SEO 101 Ep 526: AI Bots Dominate Traffic, Google Algorithm Updates, and Local SEO Developments

0:06[SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on WMR.FM. [SPEAKER_00]: Episode number 526. [SPEAKER_00]: This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing, and my co-host is my company, Senior SEO Scott Fanac. [SPEAKER_00]: I was going to say goodbye. [SPEAKER_01]: it's great my dog has been a garbage dog lately and he just got back from the groomer so now he's not gross anymore yeah we go how he's got somewhere to start from again yeah yeah he'll be he'll go swimming in the creek in no time and be a garbage dog by the weekend I'm sure [SPEAKER_00]: All right, so it sounds like this is a little non SEO news, but chat GPT has finally hit 100 million in ad revenue.

0:48[SPEAKER_00]: That's a lot of money and just ads since it just started. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so they launched six weeks ago. [SPEAKER_01]: We talked about that on the show. [SPEAKER_01]: And originally when they launched it was just all, there was no advertiser control, really. [SPEAKER_01]: Everyone at OpenAI controlled everything. [SPEAKER_01]: So six weeks ago ads are currently being shown to about 20% of eligible users and they're only 600, approximately 600 advertisers on the platform.

1:13[SPEAKER_01]: So to reach 100 million in six weeks with 600 advertisers, that's impressive. [SPEAKER_01]: I would say at this stage, [SPEAKER_01]: So they are still in the early stages of the all their ad rollout, but come April, so that's today's April 1st. [SPEAKER_01]: So sometimes this month, self-serve advertiser access is supposed to begin. [SPEAKER_01]: So I imagine as soon as that happens, they'll be able to ramp up their advertiser accounts and the money will keep growing.

1:39[SPEAKER_01]: As of right now, expansion into Canada, Australia and New Zealand are all being explored, but currently it's only available in the US. [SPEAKER_00]: Um, advertisers, if it was all one of course, it'd be spending about $167,000. [SPEAKER_01]: That's not bad by, so it's a, so it's at about 20, 20 grand a week. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, for a big company, for a big big company, that's not not easy money. [SPEAKER_00]: That's testing material.

2:12[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure there's some big wigs in there. [SPEAKER_00]: It's been a lot more than that, but that's sort of the average anyway. [SPEAKER_00]: Interesting. [SPEAKER_00]: All right. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, let's jump into the SEO news. [SPEAKER_00]: The Google March 2026 Core Update. [SPEAKER_00]: It's supposed to take three weeks, began on March 27th. [SPEAKER_00]: This is a global update that will impact all regions in all languages.

2:37[SPEAKER_00]: This is the first big core update of 2026. [SPEAKER_00]: The last core update was in December. [SPEAKER_00]: These updates aren't penalties, so just keep that in mind. [SPEAKER_00]: They're largely designed to reward great content, or at least that's what they like to say. [SPEAKER_00]: As always, if you're hit by this update, it may take some time to bounce back and you need to take a deep look at your current content to see if your quality needs a boost.

3:03[SPEAKER_00]: But as we've said many, many, many times, [SPEAKER_00]: these updates tend to cause a lot of ups and downs and you may end up better off than you were before. [SPEAKER_00]: After being in a worse position, throughout the actual update. [SPEAKER_00]: So just be really, really, really careful. [SPEAKER_00]: If you know you're following many of the guidelines, you're probably fine. [SPEAKER_00]: just stick to your guns if you feel like you've been doing a good job.

3:40[SPEAKER_00]: If you're really concerned, start tackling the stuff that's the most obvious issue content with issue, and then you're safe, generally. [SPEAKER_00]: Alright, now there's also a spam update. [SPEAKER_00]: Tell us more about this. [SPEAKER_01]: So spam update, we want to talk about it in the last episode, except we didn't have the last episode because I was away. [SPEAKER_01]: So this happened on our recording day on March 24th. [SPEAKER_01]: The spam update completed the very next day.

4:08[SPEAKER_01]: It was very quick, which is surprising. [SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't usually roll out that fast. [SPEAKER_01]: Any of these updates. [SPEAKER_01]: It applies to all languages and locations. [SPEAKER_01]: Last spam update was back in August, so there's no word right now specifically on what types of spam were targeted by this update. [SPEAKER_01]: I did a bit of digging and I couldn't find any specific details. [SPEAKER_01]: But if you found your site's rankings crashed around March 24th, [SPEAKER_01]: If you are spamming, well, yeah, I guess that's what you can't, I don't know, but if you're not spamming and you got hit, I do a bit of digging, make sure your site wasn't hacked, make sure there's nothing crazy going on that you don't know about.

4:46[SPEAKER_01]: I've definitely seen that happen where sites crash due to spam, and they don't know why, and then when you start digging, you find sometimes hundreds or thousands of pages that are not supposed to be there from hackers. [SPEAKER_01]: you know bad stuff and yeah but for the most part anybody out there that's listening because I know everyone that listens to us is following the book if anything you should only be helped by this it shouldn't this update should not hurt you if you're playing by the rule so should all right yeah fingers crossed [SPEAKER_00]: AI search engines site Reddit YouTube and LinkedIn most.

5:29[SPEAKER_00]: This is a study based on a new analysis of 30 million sources by peak AI and AI search analytics tool. [SPEAKER_00]: According to the report, Reddit is the most cited source across CHAPT Google AI mode, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI overviews. [SPEAKER_00]: Whereas YouTube LinkedIn, Wikipedia, and Forbes rounds up the top five. [SPEAKER_00]: Forbes, interesting. [SPEAKER_00]: I gotta say, I'm not, I haven't been really pleased with the results from Reddit.

6:03[SPEAKER_00]: I'm more and more, I'm just giving up on it any time I see it. [SPEAKER_00]: If I'm really digging into a product, maybe I'll look at it, [SPEAKER_00]: I think the more nefarious marketers have already gotten in there and done their job to make it less quality. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, lower the quality. [SPEAKER_01]: It's true, isn't it? [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Big shock. [SPEAKER_00]: And all right. [SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, the reason for sharing this is it helps illustrate the importance of also being listed and growing authority beyond your own website.

6:34[SPEAKER_00]: appearing another trusted platforms can help you to appear in AI and there's no question at all that as annoying as an exponent of hell, read it is to try to write for. [SPEAKER_00]: It is worthwhile if you [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's most annoying platform in the world to try and write on that just egos everywhere blocking people from writing great stuff and the only way to write on something like for example, I mean I might jump on my [SPEAKER_00]: pulpit here.

7:17[SPEAKER_00]: If I wanted to write for the SEO section, despite having plenty of experience and genuinely wanting to help, which whenever I've jumped in there I have, it doesn't get shown because I don't have a carmus score, the tie-in-off. [SPEAKER_00]: The only way to get a carmus score, which I was like, okay, fine, fine, fine, is to write in other places that, frankly, I don't have any [SPEAKER_00]: And I maybe I'm too old for that. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, it just seems dumb as bricks to make me right in areas.

7:53[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just don't I don't have any interest in and try to build up a carmus score. [SPEAKER_00]: essentially I have to fake it and to make it to finally start writing in the SEO area where I deserve to be. [SPEAKER_00]: It makes no sense you don't want to publish a bunch of stuff on Pokemon and women's shoes first and then no build up your authority no okay just not I even went out there and posted some pictures of photos I'd done that word legitimate photos I'd take and all I got was a bunch of haters saying all those must be a I just know why he took that for like it's just give me a break enough [SPEAKER_01]: Hey, just read it is toxic to say the least.

8:30[SPEAKER_01]: It can be. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, it's sad that I kind of hope it takes a dive in some respects. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't see it getting any better, especially with all the incentive that it's showing people. [SPEAKER_00]: There's going to be enough people getting them there trying to take advantage of it, but it's going to start going downhill. [SPEAKER_00]: All right, what's next here? [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, we have a new, just a quick little story here, a new feature on Chatchee PT, they have enabled location sharing for more precise local responses, which is kind of funny because I don't like don't they already do this because when I use it, it'll often reference the city that I'm in.

9:11[SPEAKER_01]: So obviously it's getting that data anyways through probably the IP or or something. [SPEAKER_01]: But I guess this is for more precise data, supposedly. [SPEAKER_01]: You can enable it to save up by going into settings and data controls and you can just turn on location sharing. [SPEAKER_01]: With it turned on, this means that your precise location can be used to provide more tailored results. [SPEAKER_01]: So for example, what are the best coffee shops near me and [SPEAKER_01]: Glenn Gay actually posted an example.

9:37[SPEAKER_01]: So this may not appear as expected. [SPEAKER_01]: He posted an exit he asked for the best stake houses near me and several of them were 45 minutes away. [SPEAKER_01]: So that's not too helpful, right? [SPEAKER_01]: So I tried it as well and I tried it with it turned off. [SPEAKER_01]: I just said, I think I said best pizza places near me. [SPEAKER_01]: and we don't really have a lot of stakeholders where I live. [SPEAKER_01]: So past pizza places near me with it turned off gave reasonably good results.

10:02[SPEAKER_01]: Like probably what I would say is the best pizza in town came up first and then it showed like sorry Domino said show Domino second. [SPEAKER_01]: Like is that really the best? [SPEAKER_01]: Like come on. [SPEAKER_01]: I don't like Domino's anyways. [SPEAKER_01]: That's that's it's subjective. [SPEAKER_01]: And it gave a couple other crappy chains and then some of the really good local places and the order didn't really seem prioritized in any way.

10:21[SPEAKER_01]: So then I turned location sharing on to the search again and I got completely different results. [SPEAKER_01]: So actually I think I just said all that backwards. [SPEAKER_01]: The bad results showed up when I had personalized, or location sharing turned on, the better results showed when it was turned off. [SPEAKER_01]: So when I had a turn off, I had all the good chains at the top. [SPEAKER_01]: When I had it turned on, it put the bad stuff at top, at the top.

10:44[SPEAKER_01]: It's flawed. [SPEAKER_00]: It's definitely just, maybe you're just closer to the bad stuff. [SPEAKER_01]: Um, you know, the best one is within walking distance. [SPEAKER_01]: So I would agree with you. [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe, but in this case, no, that's not. [SPEAKER_01]: No, it isn't. [SPEAKER_01]: So I wish that were it because you could explain it then. [SPEAKER_00]: It's funny to timing because I think yesterday I went on to charge a PT to use it and it came up with a pop-up saying, please enable or will you give me kind of like a precise location control, like, no.

11:15[SPEAKER_00]: Why would I? [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know and it was on my desktop too. [SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't even on my phone. [SPEAKER_00]: Uh, yeah, I know. [SPEAKER_00]: If it's on my phone, I might, but not on my desktop. [SPEAKER_00]: It makes a sense. [SPEAKER_00]: Um, but I see now why it was doing it now. [SPEAKER_00]: I know there was, I figured it was something I missed before, but it was, I guess, just enabled. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, this just rolled out, I don't know, the date handy, but I think it's just in the past couple of days.

11:39[SPEAKER_01]: So this is brand new. [SPEAKER_01]: What I like about some of these open AI updates is that they show up in Canada. [SPEAKER_01]: We don't have to wait a year like with Google and all their changes are usually US specific, but this is here now, so that's kind of cool. [SPEAKER_00]: Cool. [SPEAKER_00]: All right, why don't you take this next one? [SPEAKER_00]: Because I think, well, we'll take a quick break after and I'll do the Google Zero.

12:04[SPEAKER_00]: So, go ahead. [SPEAKER_01]: That sounds great. [SPEAKER_01]: So this is, I wasn't sure if it's going to include this or not, but it can have negative SEO. [SPEAKER_01]: implications. [SPEAKER_01]: So I figured I'd better. [SPEAKER_01]: So on March 26, search engine land, published an article, and it was subsequently removed from search results the next day. [SPEAKER_01]: So what had happened is somebody filed a false copy right complaint, and Google acted right away and took the article down.

12:27[SPEAKER_01]: Now, [SPEAKER_01]: Google says that their policy is to remove content upon receiving a valid complaint. [SPEAKER_01]: And then the option is for publishers to file a counternotice. [SPEAKER_01]: So that's not good. [SPEAKER_01]: They're contented at being removed globally. [SPEAKER_01]: and in the complaint it stated that there was the content was copied word for word and included copyrighted images. [SPEAKER_01]: Despite the article not having any images in it at all and it was not a direct copy in any way of the claimed material.

12:59[SPEAKER_01]: So the worry here is that how easy would it be for somebody to just file false claims on all their competition and have their competition booted at least temporarily while they try to figure out how to get it back. [SPEAKER_01]: So, but in this case with search engine land, there are articles down for about four days on March 31st, the articles were back in Google search. [SPEAKER_01]: So it was recovered quite quickly, which is nice, but it is scary how easily somebody can have an impact when your results like that.

13:30[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, hopefully the article is still relevant. [SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't too outdated, maybe it was news. [SPEAKER_00]: That wouldn't be so good. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, no kidding. [SPEAKER_00]: Alright, let's take a quick break when we come back and talk about how Google zero is missing the real problem. [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back to SEO 101 on WMR.fm hosted by myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing and my company, Senior SEO, Scott Fennak.

14:06[SPEAKER_00]: All right, so Will Scott published on search engine lane and article says Google Zero misses the real problem. [SPEAKER_00]: Your next visitor isn't human. [SPEAKER_00]: So I tried to sum this up. [SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of good content in here to create article. [SPEAKER_00]: Lots of good stats, so people will stat heavy, [SPEAKER_00]: What comes down to the main takeaway is the real problem for web publishers isn't the Google traffic is falling.

14:34[SPEAKER_00]: It's that AI agents are already doing research and making buying decisions for humans without showing up as visits at all, which makes standard traffic reports dangerously misleading. [SPEAKER_00]: So let's get into some of the stats here. [SPEAKER_00]: More than half, this is crazy of all web traffic now. [SPEAKER_00]: That's 51% is now automated and not human. [SPEAKER_00]: This happened for the first time in a decade. [SPEAKER_00]: When I saw that, I thought that was a decade.

15:02[SPEAKER_00]: I guess, I don't know. [SPEAKER_00]: I didn't want a dig deeper into that, but that was interesting. [SPEAKER_00]: But I was from an art of report from the 2025 Imperva bad bot report. [SPEAKER_00]: They're bad enough to get their own report. [SPEAKER_00]: All right. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, [SPEAKER_00]: Automated traffic grew 23.5% year over year in 2025, about 8 times faster than human traffic, which rose just 3.1%. [SPEAKER_00]: This is according to the human security state of AI traffic report.

15:32[SPEAKER_00]: Check that out, actually. [SPEAKER_00]: It's quite significant. [SPEAKER_00]: Human split does a sound, security is, uh, [SPEAKER_00]: Quite the site. [SPEAKER_00]: It ducks all about AI and traffic and bots and good in the bad and ugly and quite interesting. [SPEAKER_00]: AI crawlers now make up 51.69% of all crawler traffic ahead of regular search engine crawlers at 34% that's according to cloud fair cloud flare AI bought crow crawling grew more than 15 times in a single year hitting around 50 billion requests per day by late 2025.

16:08[SPEAKER_00]: And this is really important. [SPEAKER_00]: Google Analytics 4 and most analytics platforms cannot distinguish between a human visit, a block crawl, and an AI agent evaluating the site on a human's behalf. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, I'm going to put an asterix around cannot, I believe it's just simply not done. [SPEAKER_00]: I think Google simply decided to eliminate bought traffic from reporting which makes good sense up till now. [SPEAKER_00]: I think it needs to be clearer and it should show.

16:39[SPEAKER_00]: And hopefully that will happen within this year. [SPEAKER_01]: There should be a separate report within analytics. [SPEAKER_01]: They're always shut up and we can separate all the different bots. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: And it's just so logical. [SPEAKER_00]: I wouldn't be surprised if it lands next week. [SPEAKER_00]: Something that just says, hey, this is your AI traffic. [SPEAKER_00]: This is, or simply, bot traffic at this point until they can really hone it down.

17:03[SPEAKER_00]: And then you can see what's going on. [SPEAKER_00]: Because it's vital information. [SPEAKER_00]: But AI has been a very Google's been a bit. [SPEAKER_00]: mum about anything that helps us with AI, it's frustrating. [SPEAKER_00]: And what does this matter? [SPEAKER_00]: Well, the fact is AI bots take a lot and give back very little. [SPEAKER_00]: CloudFlare data shows how one-sided this is. [SPEAKER_00]: Anthropics CloudBot reads 23, well, let's say, 24,000 pages for every one visitor it sends back.

17:34[SPEAKER_00]: Wow, open a eyes, but reads 1276 pages for every visitor it sends back. [SPEAKER_00]: Whereas what we're used to is incredible. [SPEAKER_00]: Like Google's traditional crawler has always worked in that it reads your site and sends you visitors in return at a rate of about 831 times higher than AI systems. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, that is changing right now with AI overviews and such. [SPEAKER_00]: It's definitely a lot lower than it used to be.

18:13[SPEAKER_00]: whereas AI bots and all these agents are taking and not giving much back. [SPEAKER_00]: They're also starting to make more decisions for humans. [SPEAKER_00]: Gardner, the polling company, the survey company, predicted in 2024, 2020. [SPEAKER_00]: Brett, 2024, that regular search traffic would drop 25% by 2026 as AI agents take over queries. [SPEAKER_00]: That forecast is on track. [SPEAKER_00]: By 2028, I do believe this. [SPEAKER_00]: Gardner says 90% of B2B purchases will involve an AI agent, moving over 15 trillion through AI driven channels.

18:55[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, does that mean that that's the end purchase? [SPEAKER_00]: No, 100% no. [SPEAKER_00]: I do not believe even by 2028 will that happen. [SPEAKER_00]: I believe it will be a fundamental part of the person's decision making process, though. [SPEAKER_00]: This is pretty interesting, during Cyberweek 2025 AI agents influenced 20% of all global orders that was 67 billion in sales according to Salesforce. [SPEAKER_00]: Now businesses using AI agents grew sales 13% versus 2% for those without.

19:28[SPEAKER_00]: 13 versus 2%. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think everyone's going to have agents pretty soon. [SPEAKER_00]: That's crazy, man. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, most importantly, [SPEAKER_00]: When an AI agent checks out your website on someone's behalf, even if it does show up in analytics, it may show up as a zero second bot visit or not at all. [SPEAKER_00]: So let's say let's just say a quick visit to your site. [SPEAKER_00]: If it shows up, otherwise, it just doesn't show up.

19:57[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I felt I had to reinforce that. [SPEAKER_00]: That's so important. [SPEAKER_00]: So how to optimize for this? [SPEAKER_00]: And we've, all this is nothing. [SPEAKER_00]: We talked about this in the past, but it's, [SPEAKER_00]: always good to have it cemented. [SPEAKER_00]: Structured data is no longer optional. [SPEAKER_00]: Schema markup and all that entails is very important. [SPEAKER_00]: It's not everything, but it's very important.

20:22[SPEAKER_00]: Stale content is a huge liability. [SPEAKER_00]: Will Scott made a good example there. [SPEAKER_00]: You should read article. [SPEAKER_00]: But he mentioned that [SPEAKER_00]: You know, if your content is cited over competitors and your content is stale, it's going to look pretty bad to you if you're saying something that's outdated or wrong. [SPEAKER_00]: Conversely, if AI looks at all the competitors and looks at yours and is trying to figure who to source, they're not going to use you if they're not, you know, fooled, they're not going to use you because you're content to scale.

20:53[SPEAKER_00]: So keeping your content, your cornerstone content, updated regularly is vital. [SPEAKER_00]: Also, write content using AI best practices, and we've talked about this many times in the past, we're going to talk about it more by humans, we're going to be saying it a lot, but just an example would be that chunking, when you're writing content and you're breaking it down into headings, it's important that these headings clearly signal the underlying [SPEAKER_00]: and one of the things I learned recently is that you don't want to refer to information in a previous heading.

21:37[SPEAKER_00]: That's quite far removed because AI typically breaks down that content into chunks. [SPEAKER_00]: And it doesn't actually connect at all into one article necessarily. [SPEAKER_00]: These are always [SPEAKER_00]: Let's call it a heading and section, let's call it a section of your article instead of a chunk to make it a little easier. [SPEAKER_00]: If you're referring to content, three sections ago, AI may not connect the dots and it won't make sense and it won't do a good job of indexing it or at least surfacing it.

22:25[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, don't block AI crawlers unless you give a great consideration of what you're going to lose if you do. [SPEAKER_00]: I feel for publishers. [SPEAKER_00]: I really do, but I do believe that it's becoming the only game in town, so be really, really careful. [SPEAKER_00]: Okay. [SPEAKER_00]: Next up, Google explains how crawling works in 2026. [SPEAKER_00]: What's this all about? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so we've actually spoke about this not too long ago.

22:53[SPEAKER_01]: They gave a bit more information. [SPEAKER_01]: And this is like perfect 101 stuff. [SPEAKER_01]: And this expands on what Google had said a few weeks or maybe there's a couple of months ago now I've lost track of time. [SPEAKER_01]: And I just wanted to reiterate some of this to hopefully be helpful. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's important to know how Google bought crawls your site in terms of their limitations. [SPEAKER_01]: When they fetch any specific URL excluding PDFs, they only fetch the first two megabytes of data.

23:20[SPEAKER_01]: Anything beyond two megabytes is completely ignored, and Google never sees it. [SPEAKER_01]: Google bought doesn't see it. [SPEAKER_01]: So if you have a page, [SPEAKER_01]: that is very HTML heavy. [SPEAKER_01]: You have content at the bottom of that page that may not be visible at all. [SPEAKER_01]: So that's really important to know. [SPEAKER_01]: If you've got long-form content, take a look and see how large that HTML page is. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, it does not include video, it does not include images.

23:46[SPEAKER_01]: So, when you're looking at this, you're only looking at the code. [SPEAKER_01]: You're not looking at the extras. [SPEAKER_01]: If you have external files like CSS and JavaScript, that's great, because [SPEAKER_01]: If the CSS code or the JavaScript code is on your page, it will be included in that to make a bite data threshold. [SPEAKER_01]: If it's an external file that you're referencing, that's great because it doesn't impact that limit.

24:11[SPEAKER_01]: So it reduces the URL file size. [SPEAKER_01]: If I said that clearly, I feel like I didn't. [SPEAKER_01]: So keep all your external files, external. [SPEAKER_01]: Make sure your HTML is lean, especially if you were L sizes or if you were L sizes or large currently, you'll really work on thinning that out getting rid of redundant code. [SPEAKER_01]: Even things like comments, if you've got a lot of comments, can add to that size. [SPEAKER_01]: If you're really trying to pair it down, get rid of comments if you can.

24:38[SPEAKER_01]: And again, the CSS and JavaScript should be on external files. [SPEAKER_01]: And finally, place any critical data. [SPEAKER_01]: higher up in the HTML to make sure that it is seen. [SPEAKER_01]: When we used to do audits, one of the lines in our audits was first tech or story. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, first text is relevant to your target phrase kind of thing. [SPEAKER_01]: And that's not really as important as it used to be, but it kind of is in this case if you've got a page that is huge.

25:06[SPEAKER_01]: So make sure you know your structured markup is close to the top and the source. [SPEAKER_01]: Because it can really be anywhere on the page, but put it in your head section, you know Google will see it. [SPEAKER_01]: things like that. [SPEAKER_01]: So something to watch out for, make sure if you're having trouble getting really big pages indexed, there's a good chance that this is why. [SPEAKER_00]: So interesting. [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, Google's Ask Maps is fully available in US and India.

25:32[SPEAKER_00]: This is as of today, it prefers. [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to take this with a grain of salt. [SPEAKER_00]: Although it doesn't seem like a very funny joke, but you know what? [SPEAKER_00]: We have spoken briefly about this, but it's a new feature being rolled up by Google. [SPEAKER_00]: It leverages Gemini to help users reach local businesses, plant trips, and get recommendations. [SPEAKER_00]: Again, I'm just waiting for the mistakes to happen that are just awesome.

25:57[SPEAKER_00]: But I haven't seen anything yet. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not that I've got my finger in the pulse of news, I haven't seen anything yet. [SPEAKER_00]: There's got to be some pretty big mistakes, so that's going to happen here that can be pretty funny and hopefully not tragic. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I'm sure about it someday, probably. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Google is testing a huge block of citations at the bottom of AI overviews.

26:21[SPEAKER_00]: Session Patel on X posted about large link cards at the bottom of the AI summary. [SPEAKER_00]: Citations are listed in a giant blue card broken up into table format displaying thumbnails of no apparent value, the site name, faevaicon, description, and title. [SPEAKER_00]: Barry calls the change ugly and suggested this may be a bug. [SPEAKER_00]: He does not suspect this test will get rolled out, but keep a lookout for it. [SPEAKER_00]: I hope I do see that.

26:52[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I tried to replicate it and I couldn't, but I did see in the screenshots in the article that the cards are normally kind of in a blue box off to the to the right of the AI overview. [SPEAKER_01]: And now this is at the bottom and it could be a bug, I guess we're going to find out. [SPEAKER_01]: But I don't know why they would move it, but I'm curious to see what the [SPEAKER_01]: what impact that would have on clicks and I don't know.

27:14[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like it would hurt them if anything having it below the continent as opposed to being right there. [SPEAKER_01]: But is he? [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we will see. [SPEAKER_00]: One thing I wanted to add is that as a separate note in the show, we have just partnered up with a white label agency that's helping us with clients who have [SPEAKER_00]: reviews on their local business profiles, and this is Google, so if they've got a review on there that they don't like, that is clearly unfair, is harming the reputation and simply needs to go.

27:50[SPEAKER_00]: They may have already tried to have it removed, whatever, and they just had fallen on deaf ears. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, never done this before. [SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of exciting, actually. [SPEAKER_00]: Our partner is guaranteed that, and they have about a 90% success rate, they can remove these and we're able to provide it with a money-back guarantee. [SPEAKER_00]: So anyway, anyone out there listening who has some reviews out there that are just infuriating them.

28:27[SPEAKER_00]: That's in their local business profile and they want them removed. [SPEAKER_00]: Let me know. [SPEAKER_00]: You can reach me at Ross at stepforth.com. [SPEAKER_00]: That's STEPFORTH.com and let's chat and see if I can help you out. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, by no means are we doing anything here that's against Google's guidelines. [SPEAKER_00]: This is fully on the up and up and, you know, if it's unfair and it's, it shouldn't be there.

28:52[SPEAKER_00]: Let's get it off and we finally have an opportunity and a means to do that, which I'm happy to say. [SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, just something I want to add there because I think it's going to be really helpful for the business owner. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing and my company Senior SEO Scott Vanac, thank you for joining us today. [SPEAKER_00]: If you have any questions you'd like to share with us, please feel free to post them on our Facebook group easily found by searching SEO 101 podcast on Facebook.

29:22[SPEAKER_00]: Have a great week and remember to tune to the future episodes which are every week on WMR.fm. [SPEAKER_01]: And thanks for listening, everybody.