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When you're a maintenance engineer in a beverage manufacturing plant, you keep production lines moving and quality on track because there's no room for slowdowns. With Grainger's vast selection of high quality motors, sensors, belts and hard to find parts, you can get what you need fast and all in one place. So nothing gets in the way of getting the job done. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
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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. Technology at Capital One.
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Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on WMR FM. This is episode number 534. My name is Kovanak and I am the senior SEO at Set Forth Web Marketing. Ross is away today so I'll be doing the show on my own and we're going to dive in here with a little bit of non SEO news. OpenAI has set August 9th as the end date for ChatGpt Atlas. I think it was about a year ago we mentioned that they were launching their own browser Atlas and now it's coming to an end. Have you tried it? I have not. If you still want to, it's not too late. You've got a couple weeks. Although I'm not sure why you would bother considering it will be going away. They will be discontinuing it, but they are replacing it with a ChatGPT desktop app. The new app includes ChatGPT Work, which is OpenAI's work focused agent, and ChatGPT Codex. The new app will also include browsing capabilities. So it's kind of an app, isn't it? Isn't that what that means? Chrome users who use Chrome can what am I trying to say here? Chrome users can still use Chrome as OpenAI also offers ChatGPT and Codex extensions. So if you're already doing that, great that nothing's really going to change for you. And a little bit of SEO news. We'll dive into that. Well, quite a bit of SEO news I suppose. The EU has ordered Google to share search data with rivals starting in 2027. The European Commission has ordered Google share anonymized search data with rival search engines and qualifying AI chatbots. Under the Digital Markets Act, Google must provide competitors with the same search data it uses to optimize its own services, aiming to level the playing field for alternative search and AI products. This requirement comes after the Commission determined that Google's previous data sharing efforts were insufficient. Qualifying AI search services, not just traditional search engines, are now available and eligible for the same data access as Google's own services. By July 2027, Google must allow rival AI assistance those competing with Gemini, for example, the same access to Android features, enabling users to choose and activate their preferred assistance for in app actions via voice. Google is required to implement multi layer anonymization, a fair pricing model and a transparent process for data access. The changes are intended to boost competition, but the article notes that shifting user search habits remains a significant hurdle for Google rivals. No fines were imposed here. The ruling clarifies compliance obligations under the DMA rather than finding a violation. The timeline is such that Data sharing begins January 2027 Android changes roll out July 2027 kind of makes me want to start my own search engine just so I can get access to all this data that Google now has to share. Might make it interesting. I don't know if the search landscape will change much when Bing and Yahoo and all the AIs and all the other DuckDuckGo when they all get access to this statistical data. We'll be curious to see how that helps them, if at all. Next we've got some image related news which is unusual. Last week was actually the 25th birthday to Google Image Search. The Google Image search started shortly before I got into this industry I suppose around 20. Sorry, 2001, not 2021. 2001 images.google.com is moving though they're doing a bit of a design change. They're moving from a clean basic page with you know, your logo and search box. That's more reminiscent to one. Sorry, that is more reminiscent of Pinterest. So instead of having their standard search looking homepage, if you like Pinterest you're probably going to like this new look. I have not seen it live just yet, but the screenshots I've shown are reminiscent of Pinterest or maybe Instagram or something like that. I'm not sure. I'm a big fan, but I also don't use images Google very often so it won't really bother me much. A new dynamic immersive gallery of images is also updated in real time, tailored to your unique interests and will be present on the screen. Changes will be rolled out over the coming weeks on desktop in the US and for those signed into their Google account, we also have another little update to AI Overviews where you can now create images using the latest Nano Banana model. AI Overviews can now be used to generate images. Simply enter your command into Google Search and AI Overviews will either create the image for you or prompt you for more details. I tried with provide an image of a dog fishing with a giant donut. Great, great image. And it prompted me and asked if I wanted the image to be a photo or whimsical or realistic. So I asked for whimsical and it spat out exactly what I was looking for. I next asked for the dog to be changed. I said can you make his hat blue? And it made the hat blue. So you know. I later entered the same prompt into AI Overviews and it said I can only I cannot directly generate an output image file. So perhaps this is still rolling out and not fully in place, but the ability for it to quickly throw an image together for me. I could see a lot of good, useful case studies for that and a lot of good reasons for why you might want to do that. Kind of cool, silly. I mean there are a lot of options out there for image generation, so I don't know that we need it, but I guess it makes sense that they would add it next up. Google Clarifies Canonicalization fixes can Take up to two Weeks to Resolve if you have canonicalization issues on your site, you can expect these fixes that you've made to take up to two weeks to be reflected in search in Google's canonicalization documentation. Google has added the following Reevaluation takes time. Even after fixing content issues, Google might hold pages in a duplicate cluster for up to two weeks. Content difference matters. Pages will generally split out faster in the difference between the new content and the other clustered pages is clear and significant. So yeah, you know, make sure if you have these canonical issues, you've got pages that are nearly identical. Break them apart, make them not identical, add some unique content to each of these pages, have a reason for them to stand out and your canonicalization canonicalization issue should resolve within a few weeks. You know what, let's take a quick break right now. We'll take a quick break and when we come back we will touch on AI mode, changing URLs on your website, and some issues that have been going on. Some bugs with Google Local. Welcome back to SEO 101 on WMR FM hosted today by myself, Scott Van Ak, Senior SEO at Stepforth Web Marketing. Remember, we have a Show Notes newsletter you can sign up for at any time@seo101radio.com don't miss a single link. Refresh your memory of past shows. You know, oftentimes we'll reference studies and things like that. All the links are in these show notes so it'll make it a lot easier. A bit tricky to follow links that are spoken verbally. Get the Show Notes newsletter. They'll make your life a lot easier. Before the break we were discussing AI overviews, a bit of news on images, court ruling for Google Canonical tags and now we're going to dive into a little bit of AI modes stuff. So Google is AI Mode's number two most cited domain according to a report by Davis McCain at Profound. Their report shows that AI mode is shifting to citing itself primarily between April 15th and June 30th. Google's AI mode saw an 8.4 times surge in citation share for google.com making it the number two ranked domain. The increase came almost entirely from Google Business Profiles and Product Knowledge Panels. These Google hosted cards now appear within AI Mode for many local and product related searches. The business profile panels can display your hours, your photos, locations, reviews. So really it is now very important to ensure that your business profile is accurate and up to date. You know, just make sure it's correct because if it's wrong it's going to be that much worse. Now you're going to start to see yourself show up in AI mode and in AI overviews and it'll have the wrong data. If you are not actively managing your business profile, find someone to do it. We have Rose on staff. She's amazing and takes care of all of our local clients. But you need to be in there even if you get somebody managing because you should be replying to reviews yourself. Reply to all the reviews, good or bad. You know we've talked a lot on the show about how to reply to reviews so I won't go into that too much. But you know, make sure you're active in your Google business profile. Make sure everything is correct all the time. Make sure things haven't been changed. It happens sometimes, so be careful. One thing I found interesting though, you know, if you are wondering what domain is number one the number one sided domain in AI mode, the report didn't say anything about this so I had to look it up and I kind of suspected it was Reddit. And it was Reddit. Of course it was Reddit Ahrefs did a study and they actually published it yesterday that talks about all of this and their study showed that Reddit is number one being cited 19.9% of the time. Interestingly enough, Ahrefs has a different number too. The ahrefs report shows google.com in the number three spot with Capital One's tech
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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 stack that's technology.
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At Capital One, most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold. Every day. Data brokers are making billions, pulling details about you from public records and the Internet and then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where Aura comes in. Aura actively removes your data from broker sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web. But Aura goes beyond data protection. With one app you get a vpn, antivirus, password manager, spam, call protection, dark web monitoring, and even up to $5 million in identity theft insurance. All backed by 24, 7 US based fraud support. Other companies might sell just credit monitoring or just a vpn. Aura gives you all of it together at the same price competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today at aura.com remove protect yourself now@aura.com remove the YouTube being number two.
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Now YouTube is also a Google property, but it's not google.com so I suppose they have the number two and number three spots. But Reddit. Yeah, Reddit just continues to dominate those spots. But it kind of makes sense. There's just so much user generated content there. But can we really trust it? Some of it, sure. But anyways, I don't know if we need to see so much Reddit. Be nice if they scaled that back a little bit, gave more people a chance. Next up, Google says AI Features Google says AI search features send billions of clicks to websites each week Google's Nick Fox said that Google is now sending billions of clicks to websites every week through AI features. In Search alone. Overall, he says Google is sending billions of clicks to the web every day. While most of us are seeing less and less traffic from Google, Nick says they're seeing the opposite. Uh, okay, if this is true, why is AI based click data still hidden? Why are they not releasing that in Google Search Console? Even Barry said, if we're getting clicks, show us the data. Yeah, show us the data. It gets me thinking, so that Google is out here telling us that traffic is increasing. Business owners are getting more clicks from organic search, they're getting clicks from AI overviews, they're getting clicks from AI mode. Everything is good and growing, and more people are searching Google than ever. And everything is great. But that's not what we're seeing. We are seeing websites lose traffic. So why are we not, you know, experiencing the same stuff here? It's very bizarre to me that they're just hiding it. What do they got to hide? What is this all smoke and mirrors and lies? If I told a client, if a client said, how are we doing? And I said, oh, your Traffic is up 10 times. More people are searching and visiting your site than ever before. Your revenue is through the roof. And if I throw out a whole bunch of stats that were just really amazing, the client would ask for proof on these stats. And if I can't deliver it, well, they're not going to be a client for very long. Google, I guess, of course they have the luxury. People aren't going to fire Google. I mean, it's still going to be there. There's nothing they can. You can do. You can't get rid of Google. I suppose you could use other engines, but Google will be huge for the foreseeable future. I don't know. They need to fix this. They need to share this data, tell us what's really happening. Why so secretive? If they're. If it's true, if what they say is true, just show us. Wouldn't be hard. All right, next up, I have a bit of a story on changing URLs on a website and I want to talk about it briefly. At least we have a client and before working with us, she's a new client. She's been with us just a little over a month now. I believe before working with us, she had switched a page from about. It was her about page and she switched it to say, slash Studio and then came to us. We actually didn't realize that the page had even been about originally. And I kind of thought it was weird that it was Studio, but, you know, I don't really like to change URLs. I don't like to do that stuff because the risks are usually pretty high and the rewards are usually pretty low. There's usually not a lot of motivation as to why you should change a URL. Sometimes there is. So in her case, she came to me and said, should we switch it back? How do we do it? Can you help me? And I said, oh well, let's look into this. Her reason for switching was because there were some inbound links to that old URL from a few publications that she's mentioned in, which makes sense. So the first thing I did is I looked at the old URL. I looked at the new URL and I looked at inbound links, I looked at landing page traffic. I looked at organic rankings. There really for the new URL, there really wasn't much of anything. She had a handful of people entering the site through the new URL. Actually had more people entering the site through the old URL, even through regular organic search, despite the page being gone for several months. What this means is in her case, it made sense. It made perfect sense to switch the URL. We switched the labels instead of saying Studio in the header navigation, now it says about us. Or I believe it just says about the URL has changed and the 301 redirects are in place. It's very new, just happened a few days ago, so I haven't really seen a lot of impact on this yet. But it's just one of those examples where sometimes you do want to change the URL. So I thought I'd just quickly go over some advantages here. If you want to change a URL, definitely, definitely, definitely look into your traffic, your rankings, your backlinks. If the page has any significant numbers in terms of rankings, traffic and backlinks, don't get rid of it unless it is now irrelevant. If it has become irrelevant, sure, go for it. Change it up. It's all good. If the content is highly dated and inaccurate, yes, you can move it or change it or, or if you have highly irrelevant dated content but the page still has rankings and traffic or a number of backlinks, update the content instead. Make it relevant. Make it so it's no longer dated. Another reason you might want to change it, or at least know it's safe to change, is if a URL is not even indexed in Google. We've had that happen a few times, especially more recently. Google is making it harder to get pages indexed than it used to be. You can have high quality Pages and sometimes they just don't want to index it. We had one client where we had a couple blog posts that were great. She put in so much effort into these blog posts. Google wouldn't index them. And we ended up looking at it. It actually made more sense to have it as an evergreen page within her regular site navigation. So I suggested that she agreed. In doing so, of course it changes the URL, but the page wasn't even being indexed, so we changed it. It was indexed that day and started getting some rankings right away. Sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it's okay. But the big kicker always though, before you make the change, do your research, get your data on that page so that you are not hurting a lot. Actually, I hate to go into more examples, but I had another example. A company, a client of ours, great client, they sell RVs. And they got rid of a blog post, and they got rid of this one blog post. They didn't consult me or tell me about it. They just got rid of it, deleted it. And we saw a huge drop in traffic to their site. Like, huge drop, like, what is going on? And they were mad at me because I'm the SEO and now their traffic is crashing. What's going on? So I start digging into it. I find out that it's this page that is now gone. They just deleted this page. And that page happened to have some killer rankings that was driving a lot of good numbers, like thousands and thousands of people to their site a month or a week, I guess. And so I talked to them and oh, we didn't really like that page. And they had their reasons, but they also saw the benefit and they saw what they were losing by having it removed. They agreed, they put it back online and it took a little bit of time, I want to say maybe a month. And then that traffic started coming back, the rankings returned and things are good. But they didn't research it, they just saw the page, ah, we don't know that we want this one anymore. And they got rid of it and that was a mistake. So make sure you do your research before you remove any content. And finally, we've got a couple stories here on local. The first one goes back to early July. Google was investigating reports of reviews going missing and was pausing reviews on local listings after several days of complaints from businesses. On July 3, Google confirmed it was investigating these reports of missing reviews. They also temporarily paused the ability of Google business profiles from receiving reviews. There were also some reports of businesses who had all reviews removed and their ratings dropped. To zero. Google is aware of this issue. They're working to fix it. As I said, Barry originally posted this on July 3rd, 2026 and as of today I'm not really finding any reports or anything that's showing it's been resolved yet, so I'm guessing they're still working on it. Hopefully they get it fixed soon because there's another bug Google Local review replies are not displaying kind of the same bug, but different. So this bug is within Google Local as well obviously, and has review replies from owners not showing up. This appears to be a widespread bug impacting most or all Google business profiles. It appears that replies left by owners have been removed, but in reality they're just not being displayed. So if you are a business owner and you're logged in, you will be able to see your replies to the reviews for your business. If you are not logged into Google, they are not visible. So that's a pretty big deal. Google is aware of this and they are working to resolve it. And this issue showed up today and today's July 22, so by the time you're listening to this, it will hopefully be resolved. And next show we'll probably talk about some new bugs that have come out because it just seems to be one after another. Anyways, that is it for this week. On behalf of myself, Scovinac, Senior SEO at Stepforth Web Marketing, thank you for joining me today. And remember about the Show Notes newsletter, you can sign up at seo101radio.com don't miss a single link. Refresh your memory of a past show at any time. Find all the details. Sometimes there's screenshots and images and useful data in there. Get the Show Notes if you like our show, you'll be helpful. You'll be happy with the Show Notes. If you have any questions you would like to share with us, please feel free to post them on our Facebook group. Easily found by searching SEO 101 podcast on Facebook. We also appreciate any feedback on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, anywhere you listen to your favorite podcast stream. We are probably there. We do listen to feedback. We will reply to you. We will acknowledge what you have to say. Have a great week and remember to tune into future episodes which air every week on WMR fm. Thank you for listening everybody. I cashed out my entire 401k thinking
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someone stole my identity.
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A fake email cost me my dream home. After I sent my personal information to a scammer, my AI agent wired thousands
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to an account I'd never seen when
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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 Moneylion. See it in action@gendigital.com Capital One's tech
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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.