Clicks as a ranking-related signal have been a subject of debate for over twenty years, although nowadays most SEOs understand that clicks are not a direct ranking factor. The simple truth about clicks is that they are raw data and, surprisingly, processed with some similarity to human rater scores. Clicks Are A Raw Signal The…
Boost your skills with Growth Memo’s weekly expert insights. Subscribe for free! When an AI answers a question using your content, it usually cites you with a source link. What it doesn’t do, 62% of the time, is say your name. The link is there. The brand mention is not. This is what I like…
Google updated its snippet documentation today with a new section on “Read more” deep links in Search results. The section outlines three best practices for increasing the likelihood that a page appears with these deep links. What A Read More Deep Link Is Google defines the feature as “a link within a snippet that leads…
This series has been written in English, tested in English, and grounded in research conducted primarily in English. Every framework discussed here (vector index hygiene, cutoff-aware content calendaring, community signals, machine-readable content APIs) was conceived by an English-speaking practitioner, stress-tested against English-language queries, and validated against benchmarks that, as this article will show, are themselves…
It won’t surprise anyone that most advertisers are hesitant to use auto-generated creative from ad platforms. Auto-generated ads fall into the following categories: Customer-in-the-loop (CITL): Assets are generated based on inputs like a website URL or a user prompt. The advertiser always has a choice as to whether or not they want to include these…
Last year, after spending a few days at a work summit in Austria, I asked Perplexity for the latest news related to SEO and AI search. It responded with details about a supposed “September 2025 ‘Perspective’ Core Algorithm Update” that Google had just rolled out, emphasizing “deeper expertise” and “completion of the user journey.” It…
Google just announced the deprecation of Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) and is officially moving its legacy capabilities into AI Max. Starting in September, eligible campaigns using Dynamic Search Ads (DSA), automatically created assets (ACA), and campaign-level broad match settings will automatically upgrade to AI Max. While advertisers have speculated about this change for months, the…
Google updated their report-a-spam documentation to reflect that the feature may now be used to initiate manual actions against websites that are found to be spamming. This is a change in policy that gives SEOs the opportunity to now have their spam reports potentially go into the queue for a manual action. Change In Spam…
It works, until it doesn’t. The Chase Imagine you’re a news publisher. Your journalism is good, you write original stories, and your website is relatively popular within your editorial niche. Revenue is earned primarily via advertising. Google search is your biggest source of visitors. Management demands growth, and elevates traffic to the throne of all…
Ask ChatGPT or Claude to recommend a product in your market. If your brand does not appear, you have a problem that no amount of keyword optimization will fix. Most SEO professionals, when faced with this, immediately think about content. More pages, more keywords, better on-page signals. But the reason your brand is absent from…