SEO and AI News Roundup: Google’s /goto Redirects, GSC AI Reports, PAA Goes AI & Publisher Payment Pilot Program

0:00Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Search with Candor. I am recording this the day after Search Norwich Excel. So if you did come and join us last night and yesterday for the first ever Search Norwich Excel, thank you so much. We really appreciate it. Had quite a few people come up and say they enjoy the podcast and they've been enjoying and learned about the event through the podcast as well, which was very, very cool. And on this week's episode, I'm going to be talking about the last four weeks of SEO news that we've covered in core updates before next week's episode is going to be the launch of season five and our brand new AI Search focused mini series season.

0:44The whole season basically is going to be focused on AI Search. I've already recorded three episodes. I'm recording two more episodes next week as well. I've got some fantastic guests like Charlie Whitworth, like Nathan Gotch, like Mark Williams Cook coming back on the show and so many other people. I'm really, really looking forward to diving into so many different aspects of AI search. And I feel like I have a lot to digest and think about from our talks from yesterday at Search Norwich as well. First of all, I want to give a huge shout out to all of our speakers and panelists from yesterday.

1:16We kick things off with Arnett Hellmans, Bengu, Darisha Dinsher, Adam Gent, Miriam Ziasseh, Martin Split, Charlie Marchant, Brendan Bennett, Emma Jane Stogden, Eva Yovanovitch. who asked me, Julia Ponozzo. It was an absolutely stellar lineup. Every talk and every panelist stood up, delivered, did brilliant work and really, I think, opened a lot of people's eyes to things they haven't been considering in marketing and SEO at the moment. It was absolutely fantastic. I think everybody who came really enjoyed it. We've had some really lovely feedback as well. And hopefully we plan to do it again next year.

1:55So hopefully you can come and join us next year for Search Knowledge XL2, whatever we want to call it, 2027. And yeah, we'll be back next year with more events and more cool stuff. And like I said, next week, we're kicking off season five, the brand new AI search focused season that you can look forward to. But like I said, this week's episode, before we get to that stuff, let's talk about some news, shall we? And I'm just going to get my notes up here. It's basically going to cover the last four weeks, all the important, most important news stories that we have covered on our newsletter, which is Core Updates.

2:30You can subscribe at coreupdates.com. And it's the headlines from all the last four issues, basically. Let's have a little look, shall we? So this is from August 31st, right at the end of the month. This is since I've recorded my last news episode. Google rolls out go to google.com slash G-O-T-O and you pass through URL on SERPs we'll go over of course let me flick over here there we go to the right hand side of course the one and only Barry Schwartz who maybe has covered more SEO news in the history of SEO than anyone else ever this is a thing that Google has introduced to stop scraping basically the lawsuit they've been in with SERP API which is a company that takes Google information, SERP data, and feeds it to their customers.

3:21This is essentially a big discussion about how Google actually gets you and crawlers and machines to the URL it's sending you to. And they've created a little redirect system, or pass through URL, as some people call it, as Barry calls it here, where rather than SERPs linking directly to that source, you go through a google.com slash go to url and yeah google have introduced quite a lot of this stuff you can see the examples here on screen if you're watching on youtube or spotify i'll of course put links for every single news story all four of them in the show notes down below so you can go and check those out as well and here is an interesting little uh a little bit of data as well there were some interesting graphs about how you can see how these anti-bot kind of resistances from Google are showing up on some of the tools and some of the data there as well.

4:19This is, of course, I think massively related to this SERP API discussion, this lawsuit that they're going through. And it seems to be pretty much universally rolled out from what I've seen. I've seen it multiple times across various client sites, across all the different SERPs. and yeah probably is a thing here to say interestingly enough it didn't affect that many of the rank tracking tools i spoke to a couple of guys at semrush guys at hrefs the team over at sistrix a few other companies and tools to kind of ask what is going to happen with rank tracking and i don't know how they did it i didn't ask it's not my business they were able to find workarounds to still access that rank tracking data through these redirecting URLs.

5:10So that is good news for us. We are not losing loads of SERP data. But I still think it's interesting to cover as Google is trying to crack down on a lot of these companies pulling SERP data against Google's wishes, basically. So let's move on to September. This was the covered this in the 7th of September edition. Here we are. 7th of September. The day before my birthday. My birthday is the 8th of September. As I think I mentioned it on a recent episode as well. Google Search Console AI reports are now available globally. So this is the generative AI controls and the AI performance reports. I don't know if you guys have seen this.

5:53It's an impressions thing. So you get your impressions here. no clicks yet because I think that will be something Google doesn't want to share because it will see how bad it is but under the performance section you can see search results and then it says generative AI and that shows you the impressions you get from things like AI mode and AI overviews so you can see this in more detail here where you get the impressions of particular URLs I have shown this to a few clients and they have not been particularly interested because impressions are like, brand visibility, sure, URL visibility. It doesn't really tell you much.

6:29And this was a big discussion we actually had on our Future of Search and SEO panel at Search Norwich yesterday, where we were talking about the level of data transparency and if we will get better data and more accurate attribution and tracking in the future. A lot of people aren't convinced. Some people think we will and we'll have to, but some people aren't convinced. I guess we will find out. And also all the talks, the panel and everything like that from Search Norwich will be published in the next couple of weeks or so, pretty much. They'll all be going up on our YouTube channel. So if you want to go and subscribe to the Search Norwich YouTube channel, you can check that out.

7:06It was a brilliant discussion with some fantastic talks as well. So the good news is this stuff is rolling out. I think we will be getting more and more data. This is now rolled out globally. and also the generative AI controls that they talked about as well, which is a toggle for sites to block AI overviews and AI mode from including their sites. So you are not included in the AI search features if you toggle this thing off, essentially. You can opt out, but they will not receive traffic or impressions from our generative AI features, is how Google words it here. other than that it doesn't affect anything else that does not mean you lose organic rankings or anything like that it's just a control for ai mode and ai overviews and it looks like this there's a little toggle here you can say include my site's links and content in search generative ai features or exclude my site's links and content from search generative ai features it's nice and easy this is something that's been pushed a lot by the european commission and a big battle that's been going on with a lot of the publishers as well and a lot of the legal side of things that's been going on with Google and the increase in the use of generative AI in their search platform and their search features.

8:25So this is kind of a rebuttal and a battle back to that. This is Google trying to cover themselves. A lot of people saying this is not enough, but it's a start, right? It's something. It's better than nothing. You can have a little bit of control, which is very nice to see. Next up, let's move on to the 14th of September. All right, just my white press hat here. They were our headline sponsors at Search Knowledge, hence why I've got the new hat. And I didn't have time to do my hair today because Search Knowledge happened. So deal with me in a baseball cap, everybody. I'm sorry. this one is funny enough broken news by our very own mark williams cook nearly 100 % of people also asked results are ai generated here's the post let me flick to the left here you can see it in full massive change by google we are likely to see 100 % aios within people also asked answers in the next few weeks.

9:24And this was a couple of weeks ago. Also asked a sample of 19.2 million English language queries made in 2026 and found a dramatic monthly increase in AI generated answers. 97 % of PAA answers in the first week of September are AIOs, up from 86 % in August. so we may be heading towards a all ai overview people also ask result what does that mean for you look at this graph it is pretty crazy it dropped in april but has gone massively up over the last what's that five months or so it's pretty crazy this this steep graph increase. Obviously there's been a lot of chatter about this on the LinkedIn side of things, in the news as well.

10:19Other people were covering Mark's post about this and this is something obviously we've been talking about and the Also Ask team have been talking about a lot. I don't like AI overviews appearing in other SERP features. It feels weird like we've got so much of the AI integration to like the local stuff and the map packs and all that kind of thing. feels very strange to me but yeah this is an additional kind of thing that is added into people also asked i kind of want people people's asked to be a fairly straightforward kind of uh element to this to the serps we don't need extra ai views in there as well in my opinion feels a bit unnecessary anyway yeah if you're optimizing for people to ask stuff think about what you're doing and check out more studies and data from also as well we've got a bunch of stuff that i will link to in the show notes as well last but not least yes i know very very quick episode this week this is a big one though and i'll flick myself to the right this time google ai contribution pilot tests paying websites when they're used in ai results yeah this is a big one this is something I actually discussed briefly in my Brighton SEO talk last year and something I'll be talking about in a couple of weeks, actually next week by the time you hear this on Monday at OM conference in Antwerp in Belgium on the, yeah, next Monday.

11:50This is a real kind of, again, Google trying to cover themselves, cover their ass kind of thing. This is Google paying publishers through Google Search Search Console, no less, which I thought was kind of the weird part. A payment system through Search Console that essentially reimburses you for the lost traffic you have because of AI reviews and AI mode. So they don't admit you're losing traffic because of AI mode and AI reviews, but they're happy to pay you if your content is used there. Interesting. So let's scroll down a little bit here. here is the exact wording and a couple of screenshots here which i think are worth highlighting google is running at least a test with at least dozens of publishers the program is apparently mainly being tested with small and mid-sized publishers and is covering a scope far beyond just news publishers a panel in google search controls includes a payout feature That seems so weird to me.

12:55And here's the quote from Google. Accumulate earnings when your content contributes significantly to AI generated responses in participating products. so actually the guys from digiday interviewed a couple of publishers in the pilot who said the information is very basic with one explaining that they're hopeful that the fact that google is setting a precedent for exploring paying publishers directly for content through this is meaningful let's hope so um the support page is also available to the people in the pilot program That is not available to the public, by the way. The AI contribution pilot allows you to earn money when your content contributes significantly to the creation of AI-generated responses shown to users in participating products.

13:44That's the bit we already covered. AI contribution focuses on the phase of generation where web content can significantly influence what response is generated. Web content may also confirm facts or be linked to within Google's AI after a response is generated, but those instances don't qualify for AI contribution. contributions can currently be earned from these participating products the gemini app ai overviews and ai mode use the a earn contribution pilot report to track your earnings and last payment this is how it works you can accrue earnings for your content you can manage your participation you can track your earnings you can track your payments they had teased this earlier on in the year in june and they said they were piloting a new way to partner with websites whose content meaningfully contributes.

14:31And they specifically mentioned the freshness and factuality of generative AI responses, which I think is interesting. They had originally talked about a smaller scope publisher partnership that was more, you know, the huge publishers that they would directly partner with to provide stuff for their AI search features. This is a broader thing. This may be a thing you can apply for. We don't know any more details at time of recording and time of publishing but it is maybe maybe just a little step in the right direction to help these smaller sites and smaller publishers get a little bit of the money back that they have lost due to AI mode and AI overviews fingers crossed this is a step in the right direction I really hope it is and I really hope that this is a positive step for so many publishers like I said this is something I'm very passionate about something I've spoken about a few times already and something I'll be talking about next week.

15:28If you're going to be in Belgium at the OM Collective's OM conference, come and say hello, and I'll be doing an updated talk of my version from updated version of my talk from Brighton SEO last year, because a lot has changed in the last year, funnily enough. And that's about it, folks. I know I'm only going 15 minutes or so. Please give me some slack, because we ran a conference yesterday. And yeah, I'll be back next week, like I said, with a brand new season five. We're kicking off our AI search featured all kinds of cool stuff. We're kicking off with Charlie Whitworth, who I'm sure you probably already know through things like Hive MCR and speaking at various events.

16:11Charlie is brilliant and has been around in the SEO game for a while. He's a former journalist as well and has some really interesting insights into what SEO tactics and strategies are still working for AI search optimization. that's the opening conversation we have to open the season it's kind of a comparison between tactics and strategies for traditional seo versus the new aeo geo kind of stuff and it's a really great conversation we recorded it a couple of weeks ago charlie has got some genuine legit data and case studies about how this stuff works rather than this kind of hypothetical speculative kind of stuff a lot of these conversations i'm really aiming to have genuine actual data behind them because I find so many conversations around AI search are very broad and very shallow, essentially.

17:02That's exactly what I want to avoid. I want them to be actionable. I want people to bring data to the podcast so we can show and prove that they know what they're talking about and actually give you guys value, insights and practical, actionable things to do after you finish listening to the podcast. in the meantime before i hang out with charlie and enjoy next week's episode have a very lovely week i said stay tuned for a search knowledge updates coming soon we'll have all the talks up very soon and i will see you next week when i'm joined by charlie whitworth to kick off season five of search with candor have a lovely week see you next week folks