Skip to content
Doctor SEO
Free SEO audit

Category: SEO Trends

Named studies with disclosed methodology, industry data and structural shifts in search and AI search.

Four-row table comparing Zyppy’s opt-out experiment with Google’s documentation of the Search generative AI control. SEO Trends Zyppy Switched Off Google’s AI Features for 28 Days Cyrus Shepard excluded his own site from Google’s AI features for 28 days. His estimate: 21% of clicks. The checkable part is… 11 min read Four-row table: the Nozzle study, Google spam policies, the Search Status Dashboard and TrueRanker, with what each one establishes about the altered result pages served to rank trackers. SEO Trends Google is serving altered results to rank trackers A rank-tracking vendor reports that Google answered 8.0% of its judged result pages with sites that were not the usual ones, then… 13 min read Three-step diagram of how Google's crawl and index timings reached the reader. One, the slide: Gary Illyes presented typical and worst-case durations in Barcelona on 2 October 2026, and what it does not show is anything published, because Google published no blog post, no documentation page and no changelog entry. Two, the recap: one attendee, John Campbell of the agency ROAST, recapped it on LinkedIn, and what it does not show is a first-hand reading, because LinkedIn blocks automated retrieval and this article has not read it directly. Three, two reports: PPC Land published eight rows on 3 October and Relevant Audience sixteen on the 4th, and what it does corroborate is that the eight shared rows match exactly, which validates the transcript and not the data. None of the sixteen figures carries a methodology, a sample size, a date range or a definition of typical. SEO Trends Google Read Out Its Own Crawl and Index Timings Gary Illyes presented Google internal crawling, indexing and serving timings in Barcelona. Google has published none of the figures, so we checked… 15 min read Three-step diagram of the system the SAFE paper describes. One, the input: it takes a cluster of channels rather than a single item, and the accuracy metric is defined over a given set of channel IDs; the words page, site and query do not appear in the document. Two, the examination: three agents read synthetic artefacts, inorganic spatiotemporal patterns and inter-account linkages, over YouTube channel signals, channel connections and video metadata. Three, the verdict: the Root Agent orchestrates the other agents and synthesises a verdict on the cluster, and the paper publishes no accuracy, recall or false-positive value on any dataset. SEO Trends Google’s SAFE Paper Is About YouTube, Not Search Rankings Google published SAFE, a multi-agent forensic system for “AI slop”. The paper is about YouTube channels, not Search, and it carries no… 13 min read Table of the three arms of the preregistered field experiment on AI Mode: No AI Search, which ended up hiding only 51.1% of AI Overviews and so reports its +8.8 pp as LATE; Current Search, the control, which carries no figure of its own; and AI Mode Search, which reduced click-through to publishers by 18.8 percentage points, ITT, 95% CI −22.2 to −15.3. SEO Trends AI Mode Cuts Publisher Clicks by 18.8 Points: The First Randomised Experiment A preregistered field experiment with 1,100 Google users measures the causal effect of AI Mode on clicks to publishers: −18.8 percentage points.… 13 min read Bar chart of the three click-through-rate reduction ranges between Bing Chat and Bing web search that the brief attributes to Microsoft’s internal data: The New York Times sites, 87 to 93%; the Daily News sites, eight titles, 83 to 91%; and the Ziff Davis sites, 51 to 94%, a band whose ceiling is the 94% quoted in the headlines. SEO Trends Microsoft’s Own Data on Copilot’s Publisher Click Loss A court filing made public on 17 September 2026 contains Microsoft’s own measurement of how many clicks publishers lose to Bing Chat… 13 min read