Author: Ryuzaki

Search has moved far beyond blue links and basic ranking signals. People now discover information on Google, TikTok, Pinterest, Amazon, YouTube, and an expanding layer of generative AI platforms that synthesize answers from trusted sources. As SERPs shift toward rich results and AI summaries, users often get what they need without needing to click at all. In this environment, brand authority isn’t just tied to your domain. It spans platforms, formats, and the systems that learn from your content. Modern off-page SEO must support both search engines and the AI models that evaluate and surface your expertise. This off-page optimization…

The European Commission is asking industry players to weigh in on Google’s proposal to resolve sweeping antitrust charges tied to its advertising technology business — a case that has already triggered nearly €3 billion ($3.5B) in fines. What’s happening. The Commission is circulating a non-confidential version of Google’s proposal to roughly 200 industry stakeholders, including publishers, advertisers, and ad tech rivals. Officials say the feedback will inform the final assessment of whether Google’s commitments restore fair competition in the EU’s digital ad market. The backstory. Google was fined €2.95B and ordered to stop favoring its own ad tech services. In…

Social media now drives more traffic to small and medium-sized businesses than search, and many SMBs are beginning to track AI-generated referrals. They also see competitors showing up in AI summaries as an emerging threat, according to new survey data published today by WordStream by LocaliQ. Why we care. Small businesses now see AI summaries as an emerging and important channel. These summaries shape buyers’ early decisions and can steer them toward competing products. AI referrals have also become clear and trackable, convincing businesses that they can – and should – optimize for them. Google traffic losses rise. Forty percent…

Rediscovering Intimacy and Connection After 60 When we reach our sixties, many of us find ourselves at a curious crossroads, pondering the essence of intimacy, love, and sexuality. Despite societal assumptions, this chapter of life can be rich with passion and connection—even when traditional sexual activity may not be as frequent as it once was. As we grow older, many perceive sexuality as a taboo subject, often associating it with youthful vigor and desirability. Yet, true intimacy transcends physicality. It embodies emotional connectivity, mutual respect, and deep affection. It’s essential to shift our perception and acknowledge that intimacy can flourish…

Google announced new “AI-powered configuration” within the Search Console Performance report that lets you ask Search Console to show you a specific report, and Google will “instantly” configure a report for you. This feature is “experimental” and won’t show up for everyone today. This is a lot like AI-powered advisors in Google Ads and Google Analytics but for Search Console. AI-powered configuration. Google said AI-powered configuration “lets you describe the analysis you want to see in natural language. Your inputs are then transformed into the appropriate filters and settings, instantly configuring the report for you.” What it looks like. Here…

AI is changing how people discover and understand brands.  It’s also reshaping how they search, with users turning to tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews for answers instead of clicking through pages.  They interact with synthesized summaries, not traditional results. That shift forces marketers to rethink how visibility is built. SEO still matters, but it now extends beyond on-page content or rankings.  Visibility depends on how often a brand is cited, referenced, and discussed across the digital ecosystem, and how those signals are interpreted by large language models. Enter the PESO model.  Long used to balance paid, earned,…

Google is pushing AI Mode within Google Discover, with options to summarize, follow-up and dive deeper after you start reading a story from within the Google Discover feed. This is just one more avenue where Google is pushing its users into AI Mode. How it works. After you click into an article from the Google Discover feed, when you click on the three dots at the top right, there are options for: Summarize with Al Mode Ask a follow up with Al Mode Dive deeper with Al Mode Damien (adell) on X posted a video, here is a screenshot from that video,…

The latest benchmark results reveal a surprising drop in SEO accuracy from top AI models. TL;DR:  The latest flagship AI models (Claude Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro) have statistically regressed in performance for standard SEO tasks, showing a ~9% drop in accuracy compared to previous versions.  This isn’t a glitch – it’s a feature of how models are now optimized for deep reasoning and “agentic” workflows rather than “one-shot” answers.  To survive this shift, organizations must stop relying on raw prompts and move to “contextual containers” (Custom GPTs, Gems, Projects). The ‘newer = better’ myth is dead Last year, the…

Google today released its 2025 Year in Search list, but don’t mistake it for a ranking of the “top searches” or the “most searched” terms. This year’s recap focused on trending queries – the topics that grew the fastest compared with 2024. That shift reveals a lot about where Google Search is heading, and how it’s been evolving for years. Why we care. Google chose to spotlight fast-rising, emerging queries. Freshness has long mattered in search, but the 2025 top trending queries list underscores an accelerating shift: the biggest AI search and SEO opportunities will come from new, developing topics –…

The narrative in SEO right now is simple: Google’s AI Mode doesn’t send traffic. If it becomes the default Google Search experience, your website will starve for clicks. There’s one problem, though: the studies claiming “AI doesn’t send traffic” focus almost entirely on informational queries. Yes, if someone wants to know what a basal cell carcinoma looks like, AI will kill that click. But what happens when someone wants to find a dermatologist to check that mole? No one has shared a study like that yet. So we decided to fix that. We ran the first UX study focused specifically…