SEO 101 Ep 533: Episode 533: Google Search Console, AI in Content Creation, and Remembering an SEO Pioneer

Summary

SEO 101 Ep 533: Google Search Console, AI in Content Creation, and Remembering an SEO Pioneer

Date: July 7, 2026
Hosts: Ross Dunn & Scott Van Achte
Podcast: SEO 101 (WMR.FM)

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, Ross Dunn and Scott Van Achte dive deep into recent updates and developments from Google, the role of AI in both search and content creation, and reflect on the passing of SEO industry pioneer Bruce Clay. The hosts deliver practical advice for SEOs and website owners, from leveraging new Search Console features, to handling AI-generated content, and interpreting Google’s algorithm updates. The episode maintains its friendly, beginner-focused tone, providing actionable guidance without overwhelming technical detail.

---

Remembering Bruce Clay: The Father of SEO

[01:48–04:53]

• Announcement: The hosts open with the sad news of Bruce Clay’s passing, reflecting on his immense influence in the SEO industry.
• Personal Anecdotes:
  • Ross Dunn: Shares a humorous and slightly awkward first encounter with Bruce at a conference:

    “I went to my first conference... and when I got to Bruce, I said, 'Hi, I’m Ross.' And kind of waited for him. He says, 'You don’t know who I am?' I said, 'No.' 'I’m Bruce Clay.' Like, 'Oh, okay.' A bit of a weird first impression...” — Ross [02:16]

  • Both hosts agree his work and company’s resources helped educate a generation of SEOs.
• Industry Impact:
  • Bruce Clay’s company spanned globally, producing respected educational content.
  • Scott notes:

    “He definitely was a contributor to a lot of people who are SEOs today and getting them off the ground.” — Scott [03:38]

  • The casual, sometimes impersonal nature of industry networking in the past is discussed, contrasting it with today’s visual tools like Zoom and About Us pages.

---

Google Search Console: Social & Video Platform Reporting

[05:23–07:44]

• New Feature: Google Search Console is rolling out the ability to track data from major social platforms (Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube).
• Key Benefits:
  • View detailed performance reports (clicks, impressions, top posts, queries).
  • Track milestones and achievements, with a “gamification” element similar to Local Guides.
  • Set up through the “Add Property” feature; rollout still limited but expected soon.
• Practical Take:
  • The hosts are optimistic but await hands-on access; see it as a potentially “really cool” addition for integrated marketing.
  • Discussion of gamification as a motivator for many users ("us humans are simple that way" — Ross [07:44]).

---

Google Trends: Historical Data Comparison

[08:22–11:20]

• Update: You can now compare previous time periods directly in Google Trends.
• How It Helps:
  • More easily identify seasonal or trending topics for content planning or troubleshooting unexpected traffic changes.
  • Avoids the cumbersome previous method of taking snapshots for manual comparison.
• Practical Examples:
  • Used to explain client traffic drops due to changing search volumes, not ranking issues (e.g., a rafting company saw business down due to poor weather, identified via Trends).

  • “If you do ever see a traffic drop but your ranking still looks strong... check out Google Trends and throw in some of your key terms.” — Scott [10:05]

• Bonus Use: Ross enjoys using Trends to check the origins and spikes of new slang his daughter uses.

---

Google June 2026 Spam Update: Key Insights

[12:00–13:12]

• Spam Update: Google rolled out a large-scale spam update (June 2026).
• Hosts’ Take:
  • No new specifics from Google; completed later than initially stated.
  • Potentially bigger than the March update.
  • If you see an impact, audit your site for spammy signals. Otherwise, legitimate sites should remain unaffected.
• Use of AI:
  • Ross cautions about letting AI perform audits:

    “Be really careful with trusting what you see... you just can’t take it at face value unless you know your stuff.” — Ross [13:16]

  • When in doubt, consult an expert for targeted, efficient audits.

---

AI in Content Creation: Best Practices

[22:17–29:45]

• Automatic Content Creation:
  • Vendors are pushing AI-generated content, but pure automation is risky for long-term success.
• Three Approaches to Content Creation:
  1. Fully Automated by AI:
     • May work short-term for unique topics; poor for longevity or authority.
  2. AI-assisted Planning & Writing with Expert Input:
     • Use AI for ideation and outlines.
     • Human expert reviews, edits, and injects unique experience/expertise.
     • Add multi-modal content (video, infographics, etc.) with help from various AI tools (e.g., Opus, Fable, Claude).

     • “Eight times out of ten you’re going to be pretty darn impressed with the result if you’re using a high-end AI... then whatever content’s created, get someone else to read it, they like it, and you’ve done the editing, post it, and then add multimodal content.” — Ross [28:03]

  3. Professional Human Writers:
     • The gold standard: human writer (like Christine from their team) interviews the expert and crafts the final content. No AI, full expertise, proven to go viral.

     • “She interviews the client... they just have to answer the questions, they provide their expertise, and then Christine takes those notes and builds it into a comprehensive, kick-ass article.” — Ross [29:15]

• Final Advice:
  • Human-led, expert-driven content remains the most future-proof approach, though high-end AI (with heavy expert guidance) is making rapid progress.

---

SEO Site Structure: The Problem with Single Page Websites

[24:18–25:40]

• Ross shares frustration seeing so many single-page sites in sales conversations.
• Why It’s Problematic:
  • Hard for Google (and users) to understand your key offerings and relevance.
  • No room to emphasize/highlight top services or products with internal links or detailed pages.
  • Limits marketing opportunities (e.g., landing pages for ads or social).

  • “Single page websites…are such an outlier that I never recommend it. If I ever see it, I always suggest building out individual pages for each of your services or your products…” — Ross [24:32]

---

Google Makes Recipes in AI Mode More Publisher-Friendly

[13:12–16:30]

• Update: Recipes shown in Google’s AI search mode now include more prominent links to publisher sites, with creator’s name, ratings, and ingredients.
• Rationale:
  • Aims to drive more actual traffic to content creators, addressing complaints about AI “stealing” their value.
• Skepticism:
  • Unclear if these changes will truly result in more clicks, since Google/Bing don’t report them; some concern it’s “lipstick on a pig.”

  • “It’s brutal seeing what AI is doing to content creators and yet it’s flourishing off that content. It’s not fair, not right. And they need to work on this.” — Ross [16:19]

---

Google.com/goto Tracking URLs — Impact on SEO Tools & Searchers

[19:00–22:17]

• Testing Redirect URLs:
  • Google is experimenting with routing clicks through a google.com/goto tracking URL rather than linking directly to websites.
• Potential Effects:
  • Causes issues for rank tracking/SEO reporting tools (e.g., Ahrefs, SEMrush), as links no longer point directly to target sites.
  • May affect user ability to preview URLs for safety before clicking.

  • “If you see your tracking tools start breaking, it’s something to consider looking into… you see this Google link, you have no idea where it’s actually pointing.” — Scott [21:46]

• Evidence: Ahrefs already finds google.com/goto with millions of keywords; SEMrush less so but confirms some usage.

---

Google Search Console: Generative AI Reporting Bug

[22:17–23:33]

• Bug Alert:
  • June 24th bug led to incorrect data in generative AI performance reports. Only reporting was affected; core site performance remained unchanged.

  • “If you’re lucky to have access to the generative AI performance reports in Google Search Console, don’t put much weight on the results...” — Ross [22:17]

• Expectation:
  • It’s new tech, so more bugs are likely as AI features roll out.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Ross on Bruce Clay:

  “Bit of a weird first impression, but…I definitely came to respect his content and his knowledge. There was a lot of good stuff that his company put out and it has helped a lot of people…” [02:16]

• Scott on Trends Usage:

  “If you do ever see a traffic drop but your ranking still looks strong... check out Google Trends...” [10:05]

• Ross on Content Quality:

  “You can’t really succeed, at least long term, with content that’s purely generated by AI without your expertise.” [26:18]

---

Episode Timeline & Timestamps

• [01:48] — Remembering Bruce Clay (industry anecdotes, legacy)
• [05:23] — Google Search Console: Social & Video Reporting
• [08:22] — Google Trends: Compare Previous Periods
• [12:00] — June 2026 Spam Update
• [13:12] — Recipes in AI mode: More Publisher Friendly
• [19:00] — Google.com/goto Tracking URL Test
• [22:17] — Generative AI Reporting Bug in GSC
• [24:18] — Single Page Websites — SEO Pitfalls
• [26:00] — AI in Content Creation: 3 Quality Tiers
• [29:45] — Episode wrap-up

---

Final Thoughts

This episode covers a broad swath of ongoing Google updates with a healthy skepticism and practical focus. Listeners get actionable strategies on site structure, using Google’s reporting tools, and navigating the rising influence—and pitfalls—of AI in SEO and content creation. The episode closes with a heartfelt homage to SEO’s past and practical advice for its future.

---

For more episodes, tools, and tutorials, visit the SEO 101 Podcast Facebook Group or check out Ross’s tutorials at seodunn.com.

Transcript

[Scott Van Aken]

I cashed out my entire 401k thinking

[Ross Dunn]

someone stole my identity. A fake email cost me my dream home. After I sent my personal information to

[Commercial Voice]

a scammer, my AI agent wired thousands to an account I'd never seen.

[Gen Digital Announcer]

When billions of people feel unsafe, that's no longer a security problem, it's an economic one. At Gen, we're building the trust layer for a more fearless planet with products and technologies from our global brands, Norton, Lifelock, Avast and Money Lion. See it in [e-mail] want stories that

[Scott Van Aken]

spark ideas and inspire hope.

[Ross Dunn]

The Every Child Thrives podcast network features

[Scott Van Aken]

conversations from healing and resilience to youth leadership and equity that brings together voices from across the country working toward change. Discover how we heal voices of I

[Ross Dunn]

am New Orleans Common good and past the sopapillas.

[Scott Van Aken]

Wherever you listen to podcasts, you foreign.

[Ross Dunn]

Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on WMR FM episode number 533. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing and my co host is my company senior SEO Scott Van ak. Well, lots of Google News today. Holy smokes, is it the Google News day? I guess that's all it is really.

[Scott Van Aken]

And nothing from Bing. I have nothing from Bing today.

[Ross Dunn]

All right, all right.

[Scott Van Aken]

Because when I include Bing, you're like bing. That's surprising. So. But Bing doesn't usually have a lot.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah, it took enough time last time for a good month at least.

[Scott Van Aken]

Yeah, that's right.

[Ross Dunn]

We'll start with something a little somber. Unfortunately, we found out that Bruce Clay, known as the father of SEO, has passed away. I, I didn't know Bruce that well. I I my first experience with him wasn't the greatest, but I, I thought I'll share just because it was funny, a funny anecdote. I went to my first conference way later in my career. I was never really that social per se, so I, I, but I went to it and I met a bunch of people and I was introducing myself and, and when I got to Bruce, I said, hi, I'm Ross. And kind of waited for him. He says, you don't know who I am? I said, no, I'm Bruce Clay. Like, oh, okay. A bit of a weird first impression, but you know, I didn't really have any more interactions with him after that. Again, I wasn't super strong in going to conferences and stuff where he was a lot, but I definitely came to respect his content and his knowledge. There was a lot of good stuff that his company put out and it has helped a Lot of people and a lot of the anecdotes from my colleagues who have spent a lot of time with him were just glowing. So I know it was a big loss to the industry and it was a shock. Apparently he passed away in May. It wasn't even new recent. It just didn't get out there somehow, I guess. He was retired. I don't know where he was at, but his company spanned all English speaking countries as far as I know, and perhaps even others. It was huge, absolutely huge. And yeah, excited here that he's passed.

[Scott Van Aken]

Yeah, I didn't know him either, obviously, but I certainly learned a lot in my early days from writings and, you know, things like that. I don't know if he had a blog at the time, it's going back a long time, but I don't know. He definitely was a contributor to a lot of people who are SEOs today and getting them off the ground.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah. And you know, to reflect back on that first meeting, it wasn't that I didn't know his name, I just didn't know his face to his name when I was like, oh, Bruce Clay. Yeah, I've heard of you. I just hadn't met you or seen you. So. Hi. Yeah, it's a weird moment in time.

[Scott Van Aken]

It's funny we can think about that even with our clients because until recently all meetings were on the phone, like old school phone. And now it's all zoom. So we actually get to physically, not physically, but visually meet our clients. And for years like you could have walked by almost any one of our clients that had no clue that's who they were. So it's kind of cool. And even now with our websites like you, you have to have your about us page and all this kind of stuff with your photo. So even that has forced us to know what they look like. And you know, in 2002 there weren't a lot of photos of everybody. And so the self promotion wasn't what it is today, that's for sure.

[Ross Dunn]

No. Yeah, some of our staff I've never met, like Dennis, he's been with one of our staff's been with us 20, 20 years easily. And he's lived in the Ukraine. He's lived in. That's where he's from. And now he's in Lisbon and love him to pieces. He's been fantastic guy to have around and I just can't believe I've never actually met him in person.

[Scott Van Aken]

Really weird. Super weird.

[Ross Dunn]

All right, well, let's get right into here. So this next piece is Google Search Console gains reporting on social and video platforms. Ooh, fill us in.

[Scott Van Aken]

Yeah. So this is kind of interesting. So this is being rolled out now. I don't see it at all. But it will be there eventually. And you'll be able to track search terms and other data related to some social media platforms within Google Search Console. Currently you have the. Currently you don't. Soon you will have the ability to integrate Instagram, TikTok X YouTube and see how they're performing in search once they're verified. This is broken into sort of three main sections. There'll be a performance report that shows clicks, impressions, additional metrics. You can filter and sort this data to see which specific posts and queries are driving the most traffic. You can of course also export this data like you can with other reports. There's an insights report where you can view high level view a high level overview of your recent traffic trends, top performing posts, help people discover your account on Google, that sort of thing. And achievements where you can track growth and celebrate milestones, which Google loves those milestones that you've had so many views in the past 30 days. We get a lot of those. Well already through local, like for my own, you know, the ratings. What do they call it? The. When you're reviewing stuff, Everything. Oh my goodness, my brain is not working, sir.

[Ross Dunn]

I was multitasking and I don't remember what you're saying.

[Scott Van Aken]

Yeah, like I'm like a level 8 reviewer or whatever. But there's like a term they use anyways.

[Ross Dunn]

Oh, a local, Local guide. Local guide, yes. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

[Scott Van Aken]

So they, they send those every month. Like you've, you've contributed this much and you've got these milestones. It's probably gonna be the same with badges and stuff which is maybe silly, I don't know, but it's gonna be there. If you want to set this up, you go to the Google Search Console verification page or you can select add property from within the property selector dropdown. And I don't know what happens after that because I can't see it. But it's probably pretty straightforward. It's pretty new. You probably. It's very limited right now, but it will be rolling out in the next few weeks. So potentially this is going to be really cool. We'll wait and see and report on it when we can actually access it and see what it does.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah, I guess it's a form of gamification, you know, just trying to make it fun and exciting that you, you win these milestones and maybe Get a smiley face, whatever. Yeah, us humans are simple that way. Anyway, good idea. I think they were going to do the same thing or they did the same thing in analytics at one point. Oh, in terms of gamification, like giving you like heads up and hey, congrats, you reached this milestone. I feel like we reported it at one point, but I'm not sure I've seen it. Maybe it didn't get rolled out. I don't know.

[Scott Van Aken]

Maybe it was just a test or something they were, they were thinking about.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah, it, it sounded like the kind of thing that would have done well because everyone seems to find that stuff appealing. It seems not everyone, but money. All right, Google Trends adds previous time period period comparison. The title pretty much says it all. If you haven't used Google Trends yet, it can be useful in identifying seasonal trends or for spotting new trending data, helping to plan content marketing efforts, troubleshooting issues, you name it. I've used it many times in the past just to see why this particular topic seems to be getting us traffic. Sometimes we get the traffic or what the heck. And this is because something we talked about at one point mentioned this word totally irrelevant. But as a result we're getting traffic. And it was because there was something in the news and it was again not relevant, but we were getting the traffic. It can be a way to just to see why things are happening if you really can't draw a direct line. Anyway, they've made a small but useful change by finally adding a comparison for previous data to your chart. Now when you need to compare against the last month or last year, it will make everything faster and easier, which is nice because otherwise you had to just take snapshots and then go back and do it again. And snapshot and trillion pair and very simple changes. Probably one of their 1%. What are they? What was it? 1%? No, 5% of their time they spend on their own projects at Google, maybe. Anyway, I can't remember that it's been so long. Yeah, probably someone say, I'm going to finally code this. And I'm glad they did. It's a good idea.

[Scott Van Aken]

One thing that I've found it useful for not that long ago is I had a client who saw a big drop in traffic like, well, what's going on here? And it turned out one of the. So Trends actually helped me spot this one of the search terms that they rank really well for. They were still ranking for but had tapered off. People weren't searching for that term like they used to. So it was just the sheer volume of their targets that they were going after had gone down. So if you do ever see a traffic drop but your ranking still looks strong and you're like, you can't really figure out why, check out Google Trends and throw in some of your key terms that are really important and see if that could be the reason. Maybe it's time to switch targets or. Or mix it up a little bit or, you know, maybe there's just a reason trends are now like. Another good example is we have a client who does river rafting and that sort of thing, and. And they had a quiet period a month or so ago, but it was related to weather, so the weather went down. So fewer people were searching to know who wants to go rafting when it's pouring rain and the weather's miserable. Right. So fewer people searched in that time period compared to the year before. So obviously they had less traffic and less business.

[American Express Announcer]

But.

[Scott Van Aken]

But it was actually related to the trend connected to the weather. So it can help you spot things like that sometimes. So you think things are bad, but maybe they're not, and trends are helpful for that.

[Ross Dunn]

I also love using it just for fun. Like, even when, I don't know, my daughter uses some slang term I've never heard of before, and I go, which is often these days. I'll put it in there just to see, when did this start? And sometimes it was years ago, and I feel really dumb, but sometimes that's just, like. Just spiking. It just shows how on top of things these kids are these days. It's pretty revealing. All right, Google News or, sorry, Google. June 2026. Spam update is done. Rolling out now. What does this actually mean? Do we know?

[Scott Van Aken]

Well, it depends. It doesn't mean nothing. I'm kind of kidding there.

[Ross Dunn]

But I.

[Scott Van Aken]

We.

[Ross Dunn]

That's how much we know. Go ahead.

[Scott Van Aken]

Yeah, yeah. It's just. It's done. Google doesn't really tell us anything. It's, you know, this. I kind of found this funny that they said on June 24, when it started, it would take a couple days. And we talked about this on our last show. I think our last show was on June 24th. And I said, yeah, it's only gonna take a couple days. It'd be like a month and two

[Ross Dunn]

days later, they were done. It's like, what?

[Scott Van Aken]

It's because I put it on the show. Somebody was listening and like, oh, man, Scott's listening. We. We got to hurry up. These updates. This is not okay.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah. You talked about betting on it. So they must have really felt the pressure.

[Scott Van Aken]

Exactly. I. We should have bet on it. On the. Whatever that site is. That betting site that's all over the news lately. Whatever it is, you can bet on everything next time. So this was like a sort of your normal spam update, cleaning a bunch of stuff up across all languages and locations. There were some reports that it was significantly bigger than the March spam update. Yeah, I was gonna say may the March spam update. Again. If your site was impacted, you definitely want to consider auditing your site for possible spam. But if you're, you know, above board and you follow the rules, it really shouldn't be an issue for you.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah. And if you're gonna use AI to audit your site, be really careful with.

[Scott Van Aken]

Yes.

[Ross Dunn]

Trusting what you see. Okay. I'm 100% about trying AI and, and watching it break, because it will break and trying to iterate from there and make it into something you can use it for. I mean, it's fun. I find it ridiculously fun and time consuming and I don't have enough time, but it is really interesting. It's just that you just can't take it at face value unless you know your stuff. So be very careful. If you're really concerned and you want to know why something's happening and you need an audit done, contact an expert. You know, obviously we do it. There's lots of other companies that do it too. But just getting that expert opinion is worth its weight in gold, really. And it's going to cost relatively little compared to what you could lose. And it doesn't always have to be a full fledged huge audit too. The more an SEO knows, the more laser focused the audit can be. Doesn't mean it's going to uncover the issue. It could be the other things were in. In play. But you know, if we happen to know you made a big change to your site over this period and maybe you're concerned about this new layout, whatever it could be, it gives us something to focus on. It drastically reduces the size and scope and cost of the audit. So keep that in mind. All right. Google makes recipes in AI mode more publisher friendly. Now, we know we have a lot, or we have in the past anyway, lots of listeners who have food or food bloggers published recipes, you name it. So you're going to be very happy about this, I hope. Google's now putting prominent links within AI mode that lead directly to the publisher's recipe pages. These new links show more details, including the creator's name, recipe ratings and the number of ingredients Robby Stein from Google said quote, they are now prominent links at the top of responses with useful details and images like the creator name, recipe name, ratings and number of ingredients. He added that this should make it even easier to discover and visit recipe pages within AI mode, unquote. Now we don't know how many actual clicks are coming from these things because Google won't show it, Bing won't show it. Makes me really wonder if there's any so this could just be lipstick on a pig. I don't know. Is this really going to help? I hope so. It's certainly better than nothing. It's a step forward and I hope it works for you and I hope you get some business because it's brutal seeing what AI is doing to content creators and yet it's flourishing off that content. It's not fair, not right. And they need to work on this. All right, let's take a quick break. We come back, we've got more Google News. I know it's a shock.

[Commercial Voice]

I'll be honest. This summer is stacked between that one big international soccer tournament, America's 250th anniversary, and the Route 66 antenna millennial people are going to be traveling. What a lot of folks don't realize is that taking a trip in an RV is a whole heck of a lot more enjoyable than TSA lines or stodgy hotels. And you don't even have to own an RV or drive one to take part. With Outdoorsy, you can rent an RV or camper almost anywhere in the country. You can drive it, tow it, or have it delivered and set up for you. And these aren't bare bones setups. Many come with full kitchens, bathrooms, showers and real beds. It's often more affordable than hotels, especially for families or groups. And everything includes insurance, 24, 7 support, and roadside assistance. If you're thinking about a summer trip or just planning ahead for the rest of 2026, get 10% off when you book using promo code outdoorsy2026 head to outdoorsy.com that's outdoorsy.com promo code outdoorsy2026 I

[Ross Dunn]

cashed out my entire 401k thinking someone stole my identity. A fake email cost me my dream home. After I sent my personal information to

[Commercial Voice]

a scammer, my AI agent wired thousands to an account I'd never seen.

[Gen Digital Announcer]

When billions of people feel unsafe, that's no longer a security problem. It's an economic one. At Jenn, we're building the trust layer for a more fearless planet with products and technologies from our global brands. Norton, Lifelock, Avast and Moneylion. See it in [e-mail] get that Amex Gold cart ready.

[Commercial Voice]

I'm way too tired to cook tonight.

[American Express Announcer]

You read my mind. With the Gold Card, we can get up to $120 a year in statement credits. Are you feeling The Cheesecake Factory? Five guys. Either of those sound good?

[Ross Dunn]

Yes.

[American Express Announcer]

Which one? Both pay with the Gold Card to receive up to $10 a month in statement credits at participating partners. Uncover more ways to reward [e-mail] explored. Gold enrollment required terms apply.

[Ross Dunn]

Welcome back to SEO101 on WMR FM, hosted by myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing and lead company senior SEO Scott Vanack. Okay, Google tests a google.com goto tracking URLs in search results so case Silkee, fill me in.

[Scott Van Aken]

Yeah, so I haven't seen this in person yet. Barry, where I originally saw the article on SE Roundtable, also has not seen it, but he's seen reports of this and I've got some evidence I'll mention in a second which shows it is actually happening. But what they're doing is they're testing rather than linking through. Maybe I should just read what I've got here. Google is testing tracking URLs in search that may have an impact on your rank traffic efforts in some tools.

[Ross Dunn]

So sorry.

[Scott Van Aken]

Yeah, so some site owners and SEOs have noticed this happening where Google is no longer linking directly to your website from the search result. Instead they're pointing to google.com goto and then a bunch of tracking parameters. That URL is then 301 redirected might be a 302. Actually I didn't check that. It's being redirected to your main site. So if Google fully rolls this out, this will undoubtedly cause another rank reporting headache as tracking tools scramble to fix it. Last time such a change happened in Google and caused a bunch of chaos was back in, I think it was October with the num100 variable. They removed that and almost all tracking tools use that variable to report on rankings. So when that happened, all tracking tools broke and it was crazy for I don't know, a month or so, tracking tools were out of commission. I question if this sort of change could cause that same problem because now the URLs are no longer in search results, it's all the Google tracking URLs. So they would have to follow all of those, check the redirect and See where that goes and then report on it. So that could get ugly if they fully roll this out. Now, the evidence here, just to show it, Barry references Ahrefs as well. And if you go to ahrefs and you check the performance report for google.com goto, it shows about 1.2 million organic keywords and about 120 million monthly visitors. So that means it's, it's being used out there currently for sure. And SEMrush, interestingly enough, I put it into SEMrush as well. The numbers are much smaller. SEMrush shows 14 total rankings, but 63 monthly, sorry, 6,300 monthly visitors, which is actually a pretty good visitor count for only 14 rankings. But it just shows that the search reporting tools are finding it. They're finding this particular URL and reporting it on as being google.com goto not whatever website it's actually connected to. So if you're seeing your performance numbers in SEMrush, well, not SEMrush yet in Ahrefs going way down. Maybe they're not going down. Maybe they're just being attributed to this redirecting URL that Google's now using, this tracking URL.

[Ross Dunn]

So it's a.

[Scott Van Aken]

Who knows what's going to happen. But if you see your tracking tools start breaking, it's something to consider looking into. I didn't really see a downside for searchers until I read what Barry had pointed out. And he said that for him, he likes to preview a URL before clicking a search result to help, you know, make sure it's not a phishing scheme or scam, scam or spam of some sort. But with the go to tracking parameters, you see this Google link, you have no idea where it's actually pointing. So that may be a usability issue for Google if they do roll this out.

[Ross Dunn]

Interesting. Okay, well, Google Search Console has first generative AI reporting bug. Big shock there. This is what happens when things are new. It is very new. So if you're lucky to have access to the generative AI performance reports in Google Search Console, don't put much weight on the results, even if you were thinking of doing so, which I think many wouldn't. On June 24, there was a bug that resulted in incorrect data. This bug only impacted reported figures and not actual site performance. Reporting before and after June 24th should be accurate. And hopefully yes, this isn't the first in a long line of AI reporting bugs, but I will believe it when I see it. Now, another thing I wanted to jump into here is just a few things that have come up this week and I'd like to just throw in our own anecdotes and doing a lot of sales these days I'm seeing a ton of websites and it astonishes me how often I see one page websites. Now there have been outliers. I've seen the odd one page website do well, but it's such an outlier that I never recommend it. And if I ever see it, I always suggest building out individual pages for each of your services or your products or whatever you're selling and whatever you've got going on. And the reason why is when Google AI whatever looks at your content on a single page, it has to determine what you're all about and imply importance on specific services or products where. Whereas if you have content and that it's devoted to those specific specific services or products, you can really make a pretty, pretty clear which ones are the most important ones through internal linking, making sure there's more links to particular products or services, or simply expanding upon the content upon a particularly high value product or service. So if you have a single page website, definitely consider building it out. It's going to be worth your time. It gives you so many more opportunities for marketing, for landing pages. Because if you're doing any kind of paid ads or any kind of social media, if someone comes to that page and you're trying to focus them on one particular service, they could easily get lost, they could get overwhelmed, whatever, and then they'll leave. However, if you have a page you can send them to that's devoted to that one thing you're trying to pitch, it's going to do infinitely better and convert better and simply just show professional expertise better. So just keep that in mind. It's, it's kind of shocking how often we see that. Next up is content creation options. We had this talk with one of our great clients at the day and the idea was, you know, do we, do they just create content automatically? Is that a good idea? And they're being pitched constantly by companies saying we'll create your content for you, we'll use AI, blah blah, blah, and this is, this is going to be great for you. Well, the problem is, and you've heard this ad infinitum, I'm sure from us that you can't really succeed, at least long term with content that's purely generated by AI without your expertise. So I kind of broke it down into three things. One, three different options for creating content and it increases in quality. The first is the lowest quality, which is completely automatic, having AI created for you. If it's a completely unique idea, no one's ever created it before and you think AI can create it, maybe it'll work again. It won't work long term, but it might work for a while. Number two though, is kind of the benchmark in what a lot of people are doing and it makes perfect sense. First of all, plan out what you're going to write. If you have concerns and don't really know what to write, which we all do every day, it seems whenever we're trying to think of something, it's like a bit of a block. Ask AI, tell it what you've written before, even show it what you've written before and say, hey, give me some ideas. What am I missing? Where are my gaps? What, what can I talk about? I need it. I need some ideas here. And it'll often give you some great ones. And then once you've done that, say, okay, please outline what this could look like, what an article could look like that would be authoritative and it'll give you an outline again, 100% AI. Now this is where it gets important. If you like the outline, great. If you don't work on it a bit, ultimately take the outline you do get and you do like feed it into AI and say, okay, create content for me using my voice. You're going to have to train it on that. There's a simple. There's only so much I can explain right now, but if you have a project that's been already trained on your voice, that's great, that's what you want ideally. But you put this in there and then you say, okay, here are some elements that I think you should that need to be implemented that are based on my experience. I need to add value to. This is very important. These are things that I've noted as an expert in this field that should be incorporated into this content and it will build it in. And eight times out of 10 you're going to be pretty darn impressed with the result. If you're using a high end AI like Opus 4.8, which is what's highest right now, or Fable in Claude chatgpt, whatever it's using right now, I don't use enough, focused only on Claude these days, but whatever's the highest end one or fairly close to it. Use that and it's going to blow your mind often. Then whatever content's created, get someone else to read it, they like it and you've done the editing, post it and then add multimodal content. And you can use different AIs to do that. So add some video. Video could just be slides talking about what you're talking about. And then another part could be an infographic which you can notebook lm create free which is an AI. There's all these different AIs have different strengths and when you use these and you build them in, it's great. It really does help. If you want more information on this, check out seodone.com S-O-U-N-N.com in there. I've got tutorials on how to do this stuff because I wanted to share and it's fun and it's really interesting and I think I even talk about which actually I know I do. I've got an article about multimodal content and what tools seem to be strongest at building them. So check that out. The third option is the best option and that is where we use one of our writers. In our case we use Christine. She's amazing. She's been writing for years and she interviews the client and the client doesn't have to do anything else. They just have to answer the questions. They provide their expertise, really add value in that way. In 20 minutes, half an hour and then they get to go back to work and then Christine takes those notes and builds it into a comprehensive kick ass article. And it's not using AI. It's purely written with expertise and it's a slam dunk. She's had those go viral. They're so well written. So that's the best way and I think it's going to be the best way for I don't want to say the foreseeable future, but at least the next couple years until AI gets even better. I don't know. That's an argument. We could have foreseeable future. Actually maybe I do feel like that that could be the case. It's hard to say in either way. It's going to be excellent and then you can go and add all the multimodal stuff after. So that that's my two bits stuff that's come up this week and I thought it would be cool to share. So I hope that helps you out. All right. With that said, thank you for joining us today. Remember, we have a show Notes newsletter you can sign up [e-mail] and 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 Van Aken]

Thanks for listening everybody. I cashed out my entire 401k thinking

[Ross Dunn]

someone stole my identity. A fake email cost me my dream home. After I sent my personal information to

[Commercial Voice]

a scammer, my AI agent wired thousands to an account I'd never seen.

[Gen Digital Announcer]

When billions of people feel unsafe, that's no longer a security problem. It's an economic one. At jen, we're building the trust layer for a more fearless planet with products and technologies from our global global brands Norton, Lifelock, Avast and Money Lion. See it in [e-mail] get that Amex Gold cart ready.

[Commercial Voice]

I'm way too tired to cook tonight.

[American Express Announcer]

You read my mind. With the gold cart, we can get up to $120 a year in statement credits. Are you feeling the Cheesecake Factory? Five guys? Either of those sound good?

[Scott Van Aken]

Yes.

[American Express Announcer]

Which one? Both pay with the Gold card to receive up to $10 a month in statement credits at Participating partners uncover more ways to reward [e-mail] explored gold enrollment required terms apply.