Ross Dunn (2:46)

the U.S. so the average advertisers, if it was all one, of course, would be spending about $167,000. That's not bad.

Scott Fenach (3:02)

So it. So it's at about 20, 20 grand a week, you know, and for a big company, for a big, big company, that's not crazy money.

Ross Dunn (3:11)

That's testing material. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure there's some bigwigs in there spending a lot more than that, but that's sort of the average anyway. Interesting. All right, well, let's jump into the SEO News. The Google March 2026 core update, it's supposed to take three weeks, began on March 27. This is a global update that will impact all regions in all languages. This is the first big core update of 2026. The last core update was in December. These updates aren't penalties, so just keep that in mind. They're largely designed to reward great content, or at least that's what they like to say. As always, if you're hit by this update, it may take some time to take, you know, to bounce back and you need to take a deep look at your current content to see if your quality needs a boost. But as we've said many, many, many times, just like, don't react too quickly. These updates tend to cause a lot of ups and downs and you may end up better off than you were before after being quite in a worse position throughout the actual update. So just be really, really, really careful. If you know you're following many of the guidelines, you're probably fine. Just, yeah, stick to your guns. If you feel like you've been doing a good job. If you're really concerned, start tackling the stuff that's the most obvious issue, content with issue, and then you're safe generally. All right, now there's also a spam update. Tell us more about this.

Scott Fenach (4:55)

Yeah, so spam update. We would have talked about it in the last episode, except we didn't have the last episode because I was away. So this happened on our recording day on March 24th. The spam update completed the very next day. It was very quick, which is surprising. It doesn't usually roll out that fast, any of these updates. It applies to all languages and locations. Last spam update was back in August. So there's no word right now specifically on what types of spam were targeted by this update. I did a bit of digging. I couldn't find any specific details, but. But if you found your site's rankings crashed around March 24. If you are spamming, well, yeah, I guess that's what you get. I don't know. But if you're not spamming and you got hit, do a bit of digging. Make sure your site wasn't hacked. Make sure there's nothing crazy going on that you don't know about. I've definitely seen that happen where sites crash due to spam and they don't know why. And then when you start digging, you find sometimes hundreds or thousands of pages that are not supposed to be there from hackers. So, you know, do a bit of an audit of your site if you've been hit and you're not knowingly doing any, you know, bad stuff and. Yeah, but for the most part, anybody out there that's listening, because I know everyone that listens to us is following the book. If anything, you should only be helped by this. It shouldn't. This update should not hurt you. If you're playing by the rules, so should you not.

Ross Dunn (6:21)

Yeah, well, fingers crossed. AI search engines, site Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn, most. This is a study based on a new analysis of 30 million sources by Peak AI, an AI search analytics tool. According to the report, Reddit is the most cited source across ChatGPT, Google, AI mode, Gemini, perplexity and AI overviews, whereas YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia and Forbes round up the top five. Forbes. Interesting. I gotta say, I'm not. I haven't been really pleased with the results from Reddit. I'm more and more I'm just giving up on it anytime I see it. If I'm really digging into a product, maybe I'll look at it, but I think the more nefarious marketers have already gotten in there and done their job to make it less qualitative, you know, lower the quality.

Scott Fenach (7:23)

It's true, isn't it?

Ross Dunn (7:24)

Yeah, big shock. I know, right? Anyway, the reason for sharing this is it helps illustrate the importance of also being listed and growing authority beyond your own website. Appearing on other trusted platforms can help you to appear in AI. And there's no question at all that as annoying as expletive hell, Reddit is to try to write for it is worthwhile if you, if your market's there. I freaking hate it. Yeah, it's the most annoying platform in the world to try and write on. Just egos everywhere blocking people from writing great stuff. And the only way to write on something like, for example, I mean, I might jump on my pulpit here if I wanted to write for the SEO section despite having plenty of experience and genuinely wanting to help, which whenever I've jumped in there, I have. It doesn't get shown because I don't have a copy Karma score. That's high enough. The only way to get a karma score, which I was like, okay, fine, fine, fine. Is to write in other places that frankly, I don't have any interest in. Yeah, and I. Maybe I'm too old for that. I don't know. It just seems dumb as bricks to make me write in areas I just don't. I don't have any interest in and try to build up a karma score. Essentially I have to fake it to make it to finally start writing in the SEO area where I deserve to be. It makes no sense.

Scott Fenach (9:06)

You don't want to publish a bunch of stuff on Pokemon and women's shoes first and then.

Ross Dunn (9:10)

No.

Scott Fenach (9:11)

Build up your authority. No. Okay, just check.

Ross Dunn (9:13)

No. I even went out there and posted some pictures of photos I'd done that were legitimate photos I'd taken. All I got was a bunch of haters saying, oh, those must be AI. There's no way he took that photo. Like, just give me a break. Enough.

Scott Fenach (9:27)

Reddit is toxic, to say the least.

Ross Dunn (9:29)

It is. Can be, yeah. Anyway, it's sad, but I kind of hope it takes a dive. In some respects, I don't see it getting any better, especially with all the incentive that it's showing people. There's going to be enough people getting in there trying to take advantage of it that it's going to start going downhill. All right, what's next here?

Scott Fenach (9:55)

Yes, we have a new. Just a quick little story here. New feature on Chat GPT, they have enabled location sharing for more precise local responses. Which is kind of funny because I'm like, don't they already do this? Because when I. When I use it, it'll often reference the city that I'm in. So obviously it's getting that data anyways through probably the IP or something, but I guess this is for more precise data. Supposedly you can enable or disable it by going into settings controls, and you can just turn on location sharing with it turned on. This means that your precise location can be used to provide more tailored results. So, for example, what are the best coffee shops near me and Glenn? Gabe actually posted an example, so this may not appear as expected. He posted on X that he asked for the best steakhouses near me and several of them were 45 minutes away, so that's not too helpful. Right. So I tried it as well, and I tried it. With it turned off, I Just said, I think I said best pizza places near me. And we don't really have a lot of steakhouses where I live, so best pizza places near me with it turned off gave reasonably good results. Like probably what I would say is the best pizza in town came up first. And then it showed, like, sorry, Domino's. It showed Domino's second, like, is that really the best? Like, come on. I don't like Domino's anyways. That's. It's subjective. Sure. And it gave a couple other crappy chains and then some of the really good local places and the order didn't really seem prioritized in any way. So then I turned location sharing on, did the search again and I got completely different results. So actually I think I just said all that backwards. The bad, the bad results showed up when I had personalized or location sharing turned on. The better results showed when it was turned off. So when I had it turned off, I had all the good chains at the top. When I had it turned on, it put the bad stuff at top. At the top. So it's flawed. It's definitely flawed.

Ross Dunn (11:46)

Maybe you're just closer to the bad stuff.

Scott Fenach (11:50)

You know, the best one is within walking distance. So I would agree with you. Maybe. But in this case, no, that's not. No, it isn't. So I wish that were it because you could explain it then.

Ross Dunn (12:00)

It's funny, the timing. Cause I think yesterday I went on to ChatGPT to use it and it came up with a pop up saying, please enable or will you give me kind of like precise location control? Like, no, why would I? Hell no. And it was on my desktop too. It wasn't even on my phone. Yeah, I know if it's on my phone I might, but not on my desktop. It makes no sense. But I see now why it was doing it. Now I know there was. I figured it was something I missed before, but it was, I guess, just enabled.

Scott Fenach (12:35)

Yeah, this just rolled out. I don't have the date handy, but I think it's just in the past couple days. So this is brand new. What I like though about some of these OpenAI updates is that they show up in Canada. We don't have to wait a year like with Google. And all their changes are usually US specific, but this is, this is here now, so that's kind of cool.

Ross Dunn (12:55)

Cool. All right, why don't you take this next one because I think we'll take a quick break after and I'll do the Google zero, so.

Scott Fenach (13:05)

Yeah, that sounds great. So this is I wasn't sure if it's going to include this or not, but it can have negative SEO implications so I figured I better so on March 26th, search engine land published an article and it was subsequently removed from search results the next day. So what had happened is somebody filed a false copyright complaint and Google acted right away and took the article down. Now Google says that their policy is to remove content upon receiving a valid complaint and then the option is for publishers to file a counter notice. So that's not good. Their their content ended up being removed globally and in the complaint it stated that there was the content was copied word for word and included copyrighted images, despite the article not having any images in it at all and it was not a direct copy in any way of the claimed material. So the worry here is that how easy would it be for somebody to just file false claims on all their competition and have their competition booted, at least temporarily while they try to figure out how to get it back. So but in this case with Search Engine Land, their article was down for about four days. On March 31 the articles were back in Google search, so it was recovered quite quickly, which is nice. But it is scary how easily somebody can have an impact on your results like that.

Ross Dunn (14:30)

Yeah, hopefully the article is still relevant. It wasn't too outdated. Maybe it was news. I wouldn't be so good.

Scott Fenach (14:37)

Yeah, yeah, no kidding.

Ross Dunn (14:38)

All right, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about how Google Zero is missing the real problem. Welcome.

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Ross Dunn (15:55)

Welcome back to SEO101 on WMR FM hosted by myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing, and my company, Senior SEO Scott Fenach. All right, so Will Scott published on Search Engine Land, an article says Google 0 misses the real problem. Your next visitor isn't human. So I tried to sum this up. There's a lot of good content in here, a great article, lots of good stats. So this would be a little stat heavy, but it is important and interesting stuff. When it comes down to the main takeaway is the real problem for web publishers isn't that Google traffic is fail is falling. It's that AI agents are already doing research and making buying decisions for humans without showing up as visits at all, which makes standard traffic reports dangerously misleading. So let's get into some of the stats here. More than half. This is crazy. Of all Web traffic now, that's 51% is now automated and not human. This happened for the first time in a decade. When I saw that, I thought decade, I guess. I don't know. I didn't want to dig deeper into that, but that was interesting. That was from an A report from the 2025 Imperva Bad Bot report. They're bad enough to get their own report. All right, well, Automated traffic grew 23.5% year over year in 2025, about eight times faster than human traffic, which rose just 3.1%. This is according to the Human Security State of AI Traffic Report. And check that out. Actually, it's quite significant. Human spelt does it sound. Security is quite the site. It talks all about AI and traffic and bots and good and the bad and ugly. And quite interesting. AI crawlers now make up 51.69% of all crawler traffic, ahead of regular search engine crawlers at 34%. That's according to Cloudflare. AI bot crawling grew more than 15 times in a single year, hitting around 50 billion requests per day by late 2025. And this is really important. Google Analytics 4 and most analytics platforms cannot distinguish between a human visit, a bot crawl and an AI agent evaluating the site on a human's behalf. Now, I'm going to put an asterisk around cannot. I believe it's just simply not done. I think Google simply decided to eliminate bot traffic from reporting, which makes good sense up till now. I think it needs to be clearer and it should show and hopefully that will happen within this year.

Scott Fenach (18:42)

There should be a separate report within analytics. There always should have been where you can separate all the different bots.

Ross Dunn (18:47)

Yeah, yeah. And. And it's just so Logical. I wouldn't be surprised if it lands next week. Something that just says, hey, this is your AI traffic, this is. Or simply bot traffic at this point until they can really hone it down and then you can see what's going on because it's vital information. But AI's been a bit. I'm sorry, Google's been a bit mum about anything that helps us with AI. It's frustrating anyway. Why does this matter? Well, the fact is AI bots take a lot and give back very little. Cloudflare data shows how one sided this is. Anthropic's Claudebot reads 23. Well, let's say 24,000 pages for every one visitor it sends back.

Scott Fenach (19:34)

Wow.

Ross Dunn (19:35)

OpenAI's bot reads 1276 pages for every visitor it sends back. Whereas what we're used to is incredible. Like Google's traditional crawler has always worked in that it reads your site and sends you visitors in return at a rate of about 831 times higher than AI systems. Now that is changing right now with AI overviews and such, it's definitely a lot lower than it used to be. However, it was still infinitely better. Whereas AI bots and all these agents are taking and not giving much back, they're also starting to make more decisions for humans. Gartner, the polling company, the survey company, predicted in 2024 that regular search traffic would drop 25% by 2026 as AI agents take over queries. That forecast is on track by 2028. And I do believe this, Gartner says 90% of B2B purchases will involve an AI agent moving over 15 trillion through AI driven channels. Now does that mean that that's the end purchase? No. 100%. No, I do not believe even by 2028 will that happen. I believe it will be a fundamental part of a person's decision making process though. This is pretty interesting. During Cyber Week 2025, AI agents influenced 20% of all global orders. That was 67 billion in sales according to Salesforce now, businesses using AI agents group sales 13% versus 2% for those without. Huh, 13 versus 2%. Yeah, I think everyone's going to have agents pretty soon. That's crazy, man. Now, most importantly, when an AI agent checks out your website on someone's behalf, even if it does show up in analytics, it may show up as a 0 second bot visit or not at all. So let's just say a quick visit to your site if it shows up. Otherwise it just doesn't show up. I mean I felt I had to reinforce that it's so important. So how to optimize for this? We've all this is nothing new. We talked about this in the past, but it's always good to have it cemented. Structured data is no longer optional. Schema markup and all that entails is very important. It's not everything, but it's very important. Stale content is a huge liability. Will Scott made a good example there. You should read the article, but he mentioned that, you know, if your content is cited over a competitor's and your content is stale, it's going to look pretty bad to you if you're saying something that's outdated or wrong. Conversely, if AI looks at all the competitors and looks at yours and trying to figure out who to source, they're not going to use you. If, if they're not, you know, fooled, they're not going to use you because your content is stale. So keeping your content, your cornerstone, content, updated regularly is vital. Also, write content using AI best practices. And we've talked about this many times in the past. We're going to talk about it more, by all means. We're going to be saying it a lot. But just an example would be that chunking, you know, when you're writing content and you're breaking it down into headings, it's important that these headings clearly signal the underlying content and then that the next heading does the same thing and the next heading. And one of the things I learned recently is that you don't want to refer to information in a previous heading that's quite far removed because AI typically breaks down that content into chunks and it doesn't actually connect it all into one article necessarily. These are always, it depends. But it could find that you're sourcing something from an earlier chunk and let's call it a heading and a section, let's call it a section of your article instead of a chunk to make it a little easier. If you're referring to content three sections ago, AI may not connect the dots and it won't make sense and it won't do a good job of indexing it or at least surfacing it. You get into detail when you get into this stuff, but it's very important. Finally, don't block AI crawlers unless you give it great consideration of what you're going to lose if you do. I feel for publishers, I really do. But I do believe that it's becoming the only game in town. So be really, really careful. Okay? Next up, Google explains how crawling works in 2026. What's this all about?

Scott Fenach (24:51)

Yeah, so we've actually spoke about this not too long ago. They gave a bit more information and this is like perfect 101 stuff. And this expands on what Google had said a few weeks, or maybe it was a couple months ago. Now I've lost track of time and I just wanted to reiterate some of this to hopefully be helpful. So it's important to know how googlebot crawls your site in terms of their limitations. When they Fetch any specific URL, excluding PDFs, they only fetch the first 2 megabytes of data. Anything beyond 2 megabytes is completely ignored. And Google never sees it. Googlebot doesn't see it. So if you have a page that is very HTML heavy, you have content at the bottom of that page that may not be visible at all. So that's really important to know. If you've got, you know, long form content, take a look and see how large that HTML page is. Now, it does not include video, it does not include images. So if you're, when you're looking at this, you're only looking at the code, you're not looking at the extras. If you have external files like CSS and JavaScript, that's great because if the CSS code or the JavaScript code is on your page, it will be included in that 2 megabyte data threshold. If it's an external file that you're referencing, that's great because it doesn't impact that limit, so it reduces the URL file size. If I said that clearly, I feel like I didn't. So keep all your external files external. Make sure your HTML is lean, especially if URL sizes are, are large. If your URL sizes are large currently, you'll really work on thinning that out, getting rid of redundant code. Even things like comments, if you've got a lot of comments, can add to that size. If you're really trying to pare it down, get rid of comments if you can. And Again, CSS and JavaScript should be on external files. And finally, place any critical data higher up in the HTML to make sure that it is seen. When we used to do audits, one of the lines in our audits was first tech or sorry, yeah, first text is relevant to your target phrase kind of thing. And, and, and that's not really as important as it used to be, but it kind of is in this case if you've got a page that is huge. So make sure you know your structured markup is close to the top in the source because it can really be anywhere on the page. But put it in your head section, you know, Google will see it, things like that. So something to watch out for. Make sure if you're having trouble getting really big pages indexed, there's a good

Ross Dunn (27:21)

chance that this is why so interesting. Okay. Google's Ask Maps is fully available in US and India. This is as of today, April 1st. So I'm going to take this with a grain of salt, although it doesn't seem like a very funny joke, but you never know. We have spoken briefly about this, but it's a new feature being rolled out by Google. It leverages Gemini to help users reach local businesses, plan trips trips and get recommendations. Again, I'm just waiting for the the mistakes to happen that are just awesome. But I haven't seen anything yet. Not that I've got my finger in the pulse of news, but I haven't seen anything yet. There's got to be some pretty big mistakes though that's going to happen here that are going to be pretty funny and hopefully not tragic.

Scott Fenach (28:11)

We'll have a show about it someday probably.

Ross Dunn (28:13)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Google is testing a huge block of citations at the bottom of AI overviews Sachin Patel on X posted about large link cards at the bottom of the AI summary. Citations are listed in a giant blue card broken up into table format displaying thumbnails of no apparent value, the site name, favicon, description and title. Barry calls the change ugly and suggests that this may be a bug. He does not suspect this test will get rolled out, but keep a lookout for it. I hope I do see that.

Scott Fenach (28:53)

Yeah, I tried to replicate it and I couldn't. But I did see in the screenshots in the article that the cards are normally kind of in a blue box off to the to the right of the AI overview and now this is at the bottom and it could be a bug. I guess we're gonna find out but I don't know why they would move it. But I'm curious to see what the what impact that would have on clicks and I don't know, I feel like it would hurt them if anything, having it below the content as opposed to being right there.

Ross Dunn (29:17)

But we'll see. Yeah, we will see. One thing I wanted to add is that as a separate note in the show, we have just partnered up with a white label agency that's helping us with clients who have reviews on their local business profiles. And this is Google, so they've got a review on there that they don't like that is clearly unfair, is harming their reputation and simply needs to go. They may have already tried to have it removed, whatever, and they just hit fallen on deaf ears. Well, never done this before. It's kind of exciting actually. Our partner is guaranteeing that and they have about a 90 success rate. They can remove these and we're able to provide it with a money back guarantee. Well, the most you spend is 100 bucks. So anyway, anyone out there listening who has some reviews out there that are just infuriating them, that's in their local business profile and they want them removed, let me know. You can reach me at rosstepforth.com that's S T-E-P-F-O-T-H.com and let's chat and see if I can help you out. You know, by no means are we doing anything here that's against Google's guidelines. This is fully on the up and up and you know, if it's unfair and it's, it shouldn't be there. Let's get it off. And we finally have an opportunity and a, a means to do that, which I'm happy to say. Anyway, just something I wanted to add there because I think it's going to be really helpful for the business owner. Well, on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing, and my company, Senior SEO Scott Van Eck, thank you for joining us today. If you have any questions you'd like to share with us, please feel free to post them on our Facebook group, easily found by searching SEO101podcast on Facebook. Have a great week and remember to tune into future episodes which air every week on WMR fm.

Scott Fenach (31:28)

And thanks for listening, everybody.

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