Brinley William Rebstein

SEO News: if you missed my post over the weekend, there’s been some massive fluctuations to data in GSC. Interestingly, this change may actually point to a broader underlying issue in our data that was originally thought to be related to the AI overviews rollout. Impressions going up but clicks not following. This has been the shared understanding of the SEO community based on recent studies, but we may be now discovering how flawed this methodology was in the first place. Google has been pushing back on these studies recently and the disabling of &num=100 may have motives outside of preventing competition from scraping their search results. The outcome? Well, it seems like desktop impressions in particular in GSC for many sites (due to desktop being the primary rank tracking surface) may have been heavily influenced from an influx in bots (due to new AI analytics entrants) scraping their search results. We can see this in the graph shown, where desktop impressions have dropped a whopping 200K impressions overnight for this site, forcing average position to move in a direction that is more close to mobile. So you’re telling me 200K daily impressions on desktop were from scraper tools!? That seems a bit ridiculous, but potentially not fully outlandish. There is likely more to this story. The reason for this is that by default, most users would have the top 10 search results shown in Search. An impression is only recorded in GSC if the result is loaded on that page and the link is within visible, but it doesn’t need to be scrolled into view. When the top 100 results are loaded, this will completely throw this dataset out of whack, causing the average position to increase dramatically. Many think that Google has made this change to prevent external services abusing their systems. While this may be true, I do wonder whether there are ulterior motives in putting “the great decoupling” theories to rest.

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A lot of SEOs & SEO agencies are going to have had clients asking why organic performance has declined. So, client education is key. In this example a client came for an SEO audit because clicks were dropping off, they exhibited concerns about their current SEO agencies ability to deliver, but when you look at the right hand image you can see categorically POSITIVE movement from the SEO. I explained to the client over a loom video about their exposure to "INFORMATIONAL" queries which was where a majority of clicks had been lost to and explained that the agency hadn't done anything wrong. But, this is a REAL issue. Google lied - Liz Reid VP and head of google search said: “We’ve found that with AI Overviews, people use Search more, and are more satisfied with their results” and that “the links included in AI Overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing. But she knew this was a lie. 25+ years people who use search engines click on links to get their answers / wants / needs. So when you launch something that answers questions IN SEARCH that is 1000% NOT going to increase clicks, its going to decrease clicks. The ISSUE here is two-fold, but the main one being: IF you train your LLM on peoples content and then resummarise peoples content but you don't give them the click you take away the EXCHANGE OF VALUE. Google + Publishers have had a relatively stable relationship over time - EXCHANGE of value looked like this: 🌟 10 years ago: 🩷 Google crawled roughly 2 pages for every 1 visitor it sent to publishers 🤮 Six months ago: Google’s crawl-to-click ratio rose to 6 : 1. OpenAI's crawl-to-click hit 1,500 : 1. Anthropic’s was a staggering 60,000 : 1 🤢 Today (as of July 2025): Google: 18 : 1 OpenAI: 1,500 : 1 Anthropic: 60,000 : 1 Do you see what's happening here? SEO thrived on the production of informational content. For many shit agencies it was an easy route for deliverables and irrelevant vanity traffic growth. For good agencies it provided an opportunity to reach people in different stages of their "CONSIDERATION" phases. But when you errode the benefit what then? So - the ADOPTION MODEL for SEO is and will continue to change: 1. You need to work HARDER for clicks 2. You need to work HARDER on conversion - make each click of greater opportunity to convert 3. DO NOT produce content for the sake of it - produce it to REALLY solve a problem, strike a cord, influence a decision and distribute it FURTHER than just uploading it as a page on your site SEO is still TOTALLY viable, but, it just got harder. In a way, it will drive a gap between THOSE who CAN do a good job and those who capitalise on people who don't understand SEO but want it (sheisters). Let me make this clear - Google OWES publishers I'm not anti-Google but I am anti what they are doing Google should ABOLISH AIOS and allow 2 models of search 1. Traditional Search 2. AI Mode conversational search

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CRO agencies are stuck in 2016. Save these 4 outdated practices and what to do instead: ❌ "Quick wins exist in CRO" ✅ Only UX bugs are quick wins ❌ "More testimonials = higher conversions" ✅ Which testimonials drive revenue? ❌ "Reduce checkout steps" ✅ Test if steps build trust vs. create friction ❌ "Global conversion rate matters" ✅ Revenue per session is what matters

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SEO agency we're working with has an interesting theory: ultra-granular collections based on search intent. Example: Instead of just one collection called 'Mens Shirts' with filters, they want 'Mens Blue Shirts Size L' as its own collection. Following this approach, they're adding 150+ collections total. The logic: Collections rank better than product pages in Shopify, and exact-match URLs capture specific buyer intent. Potential wins: - Capturing high-intent searches (size + color + product type) - Collection authority vs individual products - More indexed pages targeting long-tail keywords The alternative would be one strong collection with robust filtering, but that assumes shoppers use filters (many don't). Anyone tried this granular approach? Genuinely curious about real-world results.

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Here's something you don't hear a lot about: 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 & 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁. A big win for lots of B2B companies is breaking functional siloes (or what a client once called "random acts of marketing"): - Content pushing X SEO articles, white papers and case studies - Field marketing running events and webinars on unrelated topics, without integrated promotion and follow up - Product marketing creating product collateral and sales enablement tools that are not used or referenced by the content or demand gen teams. - Demand gen team focusing on capturing the demand that was NOT generated by the assets and activities produced by other teams ... If breaking the siloes seams like biting off more than you can chew, try this instead: 1. Create a simple shared spreadsheet "calendar" for the next quarter 2. Add all the initiatives by different teams planned for the next quarter 3. Bring the team together and look for small wins, activities that can be integrated, e.g. - Synchronize social content leading to an upcoming webinar with the webinar topic - Use relevant collateral and case studies in the webinar follow up - Repurpose clips from the webinar as social posts ... 4. Pick a single strategic topic or messaging that has a high priority 5. Plan a small-scoped integrated pilot (where each team contributes, and they leverage each other's activities) 6. Document and share all the small (and big) wins and lessons learned 7. Plan the next quarter together to do more of what worked, and fix what didn't 8. This time, synch with sales around their priorities and lessons learned from recent won and lost deals, and plan to pilot small-scoped customer research 9. Keep doubling down on what works and gradually piloting better integrated programs What you will soon realize is that: - With rare exceptions, most people want the same thing: to make an impact on the business and help the company grow - Most of them are struggling to get those results - The more you’re working together, and driving your decisions based on insights from sales and customer research, the more wins you’re creating

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The new SEO dream team: You, AI & Agents In 2026 the best SEOs won't be working harder. They’ll be deploying agents. We’re entering the era of SEO automation powered by AI agents not just tools that analyze, but agents that act. Instead of spending hours on:  → Keyword clustering  → Competitor gap analysis  → Internal link optimization  → Local SEO audits …you’ll have agents running it on autopilot. And it’s already happening. In my current setup, I’ve trained SEO agents to: → Find Reddit threads with search intent → Build keyword-based content outlines → Scrape Google Business Profiles for local optimizations and much more ... That’s 20+ hours/week saved! I’ve started mapping out the new SEO roles in this agent-powered world: SEO Agent Trainer ➡️ builds prompts and trains workflows SEO Automation Strategist ➡️ identifies repeatable tasks Local SEO Agent Developer ➡️ deploys geo-specific scrapers Content Agent Architect ➡️ automates outlines, briefs, and briefs 🙋 So, here’s my question: If you could automate one SEO task today — what would it be?

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If your Search Console looks like this currently (Impressions (purple line) dropping off a cliff) - it appears it's potentially related to Google dropping support for &num=100 - which allowed all the rank trackers and scrapers to pull top 100 results in one query. So until the rank trackers change their approach, they'll be missing out impressions on positions 11-100, which is where your URLs ranking there will nosedive in Impressions. I may be wrong and things might change with this - but if so, confirms one of my favourite long-time hypotheses that a serious chunk of impression data in Search Console is just bots :) If you want to test this out - check on high volume pages / keywords and ones that are top in all the keyword research tools. Then test it on the keywords that you know don't show up in KW research tools but you know get actual searches.

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Think anchor text doesn’t matter in SEO? Think again. One misplaced link won’t ruin your SEO. But repeated, sloppy anchors will cost you rankings over time. With a focused anchor text strategy, you can: ➡ Strengthen topical relevance ➡ Boost internal page authority ➡ Guide both users and search engines with clarity. Swipe through for some anchor text best practices to follow. ____ Found this useful? Pls like and share ♻ #seo #seotips #seoexpert

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