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- [00:00]
Asana AI Narrator
Working across teams is tough, but Asana helps you handle it. Asana AI can spot roadblocks and assign work to keep everything on track. That's how work gets handled. Visit us@asana.com.
- [00:15]
Vanta AI Narrator
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- [01:12]
Ross Dunn
Hello and welcome to SEO101 on WMR FM episode number 521. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Step Forth Web Marketing, and my co host is my company senior SEO Scott Vanack. All right, how's it going, bud?
- [01:28]
Scott Vanack
It's going well.
- [01:30]
Ross Dunn
Excellent.
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Scott Vanack
I don't. It's. It's sunny outside. I haven't seen the sunshine in a long time. Not to talk about weather, but you know, when you see the sun after it's been a long time, it kind of just doesn't matter how your day is going. It just kind of makes you feel a little bit better.
- [01:42]
Ross Dunn
It does. It definitely does. All right, so we got some non SEO news to start out here. What do we got here?
- [01:50]
Scott Vanack
Yeah, so this first one is not really anything, but I thought it was kind of funny. Interesting. A Google search is made, a small little customization that you can do. So if you don't like the color of your search results, you can now change it. They've added a little palette link in the top left hand corner and you can choose from 10 different accent colors and change the way your search results look if you're not in Canada? Because I can't do it. It's so weird. Like they add this little test feature. It's like, okay, it's kind of fun, but why do they limit it so much? I don't know, but it should have, I would assume, no impact whatsoever on basically anything. But if you want to change your look, go for it.
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Ross Dunn
It's nice to see they're spending their time on valuable things.
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Scott Vanack
Yeah, I mean, they could fix local SEO. Yeah.
- [02:39]
Ross Dunn
Oh, man. This Next one though is big and this is going to cause serious waves. Siri, the AI that everyone loves to hate because frankly, it has never really gotten better from what I've seen. It was groundbreaking when it came out and then it just sort of stayed the way it was and never really improved. Well, Mark Gurman from Bloomberg reported that Apple users will now or soon have access to Gemini AI enhanced Siri Voice Assistant as early as late February. So Google is getting even more entrenched. Pardon me, entrenched in this market. Not what I want to see. That is a lot of new exposure. I mean, it's vast. It's hard to even fathom how much more exposure they're going to get. And it's their AI. So, yeah, anyway, I wasn't happy to see it and I noticed a lot of SEOs on LinkedIn were freaking out about it too. Not a good thing.
- [03:51]
Scott Vanack
I have to wonder though, because you're a real Apple fan or, sorry, the opposite of that, you kind of hate Apple. But this is like taking a bit of Google, you know, Android, Google, it's all kind of connected, which you like putting it into Apple. I could see you buying an iPhone soon once this is done.
- [04:05]
Ross Dunn
I like Android and yes, that's definitely connected to Google, but Google, not so much these days. Yeah, no, they're too big. Way too big for their britches and I just can't believe they've managed to get past that antitrust. It's unreal.
- [04:21]
Scott Vanack
But anyway, not enough for Apple to get your business. Got it.
- [04:24]
Ross Dunn
Yeah, definitely not. Definitely not. All right, SEO news here. The title is Bad News. Google AI Overviews. Follow up questions. Go directly to AI mode now. I actually think this is good from a user's perspective. It just sucks from a business owner's perspective. Why don't you fill us in?
- [04:47]
Scott Vanack
Yeah, so currently this is only on mobile, so if you're on desktop most of the time, you won't see this in AI overviews. If you want a follow up question, you can click Show More. And when you click the Show More button, this will now take you directly into AI mode. And AI mode is popping up in this overlay that goes over top of the regular search results that you then have to close to return to those results. So this is quite likely going to result in fewer clicks for, you know, the content publishers and creators and, and anyone else that's reliant on that organic search. Robbie Stein wrote, we're making the transition to a conversation even more seamless. In our testing, we found that People prefer an experience that flows naturally into a conversation and that asking follow up questions while keeping the context from AI overviews makes search more helpful. So yeah, I think from a user perspective, if AI is doing a good job, this could be really helpful. From a website owner's perspective, you know, it's just another way to lose clicks. So we'll see how that plays out. Really?
- [05:57]
Ross Dunn
Yeah. I find when I'm doing searches on my phone and I get to something that's interesting, I have to go and click AI mode to have more of a conversation. I didn't even think of clicking the. What was it more or something. Read more, show more, show more. So I will be doing that, I guess and seeing how that pans out, it's a lot easier than having to re send the question in, which probably costs them money and adds more pollution. So let's try to avoid that.
- [06:30]
Scott Vanack
It's weird to think that's even an issue in my mind. Like, how can you know, me clicking a button on a website help pollute the world? You know, like, it's hard. There's such a disconnect in how this stuff works.
- [06:41]
Ross Dunn
Yeah. Well, and you. And it doesn't seem like it would, it'd be like leading a candy wrapper on the ground. But you know, you get millions of people doing. Does add up. But yeah, as Lily Rafe said, more bad news for websites that enjoy traffic.
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Scott Vanack
Which is maybe all of them.
- [06:59]
Ross Dunn
Yeah. Unfortunately a lot of what we're going to talk about today gets into that and just how much is changing. Yeah. Gemini 3 is powering Google AI overviews globally. Now this is announced as of January 27th. Robbie Stein again says we're making Gemini 3 the new default model for AI overviews globally. So you get a best in class AI response right away on the search results page for questions where it's helpful and if it's not helpful, I added that at the end, especially in local. God, don't, please just don't offer AI. And look, they're going to do it. I know it. I know, I know. And they're, they're working on it now, but it's making a mess of things.
- [07:48]
Scott Vanack
So I, you know, I think it is definitely getting better though. And the, the better it gets, the more I like AI. So we were, we never watch American Idol, but we happened to tune into it for a brief period the other day and it. Oh, what's her name? Great, I'm forgetting her name. This one singer is now one of the judges and I'm like Oh, is she the ditzy one that was on American Idol? And he's like, who's the ditzy? We're like, I don't remember. Isn't that her? She's like, no, I don't think that's her. And so who is she? So I just ask, ask Google who's the ditzy girl from American Idol? That's all I ask. Like, like I'm going to get an answer that actually answers my question. And right away AI overviews is like, oh, Kelly Pickler was seen as the ditzy girl from blah blah. And it told me right away and I don't know if a website result would have known that or been able to give me that information with my weird context. And, and so I don't know if that's a product of Gemini 3 specifically because this was only a couple days ago, so it would have been after this launch. But yeah, I don't know. I like, I love AI and I hate it and I want to hate it, but I, I don't know man, I'm so torn.
- [08:54]
Ross Dunn
Yeah, well, we'll get into a little bit of how we're. You're supposed to deal with it soon here, but Google searches per user fell near in the US that is fell nearly 20% year over year. That doesn't sound like much, but if you think about just how many searches that is and those searches were opportunities to be found again, as a business owner, it's not good. That's a big change. So tag team this. So I'll do the first bit here. The data suggests Google isn't losing users, it's losing repeat searches. So either getting the answer right or you're able just to have a dialogue with AI. It's really what it comes down to. From what I can tell, the drop stands in a sharp contrast to Europe where searches per user declined by just 2% to 3%. Why the drop, Scott? Oh, you're muted.
- [09:58]
Scott Vanack
That's what I get for coughing. Have to mute my mic. So users in this is the drop reasons, the reasons for the drop. Users increasingly get what they need without running multiple follow up searches. I mean like I said, my stupid example for American Idol, I got got what I needed. I didn't have to go anywhere. 0 click searches remain high but are no longer accelerating, leveling out at the low 20% range by year end. I like the idea of it leveling off. That sounds good to me. And repeat searches and clicks within Google owned properties show only minor changes indicating behavior has settled at current levels, so we'll see.
- [10:39]
Ross Dunn
That's settled at the end of the year and gosh knows what's going to happen this year. So other things are the queries are getting longer. The shift is demonstrated by the rapid growth of mid length queries. That's six to nine words. In the US extremely long queries, 15 plus words remain uncommon but show high volatility, suggesting users are experimenting with expressing detailed search requests. I fully expect those will increase. I know I'm doing it more often and I wasn't before, simply because the additional context can make a real difference in the result. Quite shockingly actually. So I imagine more and more people will start to see that.
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Scott Vanack
Yep.
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Ross Dunn
Yeah.
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Scott Vanack
Some other findings here. ChatGPT climbed to number seven among the US search destinations, making it one of the few meaningful movers. ChatGPT remains the leading AI tool in the US, reaching roughly a quarter to a third of desktop AI users. Google Gemini emerged as the clear number two, growing steadily throughout 2025 and overtaking DeepSeek and other tools including Claude Perplexity, Copilot do remain niche with no breakout adoption yet.
- [12:03]
Ross Dunn
Yeah, I think ChatGPT has just become kind of like I've said this before, it's like the Kleenex of tissue paper of AI you that they just Everyone says I'm going to chat GBT something which sounds dumb as hell but anyway it's just a common sense. It just doesn't sound right. But it's not like Google something that sounds a little more it sounded ridiculous I guess when it started to. But anyway I am seeing more and more people, but unfortunately it's probably more the savvier people who are really digging in using Claude. In fact, I've read an article today or skimmed an article. I'm not a guy who dropped ChatGPT entirely and perplexity and Copilot and Gemini and is just focused on Claude because he's found the results so much better. Now in his case he's using it for coding as well as other things, but he's finding it far more, far deeper and far more nuanced. And I 100% agree. It's what I use 99% of the time. I use a paid version of course, and it's costing me about 100amonth for whatever it is that I've got going. But it doesn't have to be that much, just be 20 bucks I think for the basic one anyway, I highly recommend it. If you haven't used Claude, it's from Anthropic and it's excellent. All right. AI overviews. Not a click through rate battle, a visibility battle. This is an article I wrote on seodone.com that's s e O-U-N-N.com and I, I wrote it because I started to see people just. And actually I saw it on Reddit talking about, well, how can I, like I'm in AI, I'm showing up, what can I do to make it so that people are more likely to click on me? And then, you know, should I, should I just have more, what do they bury the lead kind of thing? So they have to click and go to my site and, and it. Just thinking about how they're thinking about it made me exhausted. Never mind doing what they're trying to do. Don't bother. Just go for the visibility. If you've got great visibility in that one, great. You know, you're, you've, you've shown up, you've done a great job, you've got great content, you built authority. Now move on to the next target. You know, build your exposure one topic at a time and just move on to the next one and then the next one and the next one. If you get to some ethereal point where you're finding you're really well saturated out there and you really want to work on click through rate and you know, fill your britches, I don't think you're going to have any luck unless you've got a team. Maybe if you got a team and you can, you have some spare time, you can start to really, really think through this and power to you. I mean, I think that would be great. However, very few of us get to the stage where we have that much brain power sitting idle. There's always other things we could be doing. Creating more content to bolster those topics that you already have and ensure that you don't lose that foothold that other people are also going for. Anyway, just don't get too focused on click through rate. It's something we've lost. It sucks, you know, we just aren't getting those clicks anymore. But if you get that visibility in AI, you are getting the next best thing and it will lead to business. It's a question of how and when and that all depends on your business, but it is very powerful. Check out the article. I've summed it up, I think. But there are some points in there that you might find interesting. And I had some good comments too from a few readers, so always grateful for that. And it's nice to have something to respond to. All right, let's take a quick break and we come back. We're going to talk about some crawling issues on Crawling Issues with Google. Welcome back to SEO 101 on WMR FM, hosted by myself, Ross Dunt, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing.
- [16:26]
Leo Laporte
Every week we cover the week's tech news on this Week in Tech with some of the smartest people in the business. This week, join me, Leo Laporte with Alex Stamos, Patrick Beja and Doc Rock as we talk about the final details of the TikTok sale and why I decided to delete the app as soon as I saw the terms of service, Microsoft gives up its BitLocker keys and more. Join us every week this Week in Tech. You'll find it at Twitter TV or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [16:54]
Asana AI Narrator
Working across teams is tough, but Asana helps you handle it. That's because Asana is where humans and AI coordinate work together. AI can spot roadblocks and assign work in a snap, so everything and everyone stays on track. That's how work gets handled. That's Asana. Visit us@asana.com that's asana.com.
- [17:25]
Ross Dunn
Quick Break One useful thing to share I thought TikTok was just dances. Turns out it's where I learned how to save money, fix stuff and get real tips. Short videos, real people download TikTok now. My company, Senior SEO Scott Fanack, Google 75% of crawling issues come from two common URL mistakes. Fill us in, Scott.
- [17:52]
Scott Vanack
Yeah, so Google discussed its 2025 year end report on crawling and indexing challenges. It shared, it shared or they shared they it, I don't know, shared the most common URL mistakes site owners make that can result in crawling issues. So the first two here are the biggest by far. The report said these are the biggest challenges that they're facing. 50% come from faceted navigation and so that's common on e commerce sites when you have endless filters for size, color, price, whatever. And you can end up in these massive numbers of URL combinations. So that's like half of their crawling issues stem from that. 25% come from action parameters. So this is where a URL parameter triggers actions instead of meaningfully changing page content. Not gonna lie, I don't know that I fully understand that. I don't think I really see that much happening. But 25% of them, if you're doing stuff, it totally is. Yeah. If you're doing that, you know what that is. If you don't know what I just said? It's, it's probably not affecting your website. Let's be real, 10% come from irrelevant parameters. So this can include session IDs, when was the last time you saw a session ID? Session IDs, UTM tags, other tracking parameters. So if you are using tracking parameters, make sure you're doing that correctly. About 5% come from plugins and widgets that can sometimes generate problematic URLs and confuse crawlers. And 2% comes from other weird stuff. And if you're following along, that math doesn't quite add up. So I don't know where the other 3% is, but they didn't talk, they didn't talk about it. So. But all this basically reinforces the importance of, you know, a clean URL structure and correct usage of your canonical tags. If you're, you know, if you do that, you should be okay, but URL structures, it can kill your site for sure.
- [19:48]
Ross Dunn
So yeah, and this is all stuff that we have in our heads as SEOs, AI will have perhaps some of this and some of it might be outdated. So do keep in mind, if you're going to use AI for some of your analysis of your own website, be careful about that. I'm certainly nowhere near ready to trust it for that kind of tweaking that can literally shut down your website to search engines if it's done wrong. So yeah, we've got a few E commerce clients and we help them with this stuff on a regular basis. And yeah, I just cringe. I'm seeing so many people in my industry talk about how they're losing clients to AI and they're thinking, well, we're all thinking that it's just going to be a nightmare to fix when it comes back to us.
- [20:49]
Scott Vanack
Yeah. Do we have a boom coming for fixing AI screw ups like we might?
- [20:52]
Ross Dunn
Yeah, I really do believe it's coming. Whether or not people will just soldier on and just learn from their mistakes and keep using AI. I don't know. I guess they probably will like a good chunk will. And who knows, I guess the ones who are, who are succeeding will be the ones that either have done it perfectly from the start or have an SEO on their shoulder and helping them out, which we're here for. And we'd love to help you out if you're in that situation. Anyways, let's jump into the next bit here.
- [21:28]
Scott Vanack
I was just going to say, you did mention that, you know, AI can be outdated and I can't remember the context. What I was searching for. And I wish I took screenshots, but I think about that now, not when I did it. And AI had recommended the implementation of meta keyword tags for SEO purposes. Now, for those of you out there that don't know, we don't talk about meta keyword tags because they've been dead for. I was gonna say 10 years, but 20 years now, I don't even know, like forever for a very, very, very long time. It might be 20 years since they were actually helpful. So if AI is picking that up, they're pulling it from some erroneous blog. I don't know who knows where it came from, but don't trust everything right out of the box.
- [22:11]
Ross Dunn
So, yeah, yikes. All right, Google lists googlebot file limits for crawling. Google has made some updates to its help documents to help clarify some Googlebot crawl limits. These default limits are 15 megabyte for 15 megabytes for web pages, 64 megabytes for PDFs, and 2 megabytes for supported file types such as CSS and JavaScript. Once these limits are reached, Google stops the fetch and only sends the already downloaded part of the file for indexing consideration. That's pretty big. You need to know that if your site's bloated, if you've got all these issues and you can't figure out why your site's not indexed correctly, well, that's going to be why. These are some good limits that they're outlining for you. Now, this file size limit is applied to the uncompressed data. Now, when you wrote that, Scott, did it mention. So apply to the uncompressed data. So if it's compressed, it's smaller. But if it's uncompressed and it's 64 megs, that's the problem. Or if it's.
- [23:21]
Scott Vanack
It didn't specify beyond that. But my understanding is, you know, whatever your Google takes your file, the compressed version, they decompress it, check it out, and whatever that file size is after it's been decompressed is the size that you have to worry about. So, okay, if you're 18 megs and you compress it and it drops down to 13, don't think you've skirted this because when Google looks at the whole thing, it's back to 18 or whatever it is.
- [23:43]
Ross Dunn
Right.
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Scott Vanack
Okay, I should add to this 15 megs for an HTML file. Keep in mind this doesn't include things like imagery. And all the other individual files are all treated separately. So a 15 megabyte HTML page, how freaking big is that like that's going to be a big, big page and even like a 64 meg PDF. Like we do audits and our audits are on average around 100 pages and they're nowhere near 64 meg. So this is like hundreds and hundreds of pages long. But those files certainly do exist and if you have them and you need them.
- [24:19]
Ross Dunn
Yeah, 64 megs not hard to reach in a PDF. But for a web page it's if a PDF because a PDF would include the imagery as well. That's true.
- [24:29]
Scott Vanack
Back to that. Yeah. So if your basic HTML page is 15megs, you probably have other things you need to be looking at anyways if that's a determining factor. But important to know.
- [24:39]
Ross Dunn
It's a lot of bloated code. Probably. Maybe it's maybe front page.
- [24:44]
Scott Vanack
Front page. Wow. I, I don't miss those days.
- [24:49]
Ross Dunn
The code Bloat King was front page. It was the worst code. Oh my gosh. Oh dear. All right, well I'm glad things have improved in that regard anyway.
- [25:00]
Scott Vanack
Yeah, no kidding.
- [25:01]
Ross Dunn
All right. Google may be cracking down on self promotional best of listicles this is new research by Lily Ray suggesting that Google may be finally addressing this SEO tactic used by many websites. These self promotional best of listicles are rampant. In fact, I see it a lot for SEO. Podcast lists often like sites will say the best podcasts and they'll have them in there because I'm always looking to see where we're listed and yeah, we're often in there which is nice but we'll they they're always number one. It's just like oh come on. Yeah. Many software as a service brands were hit hard in January. These brands had relied heavily on review style content that ranked their own products as the number one best in the category. In many cases, organic visibility dropped 30 to 50% within weeks. Losses were not domain wide, but rather concentrated on blog guide and tutorial sections. Many of these articles were lightly refreshed to add 2026 without little evidence that they had meaningful updates. Those sections often contained dozens or even hundreds of self promotional listicles targeting best queries. Self promotional listicles say that fast were likely not the only factor impacting organic visibility. Many affected sites also showed signs of rapid content scaling. Hello AI automation and aggressive year based refreshes. Well, you know, it worked for a long time. It's Google's own fault but yeah, it's come to roost. They're getting a bit. Oh well, hopefully they can bounce back quickly enough. And it had to happen at some Point. There's so many of these things and it never looked at even when I've been tempted. I think back in the day when we did list, I could never put myself number one. It just felt wrong. It's like. Well, I don't know Anyway. Mueller file. All right, we have a Mueller file. It's been a while. We do. Tell us, what's this all about? Yeah.
- [27:21]
Scott Vanack
So John Mueller is calling Markdown for bots a stupid idea. He doesn't like it, by the way. So first of all, what is Markdown for bots? In a nutshell, this is essentially taking your website and sticking it all in a flat text file, just really stripping out any of the extras, just like a really basic text file, usually with a MD extension. So some developers are experimenting with bot specific markdown delivery as a way to reduce token usage for AI crawlers. So a developer posted to Reddit describing plans to serve raw markdown files to AI user agents instead of full HTML files. This can result in a 95% reduction in token usage per page, which should increase the site's ingestion capacity. I don't know if I'd use the word ingestion, but that's what they used. So John responded. Are you sure they can even recognize MD on a website? Is there anything other than a text file? Can they parse and follow links? What will happen to your site's internal linking header footer, sidebar navigation? It's one thing to give a markdown file manually. It seems very different to serve it a text file when they're looking for an HTML file. And then over at BlueSky, SEO consultant Jono Jano.
- [28:41]
Ross Dunn
Jono Alderson. Yeah, Jono Alderson. He was Yost's right hand guy.
- [28:45]
Scott Vanack
Oh, I didn't know that. Now I feel bad. I think I should know that. So he argued that flattening pages into a markdown strips out meaning and structure. John responded to that. Converting pages to markdown is such a stupid idea when you do. Did you know LLMs can read images? And then in all caps, he said, why not turn your whole site into an image? And you should do that. Could you imagine? We. You know, that brings back flashbacks to doing audits 15, 20 years ago, where sometimes that's what you would get. You would get a site that's like 10 pages and every page is just an image. That's all it is. Those are the best audits. Because everything was wrong.
- [29:22]
Ross Dunn
Yeah.
- [29:24]
Scott Vanack
But anyway, go to. Go ahead.
- [29:28]
Ross Dunn
I just love how outspoken John's gotten over the years.
- [29:32]
Scott Vanack
Yeah, no kidding. Eh?
- [29:35]
Ross Dunn
Comes with time. Seeing all the crap that he's had to see, I'm sure.
- [29:39]
Scott Vanack
Oh, he's seen it all.
- [29:40]
Ross Dunn
Yeah, for sure. Well, on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, and my company, Senior SEO Scott Vanack, thank you for joining us today. Remember, I am writing quite regularly on seodun.com that's S E O-U-N-N dot com. Check it out. I think you'll find there's some really good content on there. I'm trying to make it the best I possibly can, and it's. It's fun and it's useful. All right, have a great week and remember to tune into future episodes, which air every week on WMR fm.
- [30:14]
Scott Vanack
Thanks for listening, everybody.
- [30:33]
Asana AI Narrator
Working across teams is tough, but asana helps you handle it. That's because asana is where humans and AI coordinate work. Work together. AI can spot roadblocks and assign work in a snap. So everything and everyone stays on track. That's how work gets handled. That's asana. Visit us@asana.com that's a S a n a dot com from taco night in Tulum to sushi in Tokyo, make every bite rewarding with gold from Amex. Wherever you dine four times Membership rewards points. Points at restaurants worldwide are piling up. Learn more@americanexpress.com Explore Gold terms and points cap apply.