In this issue: "Crawling and indexing used to be a given. You'd put a new article on your blog or a new page on your website and it was a given that Google would crawl and index it -- sometimes right away, sometimes not. But it would get in Google's index eventually. The only worry was whether it was good enough to rank. That's changing."

In this issue: "Is it reasonable to think that another signal of prominence is how often people search for a business? In other words, if people search 'Sally Smith Realtor®' 50 times a month, and search 'Jack Jones Realtor®' 10 times a month, would that give Google a signal that Sally Smith is more prominent? I think it would."

In this issue: "In addition to having a strong website, getting links and mentions from trusted online sources, and the other ways Google measures prominence (i.e., who's a brand), search activity for your name/business is another signal Google relies on. So get your 'SEO house' in order and develop an intentional plan to encourage people to Google you."

In this issue: The Most Important 65 Seconds From Google's Search Event Last Week. "In that clip, Google's Liz Reid is explaining 'query fan-out,' a concept that Google first mentioned back in March. With this technique, which is used with AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google does 'multiple related searches concurrently across subtopics and multiple data sources and then brings those results together' into its AI answer.

I used to begin all of my blog posts with a story that would grab the reader's attention. Then along came Google's AI Overviews...along with ChatGPT search, Gemini, Perplexity, etc. You can't do it the old way anymore. I've optimized a lot of my wife's blog posts to get them into AIOs. In this issue, I share exactly how I do it.