My Patio Doors Ended Up in the Living Room

Wave 299; 1m Keywords + AI Impact; Internal Link Decay; Stop Calling It SEO; GSC Goes Social; Google Liable for False AIO Claims; Self-Promo Content Backfires; and Much More!

Author

Yoyao
July 11, 2026 • Est. Learning Time: 13 minutes

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FIRST …

Typhoon Bavi is passing Taiwan as I write this. Cat 5 at its peak, the biggest storm to come near Taiwan in over 30 years. We prepared.

I prepare seriously now after 2016 and Typhoon Meranti.

When Meranti hit, my sliding patio doors lifted out of their tracks and landed in the middle of the apartment, rain pouring in sideways. Everything in the flying doors' path broke. We hid in the bathroom with our little ones for hours until it passed.

The tracks were just too shallow to hold the doors under that kind of wind. They sat fine on a calm day. They couldn't hold under load.

A weak connection always fails at the connection.

Same with your topical map.

Topical coverage is the panel filling the doorway. It looks complete, right up until something tests it.

Topical depth is how deep it sits in those tracks. Shallow, and it holds on a quiet day but lifts out the moment real weight arrives.

That's the weakness in a keyword-by-keyword strategy, or in copying whatever your competitors rank for.

Both feel like coverage. Neither is. You inherit a list, not a foundation, and there's no depth under any of it.

A shallow map ranks until something leans on it. A deep one holds.

Build depth under every topic you want to own, and the next update is just rain on the glass.

Here's what caught my eye this week.

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SEO + GEO

Kelsey Libert covers how Fractl and Search Engine Land analyzed 1,010,848 high-volume keywords across 379 brands and surveyed 1,004 U.S. consumers to measure how AI is changing search behavior. The headline finding is not search collapse. It is demand moving away from some query types and toward others.

  • Search demand is being redistributed: Across 35.4 billion monthly searches, 29% of high-volume search demand is in decline, but growing queries nearly offset the losses.

  • Vertical risk varies: FinTech saw the largest decline at 37.7%, while Lifestyle had the smallest at 15.2%. Insurance, SaaS, and Lifestyle were the only verticals below Gartner’s 25% forecast.

  • Non-branded demand is exposed: Non-branded queries account for 90% of tracked search volume, with HealthTech at 99.6% and Wellness at 98.5%.

  • AI is not replacing Google for most buyers: Only 13% of consumers start purchase research with an AI chatbot, while traditional search engines and online retailers each sit at 47%.

  • AI mentions can still drive action: 59% of consumers said they are likely to visit a brand’s website after an AI chatbot mentions or recommends it.

Matt G. Southern reports that an updated randomized field experiment found no measurable quality gap between clicks gained when AI Overviews were removed and clicks that happened with AI Overviews present. The revised paper found a 39.8% decrease in organic clicks when AI Overviews appeared, up from the earlier 38% estimate, while bounce-back behavior, visits under 10 seconds, and time on site showed no statistically significant difference.

  • Click loss was measurable: AI Overviews triggered on about 41% of queries in the experiment, and the researchers found fewer outbound clicks per search when summaries appeared.

  • Quality did not improve: About 4 in 10 same-tab clicks returned to search results in both groups, roughly 18% of visits ended within 10 seconds, and time on site was statistically indistinguishable.

  • Informational searches carried the effect: AI Overviews appeared or were intended to appear on 53% of informational queries, compared with 15% of navigational queries and 6% of transactional queries.

  • Top rankings benefited when summaries disappeared: The top three organic results gained the most clicks when a top-of-page AI Overview was removed, with position one nearly doubling.

Motoko Hunt explains that AI search is turning international SEO governance into a knowledge-management problem. Hreflang, localization, and technical standards still matter, but global brands now need clearer ownership over entity definitions, AI crawler access, market-specific content, local authority, and how products are represented across AI systems.

Matt G. Southern reports that Google’s Liz Reid said personalization and preferred sources can help small publishers gain visibility by matching niche content to more specific user needs. The claim comes without Google data, and he notes the catch: preferred sources help publishers a reader already trusts, not sites the reader has not found yet.

My Take: Matt nails it - preferred sources sound helpful, but they reward known brands first. That is not a discovery strategy for smaller publishers unless they are also building enough authority to become someone’s preferred source in the first place.

Sophie Brannon explains that internal link decay happens when growing sites quietly shift PageRank away from the pages that matter most. New content links to recent articles, navigation changes remove sitewide links, pagination and faceted URLs absorb equity, and old internal links keep pointing through redirects instead of final URLs.

My Take: Internal linking is one of the fastest places to recover SEO value because the authority is already on the site. Most teams chase new backlinks while their existing equity leaks into old blog posts, redirect chains, and pages that do not support the business. This is why topical maps cover internal linking strategies and site architecture.

Michael King explains that AI search should be treated as Relevance Engineering, not a renamed SEO checklist, because systems retrieve passages, compare entities, and use query fan-out across owned, earned, social, and product content. Key points:

  • Write passages for retrieval: Keep each paragraph on one idea, put the answer near a clear heading, include useful data, and use semantic triples to make relationships explicit.

  • Build beyond the website: AI systems can draw from owned pages, video, social content, earned media, and partner properties. Treat them as one content ecosystem.

  • Put essential facts in raw HTML: ChatGPT and Perplexity do not render JavaScript, so product details, descriptions, answers, and data points cannot live only in client-side code.

  • Make real-time retrieval fast: ChatGPT and Perplexity may request a page when a user asks the question. Slow pages can be skipped, and King points to edge caching through a CDN as a practical fix.

  • Use digital PR to reinforce the brand story: Consistent mentions of the brand, message, and expertise across authoritative sites can give AI systems more evidence for the answer they present.

Google is rolling out Search Console platform properties so creators and site owners can see how Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube posts perform in Google Search and Google's content feed. The new property type includes Performance, Insights, and Achievements reports, with query-level and post-level data, export options, top posts, traffic trends, and 28-day click milestones.

My Take: Is it a surprise that Google has this data? It’s great that Google is showing us the data now. I’ve been an advocate of sharing across all your socials. It shows Google that you’re a “business/brand” and not just creating some random website. Establish your brand/entity across the web. Backlinks and mentions are good to have, but don’t forget the low-hanging fruits of socials.

Sara Guaglione reports that Time, The Economist, and another major publisher are building agent-readable versions of their sites as AI crawlers become a separate audience from human readers. Time is converting pages into markdown for approved bots after blocking AI crawlers by default, The Economist is testing agent-readable versions of marketing and B2B content, and another publisher is experimenting with WebMCP to serve structured data directly to agents.

Brian Morrissey interviews USA Today Co. CEO Mike Reed about why the company is preparing for a search market where Google no longer sends reliable publisher traffic. Reed says USA Today Co. is blocking unauthorized AI bots, may block Google if AI Overviews stay tied to the main search crawler, and is shifting growth toward direct audience relationships, social referrals, commerce, and content licensing.

  • Google search is no longer the plan: Reed says the traditional Google search model is broken because AI summaries keep users on Google, and USA Today Co. is planning as if search traffic disappears rather than waiting for Google to fix the economics.

  • Bot access is moving to an acceptance model: USA Today Co. blocks unverified bots by default and only lets in bots tied to authorized relationships, such as ad agencies or AI companies with licensing deals.

  • Direct traffic is the hedge: Reed points to curated newsletters, text messaging, registration, subscriptions, and social referrals as the company’s replacement paths for audience access.

  • The business still has scale: Reed says USA Today Co. averages about 186 million monthly unique visitors, targets at least 1 billion page views per month, and has not missed that page-view mark in the last 3 years.

  • AI monetization is not only subscriptions: Reed says digital subscriptions are already above $150 million and could double in 3 years, but he sees commerce and licensing as the biggest growth drivers because both can become multi-hundred-million-dollar businesses.

Glenn Gabe shares how Reddit’s scaled AI translations dropped across Google organic results, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT after the May 2026 core update and June 2026 spam update. He tracks declines in Italy, Spain, Germany, and France, and points out that sites which programmatically translate low-quality pages risk scaled content abuse actions or a spam update hit.

Shai Belinsky explains why proprietary research makes a stronger citation asset than generic explainers: AI systems can retrieve a specific, attributable claim that competitors cannot reproduce. Similarweb says its report found that users recommended a brand by ChatGPT were 2.5 times more likely to visit that brand within seven days, and 55.9% of AI-influenced visits came through search. He recommends stating the number itself, attaching a source, sample, and date, then presenting it in standalone sentences or tables so machines can extract it.

Andy Crestodina reports that Orbit Media analyzed 560,695 AI crawl requests from 74 marketing websites and 446,267 AI referrals from 27 Cloudflare Pro accounts. The research separates where AI bots collect brand information from the pages that bring a person back to the site.

  • The homepage is the primary entity page: Homepages received roughly 15 times more AI attention than their share of site URLs would predict.

  • Commercial pages bring clicks: Service and product pages earned roughly three times more AI-referral traffic per page than a typical article, while articles underperformed homepages on referrals by nearly 20%.

  • Deep pages are less likely to earn recommendations: AI bots crawled pages three or four folders deep, but pages three folders deep drew about one-quarter of the referral traffic their footprint predicted. At four folders, the result was close to zero.

  • Content still informs AI: Forty-seven percent of pages generated zero AI referrals. Orbit says non-clicking content can still inform a model’s background knowledge.

Jenny Abouobaia reports that a Munich Regional Court ruled Google can be directly liable for false claims in AI Overviews after summaries allegedly connected two German publishers with scams and questionable business practices. The court treated the AI Overview as a statement generated by Google’s system rather than a link to third-party content. Google says it will appeal.

Mateusz Makosiewicz shares that Ahrefs published 34 self-promotional pages across five domains and tracked 9,886 answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot for almost four months. The tactic created 72 new Ahrefs Evolve mentions in prompt-engine slots that had previously been empty, but 43% of answers that cited a conference-promoting page skipped Evolve and recommended another event from the same list. Citation gains were also volatile: between first and last citation, pages appeared on only about one in three eligible days.

My Take: I’d take the 89% of tool-promoting pages with a grain of salt because Ahrefs one of the most well-known tools in SEO, if not the most. It’ll be rare that they’re not mentioned if the topic of SEO tools is covered, whether or not it’s their own article mentioned.

Kevin Indig and Amanda Johnson report that Gauge data across 301 AI-cited pages found primary research was only 2.7% of the set but earned 8.4% of citation volume, averaging 11.3 citations per page against 3.4 for other content. The lift came mostly from benchmarks that answer measurable buyer comparisons: Fivetran’s warehouse benchmarks earned 58 of the 90 primary-research citations in the data set. They say original data still fails when a page buries it in narrative, gates it, moves the URL, or omits the method and a clear comparison frame.

Barry Schwartz reports that Google’s Search Console Generative AI controls, first released for .co.uk sites, are appearing on some properties in the U.S. and other countries. The setting is still unavailable on many properties, and the rollout follows Google’s wider expansion of AI Performance reports beyond the United Kingdom.

SEO + GEO Ripples

  • Google Business Profile Restrictions & Penalties Are Additive: Barry Schwartz reports that Google can stack Google Business Profile review restrictions when a profile repeats the same policy violation. One example showed a review and ratings restriction extended to 2 months after Google found additional incentivized reviews tied to the profile.

  • Fraudulent DMCA Takedowns Wreak Havoc In Google Search: Barry Schwartz reports that fraudulent DMCA takedowns are removing legitimate pages from Google Search and creating a negative SEO risk for publishers. Pedro Dias said affected URLs can stay out of Google for at least 2 weeks, repeated claims can stretch the delay to months, and Search Console warnings may miss about 80% of the notices.

  • Bing Webmaster Tools Backfilled Data For AI Performance Reports On June 1st: Barry Schwartz reports that Bing Webmaster Tools showed larger AI Performance report numbers starting June 1 because Microsoft backfilled data. So that could show a jump in clicks and impressions. Krishna Madhavan said it was a normal data processing pipeline artifact, not an anomaly, and told site owners to focus on trends.

  • Google's Mueller Flags A Case On Why LCP Fixes Miss the Target: Matt G. Southern reports that John Mueller pointed to a Nuvemshop case study showing why LCP fixes can fail when teams optimize the wrong element. Nuvemshop found carousel transitions, lazy-loaded above-the-fold images, and missing priority signals distorted LCP detection, then reported good LCP coverage rising from 57% to 96% after fixing element selection, image loading, and caching.

  • Patreon Blocks Crawlers From Stealing Creators' Work for AI Training: Samantha Cole reports that Patreon has partnered with Cloudflare to block known AI training crawlers at the network level while still allowing search crawlers that help creators get discovered. The move uses Cloudflare's newer controls that distinguish training, agent, and search traffic.

  • Google Answers Question About LLMs-Author.txt For SEO: Roger Montti reports that John Mueller said Google does not use llms.txt or llms-author.txt, and he knows of no crawler or LLM confirming use beyond SEO tools. Mueller also said Cloudflare’s Content-Signal directive has no effect for any crawler or LLM, so name ambiguity needs a stronger web presence, not a new text file.

  • Google: Cloudflare Content Signals Robots.txt Directive Has No Effects: Barry Schwartz reports that John Mueller said Cloudflare’s Content-Signal robots.txt directive has “no effects whatsoever” for any crawler or LLM and adds bloat and maintenance to robots.txt. Google also does not use llms.txt or llms-author.txt, according to Mueller.

  • Why Meta AI could become search’s sleeping giant: Andrew Holland says Meta AI has a distribution advantage that search marketers are underestimating: Meta reported 3.56 billion family daily active people in March, while WhatsApp and Instagram each passed 3 billion monthly users. As AI gets embedded in Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, product research may start inside conversations and feeds rather than with a traditional web search.

  • Google Tests google.com/goto Tracking URLs In Search Results: Barry Schwartz reports that Google appears to be testing google.com/goto redirect URLs in search results, which pass clicks through to destination pages instead of linking directly. The limited sightings could affect rank trackers and analytics, and remove the usual destination preview for searchers.

AI

Meta released Muse Image and previewed Muse Video, its first media-generation models. Muse Image can use search and coding tools, refine its own generations, and work with Muse Spark to make animated GIFs, websites with images, and interactive visual games. Muse Video also adds native audio support.

Max Spero reports that Pangram’s opt-in data from 1,002,627 scans found 13.8% of social posts flagged as fully AI-generated, with long-form items over 250 words at 25.72%. LinkedIn made up a third of scanned items but 62% of the AI content flagged, and more than 40% of its long-form posts flagged. The study covers posts scanned by the extension’s users, not a census of every social feed.

AI Ripples

  • GPT‑5.6: Frontier intelligence that scales with your ambition: OpenAI released GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna for ChatGPT, Codex, and its API. The new ultra setting coordinates four agents in parallel by default, while the Responses API adds Programmatic Tool Calling and a multi-agent beta for complex workflows.

  • Introducing GPT‑Live: OpenAI introduced GPT-Live, a full-duplex voice model that can listen and speak at the same time, then delegate search and deeper reasoning to a frontier model in the background. GPT-Live-1 is rolling out as the default for Go, Plus, and Pro Voice users, while GPT-Live-1 mini becomes the Free default.

  • Introducing Muse Spark 1.1: Meta released a multimodal agent model with a 1 million-token context window and opened a public preview of the Meta Model API. Meta says Spark 1.1 can plan and delegate across parallel subagents, operate computers across changing interfaces, and work with native tools, MCP servers, and custom skills.

Social Media

Davang Shah explains that LinkedIn uses the first line of a post to generate its URL, so a keyword-led opening carries into its retrieval signal and cannot be edited after publishing. LinkedIn recommends 200 to 300 word posts with clear questions and short answers, alongside 800 to 1,200 word articles that provide the durable authority layer. Its data also suggests authors with 2,000 or more followers and posts with 10 or more high-quality comments have stronger trust signals.

Social Media Ripples

  • How We’re Keeping Reddit Real and Safe in the AI Era: Reddit says its AI-assisted defenses block 23 million spam views and nearly 25,000 new spammy posts and comments daily, while revoking nearly 2 million inauthentic votes per day. It also says its systems cut hate-and-violence enforcement to under five seconds, raised enforcement actions by more than 200%, and reduced potentially harmful-content exposure by more than 40%.

  • X rolls out updated video editor, including green screen recording: X launched a redesigned video editor and recorder in the iOS app, adding multi-language captions and green screen recording. Nikita Bier said more creator features are planned as X continues to try to make video a larger part of the platform.

  • Try a new conversational search experience with Ask YouTube: TeamYouTube announced that Ask YouTube, a conversational search experience that blends text with relevant clips, videos, and Shorts, is available for signed-in U.S. viewers aged 13 and older searching in English on desktop. For creators, views from videos, Shorts, and previews count toward total view metrics and Partner Program eligibility, and YouTube recommends clear titles, chapters, and unique content to match video segments to questions.

WHAT I'VE BUILT FOR YOU

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