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- [00:02]
Scott Van Eck
Apro vecha los ahoros de Memorial Day in los y compra los vasicos parelo gar pormenos ahoro centadolares en la parria
- [00:08]
Commercial Announcer
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- [01:36]
Scott Van Eck
Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on WMR FM. This is episode number 529 and my name is Scott Van Eck. I'm the senior SEO at set forth Web Marketing. Ross is away today so it's the Scott show solo show for me. Hopefully you like me? We're going to find out I guess, aren't we? So we're just going to jump right in because I don't have anyone to banter with here. So here we go. Just a quick non SEO news thing which is a little bit SEO actually but so Google is testing some new bot authorization standards. So they're currently testing an advanced cryptographic protocol designed to be very to designed to verify bot traffic and make it easier to isolate unwanted crawlers. A web bot auth is an experimental protocol that is designed to verify if traffic is coming from the bots or services they claim to represent. Under this protocol, a bot would need to be more or would need more than just a label that says who or what it is. It would need to prove its identity in a way that a website can validate. This would ultimately provide site owners with a means of blocking bots who they cannot prove who they are. If your site is Being hit by unwanted bots. This may help pave the way for better blocking control or for future or disruptive bots. I am also curious how it might impact things like say, screaming frog. Because a screaming frog, you can set the bot if you choose to pretend to be Google or Bing or whatever. So I don't know if this will have an effect on that or not, but I guess we will find out if they do this. But at any rate, this is probably a good thing because I'm finding a lot of clients are getting some weird bot traffic, a lot of bandwidth issues related to this. So hopefully, you know, we can track it down and, and this will have a bit of an impact there. And now we are into SEO news. So Bing has reportedly hit a billion monthly users. And that sounds like a lot. And I, you know, would have thought though that they had reached a billion a long time ago, but I guess not. So during an earnings call earlier in May, Microsoft announced that Bing had hit a huge milestone of a billion monthly active users. When they were asked, does this include agents? Krishna Madhaven of Bing said, I can confirm no agents in these numbers, only humans. So I don't know. I love the idea of Bing growing. I decided to look at some market share figures here to see what this looks like. You know, Google's just been dominating for so long now. We need some more competition. I know, Ross, and I've said this a lot, but if Bing could really up their game, chip away at Google, it makes everybody's lives, well, more interesting at the very least. Possibly easier, possibly harder, but it would be nice to see this diversified a little bit. If we look at market share for search engine, regular search engines, back in April 2025, Google had about, about 90%, 89.65. And in April 2026 they've got 90.02. So Google's increased a tiny bit, but they're largely unchanged. Bing has gone from 3.89 to 5.13. So Bing's actually gained well over a percentage in the last year. I'm not sure exactly who they took that from. Maybe DuckDuckGo has slipped back a little bit, maybe Yahoo slipped back a little bit, but Bing is growing at least on a global scale. If we look specifically at the US we kind of see that as well. Google in April of 25 had 86.71% and they've actually dropped down to 85.16. So they've actually dropped about one and a half percent. Whereas Bing has increased in the US from seven and a half to 9.82%. So that's pretty significant over 2% growth in the last year. Cutting into Google there for sure. Yahoo, I believe is also dropped, which is probably where Bing picked that up from. And then just out of curiosity, I wanted to do a little bit of digging into AI chat bot market share. AI worldwide. ChatGPT has actually dropped significantly from about 84 down to 76%. Perplexity has dropped quite a bit from 12 to 7%. Gemini is probably the biggest winner right now in terms of growth, going from about 2% to about 9%. So that's pretty significant. Not surprising. Copilot has gone from 0.2% to 3.7%. So that's big growth there. And then Clot has also gone up significantly from 0.3 to 2.6. We're seeing kind of similar numbers in the US market share as well, but with Chat GPT dropping about 25% which is huge. And then Gemini has gone from 2% to about 13, copilot from 0.6 to 12%. So really, chat GPT has seen a big hit over the past year with a lot of these other competitors picking up steam. So. So that's cool. Oh, and some sad news in the SEO world. Ask.com is officially dead. Ask Cheese was actually founded 30 years ago, June 3, 1996. Not quite. They didn't quite make it 30 years. They were close. While they were founded in 96, they officially launched in 1997. It was created with a focus on conversational queries and in its early days it was serving more than a million queries a day, making it one of the biggest players in search in the 1990s. In February 20. Sorry. In February 2006, GS was fired and the site was rebranded as Ask Ask. Officially closed on May 1, 2026. It is kind of interesting though because they were really focused on conversational queries. They're kind of, you know, a precursor to what we're seeing today in, you know, all the AI stuff and AI overviews and ChatGPT and all of that. Really, I don't know, they were kind of ahead of their time, I guess, but didn't have the technology to pull it off like we can today with some of these LLMs. All right, next up here we've got a little lawsuit hitting Google's direction. They're being sued over false AI overview data. A Canadian and Juno award winning musician, Ashley MacIsaac. There's a name I haven't heard since the 90s I guess he's still around. He is suing Google for one and a half million dollars in damages connected to a false AI overview that called him a convicted sex offender. As a result of these accusations, he saw a recent concert canceled after organizers read the AI summary. The organizers have since, after learning of the error, apologized publicly. But Google has not. Google has not said anything. So we'll see what happens with this lawsuit because it's really quite interesting considering, you know, this is AI that's done this. And I don't know what Google's going to do to fix future issues because this is really going to set a precedent here. We've seen a lot of inaccurate AI overviews over the years. This is maybe one of the worst in terms of defamation. But curious to see where this lawsuit heads. All right, we've got a few updates over at AI Overviews and AI Mode. Lots of sources. If you check out the show notes, I've got three links here, some to Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable all contributing to this to my notes for this one. So Google's rolling out a few updates on how links appear within AI mode and within AI Overviews. So the changes includes six main areas here. One is subscription labels. So they're adding additions of subscription labels and inline links within responses. 1 When links from your new subscriptions appear, Google will now highlight those stating that people significantly were significantly likely to click on those links if they were already subscribing to that service. So, so that's pretty interesting. Topic suggestions. So at the end of many AI responses, users will now see links to articles on different aspects of a topic that they're searching for. So a kind of, you know, similar to section I guess. I'm not sure what this looks like. We haven't seen it live yet. But it does make me think of a lot of like Facebook Marketplace and things like that where they show listings that are related but not exactly what you're looking for. Discussions on and social media. Google's AI will now include previews of perspectives from public discussions in online forums, social media and other firsthand sources. Inline links are going to start to be used. Google will now start to show inline links directly within the AI responses. I have a feeling this should help increase click through rates because they're just a very natural place for these links to be. When there's just a little citation at the end of a paragraph I feel like it's not as obvious but if, if text within the content is being linked that should help get people to click, especially with this next item, a link hover. So if you're using Google on desktop, hovering over an inline link will also show a preview of the site in a little pop up. I'm assuming that shows the name of the site, page title, things like that. So, you know, that's pretty good because right now the way it is with a little citation, it's not very inviting to click on the citations the way they do it now. So maybe this will make it, you know, help webmasters see a little bit more click through rates here, get a little bit more traffic out of their AI overviews and AI mode appearances. And finally author names and sources are going to start showing up. They're already testing this apparently so that instead of just showing a link to LinkedIn or something, it'll say, for example, Ross Dunn from LinkedIn or Scott Van Eck from LinkedIn or wherever. So we're going to start to see a bit more authority being displayed and help give users that, you know, that citation that makes a bit more sense and helps the authors and content creators be recognized for their content. All right, well, I think we're going to take a quick break here and then when we get back we will touch on the impact of some AI search changes that we're seeing regarding structured markup. There's a search console bug that you should really know about. It's quite important and a weird recommendation provided by Google to me, a little personal experience I want to share. So we'll be back in a moment.
- [12:39]
Commercial Announcer
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- [13:11]
Scott Van Eck
Apro vecha los ahoros de Memorial Day in Los y compra los vasicos parelo gar pormenos ahoro centa dolares en la
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Commercial Announcer
parria que madores Charbroil Performance series.
- [13:40]
Scott Van Eck
Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping using self reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks. It doesn't just help buyers find a car they love, it helps schedule a test drive, get pre approved for financing and estimate trade in value, Advanced, intuitive and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Okay hello and welcome back to SEO101 on WMR FM, hosted by Me Scalanak, Senior SEO of Stepforth Web Marketing. Remember, we do have a Shownotes newsletter you can sign up for@seo101radio.com don't miss a single link and refresh your memory of a past show at any time. In addition, I do invite listeners to connect with Ross on LinkedIn. You can find him@LinkedIn.com in Website Marketer before the break, we discussed some AI overview updates, Bing Market share and a new Google lawsuit. And now let's dive into some Google Search Console news, a study about the impact of structured markup, and a couple other interesting little tidbits here. So if you look at Search Console frequently and you're looking at impressions and click through rates and clicks and trying to analyze how your site's performing using that data. Well, I'm sorry but your data has been wrong for the past year. So it seems that there was some data within Google Search Console that has been inaccurate for quite some time. Google is now or not is they have resolved a 50 week long logging issue that occurred between May of 2025 and April of 2026. Google did state that a logging error prevented Search Console from accurately reporting impressions from May 13, 2025 until April 27, 2026. The issue has been resolved. As a result, you may notice a decrease in impressions in the Search Console performance report. Only impressions and related metrics click through rate and average position were affected. Clicks were not affected by the error and this issue affected data logging only. So your traffic to your site is what it is. Obviously none of that was affected. It's only the impressions and click through rate and position data that is incorrect during that time span. Google has fixed it. So moving forward, anything past May, Sorry, anything past April 27, 2026 should be accurate. But they are not going back and retroactively correcting the data. So you know if you're doing year over year comparisons and things like that, it will be wrong and unfortunately there's nothing you can do about it. Instead maybe reference other data like directly from Google Analytics or other tracking software that you might be using raw log files. Whatever it may be not ideal, but that is what it is. All right, up next here we've got a study from Ahrefs that discussed how adding schema did not improve AI citations. So Ahrefs recently did this study on the effects of JSON ld, structured markup and being cited in AI. Initially, AI cited pages were nearly three times more likely to have JSON LD than non cited pages. So you think that, yeah, obviously it makes a big difference. It's significant. But the researchers were not satisfied considering that this simply could have been a correlation and not the root cause for the citations. So they wanted to get a better answer for the question, if I add schema to my page, will I get cited more by AI? So they ran a study designed to isolate the effect of adding schema. They tracked 1,885 pages that added JSON LD between August of 2025 and March of 2026 and matched them against 4,000 control pages. Measurements were taken across Google's AI overviews, AI mode and ChatGPT. In short, they found that adding schema did not boost citations on any AI platform that they tested. They found that the effects on campaigns ranged from a decrease of 4.6% to as much as an increase of 2.4%. So pretty trivial figures there. Although 4.6 is somewhat significant, but given the sample size, it, you know, it's not as significant as it may sound. So this does not mean so. So effectively what their small study showed in a nutshell is that schema structured markup does not help with achieving citations in AI mode, Google, AI overviews or Chat GPT. So this does not mean you should not use structured markup. So don't go out there and start deleting all your markup and say, hey, this study says that it doesn't help. Structured markup can still help with regular organic search, which is, you know, the big ticket right now still will be for a long time. Well, hopefully, but maybe it won't be for a long time. It is now anyways, so that can be impacted. And there are other LLMs out there, don't forget. There is, you know, perplexity in the others, even though we just talked about there, their market share declining. They exist. Gemini is going up, Copilot's going up. Others are increasing and changing and new ones are coming out there. So some of them are still going to be likely using structured markup. There is no harm in having it on your site. And there are possible benefits and possible future benefits. I mean, AI mode could start using it like crazy in the near future. I mean, look at how often Google changes things regularly. I mean, they're constantly changing algorithms and changing how everything works. So this may not be forever. But as of right now, it's kind of having an impact there. Or sorry, it's not having an impact there. So if you do continue to. So first of all, continue to utilize structured markup. But do not expect, at least right now, that by adding it, if you didn't already have it, that you'll see incredible AI results in Google, AI overviews, AI mode and ChatGPT. Those will likely be unaffected by your structured markup. So keep that in mind. Don't expect some magic from it, but your future will vary, I suppose. Okay, FAQ here's, here's some more changes which are somewhat connected to structured markup. Again, Google is no longer supporting FAQ rich results. So what are FAQ rich results? Let's just go over that really quick here. When your site appears in search, sometimes you would see frequently asked questions from your website as part of your organic listing. Typically there'd be the title, your page description that Google's deciding to show, whether that be from your meta description or if they're crafting it from somewhere else. And then sometimes below that you will see FAQs and there'll be any number of them, usually three or four or five, something like that. Well, as of May 7th, Google stopped showing these FAQs. Google is also no longer reporting on FAQ. Well, actually they are still reporting it. They're going to stop it soon. Google will stop reporting on FAQ structured data within Google Search console. I believe I don't have the date in front of me, but I believe that's slated to be removed in around June. So you will see that historic data, but it will be gone shortly. So should you remove your FAQ page structured markup or we're just back to should we remove the schema or not? I suggest leaving it in place and even continuing to add it. If you're adding new FAQs and that sort of thing, other search engines and some LLMs can still use it for their own purposes. Leaving the code in place will not be harmful and it may still help with regular organic listings, getting pages indexed, getting content found, that sort of thing. So I would leave it, but don't expect it to help you get those FAQ rich results because those rich results don't exist anymore. And also just utilizing FAQ content on your site is still very helpful for organic and AI search results. So don't mix that up. You know, don't think I'll just stop doing FAQs on my site now because the structured markup for it isn't applied and there's no rich results. That's not the case, so keep that in mind. And finally I, I saw some bad advice from Google. I was recently adding a merchant badge to a client's website within Google support. I found a kind of a surprising reference in their example code that Google gives you. They included in the HTML example the meta keyword tag. And I haven't seen the meta keyword tagged on any official sites like this in a long time. And this is right in their code example of how to implement the badge. Implementing the badge, you had a chunk of JavaScript code to your head section of your page and they show a sample HTML page with that code there. But it also includes, you know, the title tag, the meta description, and the meta keyword tag. At first I figured this is probably just some old content. They've had it there forever and nobody ever thought to remove it or update the example. I took a look@archive.org we found that the page was actually created only about two years ago. The meta keyword tag's been dead for, I don't even know, maybe 15 years. A long time. It's been dead for a long time. So my worry with this though is I was curious, or I am curious, how many people may have stumbled onto this code. Adding this merchant badge saw in the HTML example that hey, there's a meta keyword tag and thought, I guess I should add that. It must be helpful. Don't add it, please. If you do stumble upon this. If you see anybody ever recommend adding the meta keyword tag to your site, it does nothing. Don't do it. It's a waste of time. In extreme examples, you could possibly get penalized, like if you had a whole bunch of spam in there. But even that, honestly, I think Google's just going to ignore it anyways. But you know, it's not going to do any good. As far as I know anywhere, I don't think there's a single search engine or a single AI tool that uses it. A long time ago I remember seeing a client came to us and they used the meta keyword tag, but. But it wasn't for organic search. It was for their own internal proprietary search functionality that was built into their website. And I haven't seen that in a long time, but I suppose it might still exist, but that might be it. But it's not going to help you attract new visitors to your site. It's not going to help you. So anyways, if you see code like that, always, you know, fact check. Take a look. If you see a random piece of code, even if it's from Google in this case and they're recommending adding a certain tag to a page for whatever reason, maybe double check and make sure it's accurate if you're thinking about adding it. Anyways, that is it for today. Thank you very much for listening on behalf of myself, Scott Van Ek, Senior SEO at Stepforth Web Marketing. You know, very grateful to have you guys listening to our podcast. Please remember to subscribe if you haven't already. Don't forget about our Show Notes newsletter. You can sign up for it@seo101radio.com and if you have any questions you would like to share with Ross or myself, please please please feel free to post them to our Facebook group. It hasn't been super active lately with users or with us and I know we need to change that. But if you guys start listening, you start posting on Facebook, we will follow suit and really become active in there. But definitely if you do post any questions there, we do look, we do check and I will address those questions in a future episode. I love answering questions. Answering questions is fantastic for the show because you get information that you want to know the answer to and it's actually kind of easy for us. It makes our job easier. It makes the show more useful to you and to other listeners. So also if you do enjoy it, we would really appreciate any feedback on Apple Podcast Stitcher, any of your favorite podcast streams. We do look at those and take them to heart. So you know, please leave those reviews. Have a great week and remember to tune into future episodes which air every week or every two weeks on WMR fm. Thank you for listening everybody. You think a ticket for not wearing your seatbelt is the worst that could happen until you crash? Click it or ticket paid for by NHTSA. Tired of overpaying with DirecTV? Dish offers a reliable low price every month without surprises. 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