Latest Technical SEO News - Page 3
Crawling changes, algorithm updates, rendering fixes, and structured data developments as they happen.
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Google says AdSense crawler rules also affect Ad Manager
Google's crawler docs now say Mediapartners-Google rules affect several ad products, and the crawler ignores the * group, so only a named robots.txt group stops it.
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Charging AI agents per page works, but no search crawler can pay
Suganthan Mohanadasan's x402 demo charges AI agents one cent a page. Only agents Mohanadasan runs have paid, in testnet money, and Googlebot cannot pay at all.
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Google's AI agent dropped local firms with vague pages in a test
A Reddit tester says Google's agent kept home service firms stating fixed quotes or same-day service, and the fixes are in page copy and LocalBusiness markup.
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ChatGPT's default model cites brand sites far less than Thinking
Writesonic ran 50 prompts through two ChatGPT models. Brand websites got 8% of the default model's citations and 56% of Thinking's, and sources barely overlapped.
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AI answers cite retailers' size guides, support and policy pages
Aleyda Solis reviewed Semrush and Similarweb data for 25 US retailers and found AI answers cite size guides, help articles and policies alongside product pages.
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Google crawled a news site less as its soft 404 count climbed
A Search Engine Land case study traces a 90% traffic loss at a crypto news site to a botched migration, then finds soft 404s growing on its other country sites.
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Google deindexed a 1,800-post blog that passed technical checks
A gaming blog's 1,015 pages sat at Crawled - currently not indexed with blank canonicals, and a Screaming Frog crawl found exploit scripts and download gate code.
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Robots.txt only stops AI crawlers that choose to obey it
Reverse DNS for Googlebot, OpenAI's published IP lists, and CDN rate limits deal with the AI bots a Reddit thread found hitting parameter URLs despite robots.txt.
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AI Overviews and ChatGPT usually criticize different brands
BrightEdge compared negative brand mentions in Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT: Google leans on lawsuits and recalls, ChatGPT on product limits and compatibility.
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Adding schema did not raise AI citations in an Ahrefs study
Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD against matched controls and found no citation lift in ChatGPT or AI Mode, plus a small dip in AI Overviews.
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Google may reorder results using hovers and scrolls on the SERP
SALT.agency describes Glue, a Google log of hovers, scrolls and viewing time on SERP features that feeds a popularity score used to reorder ranked results.
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Fix soft 404s on empty category pages by how long stock is gone
Search Console flags empty category pages as soft 404s. Added content, a 302 or noindex each fits a different stockout length, and a canonical fits none.
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Lighthouse now grades pages for AI agents on accessibility and CLS
Lighthouse 13.3's Agentic Browsing category checks the accessibility tree, CLS, WebMCP form annotations and llms.txt, and sites without AI features still pass.
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Migrations that merge pages need a staging crawl before launch
A Reddit thread on moving a custom CMS store to Shopify shows why merged pages and Shopify's own canonical tags call for a full staging crawl before launch.
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AI agents built on Cloudflare may never run your JavaScript
Cloudflare's Project Think SDK lists a headless browser as an add-on tier that agents may never use, so schema and content injected by JavaScript can go unseen.
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307 redirects hit both brands but only one fell out of Google
An r/bigseo post describes two clothing brands moved to subdomains with six weeks of 307 redirects; the one Google dropped also had a sitemap it could not read.
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Google drops FAQ rich results and cuts their Search Console data
FAQ rich results left Google on May 7, 2026. The FAQ report, filter, and Rich Results Test support go in June, and Search Console API support ends in August.
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Hreflang won't carry EU rankings to a new US store domain
An r/TechSEO thread on a Next.js and Strapi retailer's US launch favors a subfolder, and Google's docs explain why each locale needs its own crawlable URL.
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Scaled content may lose crawling after Google tests a sample
Dan Taylor argues the early spike from scaled content is a freshness boost, after which Google tests a sample of the new URLs and cuts crawling if they fall short.
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Google adds more links to AI answers but shares no click numbers
Google's five link changes to AI Mode and AI Overviews include inline links, desktop hover previews and subscription labels, with no rollout dates or click figures.
