Danny Goodwin
Verified
Editorial Director @sengineland & @SMX A robot trapped in a man's body. Posts mostly about SEO, PPC, search, content, social media, and digital marketing.
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Articles by Danny Goodwin
Google AI Overviews jump from 26% to 80% of branded queries
Google AI Overviews appeared on more than 80% of tracked branded queries by late September, according to new DemandSphere data. That was up from about 26% at the start of the month. The increase accelerated in the final days of September. AI Overview presence peaked at 90.48% on Sept. 27. Branded AI Overviews surged. AI Overviews appeared on roughly 27% to 35% of DemandSphere’s tracked branded queries through much of September. That changed late in the month. Presence jumped to 69.21% on Sept.
ChatGPT and Google AI favor large retailers in shopping answers
AI shopping recommendations heavily favor large national retailers over small and local stores, according to a Vaer AI study of nearly half a million AI responses conducted on behalf of Lightspeed Commerce. National chains accounted for roughly two-thirds of store recommendations when AI answered without web search. Even with live search, large retailers were the top recommendation in 46% to 58% of responses. Why we care.
Publishers want Congress to stop AI crawlers from hiding
More than 300 news publishing executives are heading to Washington, D.C., today. They plan to urge Congress to crack down on AI crawlers that disguise themselves while scraping websites. Executives from Condé Nast, Hearst Magazines, USA Today Co., and The Seattle Times are expected to meet with lawmakers and their staff. They will focus on the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, which would require automated crawlers to identify themselves and disclose their purpose. What the bill would do.
Conductor CEO Seth Besmertnik steps down after 20 years
Conductor co-founder Seth Besmertnik is stepping down as CEO after two decades. Chief Product Officer Wei Zheng will take over as Conductor makes answer engine optimization a bigger part of its business. Besmertnik will remain on Conductor’s board. In a LinkedIn post announcing the move, Besmertnik said he would continue supporting Zheng and the company as a major shareholder. Zheng takes over. Zheng has been Conductor’s chief product officer for the past five years, overseeing product strategy.
Rank Math AI unifies SEO tools, adds Gemini visibility tracking
Popular WordPress SEO plugin Rank Math today launched Rank Math AI, bringing its content, internal linking, and AI visibility tools into one offering for users. Rank Math also expanded its AI Visibility feature to track brand mentions in Google Gemini, in addition to ChatGPT. Three tools under one name. Rank Math AI combines Content AI, AI Link Genius, and AI Visibility. Content AI, previously a standalone product, handles content ideation, creation, and optimization.
Google AI Mode cuts clicks and user satisfaction: Study
Google AI Mode sharply reduced clicks to outside websites without delivering a better search experience, according to a randomized field experiment involving 1,100 Google users. Researchers forced some participants’ Google searches into AI Mode. The share of searches that led to an external website fell by 18.8 percentage points compared with when people used Google normally. AI Mode sent fewer users to the web. People assigned to AI Mode also conducted 0.92 fewer Google search sessions per day.
Google AI Overviews now appear in 39% of U.S. desktop searches
Google AI Overviews appeared in nearly 4 in 10 U.S. desktop searches in June. At the same time, AI assistants increasingly shaped how consumers researched products and discovered brands, according to Comscore’s Q2 2026 AI Intelligence Report. By the numbers. Google searches with an AI Overview reached 39.4% in June, up from 25.8% in July 2025, according to Comscore’s U.S. desktop data. Bing searches with Copilot Search reached 17.3%, up from 11.8% in July 2025.
From pre-Google SEO to AI: What Heather Lloyd-Martin says still matters
Heather Lloyd-Martin was optimizing content before Google existed. More than 25 years later, the SEO copywriting pioneer has lived through nearly every major transformation of search – from AltaVista and the rise of Google to content spinning, zero-click search, and generative AI.
Google faces six years of court oversight in ad tech antitrust case
A federal judge ordered Google to operate its advertising technology business under the oversight of an antitrust compliance monitor. The company must also make a series of behavioral changes to restore competition, according to a remedies opinion (PDF) unsealed yesterday. The opinion provides the first detailed look at the remedies. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema announced earlier this month that Google wouldn’t be forced to break up its ad tech business.
Content marketing success falls to 12-year low: Survey
Content marketing performance fell to its lowest level in 12 years, even as AI adoption topped 92%, according to Orbit Media’s latest annual blogging survey. Just 14% of marketers said their blogs delivered “strong results.” That’s six percentage points below the previous 12-year low and nearly half the 26% reported in 2022. The decline reflects marketers abandoning tactics historically linked to stronger results, not AI adoption itself, the report concluded Why the decline?
Google’s top ranking factors, according to 131 SEO professionals
Backlinks ranked as Google’s second most important ranking factor in a new survey of 131 SEO professionals conducted by Zyppy. Relevance ranked first, and content quality ranked third. Backlinks ranked No. 2. Although Google’s Gary Illyes has said links are not among Google’s top three ranking signals, 54.8% of respondents selected backlinks as one of the three most important factors. Only relevance ranked higher at 57.1%.
Jessica Bowman: SEO can’t win AI visibility alone
Jessica Bowman has spent more than 20 years figuring out how to make SEO work inside large organizations. Now she thinks AI is turning visibility into a challenge that SEO – and even marketing – can’t solve alone: “The SEO team is not going to be the ones that can take it to the finish line in every case.
USA TODAY overhauls audience strategy, citing search pressure
USA TODAY is reorganizing its audience team after telling employees that search traffic is under pressure and platforms are increasingly keeping users from clicking through to publishers, according to internal memos. The restructuring coincided with a broader round of layoffs that executives said was necessary to adapt to changing audience behavior and the economics of digital publishing. Search pressure reshaped the strategy.
SMX Now: Find the entity gaps holding back your content strategy
Your schema tells search engines what your brand is. But that doesn’t mean Google’s systems understand it the same way. That gap can reveal where your content strategy is falling short. Our next SMX Now on Sept. 16 at 1 p.m. ET will feature Ray Martinez, VP of SEO at Archer Education. He’ll show you how to measure the difference between the entities you define and the ones Google’s natural language processing (NLP) actually recognizes.
Google avoids AdX breakup in ad tech antitrust case
A federal judge rejected the U.S. Justice Department’s bid to force Google to sell its AdX advertising exchange. Google is allowed to keep the business despite an earlier ruling that it illegally monopolized parts of the publisher advertising technology market. The decision leaves Google’s antitrust liability intact but rejects the DOJ’s request for a court-ordered divestiture. Court ordered behavioral remedies.
Lily Ray on why shortcuts rarely win in SEO or AI search
Early in Lily Ray’s SEO career, her CEO offered her a deal: Get the company to No. 1 in Google, and he’d buy her a drum set. This was around 2011. Ray had discovered that buying links worked. Really well. So she kept buying them. Then came Penguin. “I think it was August 2012. Went to work that day and all of our rankings disappeared,” Ray said. The company had gone from ranking second, third, or fourth for nearly every keyword it cared about to being gone from the search results.
Google’s August 2026 spam update hit rankings harder than normal
Google’s August 2026 spam update saw an 82% increase in top 10 URLs dropping out of the top 100 compared with a period without a confirmed ranking update, according to new SE Ranking data. During the update, 16.71% of URLs that had ranked in Google’s top 10 fell beyond position 100 for the same keyword, compared with 9.2% during a similar five-day period in July. That made a top 10 URL about 1.8 times more likely to disappear from the top 100 during the spam update. By the numbers.
The SEO blind spot is what happens after the click
A few weeks ago, I spoke with a colleague about connecting SEO content to conversions. We agreed there’s a blind spot in SEO: getting people to the website has traditionally been treated as the goal, even as LLMs change how users find and enter websites. We’re seeing more branded traffic, less organic SERP traffic, and users entering at different stages of the funnel.
Duane Forrester: AI is rewriting SEO, but the mission is the same
Duane Forrester has watched search evolve from the days of meta keyword stuffing and penny clicks through mobile, personalization, “(not provided),” AI, and LLMs. After more than 25 years in the industry, including a decade at Microsoft, Forrester believes search is entering another foundational shift. To him, it feels a lot like the industry’s earliest days.
Business websites dominate Gemini’s local AI citations
Business websites accounted for nearly 60% of Gemini’s citations in local AI search, according to a new study. Steady Demand’s analysis of 14,472 citations from 1,487 local search queries across 50 U.S. metro areas also found that identical searches often produced different AI recommendations. Business websites beat directories. Nearly 60% of Gemini’s citations pointed directly to businesses’ own websites. That was more than the combined total for directories, review platforms, and forums.
Business websites dominate Gemini local AI search citations: Study
Business websites accounted for nearly 60% of Gemini’s citations in local AI search, according to a new study. Steady Demand’s analysis of 14,472 citations from 1,487 local search queries across 50 U.S. metro areas also found that identical searches often produced different AI recommendations. Business websites beat directories. Nearly 60% of Gemini’s citations pointed directly to businesses’ own websites. That was more than the combined total for directories, review platforms, and forums.
Reddit’s ChatGPT Search citations fell 86% in four days: Report
Reddit’s share of ChatGPT Search citations fell 86.4% in four days, according to new Promptwatch data. The decline began Aug. 14 after weeks of relative stability, the AI visibility platform reported. What happened. Reddit accounted for an average of 3.83% of ChatGPT Search citations between July 18 and Aug. 7, Promptwatch said. That share fell below 1% on Aug. 14, then averaged 0.52% through Aug. 17.
Shopify: AI referrals up 197%, but organic search still leads traffic
AI-referred sessions to merchant storefronts grew 197% year over year in the second quarter, Shopify said. Organic search traffic also increased 12%, according to new commerce data the company released this week. The company found that AI and organic search serve different shopping behaviors. AI-referred shoppers converted at roughly twice the rate of organic visitors in research-intensive product categories. But organic search remained the largest source of referral traffic for Shopify merchants.
Only 1.1% of news publisher visits come directly from AI: Study
AI referrals accounted for just 1.1% of visits to news publishers after conversations with AI assistants, according to a new Scrunch study that tracked millions of searches, AI chats, and website visits. Most publisher visits came through direct navigation or traditional search. Google AI Overviews mostly appeared on news searches that already generated relatively few publisher clicks. By the numbers.
Judge lets SEO sabotage lawsuit over toxic backlinks move forward
A federal judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit alleging an auto transport company used toxic backlinks to hurt a competitor’s Google rankings. Catch up quick. The June 2 ruling came at the motion-to-dismiss stage: The court didn’t decide whether the allegations are true. Instead, it found the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged a false advertising claim under the federal Lanham Act, along with trademark and related Illinois consumer protection claims.
Anthropic adds AI text watermarking to Claude models worldwide
Anthropic said it will begin embedding machine-readable watermarks into text generated by new Claude AI models worldwide. This fulfills commitments the company made under the European Union’s AI Act transparency code. EU rules, global rollout. The new requirements apply to Claude models launched in the EU on or after Aug. 2. Anthropic said it will enable the watermarking system everywhere Claude is available, not just in Europe.
300 French newspapers file complaint over Google AI Overviews
Nearly 300 French newspapers filed a complaint today with France’s competition authority. They accuse Google of violating a compensation agreement by launching AI-generated search summaries without publishers’ consent. What’s happening. APIG, the Alliance de la Presse d’Information Générale, filed the complaint after Google launched AI Overviews (the AI-generated summaries that typically appear above traditional organic search results) in France in late July, France 24 with AFP reported.
AI models favor familiar brands in search: Study
AI models searched for brands they already knew 3.2 times more often than unfamiliar brands, according to a new study. Models searched for familiar brands 55.7% of the time, compared with 17.4% for brands outside their top 10, geoSurge found. Memory strongly decided which companies were considered. Researchers measured model memory and search behavior separately to see whether what a model knew influenced what it searched for.
SMX Advanced expands in 2027: See you in San Diego or Boston
It’s official: There will be two SMX Advanced events in 2027. The shows are scheduled for March 17 to 19 in San Diego and Sept. 20 to 22 in Boston. This is the first time SMX Advanced will run twice in one year. Two coasts, two events. The expanded schedule will give you two chances to join the advanced search marketing conference, with one event on the West Coast and one on the East Coast.
ChatGPT gains access to Yelp reviews, ratings, and photos
Yelp is licensing its reviews, ratings, photos, and business information to OpenAI, giving ChatGPT access to real-time local recommendation data, Axios reported. ChatGPT gains Yelp content. ChatGPT will be able to include Yelp reviews, ratings, photos, and business details in responses to local queries. Yelp branding and links will appear when OpenAI uses its content, although OpenAI controls how that experience is presented, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told Axios. Yelp expands into ChatGPT.
Google loses key DMCA claims against SerpApi in scraping lawsuit
Google’s DMCA claims against SerpApi were dismissed July 20. Google now has 21 days to amend part of its complaint. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted SerpApi’s motion to dismiss Google’s two claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The court also stayed discovery until Google files an amended complaint, if any, and any resulting motion to dismiss is resolved. Claims split by content type.
ChatGPT topic ownership is rare, and SEO alone doesn’t explain it
Only 15.2% of ChatGPT topic categories had a clear brand owner across related buyer questions, according to a Semrush analysis. That means about 85% of categories had no dominant brand. Appearing in one prompt didn’t mean a brand appeared consistently across related questions in the same topic. How ownership was defined.
Google AI Mode adds Instacart, Canva and YouTube Music integrations
Google is starting to roll out connected app integrations in AI Mode in Search, letting U.S. users link services such as Instacart, Canva, and YouTube Music to take action on AI-generated responses. Apps in AI Mode. Users can securely connect supported services and interact with them from AI Mode, according to Google. The integrations are meant to reduce the steps between planning a task in Search and completing it in another app, Google said. Initial app examples.
EU orders Google to share search data with rivals starting in 2027
The European Commission ordered Google to share anonymized search data with rival search engines under the Digital Markets Act, specifying how the company must give third parties access to data used to improve search services. The legally binding measures clarify how Google must comply with the DMA’s search data-sharing rule. Google must begin sharing search data with eligible third-party search providers in January 2027. Google must share search data.
Google AI Mode ads reach nearly 30% of queries: Study
Google’s AI Mode showed text ads on 29.45% of commercial queries in a new SE Ranking study, less than a year after ads began appearing in AI-generated search answers. Ads appeared on 14,733 queries in the study, which analyzed U.S. commercial searches where text ads could appear, excluding product carousels. AI Mode ad adoption accelerated.SE Ranking said ads began appearing in AI Mode responses in late 2025. By mid-2026, nearly one in three commercial queries in its data set showed a text ad.
Google is AI Mode’s No. 2 most-cited domain: Report
Google’s AI Mode increased citations to google.com by 8.4x in about two months, making it the No. 2 cited domain in Profound’s tracking. The increase came almost entirely from Google Business Profiles and Product Knowledge Panels, according to Profound. Those Google-hosted cards now appear within AI Mode answers for many local and product searches. Google cards moved up. AI Mode now surfaces Google Business Profiles as inline panels for local-intent queries.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT ads could miss $100 billion revenue target: Report
OpenAI’s ad revenue forecast is on pace to miss its 2030 target by 90%, according to Emarketer. OpenAI projected $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year and $100 billion by 2030. Emarketer estimates the entire U.S. market for standalone chatbot ads will generate less than $1 billion this year and $5.41 billion by 2030. OpenAI’s target. OpenAI began testing ChatGPT ads in February. By April, the company projected that ad revenue would grow to $100 billion within five years.
OpenAI sets Aug. 9 end date for ChatGPT Atlas
OpenAI is discontinuing ChatGPT Atlas, its standalone desktop browser. The browser-based AI features are moving to the new ChatGPT desktop app, which includes ChatGPT Work, OpenAI’s work-focused agent, alongside ChatGPT Codex. The end of Atlas. James Sun of OpenAI confirmed on X Atlas will be deprecated Aug. 9. “The current targeted date for deprecation is 8/9, and we’ll share more information in the upcoming days both in-app and via email,” Sun said. One desktop app.
Ask YouTube AI search experience expands to U.S. desktop users
YouTube expanded Ask YouTube to signed-in U.S. desktop viewers 13 and older, moving its conversational search experience beyond a Premium-only test. What is Ask YouTube? Ask YouTube lets users type natural-language questions into the YouTube search bar and receive responses that combine text, video clips, long-form videos, and Shorts. Users can also ask follow-up questions to refine results. Access expands.
Google expands AI ad disclosures across Search, YouTube, Discover
Google is adding AI disclosures to ads across Search, YouTube, and Discover. The new How this ad was made section will appear in My Ad Center, Google announced today. The panel will indicate whether an ad was created or modified with AI, Google said. The feature will roll out globally across Google’s main ad surfaces, expanding its ad transparency tools as more advertisers use generative AI to create ad assets. What it looks like. Users can access it from the three-dot menu or the info icon on ads.
ChatGPT citations change when hidden search pipelines switch
Two new analyses found that ChatGPT’s cited sources changed as its search traffic shifted between hidden retrieval pipelines. The findings. Research from Chris Green and Suganthan Mohanadasan adds a new complication to AI visibility tracking: the final answer doesn’t reveal how ChatGPT selected its sources. Both researchers found internal source-selection labels, including Labrador, Bright, Oxylabs, and SERP. Those labels sit behind the answer, not in the citation cards users see.
SMX Now: Build better site architecture for SEO, AI, and users
Advanced architecture is no longer just technical structure. It determines whether your content can be found, understood, and surfaced by search engines and AI systems. Our next SMX Now on July 15 features Shari Thurow, co-founder, information scientist, and search director at the Information Architecture Gateway. She’ll explain how advanced architecture works and where most AI, SEO, and site development workflows fall short.
ChatGPT Thinking mode changes which brands get cited
ChatGPT’s high-reasoning mode acted like a different search surface for brand visibility in a Semrush analysis with Kevin Indig. It cited different domains than in minimal reasoning mode and ran nearly five times as many web searches. By the numbers. Only 25.6% of cited domains overlapped between minimal and high reasoning for the same prompts. Nearly three in four sources changed when ChatGPT shifted from Instant-style answers to Thinking-style answers. Thinking mode used more sources.
How to use Google query expansion to improve content visibility
LLMs have changed the way people search and the way Google answers. While the SERP hasn’t been 10 blue links in a very long time, it has traditionally been centered on a single intent: the thing a person is looking for. Now, AI Overviews create a full article directly in the SERP. They don’t just answer the searcher’s query. Results include related terms, contextual refinements, and supporting information that help searchers make decisions.
ChatGPT recommendations drive more brand website visits: Study
Users who saw a brand recommended by ChatGPT were much more likely to visit that brand’s website within a week, according to Similarweb. What happened. Users were 2.5 times more likely, on average, to visit an AI-recommended brand than a direct competitor, based on Similarweb’s study of U.S. desktop behavior across finance, travel, and beauty.
A 13-word edit can steer what deep-research AI agents recommend
Cornell Tech researchers found that deep-research AI agents can be manipulated by short edits to public user-generated pages, allowing a single injected Reddit-style comment to become a cited recommendation for fake products, services, or entities. The paper called those altered pages “poisoned” because the added text was designed to steer what the AI system cited and repeated. It identified the weakness in systems that search the web, gather sources, and write cited reports.
Cloudflare and beehiiv give publishers new AI crawler controls
Cloudflare and beehiiv added AI crawl controls to beehiiv’s platform. This gives newsletter publishers a way to see, allow, or block AI bots from their dashboard as AI search becomes a new discovery path for web content. The integration, announced Tuesday, embeds Cloudflare’s Crawl Control technology into beehiiv.
USA Today vs. Google AI Overviews: A World Cup battle for breaking news traffic
USA Today Co. is using AI-assisted shell files to publish breaking sports coverage faster. The strategy is designed to capture search traffic before Google’s AI Overviews summarize the news. The publisher tested the approach during the 2026 Winter Olympics and is now using it for coverage of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Digiday reported. USA Today pre-writes breaking stories.
Pew: 60% of Americans read AI summaries in search results
AI is changing how Americans search for information. A new Pew Research Center report found that 60% read AI-generated summaries at the top of search results, and about 40% use chatbots to find information. AI-generated answers now appear across both traditional search results and dedicated chatbot platforms, including tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot, Pew found. AI summaries reach most searchers. Six in 10 U.S. adults said they’ve read AI summaries at the top of search results, Pew found.
Google AI Overviews cite self-serving listicles, but recommend competitors 69% of the time
Google AI Overviews cited self-promotional “best” listicles while excluding the brands behind them from recommendations in 69% of cases, according to a new analysis of B2B software queries by Lily Ray. Brands have used self-serving listicles to influence AI search results, but Ray found Google often cited those pages while recommending competitors instead. By the numbers. Ray analyzed 100 B2B “best [category] software” queries in Google AI Overviews across three dates: April 15, May 15, and June 8.
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