thousands of websites got hit by manual actions for paid links and guest posting links.

Ranking Where You’re Supposed To Rank

The Penguin Algorithm marked a turning point in the business of building links. Internally at Google there must have been a conversation about the punitive aspect of catching links and at some point not long after Google started ranking sites where they were supposed to rank instead of penalizing them.

In fact, I coined the phrase “ranking where you’re supposed to rank” in 2014 to show that while sites with difficulty ranking may not technically have a penalty, their links are ineffective and they are ranking where they are supposed to rank.

There’s a class of link sellers that sell what they call Private Blog Network links. PBN sellers depend on Google to not penalize a site and depend on Google to give a site a temporary boost which happens for many links. But the sites inevitably return to ranking where they’re supposed to rank.

Ranking poorly is not a big deal for churn and burn affiliate sites designed to rank high for a short period of time. But it’s a big deal for businesses that depend on a website to be ranking well every day.

Consequences Of Poor SEO

Receiving a manual action is a big deal because it takes a website out of action until Google restores the rankings. Recovering from a manual action is difficult and requires a site to go above and beyond by removing every single low-quality link they are responsible for, and sometimes more than that. Publishers are often disappointed after a manual action is lifted because their sites don’t return to their former high rankings. That’s because they’re ranking where they’re supposed to rank.

For that reason, buying links is not an option for B2B sites, personal injury websites, big-brand websites, or any other businesses that depend on rankings. An SEO or business owner will have to answer for a catastrophic loss in traffic and earnings should their dabbling in paid links backfire.

Personal injury SEO is a good example of why relying on links can be risky. It’s a subset of local search, where rankings are determined by local search algorithms. While links may help, the algorithm is influenced by other factors like local citations, which are known to have a strong impact on rankings. Even if a site avoids a penalty, links alone won’t carry it, and the best-case scenario is that the site ends up ranking where it’s supposed to rank. The worst-case scenario is a manual action for manipulative links.

I’ve assisted businesses with their reconsideration requests to get out of a manual action, and it’s a major hassle. In the old days, I could just send an email to someone at Google or Yahoo and get the penalty lifted relatively quickly. Getting out of a manual action today is not easy. It’s a big, big deal.

The point is that if the consequences of a poor SEO strategy are catastrophic, then buying links is not an option.

Promotion Is A Good Strategy

Businesses can still promote their websites without depending heavily on links. SEOs tend to narrow their views of promotion to just links. Link builders will turn down an opportunity to publish an article for distribution to tens of thousands of potential customers because the article is in an email or a PDF and doesn’t come with a link on a web page.

How dumb is that, right? That’s what thinking in the narrow terms of SEO does: it causes people to avoid promoting a site in a way that builds awareness in customers—the people who may be interested in a business. Creating awareness and building love for a business is the kind of thing that, in my opinion, leads to those mysterious external signals of trustworthiness that Google looks for.

Promotion is super important, and it’s not the kind of thing that fits into the narrow “get links” mindset. Any promotional activity a business undertakes outside the narrow SEO paradigm is going to go right over the head of the competition. Rather than obsessing over links, it may be a turning point for all businesses to return to thinking of ways to promote the site, because links are less important today than they ever have been, while external signals of trust, expertise, and authoritativeness are quite likely more important today than at any other time in SEO history.

Takeaways

• Link Building’s Declining Value:
  Links are still important, but less so than in the past; their influence on rankings has steadily decreased.
• Google’s Increasingly Sophisticated Link Algorithms:
  Google has increasingly neutralized manipulative link strategies through algorithm updates and statistical detection methods.
• Rise and Fall of Paid Link Schemes:
  Paid link networks once thrived but became increasingly ineffective by 2012, culminating in penalties via the Penguin update.
• Ranking Where You’re Supposed to Rank:
  Google now largely down-ranks or ignores manipulative links, meaning sites rank based on actual quality and relevance. Sites can still face manual actions, so don’t depend on Google continuing to down-rank manipulative links.
• Risks of Link Buying:
  Manual actions are difficult to recover from and can devastate sites that rely on rankings for revenue.
• Local SEO Factors Rely Less On Links:
  For industries like personal injury law, local ranking signals (e.g., citations) often outweigh link impact.
• Promotion Beyond Links:
  Real promotion builds brand awareness and credibility, often in ways that don’t involve links but may influence user behavior signals. External user behavior signals have been a part of Google’s signals since the very first PageRank algorithm, which itself models user behavior.

Learn more about Google’s external user behavior signals and ranking without links:

Google’s Quality Rankings May Rely On These Content Signals

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero

Google Discusses If It’s Okay To Make Changes For SEO Purposes via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt discussed making changes to a web page, observing the SEO effect, and the importance of tracking those changes. There has been long-standing hesitation around making too many SEO changes because of a patent filed years ago about monitoring frequent SEO updates to catch attempts to manipulate search results, so Mueller’s answer to this question is meaningful in the context of what’s considered safe.

Does this mean it’s okay now to keep making changes until the site ranks well? Yes, no, and probably. The issue was discussed on a recent Search Off the Record podcast.

Is It Okay To Make Content Changes For SEO Testing?

The context of the discussion was a hypothetical small business owner who has a website and doesn’t really know much about SEO. The situation is that they want to try something out to see if it will bring more customers.

Martin Splitt set up the discussion as the business owner asking different people for their opinions on how to update a web page but receiving different answers. Splitt then asks whether going ahead and changing the page is safe to do.

Martin asked:

“And I want to try something out. Can I just do that or do I hurt my website when I just try things out?”

Mueller affirmed that it’s okay to get ahead and try things out, commenting that most content management systems (CMS) enable a user to easily make changes to the content.

He responded:

“…for the most part you can just try things out. One of the nice parts about websites is, often, if you’re using a CMS, you can just edit the page and it’s live, and it’s done. It’s not that you have to do some big, elaborate …work to put it live.”

In the old days, Google used to update its index once a month. So SEOs would make their web page changes and then wait for the monthly update to see if those changes had an impact. Nowadays, Google’s index is essentially on a rolling update, responding to new content as it gets indexed and processed, with SERPs being re-ranked in reaction to changes, including user trends where something becomes newsworthy or seasonal (that’s where the freshness algorithm kicks in).

Making changes to a small site that doesn’t have much traffic is an easy thing. Making changes to a website responsible for the livelihood of dozens, scores, or even hundreds of people is a scary thing. So when it comes to testing, you really need to balance the benefits against the possibility that a change might set off a catastrophic chain of events.

Monitoring The SEO Effect

Mueller and Splitt next talked about being prepared to monitor the changes.

Mueller continued his answer:

“It’s very easy to try things out, let it sit for a couple of weeks, see what happens and kind of monitor to see is it doing what you want it to be doing. I guess, at that point, when we talk about monitoring, you probably need to make sure that you have the various things installed so that you actually see what is happening.

Perhaps set up Search Console for your website so that you see the searches that people are doing. And, of course, some way to measure the goal that you want, which could be something perhaps in Analytics or perhaps there’s, I don’t know, some other way that you track in person if you have a physical store, like are people actually coming to my business after seeing my website, because it’s all well and good to do SEO, but if you have no way of understanding has it even changed anything, you don’t even know if you’re on the right track or recognize if something is going wrong.”

Something that Mueller didn’t mention is the impact on user behavior on a web page. Does the updated content make people scroll less? Does it make them click on the wrong thing? Do people bounce out at a specific part of the web page?

That’s the kind of data Google Analytics does not provide because that’s not what it’s for. But you can get that data with a free Microsoft Clarity account. Clarity is a user behavior analytics SaaS app. It shows you where (anonymized) users are on a page and what they do. It’s an incredible window on web page effectiveness.

Martin Splitt responded:

“Yeah, that’s true. Okay, so I need a way of measuring the impact of my changes. I don’t know, if I make a new website version and I have different texts and different images and everything is different, will I immediately see things change in Search Console or will that take some time?”

Mueller responded that the amount of time it takes for changes to show up in Search Console depends on how big the site is and the scale of the changes.

Mueller shared:

“…if you’re talking about something like a homepage, maybe one or two other pages, then probably within a week or two, you should see that reflected in Search. You can search for yourself initially.

That’s not forbidden to search for yourself. It’s not that something will go wrong or anything. Searching for your site and seeing, whatever change that you made, has that been reflected. Things like, if you change the title to include some more information, you can see fairly quickly if that got picked up or not.”

When Website Changes Go Wrong

Martin next talks about what I mentioned earlier: when a change goes wrong. He makes the distinction between a technical change and changes for users. A technical change can be tested on a staging site, which is a sandboxed version of the website that search engines or users don’t see. This is actually a pretty good thing to do before updating WordPress plugins or doing something big like swapping out the template. A staging site enables you to test technical changes to make sure there’s nothing wrong. Giving the staged site a crawl with Screaming Frog to check for broken links or other misconfigurations is a good idea.

Mueller said that changes for SEO can’t be tested on a staged site, which means that whatever changes are made, you have to be prepared for the consequences.

Listen to The Search Off The Record from about the 24 minute mark:

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Google’s June 2025 Update Analysis: What Just Happened? via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s June 2025 Core Update just finished. What’s notable is that while some say it was a big update, it didn’t feel disruptive, indicating that the changes may have been more subtle than game changing. Here are some clues that may explain what happened with this update.

Two Search Ranking Related Breakthroughs

Although a lot of people are saying that the June 2025 Update was related to MUVERA, that’s not really the whole story. There were two notable backend announcements over the past few weeks, MUVERA and Google’s Graph Foundation Model.

Google MUVERA

MUVERA is a Multi-Vector via Fixed Dimensional Encodings (FDEs) retrieval algorithm that makes retrieving web pages more accurate and with a higher degree of efficiency. The notable part for SEO is that it is able to retrieve fewer candidate pages for ranking, leaving the less relevant pages behind and promoting only the more precisely relevant pages.

This enables Google to have all of the precision of multi-vector retrieval without any of the drawbacks of traditional multi-vector systems and with greater accuracy.

Google’s MUVERA announcement explains the key improvements:

“Improved recall: MUVERA outperforms the single-vector heuristic, a common approach used in multi-vector retrieval (which PLAID also employs), achieving better recall while retrieving significantly fewer candidate documents… For instance, FDE’s retrieve 5–20x fewer candidates to achieve a fixed recall.

Moreover, we found that MUVERA’s FDEs can be effectively compressed using product quantization, reducing memory footprint by 32x with minimal impact on retrieval quality.

These results highlight MUVERA’s potential to significantly accelerate multi-vector retrieval, making it more practical for real-world applications.

…By reducing multi-vector search to single-vector MIPS, MUVERA leverages existing optimized search techniques and achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly improved efficiency.”

Google’s Graph Foundation Model

A graph foundation model (GFM) is a type of AI model that is designed to generalize across different graph structures and datasets. It’s designed to be adaptable in a similar way to how large language models can generalize across different domains that it hadn’t been initially trained in.

Google’s GFM classifies nodes and edges, which could plausibly include documents, links, users, spam detection, product recommendations, and any other kind of classification.

This is something very new, published on July 10th, but already tested on ads for spam detection. It is in fact a breakthrough in graph machine learning and the development of AI models that can generalize across different graph structures and tasks.

It supersedes the limitations of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) which are tethered to the graph on which they were trained on. Graph Foundation Models, like LLMs, aren’t limited to what they were trained on, which makes them versatile for handling new or unseen graph structures and domains.

Google’s announcement of GFM says that it improves zero-shot and few-shot learning, meaning it can make accurate predictions on different types of graphs without additional task-specific training (zero-shot), even when only a small number of labeled examples are available (few-shot).

Google’s GFM announcement reported these results:

“Operating at Google scale means processing graphs of billions of nodes and edges where our JAX environment and scalable TPU infrastructure particularly shines. Such data volumes are amenable for training generalist models, so we probed our GFM on several internal classification tasks like spam detection in ads, which involves dozens of large and connected relational tables. Typical tabular baselines, albeit scalable, do not consider connections between rows of different tables, and therefore miss context that might be useful for accurate predictions. Our experiments vividly demonstrate that gap.

We observe a significant performance boost compared to the best tuned single-table baselines. Depending on the downstream task, GFM brings 3x – 40x gains in average precision, which indicates that the graph structure in relational tables provides a crucial signal to be leveraged by ML models.”

What Changed?

It’s not unreasonable to speculate that integrating both MUVERA and GFM could enable Google’s ranking systems to more precisely rank relevant content by improving retrieval (MUVERA) and mapping relationships between links or content to better identify patterns associated with trustworthiness and authority (GFM).

Integrating Both MUVERA and GFM would enable Google’s ranking systems to more precisely surface relevant content that searchers would find to be satisfying.

Google’s official announcement said this:

“This is a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites.”

This particular update did not seem to be accompanied by widespread reports of massive changes. This update may fit into what Google’s Danny Sullivan was talking about at Search Central Live New York, where he said they would be making changes to Google’s algorithm to surface a greater variety of high-quality content.

Search marketer Glenn Gabe tweeted that he saw some sites that had been affected by the “Helpful Content Update,” also known as HCU, had surged back in the rankings, while other sites worsened.

Although he said that this was a very big update, the response to his tweets was muted, not the kind of response that happens when there’s a widespread disruption. I think it’s fair to say that, although Glenn Gabe’s data shows it was a big update, it may not have been a disruptive one.

So what changed? I think, I speculate, that it was a widespread change that improved Google’s ability to better surface relevant content, helped by better retrieval and an improved ability to interpret patterns of trustworthiness and authoritativeness, as well as to better identify low-quality sites.

Read More:

Google MUVERA

Google’s Graph Foundation Model

Google’s June 2025 Update Is Over

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