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 551 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
A persistent piece of SEO folklore holds that a backlink only counts meaningfully if it comes from a site in the exact same niche or topic as yours — a cooking site needs links from other cooking…
Links
Checking a single keyword's ranking position is the most common way businesses evaluate whether SEO is "working," and it's also one of the most misleading, since a keyword can climb in rank while…
Ranking & Algorithms
The way a site's pages are organized and linked together — its information architecture — affects far more than whether a human visitor can find what they're looking for. It directly shapes how…
Site Architecture
A page that isn't linked from anywhere, sits behind a login, or requires a form submission to reach essentially doesn't exist to a search engine, no matter how well-written its content is.…
Crawling & Indexing
A purchase decision rarely happens in a single moment — it's the end of a longer process that starts when someone first recognizes a need, moves through comparing options, and eventually resolves…
Press releases follow a convention that can feel strange the first time you notice it: a company writes about itself as if an outside observer were reporting the news, referring to itself by name…
Measurement
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
Assembled from our own archive of 551 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.
