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Foreign. Welcome to SEO 101 on WMR FM. This is episode number 531. My name is Scovanak and I'm the Senior SEO at Step 4th Web Marketing. Ross is busy being away. He is camping and fishing and out having fun and I'm having fun recording SEO 101 and doing all the daily grind work. So here we go. We'll dive in. We've got a few non SEO news items that are bit interesting and relevant so we'll dive into those and we've got some more news and all kinds of stuff today so let's see what happens. First up, Google is now can Sorry, Google can now be directly liable for false AI overview claims according to a German court A German court has ruled that Google can be found directly liable for false claims and AI overviews. The court issued a temporary injunction barring Google from repeating false claims about two Munich publishers. AI overviews had wrongly connected the two publishers to scams, subscription traps, and questionable best practices, all of which were false. The court found that AI generated summaries are Google's own content and are not protected as traditional search results are. The ruling doesn't treat AI overviews like neutral search links. If an AI generated summary makes false claims about a company, Google may be directly liable for those statements. This ruling gives publishers and brands a path to challenge false AI overviews as Google's own statements rather than merely search results. Last month we reported a Canadian and Juno Award winning musician Ashley MacIsaac is currently suing Google for $1.5 million in damages connected to a false AI overview that called him a convicted sex offender. So really, you know, Google needs to take a good look at AI overviews and make some necessary adjustments or I think we'll be seeing a lot more lawsuits pop up as precedent to set. You know, I've seen so many false AI overviews. Ross and I have talked a lot about this in the past and there's just so much wrong with them. If you ever, ever are doing a search for anything, don't rely 100% on an AI overview unless it's, you know, unimportant. Doesn't really matter. Anything that's critical or matters, do a fact check on it because it's just not reliable right now. Not fully anyways. Okay, next up is a bit of a warning about some phishing attacks within Google Ads, and this is not that new. We've seen scammers try to attract victims through Google Ads before, but this is one I figured I'D mention. Dan Foland over on X noticed this phishing attempt on Google search and he posted it to X. The scam centers around attempting to steal your login credentials. In this instance, it was Google business profile users they were after. And it's not even just the login credentials. They're trying to get access to your computer. So I'll get into that in a sec. When a user in this case did a search. Sorry. When a user does a search term for my business, which is pretty common, people search for my business on Google in order to find the login page for Google my business. It's not that uncommon to do. But in this case, the first paid listing looked and appeared to be an official Google page. When Google's clicked the paid ad, they're then brought to a login screen that looks like an official Google login screen. So everyone thinks it's all legit and happy and good when they attempt to log in. A legit looking verification prompt comes up and this is where, you know, less experienced users may fall for it. Anyone, technical SEOs, anyone that's really computer savvy wouldn't do this, but some of you might. I don't know who's listening. So the verification prompt comes up and asks users to hit Win R which brings up the command prompt and then paste in the copied code which is automatically copied. If the user does this, the scammer now has complete access to your computer files, passwords, all while the user potentially you believes they are still on a Google owned legitimate website. So you really have to be careful here. Don't. If you're looking for login pages, don't click through Google Ads, maybe don't even use search results. Go to the official website that you're trying to log into, find the login link on that site and log in. That way, you know, bookmark your login pages, maybe use something like LastPass or some sort of password keeper. There are many out there. It's really ridiculous. You know, perhaps someday Google will get better at filtering out these scam ads. But I'm not holding my breath because they keep popping up and they get through Google filters. Generally they're not there for too long but you know, Google does catch them, but they're there so watch out. Just a little friendly PSA that this is happening. Next up in a bit of non SEO. But relevant news is Google has started testing healthcare ads within AI mode. So this is not a surprise. We kind of all expected that this would happen eventually that AI mode would start to get ads. In this case, this test is very limited. It's limited to healthcare advertisers advertising in English in the United States only. It is a very small test, but of course advertisers are watching this closely to see how it progresses. It is definitely just the early stages of finding ads within AI mode. No surprise, but they're starting to roll it out. So if you are an advertiser, you're advertising on within Google Ads, keep an eye out for this. If you're a healthcare provider or I don't have any more detail that says healthcare advertisers, I'm not sure if that's product services like perhaps chiropractors or acupuncturists or if it's product related. I'm not sure. There's no data on that just yet. But if you're in that space and you're doing paid ads, you may want to look into this or at least keep a close eye on it and get in early if you can if you're advertising, because it's only going to get more and more expensive. And we've got into a bit of SEO news here. The first one's kind Of Interesting is schema.org is now starting to show some statistics for how many people are using each markup. So if you look up various Chemas over@schema.org, you will now see the statistic. They're displaying some of the usage at the top of the page next to the schema name. They're currently just giving a range. So for example, if you visit schema.org localbusiness, it says usage is between 1 and 10 million domains as of May 2026. So in May, between 1 and 10 million people are using local business markup. Honestly, that feels really low to me. I would have expected it to be much higher than 10 million, but I guess not. They do get this data from Google, apparently, so I guess it's accurate. The data set will be updated monthly and aggregated at the domain level and presented in popularity range buckets. That's like the 1 to 10 million doing it at. This approach helps filter daily noise while highlighting meaningful adoption trends for researchers and toolmakers. Keep in mind you will not see multiple usage per domain. So if you're using local business markup, for instance, on five pages on your website, that would account for only one in the tally because it's all aggregated at the domain level. So good to know. This may also prove very useful for site owners and SEOs anyone deciding on whether or not to perhaps implement a specific markup. If you see one for example that's very popular, you may determine that you need to use this as well, because everybody's using it. Local business is a good example of that. If you have a local business, you should use it and everybody should use it. You won't really get an edge from using it because everyone's using it, but make sure you do. On the flip side of that, if you find a markup that really nobody's using, that could be a sign of an opportunity potentially. But it could also mean that it's just a very little value and that's why nobody's using it. So if you see a low value, a low usage for specific markup, I would not discount it entirely. If it's relevant to your content, you should still use it. But it can give you an indication of how popular something is, how effective it may be potentially. Just interesting little bits of information they're throwing at us there, which is great. Next up over from Search Engine roundtable, report from SparkToro and similar web was published about zero click searches. They released an ongoing Google zero click study. They've done this a few times before with updated statistics. The latest update shows that zero click searches from Google search continue to increase and appear to be declining at a faster rate. The report shows that 68% of Google searches ended without a click. When factoring in AI responses, that figure rises to only about 28% of clicks actually going to the open web. That's alarming. 28% is not very much. The study shows a simple graphic within it, so you should check out the study or check out the link at Search Engine Land. Again the links are in the show notes, so subscribe to those and you'll get them easy. In the graphic it shows what happens after a Google search. So after the initial Google search, about 32% of those results result in a click. Of that 32%, 6 goes to paid ads, 27% goes to a Google property, say YouTube for example, or further into Google like Google Images or News, that sort of thing. But they stay within the Google environment. And then 66% of that goes to the open web. The other 68% of all searches result in either users bouncing from Google or and doing nothing or performing another search. When you break it all down, it results to about 27% or 276 out of every 1,000 Google searches that actually goes to the open web. Very small figure. Kind of terrifying. Used to be A lot higher. But it does make a lot of sense if you find yourself ranking well for search terms that have, you know, specific volume and you're just not getting much traffic for it. This is a big part of that. You're just, nobody's clicking on it anymore. Terrible, terrible. Anyways, we are going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll touch on the growth of Claude, some tracking parameters and rejected review responses. So stick around. We'll be right back. Welcome back to SEO 101 on WMR FM today, hosted by myself, Scott Vanack, Senior SEO of Stepforth Web Marketing. Remember, we do have a show notes 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, you can connect with him via LinkedIn.com in website marketer. Before the break we were discussing schema, some scams and Google Ads. Zero click searches. And now we're going to dive into a bit more Google. Well, not necessarily Google, but a bit more SEO news. So Claude, some new data suggests, is the fastest growing AI traffic source. According to a new SE ranking data. Claude is one of the smallest sources My writing is not good here. Claude is one of the smallest sources of traffic among AI platforms delivering referral traffic, but it is growing rapidly. This year alone, referral traffic from Claude has grown by almost four times in April when compared to January. This makes it the fastest growing among all AI platforms, but that is still a very small fraction of total site traffic. Claude is positioned to continue growing and will grow, but it's not much now. And to give you a bit of an example of how small it currently is, as of April, AI platforms accounted for only about 0.33% of all site traffic. So very, very small. ChatGPT represented about 78% of that traffic. So still the dominant force and will be for a while. But it is, it is shrinking. Per Perplexity was a close. Close was the second place at 9.3%. So not close, but second. Followed by Gemini at 6.8, co pilot at 3.5%. And Claude was at the back of the pack at 1.4%. So that's 1.4% of the 0.33%. Very small. You will not likely see a lot of traffic from Claude unless you're a very large website that gets a lot of traffic, but it's growing. I mean less than a Year ago they had half of that market share. So it's doubled. More than doubled, sorry. No, it was four times compared to January. Looking at the wrong stat here. Sorry about that. So it's growing very rapidly. Do not worry, you will start getting traffic from cloud eventually, I guess. Next up we have a bit. This is a bit long and it can be a bit technical, but I've really simplified it. It's about tracking parameters and why tracking parameters in internal links may hurt your SEO. So over at Search Engine Land, Simone DePalma wrote a really good post about tracking parameters in internal URLs in internal links and how they can hurt your SEO. His post is very extensive. It's definitely worth a read. And if you really want to get into this, please go to Search Engine Land, find the article. You also find the link in the Show Notes and check it out. I will just kind of touch on the basics here because this is 101, but I think it's worth knowing if your site does use these tracking parameters. In short, using tracking parameters in internal links, those are links essentially that are direct within your website. So you're linking from page A to page B. You're not going off to any other domains. They can cause fragmented attribution, they can dilute link equity, they can bloat crawl paths. If you don't know what any of that means, that's okay. It's just all bad. It's all stuff that will potentially damage your SEO. First of all, what are tracking parameters? For those of you that don't know, tracking parameters were first widely used in paid ad campaigns many, many years ago to help define various details of those people who clicked on them and the association behind those links. So for example, this could include the source or various other details that you want to identify within analytics. It could be a campaign name, a source, keyword data, etc. These are the links you've probably seen out there that include equals question mark UTM in them and then followed by variables. You could then use these variables within Google Analytics or whatever tracking tools you use to help identify more details about the users that click them, more details about how many people are clicking certain buttons or links within your site. It just really helps with internal tracking of that sort of thing, or statistical tracking of links that have these codes added to them. So these links work great for campaign tracking from external sources, but when you apply them to internal links, of course they force search engines to process additional URL variations, which increases crawl overhead and can cause a number of other Issues. Those issues can include multiple versions of the same page being indexed, crawl paths becoming longer and more complex, wasted resources and you know, from processing duplicate content variants, a number of technical problems can arise from them. If you're using canonical tags, I.e. step one, canonical tags are critical in a situation like this because otherwise you could get, well, almost infinite depending on how your tracking is set up, infinite variations of each URL on your site, which is definitely bad. Canonical tag fixes that. It tells Google that hey, these long URLs with all the tracking parameters, don't worry about those. Take a look at the source URL that's basic. So instead of, you know, slash product name utm? Utm equals source equals blah blah blah. It's only going to focus rankings on the product name, the very basic URL for that page. So you really, you know, want to get those canonical tags in there. However, they will not fix everything. Often heavy use of tracking parameter results in errors as well. You'll see in Google search console like discovered, currently not indexed duplicate. Google chose a different canonical, that sort of thing. In order to avoid these, it is not recommended to use internal tracking parameters. Instead, if you need to track, there is a separate solution. Simone offers a solution. It does get a bit technical, but I'll talk a little bit about it anyways. We'll touch on involves removing the tracking from the URL and adding it to the DOM layer. At its simplest form, this is a layer in the browser's live Manipula ball I really can't speak today version of your HTML page. In order to switch the tracking to this technique, it involves a change to how you were linking by simply adding some data attributes within your HTML in the link where you would normally see ahref equals URL in the source code. Now you would follow that to include say for example data track equals homepage click or some other attribute that you want tracking within your tracking tools. This can then get. You can track this within your Google Analytics or whatever you're using. It can get quite complicated. It doesn't necessarily have to be, but I'm not really sure how to explain it on a podcast. I feel like you need visual aids and screenshots and things like that to really get it across. So again, check out his article on Search Engine Land. They show some examples and there's some more information on what it is, how it works and how to do it. Hopefully that made sense for you out there. All right. And finally we have a report about rejected Google review replies. There was a study from GMB API that says it looked at 12,752 rejected reviews. Review replies? Pardon me. So these are when the business owner is replying to reviews that were left on their Google business profile. It found that 92.6% of those rejected replies were to five star reviews. Positive reviews are generating the most rejections and this is largely because businesses often respond to them with templated enthusiastic language. AI boilerplate phrases are often the single biggest triggers. 67% of all rejected replies in their data set contained at least one detectable AI boilerplate phase phrase. So what do I mean by that? I'll give you some examples. In the article over@scroundtable.com they listed I think it was a top 10. I'll just give you the top four. These phrases were thrilled to hear at 48.7% your kind words 31% thank you for your kind 20.4% and look forward to serving you 19.5%. So these top four alone are in a very high percentage of these reviews that Google has rejected. The study believes that Google does not necessarily look for these phrases in particular, but rather filters based on patterns. The pattern for example being opener plus name plus compliment plus satisfaction line plus looking forward closing. It's kind of the pattern that Google looks for and then rejects. Most of these are automatically generated by AI tools that are replying to ads or sorry, replying to reviews. For you, it's it. This study goes into really great depth. It talks about a lot of things that Google will automatically reject review replies for. Things like bad language, personal information, that kind of thing. It really goes in far if you are somebody who's replying to a lot of reviews, it's something you really need to read. So if you are a business owner and you are responding to your Google reviews, which you should definitely check out this article to make sure that all your reviews get approved and get published. If they don't get approved, nothing happens. You don't get a notification for a declined one. It just doesn't show up. And if you're not watching, you'll never even notice that it never showed up in the first place. Make sure your reviews matter. Well, that's it for today. On behalf of myself, Scott Van Ak, Senior SEO at Stepforth Web Marketing, thank you for joining me today. Remember again, I know I said this a few times already. We have the Show Notes newsletter. Sign up for it seo101radio.com really useful if you want to check out some of the sources that we talk about. You want to learn more about these things. We can only talk so much about these various studies and techniques and issues. You want to check out the source in a lot of cases, so do that. Get the show notes. Check it out. If you have any questions you'd like to share, definitely post them to our Facebook group. Easily found by searching SEO101podcast on Facebook. If you enjoy the show, I would appreciate any feedback on Apple Podcast Stitchers, your favorite podcast stream. We are everywhere. We do listen to those comments and questions and requests. Have a great week. Remember to tune into future episodes which air every week on WMR fm. Thank you for listening everybody.
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