WTF is SEO?

SEO metrics that (still) matter

WTF is SEO? — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 17:21:34 GMT

Hello, and welcome back. Jessie back from a Weakerthans fantasy draft! If you’re a millennial indie rock head with an adoration for cats and emotionally devastating lyrics, this is the band for you. It doesn’t hurt that the lead singer — dubbed Canada’s greatest songwriter (by me) — is also a prolific crafter.

This week: SEO metrics that matter in 2026. A lot has changed in news SEO since we covered key metrics back in 2023. We discuss some of the new north stars publishers should consider in the AI era.

This is not a comprehensive view. The metrics that matter will — and should — vary between newsrooms. Each organization has different business and editorial goals and ultimately, metrics should evaluate success or failure against those unique objectives. Align KPIs accordingly.

It’s sun in an empty (office) room. Photo by Ngital on Unsplash

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Let’s get it.

THE 101

What metrics still matter for search

AI upended search results. Google revamped its core product. User behaviour has shifted. With that upheaval, some old metrics are less valuable, while KPIs that measure performance against business and editorial goals (like conversions and engagement) matter more.

We’ve highlighted four SEO metrics below that still matter and some you can downgrade.

It’s worth noting: AI metrics — and currently most metrics in SEO — are very hard to track accurately and consistently. Google doesn’t yet provide click data for its AI features, and other tools not foolproof. Always keep a skeptic eye when reviewing any data.

The metrics that still matter

Conversions (subscriptions, registrations, sign ups) from search

What it is: The number of readers who convert from search.

What it measures: What counts as a conversion depends on your business strategy: signing up for a newsletter, creating an account, making a contribution or purchasing a subscription. But this demonstrates how much readers value your work. Conversions are essential for the long-term, sustainable success of your business.

Why it still matters: Publishers need to make money. Friction like registration or paywalls trades scale for sustainability and consistency. Some share of page views will be lost, but the return — a person’s email or credit card — is invaluable. It’s more sustainable and less prone to platform fluctuations.

Conversions reflect the impact of specific stories, too. It’s a signal of audience interest: subscriptions tell a publication this is an area readers care about, which can help direct newsroom resources.

How to measure it: Conversions measure the percentage of users who complete a desired action, such as account registration, subscription or reader revenue contribution. First-touch or last-touch attribution both have merits; pick the one that works for you.

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Branded search traffic

What it is: The queries readers use to look up your publication, either by brand name or product. There are several types: brand (“The Guardian” or “The Athletic”), brand + product (”NYT Connections” or “Guardian Ukraine live”), or brand + person (”Marina Hyde” or “Jia Tolentino”). These are often navigational intent, meaning readers want to go directly to your site for a product/person.

What it measures: Branded search reflects how readers perceive your brand, what topics they associate with it and which aspects of your coverage they value most.

Why it matters: It’s a measure of audience loyalty and often carries a higher-than-average CTR. These readers are more consistent and more likely to convert.

How to measure it: Use Google Search Console’s built-in “Branded queries” and “Non-branded queries” filters. (The query classification is AI-powered and can make mistakes.) Export this filter to review the queries readers use to find your content, and the pages they engage with.

Screenshot of “Branded queries” search in GSC.

Click-through rate (CTR)

What it is: The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click.

What it measures: How effective a headline, AI mention/citation or social post is at convincing a reader to click your content. Use segmentation by pages, sections or keyword groups (i.e., keywords for set topics, or branded vs. non-branded queries) to add dimension to your data. Over time, improving CTR shows if your search efforts are working.

Why it matters: Earning a click from Google is increasingly challenging. Zero-click results are growing. SparkToro research found that 68 per cent of Google searches end without a click, thanks to AI Overviews and other features that keep readers in the search ecosystem. Earning the click — and getting qualified users to your site — is more important than ever.

Understanding the recipe that wins the click is essential. News and audience editors should analyze high- and low-CTR stories to uncover the topic areas, headline formats and other on-page elements that lead to the highest number of clicks.

How to measure it: Use Google Search Console to see your average CTR for Search, News and Discover. In the Search performance report, look at CTR for queries or pages that are editorially important; on Discover, review the headlines with the highest CTR. Is there a format or topic that’s consistently highly engaging?

Screenshot of GSC showing the Average CTR over the last 28 days for all queries including “Trump.”

AI visibility and citation metrics

What it is: Visibility in AI features, including mentions, citations and cited pages.

Why it matters: As the web evolves, our measures of success must change too. Even if clicks from AI features are significantly lower than traditional results, it’s important to understand where you show up. If your publication isn’t part of the conversation in these environments, you’re missing out on potential audience.

(Caveat: AI visibility can be a challenge to track because attribution limits. Take it with a grain of salt.)

How to measure it: Google Search Console currently provides impression data for AI Overviews (but no clicks). Other tools such as Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit, Trisolute News Dashboard and more offer also offer brand AI visibility scores.

The metrics that matter less

Keyword rankings

What it is: A publication’s organic ranking positions in search for specific keywords.

What it measures: Performance on search and how well you rank for keywords. Keyword ranking tells you where your search traffic is coming from and where Google recognizes you have authority.

GSC and other SEO tools provide the average position for a keyword in SERPs.

Why it matters less: Even ranking in “Position 1” often means appearing below sponsored results, an AI Overview and various other SERP features. Ranking, even in the first position, doesn’t guarantee a reader will click a result like it once did; the answer may simply be summarized by an AIO.

GSC reports an average position, but with increasing personalization in search results (notably Preferred Sources), the SERP layout someone sees in New York may vary greatly from London, and the position metric lacks nuance.

What to do instead: Consider multiple metrics and shift your focus. Instead of average ranking, look at total clicks, conversions, CTR and engaged time as a result of ranking for a set of keywords. Ask yourself, what’s the business and editorial impact of this ranking?

Raw page view numbers

What it is: The total number of times a page is viewed in a browser.

What it measures: Volume without value. Total page views to a story in isolation is not meaningful. Hundreds of thousands of page views look great, but if none of those readers subscribe, register or read more than a single story, it’s sugar rush clicks.

(Important caveat: Ad revenue on from high-volume traffic is necessary for some publications; for these sites, pair volume metrics with engagement data. Consider qualified reach: what is the share of page views among returning or frequent website visitors?)

Why it matters less: As Google’s ecosystem changes and the opportunity to generate massive traffic on low-lift content vanishes, this metric should not be counted on.

What to do instead: Shift to engagement and loyalty metrics. Instead of just page view numbers, consider KPIs that reflect direct relationship building: pages per visit, engaged time, conversions, homepage visits, etc. Combined metrics like recency, frequency and volume (RFV), which reflect the depth of the relationship between you and your readers, are more valuable.

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THE 201

How to make metrics matter more

A single metric shows where you are right now. Layer on additional dimensions like segmentation or performance over time to get more valuable insight.

Segmentation: How the metric performs against a segment of your data. If measuring conversions from search, what topic or section sees the highest return?
Performance: If the metric is rising, falling or staying the same over time. Month-over-month and year-over-year are fairly standard periods to measure.

Together, this can show how and where your efforts are paying off — and where you need to adjust.

For example: Falling organic traffic following website development changes indicates your tactics are not working and should be reconsidered. A growing number of page views from branded search demonstrates increasing reader familiarity and loyalty.

No single metric is enough to measure success.

A mix of metrics is always going to tell a clearer, more holistic story. Start with clearly defined business and editorial goals: metrics should clearly align with your north star.

The bottom line: It’s not 2023 anymore. Understanding if your search strategy is on the right track requires more nuanced metrics. Consider AI visibility, branded traffic and loyalty metrics as central KPIs, while downgrading the importance of topline figures like page views.

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What we learned at NESS 2026

WTF is SEO? — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 17:21:35 GMT

Hello, and welcome back. Jessie and Shelby here, back from the most perfect fall weekend in Toronto. Jessie started with the utterly unhinged Elizabeth Holmes documentary (please: send me your takes) and ended with the incomparable Zadie Smith. Shelby spent her time watching a concerning amount of football and building Lego with five different candles b…

🎟️ FIVE free tickets to NESS | Ask a News SEO with Barry Adams and John Shehata

WTF is SEO? — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:21:42 GMT

Hello, and welcome back. Jessie and Shelby here — in your inboxes a second time this week with a bonus send!

This week: A special Ask a News SEO interview with the co-founders of the News and Editorial SEO Summit (NESS), Barry Adams and John Shehata.

🎉🎉🎉 We’re thrilled to be partnering with NESS — again! — to give away tickets to this year’s conference. We have FIVE (5) free tickets for NESS. Scroll to the end of this email for details about the giveaway.

Let’s get it.

THE INTERVIEW

WTF is SEO?: AI is everywhere. It’s on social media. It’s in email. It upended the traditional relationship between Google and publishers. Is AI the thing to blame for what some publishers see as declining traffic?

Barry Adams: No. AI accelerated the process, but it started probably around 2018 with algorithm updates when Google decided to force publishers to stay in their lane, focus on their core editorial specialties and not let them rank for anything and everything anymore. Before 2018, I think publishers could rank for pretty much any topic they wrote about because of the sitewide authority signals they had accumulated. Google saw that as pretty unfair.

[Google] focused heavily on authority signals, and topic authority especially. Publishers were sort of veered into their lane — you can rank for what you’re known as, what your editorial specialties are and outside of that, Google won’t give you a lot of space.

AI made it possible for Google to answer direct questions with a very high degree of confidence in search results, making it obsolete for publishers to write about commodity content.

Publishers got used to that free, endlessly renewable source of traffic. Now, with AI, suddenly that is not an endlessly renewable source of traffic. Publishers have to take every visit seriously and treat their visitors with respect. It changes the dynamic.

Publishers are complaining about this very loudly, but I genuinely believe that we are now at the start of a new era where every visitor counts, where every Google click counts. That forces publishers to re-evaluate the relationship they want to build with their readers and make sure every click is meaningful and delivers a positive experience so the user wants to keep coming back. In the long run, that will end up with a healthier publisher ecosystem with a better relationship between publishers and readers.

John Shehata: In this new era, there’s a shift in user behaviour. The challenge is publishers have been used to Google being the source of traffic for so many years. When we used to have Yahoo directories, sites were getting all their traffic from there. Then, from Yahoo directories to Google. Then, Facebook came and flooded publishers with traffic, to the point that Facebook was driving more traffic than Google. Then that went away.

Publishers got stuck with Google as the main source of traffic, and then Google added Discover on top of that. Suddenly, now user behaviour is that they like AI answers.

All the commodity content is meaningless right now. This is a big problem for publishers, but that traffic was not that great or qualified of an audience. We are in a new era, and publishers are just trying to figure out what can replace that lost traffic.

NESS is also giving back. The conference set aside 40 tickets for SEO professionals between roles and the next generation of journalists.

Learn more

WTF is SEO?: What’s something that you both have seen in terms of almost benefiting publishers with AI? How do publishers look at this with a positive lens or even a neutral lens to adapt their strategy?

John Shehata: AI has benefited publishers in a huge way within workflows and inner streams. It helped audience teams do mundane tasks much faster, too. AI helps with stuff that you don’t need a human to write, and it could be helpful for a shingle or a part of an article (not the article itself).

The major complaint is the traffic, but a lot of newsrooms have actually embraced AI to help their writers create better content and faster processes.

Barry Adams: To bring it back to the traffic part, some publishers that have, for example, very hard paywalls. They do proper in-depth reporting and investigative journalism and don’t mind being a cited source in an AI Overview or an AI-generated answer. The AI gives users a summary and then refers to them as the original source and the in-depth, detailed reporting. They see that as a pipeline for subscriptions. They don’t get a lot of clicks from AI, but those clicks have a high conversion rate to subscriptions.

If you start with the quality of your journalism and adding something of value, you shouldn’t necessarily be afraid of AI.

It’s okay to be there as a cited source or as a summarized answer. Readers who want in-depth stuff, those are the readers that you want to convert to subscribers. Then, they will come to your website from the AI summary from that cited source, and hopefully subscribe or enter that funnel. Maybe not a hard subscription straight away; maybe a trial, maybe a newsletter, whatever it is.

The publishers that feel really under threat are the ones that know, on an intrinsic level, that they’re not really doing anything that others aren’t also doing. They don’t have a unique selling point. It’s causing an existential crisis among these publishers.

It’s highly ironic that news as an industry is very fast-moving — probably the fastest-moving industry that exists — but news companies are the slowest-moving organizations I have ever worked with. Tectonic plates move faster than news organizations.

This is not a time to be a slow mover. You have to be quick, adapt, and refocus your efforts on things that you know work.

Plenty of publishers are walking the right path. There are case studies of publishers whose traffic and revenue are growing because they are focusing on their quality signals and audience loyalty. This is what you need to do as a publisher to survive. If you’re not willing to make that existential shift in your business and in your operations, then yeah, you’re going to have a very bad time.

John Shehata: Even for reputable publishers, the challenge is they have been dependent on Google as the main revenue stream, and this is the problem. They might be creating great content and doing all the right things, but the majority of their revenue was from display ads. They haven’t pivoted away from “revenue equals traffic” or “traffic equals revenue.” They’re stuck.

Revenue is a big deal here, but publishers have to build relationships with their audience. They have to build paywalls for content that users actually care about, They have to build their newsletters. Now, publishers find themselves way behind and trying to catch up. Even for good publishers, most are stuck because they have been dependent on Google as the main revenue stream.

Barry Adams: You don’t want traffic as your north star KPI. Publishers focusing on traffic as a main KPI are stuck in 2015. You need to focus on loyalty, engagement, repeat visits, even what your readers think about your brand, and trying to quantify that. That will eventually translate into subscriptions and other forms of revenue.

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WTF is SEO?: What are the North Stars that publishers need to be focused on right now?

Barry Adams: Branded search. If you’re looking at search, look at branded search. How often do people specifically seek out your brand? Then, look at the loyalty mechanisms on your website. If you have a dedicated app, how many app installs do you get? Measure that; that needs to go up. If you do newsletters, are your newsletter subscriptions growing?

Also, on-page engagement metrics: How many pages or articles read on average before they leave the website. The bounce rate needs to be low. All those metrics combined paint a picture of the kind of experience you’re presenting to your users.

Any single one of them can be misinterpreted. Take them into account in a holistic sense and get a gauge of what kind of website you are, how pleasant you are to use, and if you are delivering the kind of content that your readers want from you.

WTF is SEO?: If you’re a publisher and you’re worried about the future of SEO and broadly audience, who are the main speakers at NESS that you should be paying attention to?

John Shehata: We divided the conference into three specific themes. We still believe on Day 1 that SEO remains the foundation. Even with AI and all different things, audience growth in general and SEO are still the foundation for everything. Edward Hyatt is talking about moving from reach to paywalls and relationships, which is very important.

On Day 2, we believe that AI is the future. Younger generations will be going first to AI to ask questions, look for information, and search for news, maybe in addition to visual elements like Reels, etc. I love “SEO Automation at an Enterprise Scale” with Mark Williams-Cook, it’s going to be great.

On Day 3, we end with “Beyond Google.” We’re talking about things like increasing loyalty, podcasts, newsletters, Reddit and video. Video is very important: YouTube is the most cited platform in AI and AI Overviews.

Barry Adams: I look forward to every single one. I’m particularly looking forward to Day 1: Nicola Agius talking about Google Discover; on Day 2, Chris Carter talking about AI, and Chris Wagner talking about semantic SEO — very much looking forward to both of those. On Day 3: Sophie Loftus about newsletters, and Sarah McDowell for podcasts. Those are the ones I am specifically looking forward to.

WTF is SEO?: What was the philosophy when you approached the NESS programming this year?

Barry Adams: From the moment we founded NESS, it was always about being a community. We always knew SEO is a cross-disciplinary activity that touches on many different aspects of an organization. We cannot hide from the fact that search has become a less important traffic source for publishers in many ways, but at the same time, it is still a pivotal channel and the foundation of audience growth.

Attendees sit in audience growth teams at big publishers or work as consultants for big publishers, and they know very well how it all fits together. Search can’t sit in a separate silo not talking to the video people or not talking to the podcast people, because all of those aspects also touch on search.

I think that’s the underlying philosophy of NESS: to build that audience growth community where everybody can share their expertise and help each other survive this AI-first era.

John Shehata: Many publishers have SEO as a discipline within audience growth. SEO was the most dominant because most traffic was coming from SEO. But even when I was at Condé Nast, my team was SEO, social, newsletters and so on, all together as one team, all speaking together. We have to approach it more as audience growth for news publishers.

Publishers need to change the mindset that search is the product. News is the product. Search, social and all these different channels are just the medium where we put our products and distribute our products. This is happening in so many different places. Who knows when we meet again in ten years if we’re still doing this; the medium will probably be a hologram or watching news on your glasses. Search is just a medium; it’s not the product.

Here’s how to enter our NESS giveaway 🎉

Enter the NESS giveaway now!

Contest ends October 9th at 11:59 a.m. ET. Winners will be announced on Friday in the SEO is Journalism Slack and contacted via email.

NESS will run October 13-15th. All event details can be found on their website.

Catch up: NESS recaps

Have something you’d like us to discuss? Send us a note on Twitter (Jessie or Shelby) or to our email: seoforjournalism@gmail.com.

Written by Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley

Google Search Console: What to know

WTF is SEO? — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 17:21:56 GMT

Hello, and welcome back. Jessie here, back from the very last week of outdoor sports for the year, with my fast-pitch, slo-pitch and three-pitch leagues wrapping up (😭). It’s officially the offseason, also known as the hard pivot to crafting.

This week: Google Search Console — again! In recent years, Google released several updates to it free toolSearch Console, used to track, monitor and improve your site’s performance across the Search ecosystem. We updated our GSC primer, with fresh notes on social platform tracking and AI impressions for Discover and Search. Plus: tips from our fall community call!

Thanks to Trisolute News Dashboard for making our community call possible — and to for sharing his insights on making the most of GSC’s many technical reports. Watch the video recap here or peep the notes. What should we cover next?

RIP, the old Search Console design! So much has changed. Photo by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash

Let’s get it.

THE 101

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool that helps monitor and improve your site’s presence in Google’s search ecosystems.

It includes reports on your content’s performance in Google Search, Discover and News, alongside technical reports on the infrastructure of your site, including Core Web Vitals, or the crawl status of pages. Recent updates provide data on AI impressions, and reporting on the queries that led people on Google to your social content.

Once you have access to GSC (more on that here) there’s a wealth of information to be gleaned.

However, there are limitations with the data: it’s only a 16-month window, there’s accuracy issues due to data bundling and privacy protections (it hides low-volume or unique long-tail queries), and only 1,000 rows of data can be exported easily (there are workarounds using Google’s API or Looker). SEO and audience editors should properly caveat their reporting.

Overall, it’s best to treat GSC data as directional, focusing on patterns and performance trends rather than concrete numbers.

THE HOW TO

The Overview and Insights Performance reports

What it is: The Performance and Insights reports provide a topline view of your site’s overall performance on Search results and Discover.

The Performance overview in GSC.

In the Insight tab, there are key stats like top countries, the share of branded vs. non-branded traffic, and additional traffic sources (i.e., News search or video).

A screenshot from Google showing query groups, Top Countries and Additional traffic sources in GSC.

What it can do: Overview and Insights are helpful snapshots, providing a trendline of your general performance on search.

“Queries leading to your site” groups similar queries together (i.e., “news” might contain specific terms like “news today,” “breaking news” and “latest headlines”), and are categorized as top, trending up and trending down, making it easier to spot the trend.

Performance on Search results report

What it is: An overview of your site’s performance in Search (including generative AI). It includes filters for time range and search types, to help narrow down the data by query, page, country and more.

There is also a Generative AI sub-report for Search.

You can track four key metrics for these filters in the Performance report:

Clicks: How many times users clicked your site’s content;
Impressions: How often your site was displayed;
Average click-through rate (CTR): Clicks over impressions;
Average position: Your site’s average position in search results.

Reporting can be viewed on several timescales — from as little as the last 24 hours (excellent for breaking news), up to 16 months (useful for measuring year-over-year performance) or with various date range comparisons like the last 28 days year-over-year.

What insights can you glean?

Your site’s recent and historical performance. Time filters allow for reporting on recent and historical performance, while Compare allows editors to contrast periods (i.e., the last three months versus the previous period, or prior year). Custom filtering allows for even more specificity.

Time and date filtering allows you to measure and compare your site’s performance over specific ranges.

The date range filters — for the last 24 hours to three months, or longer 6- to 16-month periods — along with period-over-period reporting allow editors to measure performance over time. Is your content earning more clicks (compared to last year)? Are you ranking higher, on average, than the same period last year?

🔥 Pro tip: GSC Calculations automatically calculate and display percentage changes in GSC.

Your site’s key page formats. Using the Page filters, refine your dataset to see all pages with a certain URL string/parameter (i.e., “/live/” for blog or “/topic/” for tag pages). See the queries that rank for this type of content (along with clicks, etc.), and the specific URLs earning visibility on Google.

Your site’s key queries. Using the Query filter, refine your dataset to look at pages that rank for specific terms (use Queries containing to look at topics or figures — “trump” or “black friday” or “news”).

The ‘By keyword’ filter in GSC.

Regex (while sometimes finicky to write) allows for more granularity.

🔥 Pro tip: The Better Regex in Search Console Chrome extension has preset regex functions: from URLs containing a parameter to queries with Transactional intent. The extension can also save custom queries.

Your site’s branded search health. Under the Query filter, the Branded filter shows terms mentioning your brand, domain, or brand-specific products and services (including common misspellings), as determined by Google’s AI.

Branded searches can be a proxy for user loyalty, and can reveal what topics or formats are closely associated with your publication.

Terms like “Guardian football” or “NYT spelling bee” are searches associated with coverage areas or editorial tools; tracking this data tells you if you have a growing loyal audience.

The ‘Branded’ vs ‘Non-branded queries’ filtering allows for loyalty tracking.

What AI data is available? Impressions. The new Generative AI sub-report only includes impressions.

A Google screenshot showing the new Generative AI report showing impressions to a site’s content from AI Mode, AI Overviews and similar features on Google.

It’s possible this will change soon; as part of the U.K.’s CMA ruling, Google must provide publishers with “clear and detailed metrics on user engagement with their search content in search generative AI features.” It’s likely this will include clicks globally.

What other data is available? Google launched a filter in September splitting Text-based and Multimodal searches. It enables publishers to see searches done via Google Lens, images uploaded to Search or the “Search this image” feature led to their pages.

A Google screenshot showing the new Multimodal search type filter enables publishers to see the visual searches that led readers to their site.

Why it matters: Performance reporting for Search is an essential part of understanding your overall performance on Google. Use the built-in dimensions and filters to refine your dataset for more useful reporting (and expert the filtered data to Google Sheets or as a CSV for further analysis).

Performance report for Discover

What it is: A report on key metrics about your site’s performance on Discover. It tracks total clicks, impressions and click-through rate (CTR), as well as page-level performance for URLs featured in Discover feed.

There is also a Generative AI sub-report for Discover.

The Discover performance report, with clicks, impressions and CTR available.

What AI data is available? Impressions. Like the Search report, Google only includes Generative AI Discover impressions.

What it can do: Discover is not driven by specific searches (it’s algorithmically curated); GSC reporting is relatively limited: date ranges and the comparison tooling can track performance over time. There’s no data about how or why your content is selected. Use the Page filter to see a subset of URLs with a specific string. Exporting this data to a spreadsheet allows for deeper analysis.

🔥 Pro tip: After importing the data into Google Sheets, you can pull in titles, meta descriptions or featured image URLs (using IMPORTXML or similar functions) to reveal content patterns. Are specific headline formats driving higher engagement? Which verticals or topic clusters consistently see above-average CTR?

Why it matters: Discover is sometimes thought of as a black box for publishers and is a notoriously volatile platform. Track performance on Discover to understand the topics, formats and angels that work best for your site.

Performance reports for social channels

What it is: Social media channels can be added to GSC as Properties, just like your site’s domain. This allows publishers to track how their social and video content (from platforms like Instagram, TikTok, X/Twitter or YouTube) performs across Google’s surfaces.

A screenshot of GSC shows top-performingYouTube content.

What it can do: Publishers can track traffic trends (e.g., if an older video suddenly pops off), identify top-performing content, see the search terms people use to find social content, compare formats (e.g., short vs. long-form YouTube video) and more.

Screenshot from Google’s new guide shows a suggestion for comparing short vs. long-form content on Instagram or YouTube.

The report provides insights for:

Traffic over time: How many clicks content garnered over 28 days, across different parts of Google.
Top-performing content: The posts or videos with the most engagement;
Top-referring queries: The terms people use to find your channel, or specific videos and posts.
Audience breakdown: Which region/countries your audience is in.

Screenshot shows the queries that led the most people to the site’s Instagram content.

Why it matters: Google’s ecosystem is changing. It’s becoming more visual, more snackable and pulling from more places. This social media reporting allows publishers a more holistic view on how their brand appears across Google.

Opting out of generative AI

What it is: GSC now includes a section in settings for Search generative AI control. This manages your site’s inclusion in generative AI features on Google, including AI Overview, AI Mode and AI features on Discover.

A screenshot of the Search generative AI control section of GSC. Publishers have the ability to opt out of Google’s generative AI features.

What it can do: Site owners can choose whether to include or exclude their site’s links and content in Search generative AI features. Opting in (the default) allows Google to include your site’s content in Search generative AI features, including as links and helping to ground the AI responses. (Google explains grounding as “the ability to connect model output to verifiable sources of information.” Opting out excludes all your site’s content — meaning no traffic or visibility from generative AI features.

Google says the opt out setting “isn’t used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search,” but that a site’s content “may still be used to power Google Search as a whole.”

Sites can consider Google-Extended (to limit training of the models used in generative AI) or noindex (to completely block Google) to further limit Google’s access to your site.

Why it matters: Without click metrics, it remains a challenge for publishers to fully assess the risk and benefits of opting out of generative AI responses. It’s unclear how widely this will be adopted.

Technical reports in GSC

What it is: There are many technical reports available in GSC. As outlined in our fall community call, focus on reports with essential information about user experience, site speed, indexing and crawlability.

A technical report in GSC, the Pages report tells site owners why Google didn’t index URLs.

What it can do: Key reports in GSC reveal important technical health considerations for your site:

Core Web Vitals report: CWV are a minor ranking factor, but they do have a direct impact on the overall user experience of your site (a direct ranking factor and important for readers). Sites want to see mostly green (“good URLs”) in this reporting, but some yellow indicators (“URLs need improvement”) are normal.
Crawl stats report: How Google crawls your website. Average response time is a key metric to review, as it’s a measure of how fast your website responds to every request that Google bot. Google crawls based on time, not pages — so the faster the website, the more URLs Google can crawl in its limited budget. Google prefers 200 milliseconds or faster, but 600 seconds is generally acceptable.
Pages report: The index status of known URLs, with explanation of why Google chose not to index a page. Some things in this report matter (like “Crawled not indexed,” which reflects crawl waste or poor site quality), while other data (like “404 not found” since 404s are normal and don’t waste crawl budget) matters less.

Why it matters: The foundation of all good SEO is solid technical SEO. Sites that are easy to crawl and offer positive user experience will out-perform shoddy or slow sites.

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The bottom line: GSC offers so much data. Given its limitations and caveats, consider the data more directional than precise. But, it is essential for understanding the topics, keywords and content formats that drive the most traffic for your site on Google.

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THE JOBS LIST

Audience or SEO jobs in journalism. Want to include a position for promotion? Email us.

Reuters is hiring a Global Audience Editor (London, U.K., hybrid).
The Times and Sunday Times is hiring a Newsletter Editor (London, U.K.).
The Globe and Mail is accepting applications for its 2027 Summer Jobs Program (Toronto, Canada).
The Economist is hiring a Head of Strategy for The Economist Pro (London, U.K.).
CNBC is hiring a Homepage and News Editor (New Jersey, hybrid).
American Public Media Group is hiring a Manager of Audience Analytics (St. Paul, Minnesota, hybrid).
The Wall Street Journal is hiring a Senior Analyst, Newsroom Data (New York, N.Y., full time).

STARTING SOON: Join our GSC community call with Barry Adams [with Trisolute]

WTF is SEO? — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:21:51 GMT

Hello WTF is SEO? community!

Join us at 11 a.m. ET/4 p.m. GMT!

Join Jessie and Shelby and Barry Adams for our fall community call, in partnership with Trisolute News Dashboard!

Subscribe now

Google has made a lot of incremental updates to GSC, while leaving a lot to be desired. We’ll cover what new insights you can glean, plus the foundational things to not forget. Barry will also run through the top technical reports and how to think about GSC for the future of search.

We’ll cover:

Recent updates and changes, including AI Overview dashboard;
Social account integration and how to best use it;
Technical reports to keep an eye on;
How to best use GSC, period.

We’re cutting through the noise to help you figure out how to actually make use of the (frustratingly limited!) data Google provides. If you ever wondered how to better utilize this tool or what the future is, this is the call for you.

We’ll open up the chat to explore how to turn this data into insights, as well as turning insights into actions.

Bring your specific hurdles, your “do I need to care about this?” questions and any quandaries.

Join now!

Join our community call on Google Search Console:

Here are the details for the panel:
- Date: September 30, 2026
- Time: 11 a.m. ET / 4 p.m. GMT
- Host Time Zone: Eastern - New York/Toronto
How to join us on Google Meet:
- Video call link: Fall community call [with Trisolute News Dashboard]
  - Google Meet joining info
    - Video call link: https://meet.google.com/aqj-cnei-zrg
    - Or dial: ‪(CA) +1 587-786-7455‬ PIN: ‪924 618 430‬#
    - More phone numbers: https://tel.meet/aqj-cnei-zrg?pin=9896975722020

We have a lot to cover. Please be prompt — we will start on time!

Please note: By joining this call, you agree to abide by our WTF is SEO? community guidelines. Failure to respect our guidelines will result in your removal from the community call, at the discretion of WTF is SEO?.

ALSO!

We’re thrilled to share that Trisolute News Dashboard, a widely used tool in the news SEO community, is our presenting sponsor for the call!

The Trisolute News Dashboard is THE best-in-class, award-winning news SEO tool serving online news publishers since 2012. We demystify the news SEO universe and increase publishers’ visibility with near-real-time data and actionable insights while helping to build search authority on Google News, SERPs and Discover.

Please reply directly to this email if you have any questions you want answered during the call. We’re keen to make this as interactive and useful as possible.

Your pals in news SEO,

Jessie and Shelby

Recommended reading before the call:

Have something you’d like us to discuss? Send us a note on Twitter (Jessie or Shelby) or to our email: seoforjournalism@gmail.com.

Written by Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley

What is entity SEO?

WTF is SEO? — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 17:22:47 GMT

Hello, and welcome back. Shelby here, reporting live from beautiful Chicago, Illinois. The Athletic brought its football contingent together so we could operate in-person like a real newsroom for an NFL Sunday. Much deep dish pizza was eaten and many profanities were yelled at televisions. The Ravens somehow pulled off what can only be described as a miracle with a last-second field goal. Objectivity was not in the newsroom then!

This week: Entity SEO 101. The concept of entity SEO is not new, but is increasingly important in an AI world. We explain what it is and why it matters. We’ll go more in-depth in another newsletter.

🚨 Happening this week! Barry Adams will join our September 30 community call to discuss all updates to Google Search Console, presented in partnership with Trisolute News Dashboard! Register and ask us a question!

Let’s get it.

THE 101

What is entity SEO?

Entity SEO is the concept that publishers should create and optimize content on clearly defined, real-world topics rather than focusing on standalone, isolated keywords. Traditional SEO has prioritized targeting specific terms with high search volume, regardless of whether the subject was covered in-depth by the site. Entity SEO moves beyond that, considering which topics (entities) a site wants to own and cover in-depth, with expert knowledge.

While the name may seem “new,” entity SEO really is a long-standing concept — focus on things, not strings, just like Google has said since 2012. Google’s Knowledge Graph system is a reflection of the company’s continued pursuit (for better or worse) to display the top sites for a specified category, not keyword.

Friend of the newsletter and audience strategist wrote in-depth about how entities are the foundation of modern SEO. Large language models (LLMs), the machines that power most artificial intelligence systems, evaluate content and its relevance to a prompt by string matching of content and the semantic connection between it. As AI becomes a mainstay in the search ecosystem, publishers understanding how LLMs use entity analysis to evaluate content is imperative.

Entity SEO focuses on owning the topics your publication is an expert in, and doing it across the entire internet. This requires sites to write in-depth, helpful journalism, while connecting it altogether with internal and external links, on-site and on external platforms.

Entity SEO takes brand awareness to the next level. It is the crux of how publishers perform well on the internet and protect against spam penalties or straying too far from their lane.

A screenshot from Harry Clarkson-Bennett’s entity SEO analysis that explains how to build a brand with clear expertise on the internet.

🔗 Read more: Entity SEO: The definitive guide

Why is entity SEO important for news publishers in the age of AI?

Put simply: In an era where AI Overviews show up on over 43 per cent of search engine results pages, it is crucial that publishers lean into the topics they are experts on and can cover constantly with authority.

In the last several years, searching as a behaviour has evolved, moving beyond thinking about “search” as just Google, and understanding that topic authority and E.E.A.T play a crucial part in how sites are selected across LLMs, chatbots and AI surfaces. The more you are regarded as an expert on a topic, the more likely you are to be cited or mentioned in an AI response.

“Generative Engine Optimization,” then, is just another fancy name for entity SEO. AI models do not evaluate web pages by keywords; they process everything as part of its summarized response, to understand meaning, truthfulness and authority.

AI models require a clear understanding of entities that are covered by a site when conducting information retrieval. It must be very clear — through links, category pages and breadcrumbs, among other on- and off-page tactics — what topic the story covers and how it connects to the greater topic.

Additionally, entity SEO is a surefire way to avoid a spam penalty and provide quality information over commodity content. Sites that just focused on search volume — writing on an array of topics with the focus on keywords and just trying to rank well on Google — no struggle to see the same return. Commodity content is easily synthesized.

To stand out, publishers need to provide original perspectives, first-party data and analysis or clear expertise that shows they’ve been hands-on with the topic in question.

Here are a few other reasons why entity SEO should be the focus of your publisher strategy:

It goes beyond the search results. Entity SEO ensures that you are showing what topics your site is an expert in across the entire internet. As Google provides more information on how social media channels perform on SERPs, it’s critical that everything about your brand is connected. (Entity recognition is also extremely crucial for Google Discover, which reflects a user’s topics of interest.)
Authorship is prevention for AI slop. People want to trust humans, and they want to know that a real person is giving them advice and quality information. Journalists should showcase all of their expertise on their personal channels, while linking to their author bio and all of their stories. Additionally, using Schema.org structured data markup (sameAs attributes for things like LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Google’s Knowledge Profile, etc.) can help Google understand the connection between various sites that have information on a similar person.
It protects a brand from “entity drift.” For a very long time, it was easy for sites to write on any topic and see traffic from Google. This has changed. Google’s algorithms learn what sites are about and will distinguish them based on such. If a site is writing too much outside of its topic authority, this could confuse search engines (and readers) about the publisher’s core authority, and hinder its performance.

As traffic struggles continue, publishers should not chase the click. They must focus on the qualified click — a person who really values the coverage and wants to explore further.

In a future newsletter, we’ll dive into the best practices for considering entity SEO, including how to best set up your site for topics.

The bottom line: Entity SEO is not a new concept, but has become a pivotal part of a publisher’s search strategy. Consider what your publication is an expert in, or wants to be known for, and lean into this where you can. It is vital to avoid any spam penalties or reasons for LLMs to discredit your coverage.

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Ask a News SEO: Dan Oshinsky

WTF is SEO? — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 17:21:35 GMT

Hello, and welcome back. Jessie and Shelby here, here, reporting live from beautiful Calgary, Canada! We’re back from a whirlwind week spent presenting at Alberta’s premier magazine conference and exploring the mountains. We did an 18 kilometre hike up one of Canada’s best trails, saw TWO (!!) bears and only had approximately 10 diet cokes. A winning week all around. 🐻

This week: AI is everywhere — including the inbox. We talked to Dan Oshinsky, founder of Inbox Collective, about the ways artificial intelligence may be coming for what was once an intimate place, and how publishers can prepare.

🚨 Happening soon: Barry Adams will join our September 30 community call to discuss all updates to Google Search Console, presented in partnership with Trisolute News Dashboard! Register and ask us a question!

Let’s get it.

THE INTERVIEW

WTF is SEO?: AI has come for the inbox, once thought of as the last place that it could reach. How should publishers think about this change?

Dan Oshinsky: The AI inbox is the third big change in email in the last 25-plus years.

Everyone got into email in the late 90s, early 2000s. Then, there was the rise of the mobile inbox between 2007 to 2010 with the first BlackBerry, then the iPhone. Now, there’s this. There haven’t been a lot of changes for email. As a result, a lot of publishers have been a little bit lazy with their strategy compared to what they might do with SEO, where there’s so much change constantly.

With email, it’s been the same thing. And for the first time in a long time, people have to really think about their strategy and produce something that is genuinely useful, that people want to make time for.

The good news with the AI inbox is that if you produce good stuff, you’re going to be okay. The mediocre emails, the emails that people sometimes read, those people are in a lot of trouble in the AI inbox. But if your content is really good, and people make space for you on a regular basis, you’re gonna be just fine.

WTF is SEO?: For the publishers, what is the best defence against being ‘punished’ in an AI inbox?

Dan Oshinsky: Adding personality, adding voice and making sure the content feels hugely relevant to readers is really important. The rise of the creator space — platforms like Substack and Beehiiv — coming into the mix five or six years ago meant brands like The New York Times said, “our competition isn’t just The Washington Post anymore. It’s Isaac Saul, a guy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with a newsletter called Tangle breaking down what the news.”

Creators or independent newsletters forced a lot of people to step up their game. Because of that, some of the impacts of this AI inbox will be lessened. People aren’t going to react in a panicked way to that.

That said, there are still lots of very mediocre newsletters. Some of them will face a little bit of reckoning.

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WTF is SEO?: If I have a great email product, how do I tell people about it? What are my off- and on-site efforts?

Dan Oshinsky: It was definitely easier to get someone to sign up 10 years ago. There was less competition. When I first started at BuzzFeed, just having a non-terrible newsletter meant people were shocked. That’s changed a lot.

Now, levers to pull are high value touch points on your website: registration walls, after someone pays to subscribe for your product or starts a free trial, having a welcome flow where they can sign up for more newsletters. Think about events or lead magnets to collect an email address. Partnerships with other organizations are super important: if there are other newsletters to work and collaborate with, that can help you grow. Paid — email and social — is becoming a bigger piece of the puzzle, too.

Some things that once worked, like a sign-up box at the bottom of stories, won’t work as well in 2026 as it did in 2015.

WTF is SEO?: What are some of the signals an AI inbox could be picking up on?

Dan Oshinsky: It’s very much a mystery box. They [email vendors] don’t say. Historically, what it’s been based on is some sort of positive engagement: an open, a click, a star, moving it to a folder, replying or forwarding it. Something that says this email was unusually valuable and I took action as a result.

My expectation is that it will probably be something similar in the future — that the AI is looking for some sort of positive engagement. And the reverse is true, too: an unsubscribe, marking as spam, deleting emails or just ignoring them would be negative signals.

WTF is SEO?: Saturation seems like a real thing in email inboxes. Is there too much saturation to build an audience?

Dan Oshinsky: That’s been the fear for 15 years. “Everyone gets too many emails.” People working in the media oversubscribe. We’re not the norm.

I tell teams, “Go ask your cousin, your mom, your friend how many newsletters they subscribe to.” The answer is often one or two.

Media people tend to oversubscribe and there’s a little bit of panic there. But, it does come back to making your email unusually relevant. Have a really high bar for your email. Ask, “if we’re going to send a newsletter today, is it really going to resonate with a reader? Or am I just sending something to send something?”

Some teams send a couple of breaking news alerts a day, regardless of whether it’s really breaking news, because people tend to click. But, that strategy can run its course real quick, and it’s going to backfire.

Don’t worry too much about the saturation, especially for newsletters if it’s going to be something that’s incredibly important to you — related to your job or industry — or a topic that you are passionate about. People make time for those sorts of things.

WTF is SEO?: How important is authorship for a newsletter? And what do you recommend to your clients when it comes to voice?

Dan Oshinsky: To showcase an author, you can do it a bunch of different ways. I’ve seen teams add headshots and a byline at the bottom of a newsletter, or a little note at the top of the newsletter that says, “Hi, so-and-so, here’s today’s date and what’s in today’s issue.”

Some brands have the people who write the newsletter in the header image, so the first thing you see when opening the email is a face. But even just writing it in a style that makes it clear that there is a person behind it is good.

I also have always recommended that you have a person in mind when you write. Visualize the person who is sitting down to read this thing. As you read and edit the newsletter, ask: “Did I really write for them? Would this be useful for them?” Or will they say, “No, no thanks, there’s nothing in it here for me”? Having that person in mind is super important.

Outside of the inbox, there’s the tough to prove, but definitely real effect of being in other places, and showing up in front of folks. Being in the algorithmic channels — YouTube, social media, etc. — and showing up there, even if people don’t directly convert from there. Being in a person’s feed matters.

The anecdotal evidence I have is that if you see and engage with someone on Twitter, YouTube or LinkedIn, you might sign up for their newsletter as a result. It’s not direct, but there is definitely that effect.

Whatever you’re doing — but especially if you’re doing email, and you’re focused on the newsletter space — trying to find ways to build a little bit of extra loyalty beyond the inbox is important. It just reinforces whatever you’re doing in the inbox.

WTF is SEO?: What do you wish you knew about the inbox earlier in your career?

Dan Oshinsky: I’ll give you the joke answer and the real answer.

I got the job at BuzzFeed because I interviewed with them and they said, “we don’t have a job for you, but you seem interesting, come back to us and pitch something.” I came back with newsletters. It’s been a very good career choice for me, but I may have considered different options — like private jet reviews or something a little more luxurious.

The real answer is that some of this stuff comes back to just remembering that you are writing for a single person. Even if you are writing a newsletter for The Guardian, or The Athletic with hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers, at the end of the day, there’s one person reading your email in their inbox, in bed, or at work or in line at Starbucks.

You don’t write for an audience of millions because you’re not a concert performer. You write for an audience of one. The more you keep that in mind, the better your email tends to be.

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AI and Google updates to know

WTF is SEO? — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 17:21:36 GMT

Hello, and welcome back. Jessie and Shelby here, back from jam-packed weekends. Jessie spent the week on Canada’s east coast, soaking up everything the Maritimes had to offer: cute museums, gorgeous red sand beaches — and even vegan donair (review: why? Also: no). Shelby welcomed the 2026 NFL season in style: a Sunday spent watching seven hours of commercial free football. We’re so back, baby.

This week: Google and AI news and updates! Every week it seems there is a new launch or some study on the current state of news SEO and generative AI. In this issue, we go through some of the must-know information from the past few weeks.

Happening soon: will join our September 30 community call to discuss all updates to Google Search Console, presented in partnership with Trisolute News Dashboard! Register and ask us a question!

Let’s get it.

THE 101

Google says its changes to EU search results made Google worse

What happened: After rolling out changes to European search results to comply with EU antitrust regulators (and avoid fines), Google said the tweaks degrade the user experience and will cost businesses more money. Searches related to hotels and flights will now more clearly feature price comparison sites instead of Google’s tools.

These are a result of Google being fined by European Union regulators USD $534- million in July for prioritizing its own services (for shopping, hotels, etc.) in search results. The EU found these contravene its Digital Markets Act (legislation that attempts to limit the power of Big Tech).

The company said these changes mark the biggest reduction in quality in Google’s nearly three-decade existence. Updated European results will highlight “one specialized search engine at the top of the page, followed by two others with fewer details,” according to Reuters.

“These changes degrade the user experience for Europeans — boosting online intermediaries at the expense of local businesses, and removing helpful features people rely on every day. Users outside the EU will not be impacted by these changes,” Nick Fox, Google’s senior vice-president, knowledge & information said.

Google also said that users who were part of testing the experience expressed dissatisfaction, having to use multiple search queries to find the information they were looking for. (Google does not release the methodology for its testing or associated data; reports of dissatisfaction so far only come from Google.)

Why it matters: This is a rare instance of Google reversing course of the prioritization of Google tooling in results. Amid litigation (and claims Google is a monopoly), it’s likely that search results in other markets will be affected.

Google adds play-by-play feed into sports topics, connection to fantasy sports apps

What happened: Google has updated its search results with real-time sports updates, including a Live Game Feed featuring play-by-play timelines, video highlights and social commentary for ongoing NFL games. Google says it ill add college games at some point, too. The experience is multiple scrolls long on mobile and includes all of the basic information, as well as play-by-play cards with information. Additionally, Google launched the ability to connect fantasy sports accounts (like Yahoo Fantasy and Sleeper) directly into AI Mode for personalized lineup recommendations, including who to pick up or drop from weekly waiver wires.

Why it matters: Google was already taking a hefty amount of sports real estate during games. The new features from Google further reduce opportunities for publishers to earn a click. Live journalism/blogs seemed to be one of the last places traffic was viable, but depending on how much Top Stories is incorporated into the experience (which has been hit and miss so far), this could have a major impact. As for fantasy, there is potential for this to be helpful, but it seems hacky upon first try (Shelby note: It broke!).

OpenAI appears to block ads to audio- and image-generation in ChatGPT

What happened: OpenAI, one of the largest artificial intelligence companies on the market, is reportedly restricting some of its competitors from advertising standalone image- and audio-generation products on its platform.

The AI company updated its advertising policies to block standalone image- and audio-generation tools from being prompted in ChatGPT. (Video-generation tools are still permitted.) The unannounced policy change prevents companies like Adobe — a company which took part in OpenAI’s initial advertising pilot — from paid promotion.

The move comes on the heels of OpenAI’s launch of Images 2.5 and Live voice capabilities, both of which are generative AI tools used to create images and audio.

Why it matters: OpenAI is taking a strong stance against these ads as it launches its own tools, limiting exposure of competitors in the most-used chatbot platform.

The Gemini App is now available for Windows

What happened: Google launched a dedicated Gemini desktop application for Windows 10 and 11. Accessible instantly via an Alt + Space shortcut, the app is able to be incorporated into workflows similar to a Chrome tab, enabling users to manage multi-step workflows, draft documents, connect to Google Workspace apps, and generate AI images or videos directly on their PC.

Why it matters: Google’s integration of AI is continuing across all softwares and management systems.

Anthropic report warns about malicious use of AI, calls for global slowdown

What happened: Anthropic released its Threat Intelligence Report last week, which outlines how threat actors are utilizing AI models like Claude across seven main harm areas. While the threats have not resulted in anything tangibly malicious, Anthropic warns that these systems will continue to become more and more capable, and security safeguards will need to scale accordingly. On Saturday, the company’s CEO also published an essay calling for a global slowdown in AI development, days after an engineer quit over concerns about the safety of the technology.

Why it matters: As Anthrophic and OpenAI edge closer to IPO, it’s important to keep a critical eye on how they are approaching major concerns as well as the safeguards needed. The report outlines some of the potentially catastrophic use cases of the technology, but it is part of a broader group of concerns about the role and risks associated with AI in our daily habits — from information gathering to the environment.

Traffic is down for 41 of the 50 biggest news sites in the US

What happened: Traffic at 41 of the biggest 50 U.S. news sites has declined from August 2025 to 2026, according to the latest Similarweb data reported by Press Gazette. Newsweek, the Daily Mail and Business Insider all experienced the biggest drop in traffic, all of which have spoken publicly about declines in their reach since the rollout of AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Men’s Journal and India Times both experienced slight upticks in traffic.

What it means: Many publishers continue to see their traffic decline as they grapple with changes to search results that reduce the need to click. The three sites with significant drops — Newsweek, the Daily Mail and Business Insider — have all announced layoffs in recent years and reorganized audience teams to focus more on building direct audiences.

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THE JOBS LIST

Audience or SEO jobs in journalism. Want to include a position for promotion? Email us.

The Wall Street Journal is hiring an Director of Direct Audience (New York City, New York).

EVEN MORE RECOMMENDED READING

👑 Clara Soteras: How AI is reshaping search intent — what 2 studies reveal.
🤖 Anu Adegbola: Google is testing exact match Search ads in AI Mode.
🧰 Gianluca Fiorelli and Grant Simmons: Tackling technical debt, query drift, and site architecture for AI search.
🔬 Aleyda Solis: How to measure AI search visibility impact and business success.
🛍️ Similarweb: The state of ecommerce in 2026.
🏢 Steve Toth: I tested and tracked 60 LinkedIn posts ranking in Google and AI Overviews. Here’s what the top performers have in common.
🔗 Bengu Sarica Dincer: When attribution looks more precise than the data behind it.
📉 Cyrus Shepard: The 2026 Google ranking factors: Expert survey [featuring Jessie!].
🤔 Sarah Perez: Meta debuts its Muse AI agent. Will consumers trust it?
💬 Barry Schwartz: Almost all PAA answers are now AI Overviews.
💰 Barry Schwartz: Google Merchant Center AI performance: AI search intent, terms & attribution.

What did you think of this week’s newsletter?

(Click to leave feedback.)

Catch up: Last week’s newsletter

Have something you’d like us to discuss? Send us a note on LinkedIn (Jessie or Shelby) or email us (WTF is SEO? Newsletter).

Written by Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley

Join our community call on GSC with Barry Adams [together with Trisolute]

WTF is SEO? — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:21:52 GMT

Hello, WTF is SEO? community!

Mark your calendars! Join Jessie and Shelby and for our next community call, in partnership with Trisolute News Dashboard!

We’ll cover:

Recent updates and changes, including AI Overview dashboard;
Social account integration and how to best use it;
Technical reports to keep an eye on;
How to best use GSC, period.

We’ll open up the chat to explore how to turn this data into insights, as well as turning insights into actions.

Bring your specific hurdles, your “do I need to care about this?” questions and any quandaries.

Here are the details for the panel:

Date: September 30, 2026
Time: 11 a.m. ET / 4 p.m. GMT
Host Time Zone: Eastern - New York/Toronto

How to join us on Google Meet:

Video call link: Fall community call [with Trisolute News Dashboard]
- Google Meet joining info
  - Video call link: https://meet.google.com/aqj-cnei-zrg
  - Or dial: ‪(CA) +1 587-786-7455‬ PIN: ‪924 618 430‬#
  - More phone numbers: https://tel.meet/aqj-cnei-zrg?pin=9896975722020

ALSO!

We’re thrilled to partner with Trisolute News Dashboard, a widely used tool in the news SEO community, for this panel!

The Trisolute News Dashboard is THE best-in-class, award-winning news SEO tool serving online news publishers since 2012. We demystify the news SEO universe and increase publishers’ visibility with near-real-time data and actionable insights while helping to build search authority on Google News, SERPs and Discover.

Please note: By attending this event, you agree to make your name available to Trisolute.

Please reply directly to this email if you have any questions.

Your pals in news SEO,

Jessie and Shelby

Recommended reading before the community call:

Have something you’d like us to discuss? Send us a note on Twitter (Jessie or Shelby) or to our email: seoforjournalism@gmail.com.

Written by Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley

Did AI kill evergreen content? Let's discuss.

WTF is SEO? — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:21:40 GMT

Hello, and welcome back. Jessie and Shelby here, back from the final (😭) weekend of summer. Jessie spent these dog days on a lake, enjoying a kayak, campfire and cooking Vegan Balthazar. Meanwhile, Shelby went to a Blue Jays game by scoring last-minute tickets and built 25 per cent of a daybed by herself. Eldest daughters, unite! We don’t need help!

This week: Does evergreen still work? We convened an incredible lineup of SEOs to ask the question, “in this AI era, what’s the value of durable, repeatable and updatable content for publishers?” Find expert takes from Mark Williams-Cook, Louisa Frahm and Harry Clarkson-Bennett below.

HAPPENING SOON: Barry Adams will join our September 30 community call to talk updates to Google Search Console, presented in partnership with Trisolute News Dashboard! Stay tuned for more info.

Subscribe now

Throwing it back to one of our first-ever published topics: our love of trees. Photo by Michael Benz on Unsplash

Let’s get it.

THE INTERVIEW

WTF is SEO?: Explain in your own words what evergreen content is.

Mark Williams-Cook: Evergreen content is content that is relevant and can be updated a few times over a period of years with very little structural maintenance.

Something you can publish and reuse over time, unlike news. “How to make a great vegan lasagna,” for example. That’s not going to change too much over time.

Louisa Frahm: I’ve advocated for evergreen content alongside utility content throughout my news SEO career. Evergreen content is durable, authoritative content that can remain relevant over time.

It’s not content that needs to be massively revised on a regular basis, but if you want it to pop up in traditional search and AI modules during timely windows, it needs to be regularly refreshed, updated, and recirculated.

Harry Clarkson-Bennett: Resilient, repeatable content that provides value year after year.

WTF is SEO?: What historically has been the real value for publishers of evergreen content and how is that different now?

Louisa Frahm: Historically, it was a good way to showcase your brand’s expertise and unique value, and then create targeted topical hubs that can build long-term authority. The primary performance metrics were clicks and accumulated traffic over time.

Where that’s shifting — because the entire industry is shifting — especially with AI Overviews, is that click-through rates are down. We can’t evaluate search performance by clicks alone.

Even though clicks are down, effective evergreen content can still feed into brand visibility and reputation.

I previously conducted these types of search strategies at the LA Times. When a wildfire hits Southern California, they are known as an authority in the area. People know the LA Times will have an evacuation map or a wildfire preparedness guide. That connection goes beyond just clicks and to E.E.A.T: who has the experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness? Where do you go when stress is high and you need timely information from a reputable brand?

In the past, the mentality was, “hey, this can build clicks over time” and that’s how you would evaluate it. But now, because of AI, the value proposition plays more into brand visibility and brand reputation. The way that you evaluate it has changed, especially as it’s become more important to build 1:1 relationships with readers.

Harry Clarkson-Bennett: Publishers were really news focused, which makes sense.

But then people realized how powerful publisher sites are in the search landscape. Evergreen content became far more valuable for publishers, particularly when people in more senior positions realized just how powerful a channel Google had become, and the volume — particularly in a last-click channel — that’s quite rare.

Publishers start going really so far out of their lane. It’s not wrong necessarily, it’s just the byproduct of this kind of thing.

Now, there’s a reckoning: “Does this really add value? Is this what your audience cares about?”

Mark Williams-Cook: The value of evergreen content used to be that you could drop users directly into friction and get them to do what you want.

It’s a bit like how supermarkets always put bread and milk at the back of the store so you have to walk past everything else, with the sweet stuff right at the till. This is what we do with websites: they create friction to get people to do the things that we want them to do.

All you had to do was put out evergreen content and you’d get rewarded. In a way, it’s almost an anti-visitor, anti-consumer design. As a user, you don’t really want that friction. If you could tell someone to go to the store and bring your stuff to your car, that would be great. Which is more of the paradigm we’re in now with the AI era. That changes the value proposition massively.

WTF is SEO?: What do publishers need to think about when it comes to the value proposition of evergreen?

Louisa Frahm: When everything can be summarized, it’s important to know what makes you you. What makes your brand special?

When I was leading SEO at ESPN, it was critical to know why people came to ESPN specifically. There was a large emphasis on stats and the fan trust that had been built over time, from the on-air product to the digital experience.

You can’t overcomplicate the process of understanding your audience, assessing what their needs are, and evaluating how your brand can specifically connect with those elements through your individual expertise. We talk a lot about this in the AI era because everything is so easily summarized in commodity content. What can actually stand out?

In the AI era, and for some time even before this boom, we’ve had more and more publishers all gunning for the same topics. We’ve seen how highly competitive the industry has become. Whether it’s ESPN with sports and stats, or the LA Times with Southern California culture, you need to know and really understand audience needs, and then you need to elevate your own unique expertise and connection to those themes within your coverage. I think that’s where the biggest value lies.

Harry Clarkson-Bennett: It used to be relatively straightforward to give an idea of how much traffic you’re going to generate from a specific set of pages — not perfectly, but reasonably. However we look at it, that has diminished over time.

The first protocol is you have to be really clear about what we want to create and why. What purpose is it serving? Who is it for?

You also have to have a really clear idea about what the content is doing. If it’s just for SEO purposes, that would be an amber flag. You need a more nuanced approach.

A big part of that comes down to something that publishers have always done that I quite like: the composite metric for success that takes in 50 different things and every six or 12 months you review it and tweak it.

I like the idea of having something like that for your content so that you can start to value the right things and get the desk to focus on the right things.

For something like evergreen content, are you really likely to get a macro-level conversion from it as a publisher? In some cases, yes, but I think that is a harder sell now in a more commoditized age, so you need to have some pretty clear micro-conversions for that.

On the quantitative side, we have to take engagement data a lot more seriously: reducing the value of traffic and increasing the value of engagement.

Then there’s a qualitative look: Does this fit your brand strategically? Does it fit what your audience cares about? Combine those two things to get a good steer on whether you should invest more or less in this category.

Mark Williams-Cook: For our SEO clients, we go through a brand process to understand what they are. So many clients come to us and don’t really know why they’re different or why people should choose them. You cannot rely as much on that friction to create value as much as you used to.

AI has reduced the difficulty to follow what everyone else is doing. You can build tools, workflows, monitoring systems, create briefs, use data to get you 90 per cent of the way there to have something ready to go. Because everyone can do it, it immediately becomes worth a lot less.

AI can’t lead with new ideas, content, perspectives. The reason it works is, 10 years ago, you could publish good content and it would be a document on the internet that would mainly rank based on how many links it got.

The internet now is like the dominoes are stacked closer than they ever have been: if you put really good content online, because of TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, everything is so tightly connected that really good ideas tend to pick up through whatever channel a lot easier than they used to.

There’s more risk in not trying to do these big things than there ever used to be before. We tend to work on these pieces multi-channel, which gives you some resilience for when SERPs change.

The engagement we get clients do something that makes people react lifts everything.

Louisa Frahm: What has really shifted is that we used to define performance by, “Did it do well on search? Did it rank? Did it get into Top Stories?” The front page of Google was a primary channel for measuring performance.

Now, you should still make search-friendly content that’s based on user intent and the timely needs of that moment, but you shouldn’t stop with the first page of Google in terms of reach and where you might potentially connect with target audiences. Content that was originally grounded in search can also do really well on other platforms. You need to know your brand and understand which other channels make the most sense for cross-promotion.

For a long time, newsrooms have been siloed between search, social, video and other business segments. But because Google isn’t producing the visibility and results that it once did, we need newsroom departments to work much more closely together to elevate timely breakout opportunities, reinforce brand authority and prevent workflow redundancy.

That’s a bigger part of the evolution of the game with this type of content: thinking beyond just the first page of Google.

WTF is SEO?: What are the specific things that are part of the new checklist for evergreen SEO?

Mark Williams-Cook: In AI platforms especially, recency — or freshness — of content being updated seems to be a big factor in determining what’s cited. On their own outside of search engines, [AI platforms] have no real way of telling what’s good, bad or spam. If the content is similar and one was updated a week ago and another a year ago, probably the week-ago one is better.

We know for a fact that Google has a “last significant update” tag. They use a binary yes-or-no flag when they look at content to decide if it has had a significant update. Update the last modified date, and that’s what gives it that bump.

One thing available to us now with new tooling that was previously very difficult to do at scale is to monitor content for intent shift. COVID-19 is a great example. In 2020, everyone’s desperately Googling signs. Then over a few years, all the searches changed to, “Can I go outside now?” The shift in the questions people had is vastly different. That happens both seasonally and as the public zeitgeist shifts. We need to keep evergreen content relevant and meet these standards.

Louisa Frahm: We’re in the multimodal era of search now. Text might have been enough in the past. If you want guides to surface in AI platforms and modules, tapping into multimodal search best practices is important.

The text is still essential, but incorporating images and video, making the overall user experience as engaging as possible, as well as giving AI platforms diverse content to cite is an important evolution. This multimodal search development is pushing publishers to incorporate more content formats beyond just text.

Harry Clarkson-Bennett: Although publishers have been vaguely decimated, they do have an audience. Not that many brands have an audience. The byproduct of having an audience, particularly if you’re a subscription organization, is that you have opportunities to create unique data, which is normally quite difficult to do.

If you have a willing panel of subscribers, the joy is that the audience feels like they are part of the paper. It’s reassuring for them to get data from people they feel a level of kinship with.

You can’t get away from the fact that structure and headers are how bots understand your article and content quickly and efficiently. While we want to do brilliant things, use audience data, have videos, and have strong E.E.A.T, the fundamentals still matter. If you’re a big publisher, the better you can make these things, the better.

WTF is SEO?: What is one thing publishers need to stop for SEO?

Harry Clarkson-Bennett: Stop chasing clicks and straying outside of your lane. You’ve gotten too big and bloated. It’s time to nestle back into who you are. This is the sweet spot.

Mark Williams-Cook: Use AI less.

Leaning on what Harry said, I’m seeing so many websites get bloated with content that is just meh. It’s not adding anything new. In isolation it looks good, and it feels cool that you managed to pump out that article so quickly, but it’s not going to do you any favours. Less is definitely more now, because that’s the biggest problem Google’s facing at the moment: this humongous tsunami of content, trying to figure out what’s good and what’s not. The easiest way they can do that is just exclude a lot of it. You don’t want to be in that pile.

Louisa Frahm: Be very zoned in on your particular brand and the angles that make sense for your brand. That goes back to understanding your audience. Swarming every single topic imaginable isn’t the best approach, especially when it comes to preserving bandwidth these days. Zone in on the topics, themes and angles that make the most sense for your brand, where regular updates can serve timely audience needs across multiple platforms.

Has AI changed topic authority? No (but also yes)

WTF is SEO? — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 17:21:39 GMT

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Hello, and welcome back. Jessie here, back from a wonderful (if rainy!) weekend. I’m pleased to report BOTH my softball teams got the W in their first playoff games (and more importantly, the Green Beans avoided a torrential downpour by about three minutes)! We also took a bike ride through my favourite part of the city’s waterfront and painted a snapshot of a lovely park!

This week: Topic authority! We first covered topical authority in the pre-generative AI world. We went back and updated our best practices on the concept, and asked noted news SEO experts for their insight on how authority has changed in the AI world — and what to do about it!

Two brains are better than one! Photo by KOBU Agency on Unsplash

Let’s get it.

THE 101

What is topic authority?

Topic authority is SEO jargon for subject matter expertise.

Topic authority is how search engines recognize your website as an expert on an overall subject — not just random keywords, but a full range of similar and related terms within a topic. It’s your “perceived authority over a niche or broad idea set,” according to Search Engine Journal.

Search engines interpret some sites as more knowledgeable on a topic than others. As a result, articles from those sites are more likely to rank higher on SERPs over competitors who do not write in depth on the subject.

Topic authority is closely related to E.E.A.T (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), a concept used by Google and its human raters to evaluate if the content surfaced in search results is relevant and helpful.

To be considered an authoritative source on a topic, you must write quality content — journalism that answers the questions readers are asking — consistently, over time.

Topic authority is the result of a proven track record of deep expertise. High quality, original journalism on a niche builds topic authority. It is helped by an effective linking strategy: internal links to other related stories on your site, along with earned backlinks.

How does Google explain topic authority?

Starting in 2018, Google has evolved its algorithms to put more emphasis on the topic authority of a website. Instead of major news publishers ranking for any topic on the strength of their site’s authority, ranking focuses more on a niche or the expertise of a site.

In 2023, Google published a blog post outlining topic authority, explaining the concept as a system designed to understand the “degree of expertise a publication has in particular areas.” At the time, Google said it wasn’t an entirely new system, but one that had been used for years, even if it isn’t included in their official guide to ranking systems.

The three pillars Google outlined are: how notable a source is for a topic or location, how widely the original reporting is cited by other outlets (often highlighted with the Highly Cited label), and the reputation of the source.

To build topic authority, Google says publishers should focus on creating “helpful, people-first content.” Google says publishers should continue to “provide great coverage about the areas and topics they know well.”

The emphasis on topic authority means Google is better able to serve original reporting from local and expert news sources. As a result, regional publishers, who are the experts in a geographic area, can often outrank national outlets for breaking local news. That’s because news teams are “intimately familiar with the location and topic,” according to Google.

What it means: Where Google once ranked individual pages that targeted the right keywords, now the company increasingly considers sites that own that topic area. Topic authority is the difference between strings (keywords) and things (topics).

The better your authority across a defined topic or set of topics, the better your ranking visibility should be on Google (and more broadly, in AI systems).

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Why does topic authority matter?

As part of his topic authority guide, noted that internal docs leaks and public signals from Google point to the concept as a “real and important factor in ranking.” He calls it a “measurable signal of how comprehensively and credibly your site covers a topic.”

For large language models (LLMs), Kevin notes that topic authority is “a key part of how LLMs optimize for correct answers.”

“Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) — the grounding mechanism behind OpenAI’s, Google’s, Meta’s and others’ LLMs — explicitly ranks external documents for authority before passing them to the model to ground its answer,” Kevin explained.

Topic authority can also be a bulwark against Google’s core algorithm updates. As Despina Gavoyannis notes in an Ahrefs blog post, shallow sites that cover a huge variety of topics (none of them particularly well) have been penalized in Google’s core updates, notably the helpful content updates. “Sites with genuine topical depth have been more likely to hold their positions,” Gavoyannis writes.

It also improves a site’s AI visibility. “AI platforms preferentially cite sources they have evidence to trust on a subject,” Gavoyannis writes. The stronger the topic authority, the more like a site is to earn citations in AI-generated answers.

In an era where the barrier to content creation is effectively non-existent because of ChatGPT or Gemini, it’s more important than ever for legitimate sites to demonstrate topic authority (for Google and for readers).

Audience and SEO are people-first disciplines. Creating genuinely helpful, original journalism provides real value for your readers.

Unique and meaningful insights (or proprietary data) makes your content more shareable. It gives audiences good reasons to return, subscribe or support you.

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How to build topic authority?

To build topic authority, first identify where your publication has subject matter expertise. Consider your site’s current and historic strengths and weaknesses: what do you consistently rank for? Is that an area highlighted in your editorial and strategic priorities (i.e., will you cover it in depth in the future)? If yes, that’s likely an area to focus editorial SEO resources.

Topic authority starts with great journalism: high quality, original reporting that’s written by real human authors, and references subject-matter experts. It’s information that’s helpful to real people, written by real people.

To build and enhance topic authority, consider the following:

Focus and invest heavily in topics or regions your newsroom has an editorial commitment to and genuine expertise;
Prioritize high-quality, original reporting (instead of aggregating from other sites), using real writers who consult true experts. Do this over the course of months (and years!);
Demonstrate E.E.A.T, with tips we’ve outlined previously, like creating author pages for your writers, earning backlinks from reputable sites and outlining your editorial process.
Execute an effective internal linking strategy that includes robust tag pages for topics, then linking to tags and related pages on your site from each new story;
Link every story on the same topic together;
Earn backlinks by publishing original, high-quality content that other outlets want to cite. A measure of this can be the Highly Cited label, which Google applies to primary reporting when other publications link to it often.

Topic authority is not a one-off effort, but something that’s demonstrated over months or years.

THE EXPERT OPINIONS

What are news SEOs saying about topic authority and AI search?

As the Google landscape changes rapidly, and new disciplines focused on generative AI features (Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) or Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) are introduced, it prompts the question: have the foundational SEO concepts changed? Is topic authority different now because AI is more prominently in the search ecosystem and has commoditized basic information?

We asked some notable names in news SEO for their thoughts on how (and if) topic authority has evolved because of AI.

offered the most succinct of answers to the question: “No.”

Kevin Indig explained that AI makes topic authority more granular, offering the distinction between citation and recommendation authority. Citation authority means AI uses a publication’s content, but recommendation authority means the AI names it as a trusted source.

To build genuine authority, Kevin recommends publishers prioritize categories (not keywords), and to build depth over breadth. Sites should focus on original data and “specific proof points” that will earn credible, third-party coverage and mentions.

Oleg Korneitchouk also underscored the value of citations from offsite sources. While topic authority is historically based on on-site entity coverage (along with relevant internal links and backlinks), AI enables search engines to “understand the true topical authority that is missing by only looking at links.” He points to social media chatter — off-platform conversations that could mention a publication’s work — as part of this more holistic authority.

Cyrus Shepard explained that AI search puts more emphasis on brand authority and mentions, a shift from the traditional emphasis on content and links for ranking. “Traditional topic authority still seems important for AI citations, but your brand’s topical authority now lives in a much larger universe,” Cyrus explained.

Louisa Frahm explained that because AI is really good at synthesizing basic commodity questions (like “is magnesium good for sleep” or “why does my cat purr”), publishers need to focus on creating content worth citing. Original stats or proprietary research can earn backlinks, while authoritative explanations drive citations. To stay competitive, outlets should ask: “If AI could generate the same article without us, what additional value are we bringing to the table?”

Publishers must think more about distinctive content that can’t be replicated easily, Louisa said. “Interactive tools, live trackers, searchable databases, exclusive reporting, community experiences, and distinctive analysis give audiences more than a summarized answer can provide.”

This focus on distinctiveness is echoed by Barry, who said that publishers should focus more on original journalism. This helps sites “acquire more external mentions and links to stories in your core editorial specialities, as AI systems put more emphasis on external mentions over on-site content.”

Louisa says genuine topic authority extends beyond Google. It’s more “robust and resilient” when it includes audience engagement efforts like newsletters, podcasts and online communities.

The bottom line: Topic authority remains a core concept in news SEO. To excel on search and AI engines, publishers should focus on building genuine expertise. Create helpful, people-first original content that is written by subject matter experts. This journalism will earn quality backlinks, citations and mentions. Ensure SEO best practices, like linking and enhancing E.E.A.T signals, are still followed for stories to build topic authority.

Ask a News SEO: Gerard Kijlstra

WTF is SEO? — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 17:35:40 GMT

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Hello, and welcome back. Jessie here, back from a lovely weekend spent camping. We roasted vegan marshmallows on the campfire, swam in the Elora quarry, and enjoyed being able to see the stars. Ontario has so much beauty to offer, it’s a luxury to enjoy every scenic nook and cranny of the province.

This week: Gerard Kijlstra! The CEO of Newsifier outlined how artificial intelligence can help demystify Google Discover and the importance of understanding how audience interests drive viral performance on the platform.

Let’s get it.

THE INTERVIEW

WTF is SEO?: Let’s start with Google Discover. Is there an optimal Search to Discover traffic ratio?

Gerard Kijlstra: No, I don’t think so — but it also depends on the publication. Publishers with more evergreen content are at risk, of course, with AI Overviews.

A lot of clients that do more news and have less evergreen content, they don’t see less of an effect with AI Overviews, but there’s no ideal ratio. Some of our clients have mostly Discover traffic, more than 60 per cent. But on the other hand, Discover can also be really volatile.

Although the more you dig into it, I think the less of a black box it is.

WTF is SEO?: A lot of publishers think Discover is a black box, what can we know about how it works?

Gerard Kijlstra: We have a real-time analytics tool and it also tracks Discover traffic, and we do continuous AI analysis on top. When we look at the content on Discover, you can really see that Google Discover assigns you authority on certain topics but also certain content formats.

For example, we have one lifestyle publisher using the tool to identify stories where it says you have authority. He publishes articles about how much a pilot earns, for example. Every time you have that content and format, it goes viral again on Discover. Every time, he picks a slightly different angle, but it’s still the same interest. His audience is always coming back because they consciously see things that are in their interest.

AI is really interesting because it can dig deeper than just the basic topic level. It’s not always about the topic. It’s sometimes also what a certain demographic has the most interest in.

For example, when you see that the audience cares a lot about money, and is a bit lower income, something about a discount works really well. AI can say: if they care about this, they probably also care about a discount in another shop or how to save money.

AI can do deeper research than you could normally do at surface level. It goes beyond topics and more into the interest of the audience.

WTF is SEO?: What are your top tips for strong visibility on Discover?

Gerard Kijlstra: We do a lot of research into this.

There has to be a minimum word count of 400 words, above that it doesn’t do much extra. Related articles and related links matter. Use enough subheadings. It’s a no-brainer but: add images, not just a featured image.

Discover can have a lot to do with how much time on the article people spend. If the article is longer and richer, it helps. Content that goes deeper than service level.

Of course, a technically optimized website. We had one client with really bad Core Web Vitals, and just by optimizing Core Web Vitals, he unlocked a lot of Discover traffic. Apart from that, nothing changed.

A really good article experience matters, too. We say sometimes to add a poll in an article. People spend more time on the article, so that also helps. Google of course measures the post-click experience.

If you’re a publisher with less original content, and more aggregated content, you can use this to make your own original story. Sports publishers are doing it a lot. They use the poll to make an extra article. It’s interesting because these articles normally do pretty well on Discover. If you create less original content – and have more aggregated content – you can use the poll to make your own original story.

So for example, publishers ask “who needs to be the next coach of this team?” Then the publishers use that to write a new article on the opinion of the readers. A lot of the time it also gets picked up well. Publishers also use the comments section, too. If something big happens, and they write about it, and there are a lot of comments. That becomes an original story, so that works. It’s emotionally charged – and that works really well on Discover.

Sensational headlines and emotionally charged headlines still work really well in Discover. Emotionally-charged headlines, a curiosity gap, conversational headlines all work.

WTF is SEO?: What is the value of Discover traffic? Someone who searches your publication name wants your content. Someone who scrolls and clicks on Discover is engaged with that headline. Is there real value in Discover?

Gerard Kijlstra: I see Discover more as advertising for your publication. But then you should convert [the reader] to newsletter subscribers or mobile app subscribers. That will become more important.

Discover is a great way of getting your content noticed.

If you know why readers engage and why they are coming back on Discover, and then constantly feed that content to the audience. It can be recurring traffic. But of course, you never have the guarantee.

WTF is SEO?: Final question: What’s one thing you wish you knew earlier in your SEO career?

Gerard Kijlstra: Google Discover is not a black box. At first, I had no clue before we started measuring everything. When you start measuring, then you think, “oh wow there is actually a way that you can continuously get Discover traffic.”

It’s not a 100 per cent guarantee, but if you actually apply that feedback loop, then you really get Discover traffic. And before we thought it’s a black box and just to try to write nice headlines.

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THE JOBS LIST

Audience or SEO jobs in journalism. Want to include a position for promotion? Email us.

The Telegraph is hiring a Head of Community Editorial (London, England).
Boston Globe is hiring an Assistant Editor, SEO (Boston, Massachusetts).

Google news and updates

WTF is SEO? — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:21:02 GMT

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Hello, and welcome back. Jessie here, back from a weekend of softball (obviously), a long walk on Toronto Island and eating ice cream (again: obviously, it is summer).

This week: Google news and updates! We cover several interesting studies on zero-click searches, topic authority in artificial intelligence and reports on the “nuclear” option one publisher was looking at amid falling search traffic. Plus: updates from Google Search Console.

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Ah, all the possibilities of an empty Google tab. Credit: Photo by Firmbee.com on Unsplash

Let’s get it.

THE RECAP

Google makes social platform tracking available in GSC

What happened: Google launched platform properties in Search Console worldwide, a new way to track performance of social and video posts, and published a guide with tips on getting the most out of the data.

Platform properties allows publishers to connect their Instagram, TikTok, X or YouTube accounts and provides insights about the queries people use to discover their content. Publishers can track traffic trends (for example: if an older video suddenly pops off), identify top-performing content, see the search terms people use to find off-site social content, compare formats (for example: short vs. longform YouTube video) and more.

Screenshot from Google’s new guide shows a suggestion for comparing short vs. longform content on Instagram or YouTube.

Why it matters: Google has been updating GSC recently, with a report that makes tracking impressions (but not clicks) available for generative AI features. The addition of social tracking gives publishers a much more holistic view of their brand’s visibility and performance on Search.

Still on our wishlist: a Top Stories filter and click data for AI features (and much more!).

People is not blocking Google – despite threats

What happened: The CEO of People Inc. said it won’t block Google, after suggesting in an interview last month the option was “100% on the table.” Neil Vogel said the bold action of blocking Google’s search crawlers — and therefore its AI scrapers — is something the company won’t do for now, but is “constantly being looked at.” Traffic to People’s core 19 brands (which include sites like AllRecipes, Martha Stewart Living and Investopedia) has fallen roughly two-thirds from its peak.

Why it matters: Vogel said his overall objective is to secure a “fair economic deal” for People’s content, and that he would like to block Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode — “just like we would to anybody else who doesn’t have a deal with us.” As AdWeek reported, this “nuclear option” was once considered “unthinkable” but is now being explored, at least in theory.

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Zero click search: what kinds of sites see the biggest traffic decline?

What happened: iPullRank completed a study of zero-click behavior using Datos clickstream data for more than 13 billion searches. The study found nearly 47 per cent of searches end without a click. Further, while zero-click search is rising, it’s happening slowly: it increased about 2.6 percentage points from October 2024 through December 2025.

Zero-click behaviour varies widely, iPullRank reports. For example, Reddit and Github — forums where discussion is the objective — saw less erosion in their clicks, whereas Google increasingly answers queries that would previously result in traffic for informational sites such as Wikipedia and IMDb.

Screenshot from iPullRank study showing changing zero-click behaviour.

What it means: Search traffic for many sites is falling — and now getting a click from users is increasingly dependent on context. In some categories, brands are competing directly with Google’s answers, while in other verticals discussing a topic on a forum is the point of a search and therefore users will continue to click through (e.g. on Reddit). Simple queries about the time of a speech or sporting event can easily be answered by Google right in the results. This isn’t new, but does reinforce the need to think about what people really need and value from your brand – then overdeliver on that for your audience.

Topic authority and AI

What happened: Following his early deep dive into topic authority, growth advisor ’s latest research examines the following: once a brand has developed topic authority in a topic, does that authority extend into related categories? His analysis, based on Semrush data using the AI Visibility Toolkit, found it is possible for brands to earn citations outside their established areas of expertise.

“You can be a source on pretty much any topic if it matches the regular criteria for source citations. But the AI recommends you in core topics,” he reported. Further, once a brand owns a category, that expertise makes for an easier time expanding into related categories.

What it means: Publishing broadly — without establishing deep coverage — won’t result in direct AI recommendations or authoritative brand mentions. News sites can act as cited sources across various trending topics, but earning trusted mentions in Your Money or Your Life topics requires high E.E.A.T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) consistent coverage. Expand into topics closely related to your core areas – don’t branch out willy-nilly.

THE JOBS LIST

Audience or SEO jobs in journalism. Want to include a position for promotion? Email us.

The New York Times is hiring an Editor, Audience — A.I. and Emerging Platforms (New York, NY).
CNN is hiring a Director, Product Management - AI Platforms (New York, NY).

EVEN MOORE RECOMMENDED READING

🔮 Harry Clarkson-Bennett: The future of discoverability.
🗞️ Hanaa’ Tameez: America’s largest newspaper chain, USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data as search traffic falls.
⚽ Jacob Granger: How the World Cup was really watched: Inside the data behind football’s biggest live blogs.
🖊️ Andrew Deck: A record-breaking eight Pulitzer awardees disclosed AI use this year.
🧑‍💻 Caroline Haskins: The hottest new AI chatbot? It’s just a guy answering your questions.
📋 Bahga El Sobky, Ihab Rizk: Microsoft added branded and non-branded AI queries in the clarity citations dashboard.

What did you think of this week’s newsletter?

(Click to leave feedback.)

Catch up: Last week’s newsletter

Have something you’d like us to discuss? Send us a note on LinkedIn (Jessie or Shelby) or email us (hello@seoforjournalism.com).

Written by Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley

What’s a LLM?

WTF is SEO? — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:21:06 GMT

Hello, and welcome back. Shelby here, back from a wonderful weekend on Ontario’s west coast in Bayfield. Despite having to endure 3+ hours of traffic both ways, it was worth it for the weather, beach, ice cream, sandwiches, camp fires and friendship. A true Canadian weekend.

This week: What is a LLM? We go back to basics, explaining why LLMs are integral to AI Mode, AI Overviews and all of your favourite (or not-so-favourite) artificial intelligence models. Plus: why publishers should have a rudimentary understanding of how these systems work.

I, like a certain president, know a lot about computers. Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

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THE 101

What is a LLM?

A LLM is a large language model, an artificial intelligence system designed to understand, process and generate text like a human. LLMs are pattern-recognition systems that are trained on the huge volume of information on the internet — articles, websites, the code and all of the context a page provides — and then produces an answer based on patterns from the various sources.

LLMs are prediction models. They recognize patterns, but do not think like a human. A LLM operates by breaking down small pieces of the prompt into “tokens” (words or sub-words) and predicting what the most likely sequence of words should come next. AI generates this text based on the information it has previously ingested. This is why AI models can often hallucinate — answers are based on the probability that a pattern of words is correct.

Example from Google’s documentation on LLMs explaining predictive tokens and how they work.

LLMs are AI models, but not all AI models are LLMs. LLMs focus on the generation of text-based answers, and are trained on a generalized set of information. But, other AI models can build upon an LLMs system, and be trained on audio, video, images or even specific niche sets of data.

For example, a general LLM likely can’t create a perfect x-ray scan, but an AI model built and trained on specific medical information and tasks (eventually) could.

The key of a LLM is that it can gather context from multiple sources to better craft a response that fits the user’s needs. This does not mean, however, that it does not hallucinate or get things wrong. Human intervention is still important.

What is a Transformer?

To talk about LLMs, we must talk about Google’s Transformer. Transformers are the way in which language models actually know what task to perform and how to translate (or transform) the prompt into a response.

Google created and patented the Transformer in 2017, making it the most widely used architecture for language model applications.

The Transformer applies a self-attention mechanism, which also ensures the robot models the relationship between the words in the specific sentence, rather than broader context. This is especially important for sentences in journalism, where language is explaining a topic and must be relevant — explaining that there was a stock market crash needs context that it is not, in fact, a physical catastrophe, but rather a decline in investment money.

There are full transformers — which include the encoder (converting the input text into an intermediate response that has all of the information) and the decoder (converts the information into useful text for the reader) — and partial transformers, which omit the encoder.

Examples from Google’s documentation explaining how an encoder and decoder aid with translations from the Transformer architecture.

As these systems (and the systems built upon these systems) change and enhance, a lot of companies have changed their approach to how they incorporate a Transformer into their models.

ChatGPT, for example, is actually run off of Google’s Transformer (the name of which is spelled out as Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) but has never used the encoder part to keep more open-ended responses and conversation. As Google and Anthropic developed Gemini and Claude, respectively, they also moved to a more holistic approach, using decoder-only architecture for it to better compete with ChatGPT. But its more deep learning tools like T5, T5Gemma and Google Translate (which use a system called BERT) still use the encoder-decoder architecture.

🤓 To get really nerdy about Transformer and Google’s LLMs, check out their full documentation.

Why understanding LLMs matters to publishers

As noted above, Gemini’s systems run off LLMs and the Transformer architecture, scouring the internet for information and then weighing the relationships between words in a sentence to grasp context for the response.

All systems are used slightly differently, but follow the same foundational structure that is built from an LLM. That means understanding how Google — and other AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, etc. — are collecting and converting the information that they eventually serve to users as answers.

And with the evolution of AI Search, we are no longer only worried about text-based features. Other models built off LLMs also generate images, audio and video based on patterns recognized, too.

Knowing the mechanics behind LLMs can change how you interact with AI as an audience editor. It’s essential writers and editors know how and why AI responses are generated. Understanding LLMs also sharpens the level of analysis you can provide to the newsroom. Knowledge is power.

Understanding LLMs enables you to better spot hallucinations, be mindful about the information you share and know why certain patterns tend to appear regularly.

A final note: Transformer was first discussed in 2017, almost ten years ago. AI was already a thought back then, and as more people become curious about the technology, they have jumped on systems we’ve known about for a long time and enhanced their capabilities. We are just now seeing what this technology was truly capable of when they first started.

TL;DR: Quick debrief of the ‘pyramid of AI’

There were a lot of new terms discussed in this newsletter, and the way AI systems are run is very complex. Below is a list of queries we discussed, as well as a pyramid of the core engine all the way to the surface level integrated systems.

Transformer: The engine cylinders of the AI car, provides the architecture
LLM: Large language model, the raw engine power of the car (keeps it moving)
Agentic framework: The system controls for the car, being able to take action within boundaries
Search integration: Retrieving the external information needed for the user-facing prompt, like a live GPS knowing where to go
Gemini/Claude/AI Overviews: The car: the complete user-facing product ready to use

The bottom line: LLMs are just one part of the bigger ecosystem of artificial intelligence, but important for publishers to understand, as they are the engine of the Search car. Understanding the whole pyramid will level up your scope as an audience editor.

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Ask a News SEO: Nicola Agius

WTF is SEO? — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 17:21:02 GMT

Hello, and welcome back. Jessie and Shelby here, back from a devastatingly smoky (and then beautiful) summer weekend and the final days of the 2026 World Cup. It came, it caused chaos and it left… but not before driving Shelby mad. The good news: only four months ‘til U.S. elections midterms! 🫠

This week: Ask a News SEO with Nicola Agius, SEO and Discover Director at Reach PLC. We discuss the current state of Google Search, the concerns of AI and where opportunities lie for publishers.

Together with Marfeel: Missed our AI in Search webinar? Catch up with the recording now!

Let’s get it.

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THE INTERVIEW

WTF is SEO?: Search and Discover have changed a lot. Can you talk about the biggest changes you’ve seen, specifically in the U.K., and how you think it’s affecting publishers?

Nicola Agius: AI features are just everywhere — we really saw this during the World Cup that’s just finished. Live blogs during the World Cup were obviously a huge opportunity for search traffic. But when you’d search any match or team, Google would serve so much AI at the top of the SERP; diagrams, more information about the sport, player lineups, who scored, the number of minutes we were into a match, player stats and so on. That was challenging for publishers.

Historically, typical live blog headline formats like, “England vs America live: Score, latest updates, etc.” would draw huge numbers — but that kind of headline doesn’t work anymore because all that information is provided by Google’s AI right at the top of the SERP.

However, what’s interesting is that despite all of all of this, people are still scrolling down past Google’s AI content and browsing the Top Stories carousel. We know this because we’re still getting those impressions. Click-through rate (CTR) isn’t as high, but people are still scrolling down — which is an opportunity for publishers. Although people have the facts provided by AI, they still want more information — and we need to figure out what that is.

In response, a lot of the training we’re giving at the minute is around CTR, keeping in mind how AI has changed the game. I’m telling our reporters, “don’t think of yourself as a journalist, think of yourself as a sports fan. What questions do you have after reading all of those facts provided by AI?” Lean into analysis, your expert opinion — you’re the football experts, right? Lean into that. Lean into reactions, the discussions happening online. That’s one challenge we’re facing right now and that’s how we’re trying to overcome it.

Another challenge we have, which may be trickier to solve, is Google appears to be testing its own version of live blogs that are served above the Top Stories carousel in the SERPs. I saw one for EuroVision; it included key events with live reactions from Twitter (X). It’ll be interesting to see how that develops. I’ve seen it a couple of times, but haven’t seen any official announcement from Google.

Screenshot during EuroVision showing Google’s own live blogs above the Top Stories carousel. Credit: Nicola Agius.

This is pretty concerning because live blogs are still one of our biggest opportunities when it comes to search traffic and if Google’s going to tap into that — which I don’t understand how or why that benefits Google or searchers — it could be a problem.

WTF is SEO?: Those seem like two separate things; what benefits Google and what benefits the user. What does Google get or think it gets by providing its own live blog?

Nicola Agius: Exactly. It’s about keeping people within the ecosystem. But how are Google improving their product with something that doesn’t really serve user intent? Is an AI-generated blog really what searchers are looking for during a football game? Surely they want to hear from football experts and be part of the conversation? I suppose then that’s where we as publishers really have to lean in. Rather than focusing on general reactions that Google’s AI can assemble together from social media, we need to make sure people care about the reactions from our expert reporters — which is something they can only get from our sites. It’s about making our product so good with such brilliant journalism that people actively seek our reporters’ opinions on that content, rather than an AI-generated blog from Google.

The SERP has changed so much over the last 12 months. I’m seeing a lot more “What people are saying” carousels, different content formats and I’ve also noticed, for the first time, that Facebook posts are getting visibility in the Top Stories carousel. In Aleyda Solis’ analysis of the May core update, she observed that Google now seems to better understand user intent regarding content type. When people are searching for a query, do they want to see a social post? Do they want an explainer? Do they want video? We as publishers need to think a lot more about content types and should be working closely with social teams. We need to think outside the box of standard news articles.

WTF is SEO?: Interesting. And what about Discover? Should publishers still focus on it?

Nicola Agius: We’ve seen a hell of a lot of changes on Discover over the past 12 months. It really started with the June core update last year. I work for Reach PLC, so I have oversight of like 60-70 news sites. With access to so many properties in Google Search Console, I can see what shifts are happening.

In the first half of last year, national sites absolutely killed it in Discover. Then, with the June [2025] core update — at least here in the U.K. — there was a massive switch in the algorithm where Google started giving a lot more visibility to smaller publishers, regionals and more niche publishers. While analyzing Google’s May 2026 core update, I noticed that the number of domains getting into Discover was up 64 per cent year-on-year in May.

The platform is so different now to what it was in January last year. It’s the same space we’re all competing in, but now there are a hell of a lot more publishers that we’re competing against. And there’s a lot more stories getting into the Discover feed, as well. Content in the Discover feed was up 58 per cent year-on-year, comparing May this year to May last year. On top of that, social — like X and YouTube — now accounts for almost a quarter of the Discover feed, which is crazy because this time last year, X wasn’t really in there at all. YouTube was, but just a bit.

On top of that, we now have AI Overviews in Discover. And we also have combined Discover cards, where as many as 100 publishers can be grouped together, according to Damian Andell’s research. It’s important to note that Google isn’t just grouping together the same story on combined Discover cards, it’s grouping together different angles and unique takes on headlines with the same entities, which does the user a disservice.

It also contradicts what Liz Reid [Google’s VP of Search] said on an AI podcast the other day. She said, “The more publishers produce content that is really where they shine, what they bring to the table, where it’s unique and not the 10,000th copy of the same story, but something that has an interesting take on it, the more I think we’ll see people continue to click through. And that’s something Google wants.” That’s what Liz had to say, so why is Google grouping articles with unique and interesting takes together?

I’m currently looking into how Google decides to group content together and I’m providing guidance to our newsrooms on how we can potentially minimize this risk.

WTF is SEO?: What are positive things you’re seeing in the space for publishers?

Nicola Agius: I do think that Preferred Sources and features like that are a step in the right direction. It gives you more visibility in Search and Discover and, according to Google, your CTR doubles if you’re a preferred source.

Another positive is audience diversification. There’s been so much discussion about Google zero or people ditching Google for ChatGPT or TikTok, when the reality is, people are using all of these platforms together. That’s a positive for publishers because it means that you don’t have to be so overly reliant on a single referrer because your audience is everywhere now.

Think about your audience and how they find content. Are they younger? Maybe they are on TikTok as well as Google. Remember, TikTok really is a search engine, too. So is YouTube. So, use your SEO skills there. Publishers should never put all their eggs in one basket. Did we learn nothing from the Facebook traffic collapse of 2018?

WTF is SEO?: What do you wish you had known about SEO when starting?

Nicola Agius: There’s no such thing as an SEO expert. That’s my opinion. When I started, I definitely had a lot of imposter syndrome. I never wanted to post on LinkedIn because I was afraid of saying the wrong thing. I’d attend webinars and conferences to hear the experts talk and I’d be like, wow, they know so much more than me. And then I worked for Search Engine Land with SEO legends Barry Schwartz and Danny Goodwin — I was like, God, I’m never going to know as much as Barry and Danny!

But the thing is: Google’s changing all the time. Some of what you thought you knew last year probably isn’t even relevant today for reasons beyond your control. In SEO, you have to keep learning. Everyone who I respect in the industry is constantly learning — nobody knows it all. That’s why I think there’s no such thing as an SEO expert. You can never take your foot off the pedal. And remember, the loudest person in the room isn’t necessarily the smartest person in the room.

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THE JOBS LIST

Audience or SEO jobs in journalism. Want to include a position for promotion? Email us.

Immediate is hiring an Audience Development Manager (Hybrid, London, UK).
Wirecutter (NYT) is hiring an Audience Editor (New York, USA).
The Daily Mail is hiring a Senior Newsletter Editor (London, UK)

Podcast SEO tips with Steven Wilson-Beales

WTF is SEO? — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 17:21:37 GMT

Hello, and welcome back. Jessie and Shelby here, back from a much-needed extended break. So much softball and soccer was played. Summer nights were enjoyed. We’re back fresher than ever. Here’s to the second half of 2026 Google shenanigans!

This week: Top podcast SEO tips from expert Steven Wilson-Beales! Steven joined our spring community call presented by Trisolute to talk all things podcast SEO (video link here). We summarize his recommendations and best practices, as well as three key pillars for creating a great podcast. Plus: highlights from the excellent Q&A!

The empty podcast booth — a world of possibilities. Photo by Will Francis on Unsplash

Let’s get it.

THE 101

People listen to podcasts for a variety of reasons, so understanding the audience — and what they want from your audio or video content — is a foundational first step of optimization, says Steven Wilson-Beales, SEO, AI visibility and content strategy consultant.

Watch the replay!

“Most failures in podcasts happen when clear goals are not set at the beginning of that podcast campaign,” Steve said. He recommends defining the clear intent of the podcast prior to starting.

Without defined ambitions, it becomes impossible to measure success or determine the right strategy for reach, engagement and growth. To counter this, there are three key areas for optimization: product, people and promotion.

Read on for the highlights, including the best questions from the Q&A portion of the community call.

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THE HOW TO

The three Ps: People, product, promotion

Optimizing a podcast is more than just writing compelling title tags and meta descriptions. It also includes understanding your people, creating a great product and giving it the right promotion.

Product: Effective optimization requires, first, a product worth discovering. “You can’t polish a turd,” Steve said (quoting friend of the newsletter ).

Creators need to know what sets their product apart from the competition. “Lead with the need,” Steve said, urging a clear solution for your audience’s problem. No amount of clever titles or keyword-rich descriptions will save a podcast with a flawed foundation.

Consider a format that serves your specific niche, without blindly copying the top-charting podcasts (which may succeed because of their marketing budgets rather than concepts).

“Don’t assume the biggest players have it 100 per cent right,” Steve said.

People: Cater to your audience’s specific need and your topic authority. For instance, a gardening podcast might start with a series on how to grow specific plants. However, the key to success will be digging deeper to address the core challenges your listeners face, like gardening through climate change and erratic weather patterns. Understanding the burning questions — and the emotional weight behind them — puts your podcast in a much stronger position.

To find audience pain points, actively monitor Google Trends, follow Reddit threads related to your niche, monitor social media conversations and conduct real-world interviews.

Promotion: At least 55 per cent of people have heard about podcasts via word of month, Steve shared. Growing a show via social media at first is important, but the real value will come from people recommending your podcast. Make it worth recommending.

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MORE TIPS

Titles and descriptions are ‘powerful and influential’

Titles and descriptions are highly influential for podcasts, but they must be written for humans first and algorithms second.

“There are a lot of podcasts that do not do a great job describing what it is that they are about and what they do and what the offering is to the audience,” Steve said.

Title and description optimization is an opportunity to change that. These include the show title, the show description, the episode title, and the episode description. They should be precise, targeted and descriptive about the topic covered in the podcast, Steve said.

As with any SEO approach, editors should identify primary and secondary keywords to include in these descriptions.

Episode titles are generally best between five and eight words, but you will often see longer titles in the wild. This can be podcast-specific and sometimes simply works because of the nature and style of a particular show. But in general, be concise.
Don’t waste the opening of your episode description repeating the show title or host name. Users already see that. Use the first three lines to outline the specific value of that episode to the listener.

Avoid keyword stuffing. Limit to two or three keywords per title, as too many keywords can hurt CTR and sound robotic. “If you have too much language going on, it’s not going to help with click-through,” Steve said.

The same episode titles and description can be used across all podcast platforms.

MAILBAG

The following were pulled from the Q&A portion of the spring community call.

How does SEO strategy differ by platforms (Spotify vs YouTube). What are the platform-specific strategies?

Steve: Apple puts a lot of weight behind the podcast’s name (i.e., the title of the entire podcast), and show description. These areas are priority for the keywords you identified in your research. Spotify takes each episode on its own merits. This means you need to focus more closely on optimizing each episode on Spotify.

How do you leverage authorship in podcasts?

Steve: You definitely want to highlight the expert. If you have a massive celebrity guest and upload that episode to YouTube, you can guarantee a massive amount of traffic. They drive initial engagement — though, whether those listeners stay for future episodes is a different story.

As a matter of principle, if you have an expert guest on, you should include their details in the title and description of the episode. I’m not sure it gives you an algorithmic boost, but it’s best practice.

What are your recommendations for multimodal, or using one piece of content (the episode) for multiple purposes?

Steve: Tools like Riverside make it easy to create clips for YouTube Shorts, TikTok or other vertical video platforms. But, be careful: the auto-clipping can miss the true essence of the conversation.

Different podcasters approach video differently. Some publish the full conversation as a video, some have no video and some publish key segments. Video isn’t essential. Don’t do video for the sake of doing it. Poor-quality video can be damaging your brand; don’t feel obligated to produce it if it does your product a disservice.

Video — particularly on YouTube — presents a massive opportunity. Investing is beneficial for publishers. But, if you’re not careful and true to your goals, the quality could suffer: publishers end up making too many Shorts or vertical videos that don’t connect back to the actual podcast.

If a podcast covers a written breaking news story or investigation, should they publish at the same time?

Steve: If your goal is to push podcast downloads, do it at the same time. Otherwise, bring the reporter on a few days later, giving them time to also capture the story’s reaction. Adjust the schedule depending on your goal.

What about podcast transcripts? Should publishers post and optimize them?

Steve: Post the transcripts. A lot of brands don’t, and they should because it helps Google and the robots understand what the podcast is about. Some publishers optimize transcriptions, by doing a clean up and adding keywords to the text. Transcripts are being crawled and read, why not optimize it?

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Ask a News SEO: USA Today’s Michael Hastings

WTF is SEO? — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:21:53 GMT

Hello, and welcome back. Jessie and Shelby here, back from busy weekends. Jessie celebrated her birthday with the hits: a workout class, sauna, a HUGE nap, softball and gelato. Shelby is now a fully converted football (soccer) fan after a huge 6-0 Canadian win, and is attempting to go 3-for-3 seeing the matches at different Toronto establishments this Wednesday. Wish our country well, dear reader: we are watching history!

This week: Ask a News SEO with USA Today’s Michael Hastings! We talked about using AI in the newsroom, building trust with audience, as well as what he wishes more editors understood about AI.

🚨 Heads up! WTF is SEO? is off for the next two weeks for Canada Day, the Fourth of July, the World Cup and the fact it’s peak summer and we are taking Sheryl Crow’s seasonally-relevant advice (to soak up the sun).

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Let’s get it.

THE INTERVIEW

WTF is SEO?: How are you using AI the most right now? For example, are you using it to speed up workflows, edit for style or head help with any sort of spreadsheet work?

Michael Hastings: Right now, I would say the highest value applications are workflow acceleration and discovery work. It’s a great brainstorming partner, too. I use it regularly for summarizing very long documents, new policies and accelerating research. One of my favourite ways is using it to help surface large patterns — maybe even anti-patterns — in datasets. We have agentic workflows that help with a variety of repetitive tasks — cleaning documents, extracting emails, extracting data from sources across the web. Also, we have a metadata assistant tool that uses internal data to help suggest winning headlines and meta data right in our CMS. There is a human in the loop with this tool and it is great inspiration to help with all sorts of metadata decisions.

Outside of work, right now, I use it for a variety of personal projects like organizing bills or generating mockup designs of what projects could look like just from a photo. There’s a lot of interesting accelerations. I say “right now” because it seems like every month there’s a new use case or something to experiment with.

WTF is SEO?: Do you think that using AI to help produce content runs the risk of diluting your brand in the eyes of readers and search engines? What guardrails do you have in place to make sure that that doesn’t happen?

Michael Hastings: It absolutely can if done carelessly, especially without guardrails. Specifically for USA Today, as early as April 2023, we implemented an ethical guidelines policy for journalists, product teams and SEO teams that give full disclosure when we use any AI for generated assets or assisting with the content. Our guidelines also include human editorial review and clear disclosure standards On the technical side, we are continuously monitoring quality signals from search platforms and users.

We also have a variety of specialized training. Some training will be different depending on what your use case is. We also have a pretty robust council that shares ideas, approves or gives feedback on any and all AI use cases at at our company.

WTF is SEO? Newsletter: Is it even worth it to rank on AI platforms or AI search?

Michael Hastings: I think it is useful. The question is evolving though. We want to be a trusted source wherever our audience is going. And I think that’s probably the same for most publishers. Last year, Reuters put out a pretty good report on the status of AI demand. A lot of users are using this as an initial point to jump on, get some judgment-free gut checks for life decisions, conversations, some very long-tail queries — and that’s right up our alley. But, at the end of the day, we’re just focused on being a trusted, citable source across all platforms, wherever our audience is.

I think it’s also worth mentioning some of the latest Google policy documentation on optimizing for generative AI. One of the main themes from some of their latest was that SEO is still very relevant to how AI surfaces answers. A lot of their answers are rooted in a search index: Google for Gemini, Bing for ChatGPT. Again, it is SEO fundamentals that still impact and can drive a lot of AI visibility. So, the question is evolving as we look at referral traffic from those engines as well. But, we just want to be a trusted, citable source wherever our audience is at.

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WTF is SEO?: On the question of trust, what are the main priorities that you have as an organization thinking about SEO to communicate your topic authority, your E.E.A.T, your brand authority?

Michael Hastings: This is a question all publishers have. How can we display our E.E.A.T? Behind all of our content, we’re looking at trust, authority, experience and expertise. So, when we’re covering a beat, we want to make sure we’re covering it consistently. We want to make sure we have the right assets, writers, editors, and teams that have long-term experience in that beat.

We also want to provide validated, trusted content. That means transparency, following our ethical guidelines, our journalistic guidelines. We understand that our users are valuing our input because of the trust and we want to display that wherever we can on the site and through our work.

WTF is SEO?: How do you feel about AI Mode?

Michael Hastings: Any meaningful shift in how audiences discover their information is something that publishers need to take seriously. In the beginning, I would say the threat meter was higher than it is right now. I think zero clicks from Google is a bit of hype. We know that there could be some constriction in the future as AI answers questions without the follow through of a click or referral, but Google has assured us in various updates and press releases that they will continue to send traffic to publishers through their AI experiences.

We need to continue to focus on getting information out to all the people who need it most and we will continue to meet them where they’re at. We want to continue to be that source of trust and authority wherever our users are at.

WTF is SEO?: What would you never use AI for in a newsroom? And what do you advise newsrooms against using AI for at all costs?

Michael Hastings: I would never use AI for anything that needs a human connection or a lived experience. The best way I think of this it to frame it through E.E.A.T and making sure that you’re taking the experience framework seriously.

AI (right now) cannot taste, it cannot take you to places that require lived experiences like Disney World. It can’t tell you the thrill of which rides to go to. Anything that needs a lived experience is important.

For example, take a headline like, “The five best places to eat for Cinco de Mayo.” AI can summarize a listicle pretty easily. Now, compare that to, “Here are five places I actually ate at, what I ordered and which one I would take my in-laws to.” This is irreplaceable by AI and that voice cannot be authentically generated. So, I would never use it for anything that requires a human connection and a lived experience.

WTF is SEO?: What’s one thing that you wish that people in newsrooms — both journalists and senior leaders — understood better about AI?

Michael Hastings: I think that we should all know that AI is a tool in your toolbox. And with all tools, it’s useful for some things and for other things, it really is useless. Now, for the uses of AI, I don’t think we even have scratched the surface. Experimentation with use cases is extremely important. We need to push the boundaries of what we can use it for while rooting ourselves in E.E.A.T principles. It’s going to never be a substitution for things that need a human connection and lived experience.

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STARTING SOON: Tune into our AI in Search conversation [together with Marfeel]

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:01:06 GMT

Hello WTF is SEO? community!

Join us in ONE HOUR!

Our special live conversation in partnership with Marfeel is TODAY! The discussion will focus on AI in search and what to do about it.

Here’s how to join the call:

Google Meet Info: https://meet.google.com/qgq-cseh-uwj

Date: Monday, June 22, 2026
Time: 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. ET / 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. UTC
Google Meet info: https://meet.google.com/qgq-cseh-uwj
- Or dial: ‪(CA) +1 647-732-3332‬ PIN: ‪636 382 247‬#
- More phone numbers: https://tel.meet/qgq-cseh-uwj?pin=6306143396553

Have a last-minute question? Use this form!
This call will be recorded and made available after the event.

Here’s what we’re talking about:

Are you worried about AI in organic search?
- How are you currently tracking the impact of AI chatbots, AI Overviews and AI Mode on your search performance?
What insights are your missing from an SEO tool to better understand your site’s performance?
Where do you see the biggest threats and/or opportunities created by AI for your site?

Ask a question!

If you’re in any way thinking about AI and search, this call is for you.

Join Jessie, Shelby and Marfeel’s Matthew Bain for a great conversation, followed by an engaging discussion with some of the news SEO industry’s best (that’s you, subscriber!)

Join the call: https://meet.google.com/qgq-cseh-uwj

We're excited to present this call with our partner Marfeel, an analytics and personalization platform for publishers.

Marfeel helps publishers understand user behavior, acquisition, and performance-driving trends, and know whether they're under-performing or exceeding expectations with real-time tracking and predictive analytics.

Please note: By attending this event, you agree to make your name, email and company information available to Marfeel, our presenting sponsor. You also agree to abide by our community guidelines.

Please reply directly to this email if you have any questions about the event.

Your pals in news SEO,

Jessie and Shelby

Recommended reading before the panel

Have something else you’d like us to discuss? Send us a note on Twitter (Jessie or Shelby) or to our email: seoforjournalism@gmail.com.

Written by Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley

Expert SEO tips on winning Prime Day

WTF is SEO? — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:21:27 GMT

Hello, and welcome back. Jessie here, back from the first weekend of the men’s World Cup touching down in Toronto! The streets (if not the stadium) are full of boisterous energy. And while I’ll leave most of the soccer-watching to folks who know a “yellow card” not just as a one-hit wonder, for me, it was a weekend full of fitness: tennis, a Hyrox class, softball and — in a truly shocking turn of events — I even went for a run.

This week: Expert tips ahead of the summer Prime Day event. Last week, we recapped eight tips for affiliate-focused SEO work. This week, we’ve got last-minute expert tips from a handful of search pros.

🚨 Happening soon: We’re partnering with Marfeel to bring you an interactive discussion about AI in Search — and what to do about it — on June 22, 2026 at 11 a.m. ET./3 p.m. GMT. Have a question or want a calendar reminder? Use this form!

The bag, like my brain, is unfortunately empty.

Let’s get it.

THE 101

Affiliate SEO: Quick hits and highlights

Affiliate SEO is the process of optimizing stories that use referrals to sell products or services, where the publisher makes a commission off the purchase. The goal is for users to click an affiliate link and buy a product.

Tentpole events — regularly occurring moments like Prime Day, Black Friday or even Father’s Day — offer sites an opportunity to capitalize on a surge of high-intent search interest, and drive stronger-than-average revenue.

The Top Stories box in Toronto for ‘best prime day deals,’ which surfaces deals coverage from a cross-section of sites.

Tentpole coverage includes roundups of the best overall sales on a product, deal alerts, as well as product- or retailer specific guides.

The Top Stories box in Toronto for ‘best prime day blender’, which surfaces a product-specific guide to the best deals.

As always, the fundamentals of a solid search strategy for affiliate marketing consists of the same pillars as effective news SEO.

That means a technically-sound website, strong E.E.A.T signals and topic authority, keyword research to inform content production, as well as individual pages and articles that are well-optimized (with specific attention paid to headlines, subheadings and internal links) for readers and Google.

Subscribe now

THE HOW TO

What are news SEOs saying about Prime Day?

If affiliate SEO (and all SEO, really) is a marathon — Prime Day is a sprint.

Like a marathon, you need proper training long before the starting line of an event. This is done by building solid E.E.A.T. and topic authority. But, Prime Day is a sprint; it’s only a four-day event, this year landing between June 23-26, and requires all-out effort.

With that in mind, we asked top news SEOs for their advice on winning the race — and executing a successful Prime Day strategy.

Their advice reflects a few core strategies: stay flexible, monitor Google results changes and make use of real-time trends — but don’t pack up too early. Here’s what to know.

Monitor Google results page changes

Google is volatile — and SERPs during a live news event like Prime Day are no exception.

“Prime Day offers no guarantees except surprises,” says SEO consultant Isaac Brown. That means publishers need to be nimble and build flexibility into their editorial pipelines. Keep a reporter free for breakouts, or one-off pieces.

Expect Google to throw some curveballs. With less than two weeks until Prime Day, Google is showing an AIO for “best prime day deals,” followed by a Top Stories news box. That could change — even during Prime Day.

Google’s results page in Toronto for “best prime day deals,” showing a Top Stories box underneath an AIO.

“We’ve seen Top Stories carousels appearing inside AIOs for some queries recently,” Isaac says. “That is highly concerning because we can guess what that will do to the click-through rate.”

Craig Casazza, Senior Product Director for Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, agrees. “It’s a safe assumption that your visibility will be less than it was a year ago, and even less than the year before that,” he says. “This may be the first big sales event where AIO is a major factor.”

And it’s not just AI Overviews taking up real estate. Sites like Reddit, X and YouTube are in the mix, too, with more visibility than ever. It’s likely to continue.

“In the past, Google has experimented with showing What People Are Saying carousels more during deals events and shifting us into those instead of Top Stories,” he says. “We have to be ready for anything.”

Plan for the unexpected. Google’s current landscape leaves fewer opportunities for click, but search results still offer other entry points. If Instagram or Reddit is everywhere on Google for those key terms, are your best stories on those platforms?

Consider a multimodal approach to your coverage. Aim to find readers where they’re spending their time.

Use Google Trends to inform you real-time coverage

Instead of competing solely for the highest volume (and, most likely, highest competition) terms like “best prime day deals,” use Google Trends to uncover opportunities where the competition might be thinner. Don’t just look at the “Top” queries; monitor “Rising” terms, too.

Google Trends defines a “Rising” query as those with “the biggest increase in the specified location and time period compared to the previous time period.”

SEO strategist Melissa D. Cooper recommends looking at the “Rising” terms to see “what deal topics are growing in interest.”

For example, using the term “best prime day deals,” Google Trends shows that the Top queries are focused on broad event queries. Rising reflects more specific terms, like “prime day kindle deals” or “garmin prime day sales.” If your site covers tech or running gear, these could be opportunities.

The “Top” and “Rising” queries for the main “best prime day deals” terms in the US over the last 7 days.

If a product or niche topic that’s core to your coverage spikes in interest, write a quick post. If the piece gets good traction (in revenue or traffic), keep updating and adding to the piece

“Publishers need to constantly align their titles, headers, and subsections with the exact search intent of the moment, rather than relying on generic best deals formatting,” says Craig.

Plan, but stay nimble

Winning Prime Day — or any tentpole event — often comes down to smart resource allocation and being flexible with your editorial plans.

Ahead of Prime Day, establish your ideal refresh cadence for key pages (like an overall deals roundup or product-specific trackers) during the event.

“Establish ahead of time how often you think pages will need to be updated,” says Craig. “Budget that in when determining resourcing for the event.”

Communicate this clearly to writers and editors so you have fresh coverage (and timestamps) day-of; this also means your content will be the most useful to readers. (Clicking through to an expired discount code or just-ended sales is a bad user experience!)

However, have the flexibility to pivot — and the willingness to abandon underperforming pages.

“Closely monitor which types of roundups are resonating with searchers or gaining search ground throughout the day,” says Isaac.

It’s possible the content you thought was going to be a hit won’t resonate with readers or land on Google Search or Discover.

Tracking and understanding what content — i.e., which formats or topics — Google is rewarding is essential.

“It used to be that deal roundups drove the most traffic and revenue,” Craig says. “We saw starting with Prime Day in 2024, however, that individual deal posts were starting to outperform due to reach on Google Discover.”

If a specific product post isn’t driving traffic, don’t waste resources updating it. Put that energy behind what the data — internal revenue and traffic metrics, alongside SERPs intel — suggests is working.

Don’t call it quits too early

Joy Johnston, News SEO Strategist for Trisolute News Dashboard, suggests publishers should consider keeping their coverage going after June 26 — specifically with live blogs or for still-active deals.

“Multiple publishers continued to gain good mobile news box visibility in the 2-3 day window after Prime Day 2025 officially ended,” she says. The official end of the event isn’t necessarily the end of consumer interest.

Screenshot from Trisolute News Dashboard showing Mobile News Box visibility on Prime Day 2025

Notable publishers like Wired, the New York Post and USA Today had their strongest ranking in the news box after the event formally wrapped.

Joy also suggests to keep your coverage relevant post-event, consider publishing new angles. For the aforementioned publishers, several post-event angles that focused on still-active sales help drive extended visibility on search.

Joy also found that focusing on a specific product category (like laptops or TVs) or a specific brand with notable search interest (like Apple News) worked well in 2025. Effective headlines create a sense of urgency for users, for example, “you can still shop these deals.”

Headlines from 2025 that create urgency or a reason to readers to click after the official Prime Day.

Encourage loyalty now, to help you in the future

Promoting audience loyalty is essential, Melissa says: “Now is the time to push your audience to add your site as a Preferred Source on Google. Link directly to adding your site as a Preferred Source in your articles, newsletters, and social posts.”

Doing this now could pay dividends in the future, she says.

Come Black Friday in November, as well as the busy holiday season, we don’t know what Google might look like for commercial and transaction queries — but we do know that the added visibility gained by Preferred Sources can be useful for publishers.

Add WTF is SEO? as a Preferred Souce

The bottom line: Prime Day can be chaotic, but essential for your success as an affiliate publisher. Use Google Trends to uncover coverage opportunities, refer to Google SERPS to see what’s resonating on search, and consider extending your coverage after the official event ends — it could be the secret to driving extra traffic.

Subscribe now

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THE JOBS LIST

Audience or SEO jobs in journalism. Want to include a position for promotion? Email us.

The Wall Street Journal is hiring an Audience Strategist, Enterprise & Investigations (New York, New York).

Tune into our AI in Search conversation [together with Marfeel]

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:03:10 GMT

Hello WTF is SEO? community!

Mark your calendars! We are thrilled to invite you to a special live conversation hosted by your pals, Jessie & Shelby from WTF is SEO?, in partnership with Marfeel. The discussion will focus on AI in search and what to do about it.

Here are the details:

Date: Monday, June 22, 2026
Time: 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. ET / 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. UTC
Google Meet info: https://meet.google.com/qgq-cseh-uwj
- Or dial: ‪(CA) +1 647-732-3332‬ PIN: ‪636 382 247‬#
- More phone numbers: https://tel.meet/qgq-cseh-uwj?pin=6306143396553

Have a question or want a calendar reminder? Use this form!
This call will be recorded and made available after the event.

Some thoughts to get you started:

Are you worried about AI in organic search?
- How are you currently tracking the impact of AI chatbots, AI Overviews and AI Mode on your search performance?
What insights are your missing from an SEO tool to better understand your site’s performance?
Where do you see the biggest threats and/or opportunities created by AI for your site?

Ask a question!

If you’re in any way thinking about AI and search, this call is for you.

Join Jessie, Shelby and Marfeel’s Matthew Bain for a great conversation, followed by an engaging discussion with some of the news SEO industry’s best (that’s you, subscriber!)

We're excited to present this call with our partner Marfeel, an analytics and personalization platform for publishers.

Marfeel helps publishers understand user behavior, acquisition, and performance-driving trends, and know whether they're under-performing or exceeding expectations with real-time tracking and predictive analytics.

Please note: By attending this event, you agree to make your name, email and company information available to Marfeel, our presenting sponsor. You also agree to abide by our community guidelines.

Please reply directly to this email if you have any questions about the event.

Your pals in news SEO,

Jessie and Shelby

Recommended reading before the panel

Have something else you’d like us to discuss? Send us a note on Twitter (Jessie or Shelby) or to our email: seoforjournalism@gmail.com.

Written by Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley