A summary of what actually happened in search during this period, ranked by likely impact on a single site rather than by publication time. Built from our own archive of 523 stories.
Ranked by estimated impact on a single site, not by publication time.
Local Search Still Starts with GoogleAccording to our research, somewhere between 60% and 70% of AI users have used AI for local search. There are questions about frequency and trust. But regardless…
AI Search & Visibility
Here are Google’s latest AI updates from July 2026
A common piece of anxiety-inducing SEO advice insists that rankings will decay unless a site is constantly publishing new content — weekly blog posts, regular updates, a never-ending content…
Ranking & Algorithms
Anchor text — the clickable words in a link — used to be one of the most heavily gamed ranking signals in SEO. Sites built entire link networks around exact-match anchor text, and search engines…
Ranking & Algorithms Links Policy & Penalties
You’ve probably noindex-ed pages you don’t want showing up in search. It’s a solid practice for product variants or paid destination pages, and it works for Google rankings.
Crawling & Indexing E-commerce
Cyrus Shepard joins us on the Near Memo to connect what the Google antitrust trial and API leak revealed about click data to the questions local operators care about: how Google decides a result was…
Local SEO AI Search & Visibility
In August, DuckDuckGo filed an amicus brief agreeing that Google unlawfully maintained a monopoly in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
Policy & Penalties
SEO is genuinely learnable by a motivated business owner, and it's also genuinely easy to get expensively wrong through trial and error. Deciding whether to handle it yourself or bring in outside…
A keyword map assigns each target keyword or topic cluster to exactly one page on your site. Skip this step and you end up with keyword cannibalization: three different blog posts all quietly…
For years, "article marketing" meant writing a short piece, spinning a dozen slightly-reworded copies of it, and blasting them across hundreds of article directories with a link back to your site in…
Businesses move all the time, and updating the Google Business Profile to the new address is essential for ranking in the new area. In the case when a business moves to a new state, unfortuantly…
Ranking & Algorithms Local SEO
Dogfooding, or using your own products internally, helps catch bugs, but it can't replace user research: your team knows too much to represent real users.
Assembled from our own archive of 523 stories, which currently runs from 4 October 2023. Ranking is by the impact score described on the front page — an estimate of how much a story is likely to affect one website, not a measure of how much attention it got.
The archive only holds what it has seen. Periods before it started are empty rather than quiet, and it gets more complete every week it runs.
