You shouldn’t miss anything that changed for SEO, AI, LLMs, and more last month. First, you’ll learn about the most recent Google update, the steps Cloudflare is taking to fight scraping, and the results of a major AI-SEO test.
After that, you’ll catch up on why Google has de-indexed millions of pages, and get some perspectives from major SEOs on the future of LLMs, the state of link building, and how Google’s search share is holding up against AI.
At the end, you’ll find the headlines on Google’s direction. There are fresh numbers on the performance of overviews, new features for Google Ads, and fresh moves from the company to avoid hefty fines in the EU. These changes may affect you.
Google June 2025 Core Update Just Dropped
Google June 2025 Core Update Just Dropped
Barry Schwartz brings you this look at Google’s latest core update and the changes that arrived with it. This core update was one of the largest in recent history and included many changes that will affect publishers and other online marketers.
“For decades, the Internet has operated on a simple exchange: search engines index content and direct users back to original websites, generating traffic and ad revenue for websites of all sizes. This cycle rewards creators that produce quality content with money and a following, while helping users discover new and relevant information.
That model is now broken. AI crawlers collect content like text, articles, and images to generate answers, without sending visitors to the original source – depriving content creators of revenue, and the satisfaction of knowing someone is viewing their content. If the incentive to create original, quality content disappears, society ends up losing, and the future of the Internet is at risk.”
First, Barry walks you through the details of this announcement. Google has claimed that the update focuses on content and is designed to surface relevant and satisfying content more effectively.
Barry points out that the announcement was very similar in wording to the March 2025 announcement, with one notable exception.
However, that word no longer appears in the June announcement, suggesting Google may be strategizing to bypass creators and provide “satisfying” results from their own sources.
Barry predicts that many sites will see disastrous ranking declines from the update. As he points out with graphs, the number of searchers diverted to AI overviews is only going up with each update, and Google has not signaled any changes in priority.
As of July 17th, the core update is confirmed to be over. Data is still being gathered about the effects of this update, and should be ready for the next update. Next, you’ll learn how one hoster is helping publishers fight back against AI.
Cloudflare will block AI web crawlers by default, and introduces new Pay Per Crawl scheme that means AI companies will have to fork out for the privilege to scrape
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/cloudflare-will-block-ai-web-crawlers…
Jess Kinghorn brings you this look at how the Cloudflare company is giving site owners the power to fight back against aggressive scraping by AI bots looking for free content.
Cloudflare is a domain registrar that offers a range of other network services. It has many website publishers as clients and has been offering those clients more ways to protect themselves from having their content stolen in recent updates.
Last year, Cloudflare started by giving customers a one-click solution to block AI bots from their websites. That tool showed users lists of bots that could be blocked, and helped site owners find cases where their content was being republished.
Now, Cloudflare has taken it a step further by automatically blocking AI crawlers. In an announcement published on July 1st, the company claims that all users can now decide how they want AI crawlers to interact with their sites.
The statement uses surprisingly strong language to describe the intentions of this policy. In it, Cloudflare accuses AI crawlers of destroying the healthy cooperation of publishers and search engines.
“For decades, the Internet has operated on a simple exchange: search engines index content and direct users back to original websites, generating traffic and ad revenue for websites of all sizes. This cycle rewards creators that produce quality content with money and a following, while helping users discover new and relevant information.
That model is now broken. AI crawlers collect content like text, articles, and images to generate answers, without sending visitors to the original source – depriving content creators of revenue, and the satisfaction of knowing someone is viewing their content. If the incentive to create original, quality content disappears, society ends up losing, and the future of the Internet is at risk.”
Cloudflare calls this new policy a “permission-based model” and has already received many encouraging statements from other major publishers, including ADWEEK, The Associated Press, The Atlantic, and others, which can be found at the end of the statement.
This may be just the beginning of publishers fighting back. Either way, we all need to be prepared for a new world. I started by developing my own AI-SEO that I’ve now tested across multiple sites.
I did AI-SEO for ChatGPT and Google AI. Here’s what happened…
I did AI-SEO for ChatGPT and Google AI. Here’s what happened…
I spent the last 6 months trying to determine how websites get featured in Google’s AI overviews, ChatGPT, and other AI-generated search results. Now, I think I’ve cracked the code, as proven by AI mentions that have jumped by as much as 2,000%+ for my clients!
In this video, I cover why you want to optimize for AI, how you can identify all the AI opportunities that are available to you, how to optimize them, and how you can monitor how well your strategies are working.
I’ll show you what I did through the example of one client. This client was responsible for running a website for a high-quality brand. Despite a good reputation, this brand wasn’t showing up for any AI results.
As I show you through several examples, this isn’t even an uncommon problem. Many high-quality brands aren’t mentioned in AI answers and are still struggling to find out why.
The recently launched Ahrefs tool Brand Radar can be very handy for determining which AI answers to target. Just enter your brand name and the names of some competitors to find out how often you’re mentioned, and what keywords are most associated with your brand.
With that information in hand, I started developing tactics to get mentioned by AI. I refined 12 of them that were successful, including—
Be concise and get to the answer without fluff- Be conversational in your tone
- Use clear heading structures
- Provide a brief TL;DR (Too long; didn’t read) summary at the beginning of your article. A “key takeaway” section can also work
Check out the complete video to learn more about how AI learns to trust your brand and the tactics that truly work to get mentioned. Next, you’ll learn what it means that millions of results are now getting de-indexed by Google.
Google De-Indexing Millions of Pages: What’s Happening?
Google De-Indexing Millions of Pages: What’s Happening?
Edward Sturm brings you this report on Google’s quiet purge of indexed pages.
This issue first became known when an SEO in the French market documented the loss of hundreds of thousands of pages for that language last June. Other SEOs soon spotted the same trends in their regions. This may have been going on for a while.
First, Edward provides you with a timeline of SEO chatter on the issue, discovering that the issue was causing complaints as early as May. SEOs involved in those cases reported seeing active websites with good content lose page after page to deindexing.
Edward has some theories for why this may be happening. After reviewing a lot of community chatter, it seems arguable that this mass de-indexing is a result of changes in how Google measures topical authority.
These lost pages may reflect areas where Google no longer feels you are an authority on that topic.
If this is the case, it’s important not to simply reindex all the pages. This may be a waste of time in the first place, but even if you intend to reindex the pages, it’s probably not worth it unless you can prove your topical authority through links and better content.
Edward tracked some good news from some site owners. Even when they lost less topically relevant pages, the remaining pages saw improved authority. This suggests that excellent content may benefit overall from the fact that Google is taking this action.
Now that you have some fresh insights on how Google assesses content, you’ll want to get the latest on links. The next piece summarizes everything you need to know about the last year.
The State of Link Building | 2025
https://editorial.link/link-building-statistics/
The writers and researchers Pawel Tatarek, Hanna Lebedeva, and Adelina Karpenkova bring you this comprehensive look at the state of Link Building in 2025. Their report surveyed 500+ SEO professionals, in-house experts, freelancers, and others from regions around the world.
The report included questions on link building trends, budgets, tools, strategies and potential stumbling blocks that may affect the future of linkbuilding. The answers offer some big insights into what link builders think, including the following key takeaways:
73.2% believe backlinks influence the chance of appearing in AI search results.- 80.9% believe unlinked brand mentions affect organic search rankings.
- 91.9% are convinced their competitors buy backlinks.
- 56.0% don’t think Google can identify and discount paid links effectively.
- 68.1% rate Ahrefs as the most accurate and comprehensive backlink data provider.
- 48.6% think digital PR is the most effective link-building tactic in 2025.
- 86.3% consider low-quality content a major warning sign.
- Only 39.0% still use the Google Disavow tool.
- 55.2% consider link building the most challenging part of SEO.
The team thoroughly examines many of these responses, examining how link builders developed these expert opinions and what trends inspired them. Check out their justifications for these and dozens of other stats that the research covered.
Next, there’s proof that Google is still dominant compared to AI and may still need to be the top priority in your strategy.
AI Search Currently Drives Less Than 1% of Traffic to Most Sites, Google Is Still Dominant, and Watch the Long-term Risk of Ignoring Google Search
https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/ai-search-traffic-compared-to-google/
Glenn Gabe brings you this look at how he tracked AI search traffic to his site, and why he thinks the fall of Google has been seriously overblown by some in the search marketing industry.
He begins by recalling recent conversations with executives who think Google is already defeated. In these conversations, the people he spoke to estimated that at least 30% of traffic was now coming from AI, when the real numbers were closer to 1% for all models combined.
Glenn worries that this common perception may lead people to make bad strategy decisions. He wants to help other site owners find the information they need to make informed decisions. He starts with detailed steps that teach you how to find your AI traffic percentage.
After that, he argues that ignoring Google Search is a mistake that could cause significant problems later for teams jumping to focus on AI.
As he points out, sites that ignore Google run the risk of creeping quality issues. If that happens over time, they become susceptible to broad core updates.
With each new core update, AI Overviews, rankings in the 10-blue links, featured snippets, Discover, image and video search, Google News, Top Stories, and even AI Mode can be impacted.
Check out the complete guide to find out how to track and prioritize your most significant traffic source. Next, Google’s AI overviews surprisingly seem to be slipping in rankings. There may be opportunities here for SEOs to claw back some lost clicks.
Google AI Overviews rank below Position 1 in 12.4% of cases: Study
https://searchengineland.com/google-ai-overviews-rank-below-position-1-study-457561
Danny Goodwin brings you this look at how Google’s AI overviews have dropped from the top spot. When this feature was first launched, it was automatically granted priority over other results for most searches (98%).
Now, AIOs appear outside the top spot more than 12% of the time. In search results where AI overviews appear below the top spot, they most often occur in the second position, but have been spotted at position four and even lower.
Danny found that the lower rankings are more likely for transactional queries. He thinks this change might have happened because Google is responding to user behavior that does not prefer AIOs for some searches.
This is some rare good news for sites that work to be the top organic results. There is now hope (for some niches) that you can beat the AIO and collect the traffic that comes with it.
In the last piece of the day, Google is offering to change how its search results work to avoid possible fines in the EU.
Google makes new proposal to stave off EU antitrust fine, document shows
Reuters reporter Foo Yun Chee brings you this story about Google’s offers after being accused of unfairly favoring its own services for search categories like shopping, hotels, flights, and more.
Google must reach an agreement with the European Commission or face a fine of up to 10% of its global annual revenue under the EU’s landmark Digital Markets Act.
Google has made two proposals that may affect search in the EU and beyond.
First, Google offered to create a box at the top of the search page for a so-called vertical search service (VSS). The box would be populated with links to specialized search engines and service providers like hotels, airlines, restaurants, and transport services.
Google followed this up with another proposal, suggesting that another box with free supplier links could follow after the VSS box is shown.
These proposals are still being discussed, but the changes could mean big opportunities for site owners in the EU. Read the full story to learn about what’s possible, and check out the next roundup for the latest news on Google, Ads, LLMs, and the world of marketing.
