SEO

Backlinks still matter in AI search, but quality, diversity, and even nofollow links now shift visibility more than raw volume.
The post How AI Really Weighs Your Links (Analysis Of 35,000 Datapoints) appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

Google’s spam update completed after almost a month rollout, it was pretty wild and got even more wild after the rollout completed. Google AI Mode rolled out to more languages, is more visual, is testing agentic experiences and much more. Google dropped the num parameter causing a huge mess for so many of us.

Google announced new message assets requirements for Google Ads. These new requirements aim “to ensure a good user experience" and go into effect on October 30, 2025.

In June, Google began testing showing a new answer box for emoji related queries. So when you search for a specific type of emoji, Google will give you the emoji options that you can copy directly from the search results page instead of going to a third-party publisher site. Well, that seems fully live as of today.

Google Ads has announced several new features, including segmentation in asset reporting and enhancements to channel performance reporting. Google told me that this continues to provide advertisers with the visibility they are seeking.

Here is a new interview published yesterday by The Economic Times Podcasts with Elizabeth Reid, VP of Google Search. She spoke about Google’s progression of AI in Search, content quality, SEO, blue links, traffic, the ecosystem, agentic features and more.

Google announced that AI Mode had been updated to handle and respond more visually. So AI Mode responses both understand your queries in a more visual way and respond with more visual responses. Google said the responses aim at sparking inspiration, amongst other things.