As Google continues to integrate generative AI into search, advertisers are learning that familiar rules don’t always apply in new environments. One of the latest clarifications from Google Ads confirms that exact match keywords are not eligible to trigger ads within AI Overviews. While subtle on the surface, this shift has meaningful implications for how campaigns are structured and how brands show up in high-visibility search moments.

Understanding Google’s Update on Exact Match

Google recently confirmed that even if an advertiser is bidding on an exact match keyword identical to a user’s query, that keyword alone will not make an ad eligible to appear within an AI Overview. These AI-generated summaries are designed to respond to broader, more conversational intent, not precision keyword matching.

This marks a departure from how many advertisers traditionally think about control and relevance. Exact match still plays an important role in standard search results, but AI Overviews operate under a different logic, one driven by machine learning and inferred intent.

Why AI Overviews Favour Broader Targeting

AI Overviews are built to answer complex, exploratory questions. To do that effectively, Google relies on broad match keywords and AI-powered campaign types that give its systems flexibility to interpret meaning rather than syntax.

This doesn’t mean Google is removing advertiser control. Instead, control shifts from rigid keyword matching to smarter signals including conversion data, audience behaviour, and strong negative keyword strategies. Advertisers who lean into this approach are better positioned to access AI-driven placements.

What Marketers Should Do Next

For clients, this shift highlights an important evolution in how search works. User behaviour is becoming more intent-driven and conversational, particularly within AI-powered results. Brands that approach this change cautiously but proactively are better positioned to appear where attention is increasingly concentrated within AI-generated answers at the top of the page. By evolving keyword strategy in a controlled, data-led way, advertisers can safeguard results today while preparing for the future of paid search.

As we look back on 2025, it has been a year defined by learning, growth and reflection. Like any business journey, there have been challenges along the way, but these moments have helped shape our approach and strengthen the way we work. More importantly, the year has been filled with opportunities, progress and achievements that have moved the business forward and supported the work we deliver for our clients.

Throughout the year, our team has celebrated a wide range of successes, from personal milestones to collective achievements. Each win, no matter the size, has contributed to the momentum of the business and reinforced our focus on delivering thoughtful, effective marketing solutions.

We launch our PPC services

One of the standout developments of the year was the launch of our PPC services. Our co-director, Liam, took a bold step in early 2025 by expanding his skill set and introducing a new offering for our clients. This addition has allowed us to provide more comprehensive and well-rounded marketing support, helping clients optimise their campaigns and achieve stronger results. Expanding into PPC has strengthened our ability to support growth and deliver joined-up strategies.

Matthew passes his apprenticeship with flying colours

Another proud moment came when our SEO executive, Matty, completed his multichannel marketing apprenticeship with an impressive first. This achievement is a testament to his hard work, dedication and commitment to developing his expertise. His success reflects the value we place on continuous learning and professional development within the team.

Becoming finalists in the Yorkshire Post Business Awards

In September, we were honoured to be nominated as finalists for the Yorkshire Post Micro Business of the Year award. The evening at the Royal Armouries was a chance to celebrate alongside some of Yorkshire’s most inspiring businesses. While we did not take home the award, the experience itself felt like a win and a moment of genuine pride for the team.

Celebrating Together: A Festive Team Experience
As the year drew to a close, we took some time to celebrate together outside the office. Our team headed to Manchester for a live Crystal Maze experience, tackling physical and mental challenges together. The day was a testament to the collaborative spirit and strong team relationships we’ve built throughout the year. It was a fun and memorable way to wrap up 2025, reinforcing how much we value connection, support and shared achievement.

A thank you to our clients

None of the progress we’ve made in 2025 would be possible without the trust and collaboration of our clients. Working alongside such passionate and ambitious businesses has been a constant source of motivation for our team. Each partnership has challenged us to think smarter, be more creative and deliver meaningful results. As we look ahead to 2026, we’re excited to continue building these relationships, supporting our clients’ growth and achieving even more together.

Looking ahead

As we move into the next year, we carry forward the lessons, confidence and motivation gained in 2025. We are excited to continue building on this momentum, supporting our clients and creating even more reasons to celebrate in the year ahead.

Search engine optimisation is evolving rapidly as AI-driven search experiences become more common. Can users use the same SEO techniques in AI Mode as in normal search to be successful? In this article, we will discuss all relevant SEO techniques for AI mode.

How Users Search in AI Mode

AI-powered search engines no longer rely on simple keyword matching. Instead, they use queries conversationally, analysing user intent. This means content needs to answer real questions clearly and naturally. Pages written for humans, with logical structure and depth, are more likely to be selected or referenced in AI-generated responses than those built purely around keyword repetition.

Technical SEO in AI Mode

While a lot of SEO techniques may not be relevant in AI Mode, Technical SEO is still important. Ensuring your site is easily crawlable for AI bots means it is easier for them to understand and evaluate your content, making you more likely to appear in AI-generated responses.

How to be successful in AI Mode

AI mode often delivers answers directly within the search experience, which changes how SEO success is measured. Rankings and clicks still matter, but being cited or referenced within AI-generated responses becomes a key outcome. This elevates the importance of brand authority, topical consistency, and content credibility across the web.

What Google says about SEO in AI Mode

Google’s Robby Stein named five factors Google uses to judge content within AI Mode, which Roger Monti has written about extensively in his article for Search Engine Journal. The five factors include quality, helpfulness, and real user satisfaction, driving visibility. AI Mode evaluates whether people find the information genuinely useful and use engagement signals and user behaviour to rank content, much like in traditional SEO.

What this means for Marketers

SEO in AI mode reinforces what we already know about SEO, content that helps users win. By focusing on the audience websites align naturally with AI and help to create engaging content for audiences that boost traffic and profitability.

In early December 2025, Google announced a new core update to its search ranking system. The update began on 11 December 2025 and is expected to take up to three weeks to fully roll out. Core updates affect how websites appear in search results globally and can cause noticeable changes in visibility and traffic.

This December update is the third major core update of 2025, following earlier updates earlier in the year. Like previous updates, it applies broadly across industries rather than targeting one specific type of website or content.

Google has described this update as a routine improvement designed to show more useful and relevant results for people using search.

What a core update actually means

A core update is a wide-ranging change to how Google evaluates content. It does not penalise individual websites and it is not aimed at specific tactics. Instead, Google adjusts how it judges relevance, usefulness and quality across the web.

As a result, some websites may see rankings improve while others may drop, even if nothing has changed on the site itself. These shifts are a normal part of how search evolves.

What marketers should expect

During the rollout period, it is common to see rankings and traffic fluctuate. Search performance can feel unstable until the update has fully completed and the results settle.

The main things marketing teams may notice include:

• movement in keyword rankings across important pages
• changes in organic traffic without any clear on-site cause
• short-term volatility that smooths out after rollout ends

Longer term, core updates tend to reward content that is clearly written, genuinely helpful and closely aligned with what people are actually searching for.

What to do if performance drops

Google’s guidance remains consistent. There is no single fix or quick action required if rankings decline during a core update.

Instead, teams should take a measured approach. That means reviewing content quality, checking whether pages answer user questions clearly, and ensuring the overall experience on key pages is strong. Overreacting during the rollout phase often causes more harm than good.

Monitoring trends over weeks rather than days gives a much clearer picture of whether changes are temporary or part of a longer shift.

The bigger picture

Core updates like this are part of Google’s ongoing effort to improve search results. They will continue to happen regularly and will continue to create winners and losers in the short term.

For non-technical marketing teams, the most important takeaway is consistency. Brands that focus on clear messaging, useful content and genuine value for users tend to be more resilient when these updates roll out.

Big changes are coming for advertisers targeting audiences in the European Union. Meta has announced that Facebook and Instagram users will soon have more control over the ads they see, giving marketers and brands a chance to rethink how they approach EU campaigns. The move comes as Meta works to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which is designed to ensure users have a real choice over how their personal data is used.

The New User Choice

Starting in January 2026, EU users will be presented with two clear options for ad experiences. They can either continue with fully personalised, data-driven ads the type most marketers rely on for precision targeting, to switch to a limited personalised option, which uses less data while keeping the platforms free to use. This replaces Meta’s previous “consent or pay” model, which regulators argued didn’t offer a genuine choice. For users, this change means greater transparency and control, while still accessing the social platforms they love.

Impact on Advertising Strategies

For advertisers, this change signals a shift in how campaigns may perform in the EU. Users choosing the limited personalised option will generate less granular behavioural data, which could impact targeting precision and campaign performance. Brands will need to lean more on contextual targeting, broader audience strategies, and creative messaging to maintain results. While it may add complexity, it’s also an opportunity to innovate and connect with audiences in fresh, privacy-conscious ways.

Looking Ahead

This update marks a significant step in the EU’s privacy-first approach to digital marketing. For marketers, staying ahead of these changes means adapting campaigns, testing new strategies, and embracing the evolving balance between user choice and ad performance. Those who do so successfully will not only comply with regulations but also build stronger, trust-based connections with their audiences. The landscape is changing, but with the right approach, brands can thrive.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO is the practice of using undesirable techniques in order to boost the SEO performance of a website. This can include, but is not limited t,o keyword stuffing, hidden links, paid backlinks and more. Google’s algorithms have found a way to penalise sites using different Black Hat SEO tactics, while promoting sites that use White Hat SEO techniques such as creating quality content and focusing on user experience. However, there are certain individuals who will always be trying to trick search engines to artificially boost their rankings. In this article, we will look into new Black Hat SEO techniques that have emerged in 2025 and why you should steer clear of them.

How does Black Hat SEO work in 2025?

The main black hat SEO technique that has become prevalent in 2025 is AI poisoning. This is when users purposefully feed information to chatbots that is wrong or misleading in order to damage a brand’s reputation or offering. Up until now, it was believed that it would take a large amount of data to manipulate AI responses, as they have already been trained to their current understanding on vast amounts of data. However, a recent study from Anthropic shows that only a small amount (as few as 250) malicious documents can cause this Black Hat SEO technique to take effect on the user’s desired Large Language Model.

Here’s what the study had to say,

“Poisoning attacks can compromise the safety of large language models (LLMs) by injecting malicious documents into their training data. Existing work has studied pretraining poisoning, assuming adversaries control a percentage of the training corpus. However, for large models, even small percentages translate to impractically large amounts of data. This work demonstrates for the first time that poisoning attacks instead require a near-constant number of documents regardless of dataset size. We conduct the largest pretraining poisoning experiments to date, pretraining models from 600M to 13B parameters on chinchilla-optimal datasets (6B to 260B tokens). We find that 250 poisoned documents similarly compromise models across all model and dataset sizes, despite the largest models training on more than 20 times more clean data. We also run smaller-scale experiments to ablate factors that could influence attack success, including broader ratios of poisoned to clean data and non-random distributions of poisoned samples. Finally, we demonstrate the same dynamics for poisoning during fine-tuning. Altogether, our results suggest that injecting backdoors through data poisoning may be easier for large models than previously believed, as the number of poisons required does not scale up with model size, highlighting the need for more research on defences to mitigate this risk in future models.”

What this means for SEOs

Obviously, it goes without saying that manipulating large language models to try and gain some sort of edge on your competitors is not an encouraging technique, as not only is it self-serving, but it can also come back to be a negative for you as well. Firstly, if people start manipulating large language models on a large scale purely for selfish reasons, then these models will become largely unusable and have to be retrained, which is bad for everyone in the industry ultimately. Secondly, if Google starts penalising people who have been manipulating large language models and feeding them ill information, your site could be heavily penalised or, worse, altogether restricted from appearing on Google. As ever, making sure you follow Google’s guidelines and best practices when enhancing your site and its seo performance, while creating quality content, is the best and most surefire way to beat out your competitors in 2025.

Well, we’ve successfully tallied another year of brilliant celebrations as a team, this time making our way over to Manchester to enjoy the festivities! Taking the team back to an intensely nostalgic environment, The Crystal Maze live experience.

Fuelling the day’s activities

We kicked things off exactly as any great day should—with an incredible meal at Society Manchester. This vibrant food hall delivered a buzzing, festive atmosphere, paired with an impressive line-up of food traders offering cuisines from all corners of the globe.

The team wasted no time getting stuck in, tucking into irresistibly sweet and tangy hoisin bao buns before moving on to freshly prepared tinga tacos. Each dish delivered an explosion of flavour, keeping energy levels high and appetites fully satisfied before we shifted gears and prepared ourselves for some serious gaming ahead.

Let the games begin

With spirits high, we arrived at the Crystal Maze and immediately embraced the competitive energy in the air. Greeted and hyped up by the incredible game actors, the team was ready and raring to go as we entered the medieval zone to begin the challenge.

Our abilities were well and truly put to the test, with tasks designed to evaluate our knowledge, skills, and physical capabilities—alongside challenges layered with mystery and problem-solving. Without giving too much away for future participants, the experience proved to be an outstanding team-bonding exercise that had everyone fully engaged from start to finish.

We’re proud to say we emerged from the Crystal Maze dome with an impressive 78 points, sitting a solid 13 points above the average group score—despite securing just six crystals along the way.

Cheers to another exceptional year

We carried our Crystal Maze victory forward to the ever-popular Mulligans, where the team enjoyed a well-earned pint of Guinness, followed by some dancing to a fantastic live band. Once again, everyone had the chance to fully immerse themselves in an atmosphere filled with laughter, celebration, and well-deserved relaxation.

Our Christmas party always serves as a moment to reflect on the year gone by—a year defined by achievements, client wins, and challenges successfully overcome together as a team. This celebration was no exception, rounding off another exceptional year for Intelligency in the best possible way.

Google is testing a new feature in Search Console that brings social channel performance into the Insights report. It is designed to give marketers a clearer picture of how their website and social presence perform together in Google Search.

This update is currently an experiment and is only available to a small number of websites.

What is changing in Search Console

Google is expanding the Search Console Insights tab to include performance data from selected social platforms. The aim is to create a single view that shows how content performs across both websites and social channels.

At launch, the social platforms included in the test are YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

Google describes this as a unified view of search performance, rather than a replacement for existing analytics tools.

What Google has said about the update

Google confirmed that this is an early experiment and not a full rollout.

They explained that the updated Insights report will now include performance data from social channels that Google can automatically associate with your website.

This means Search Console will attempt to identify linked social profiles without manual setup at this stage.

Who will see these new insights

Not everyone will have access straight away.

Google has confirmed that the feature is only rolling out to a limited number of websites. If your site is included, Search Console will prompt you to review and confirm any social channels it has automatically linked to your domain.

If you do not see any mention of social channels in your Insights report, your site is likely not part of the experiment yet.

What data the social insights will show

The new social view mirrors the type of information marketers are already familiar with in Search Console, but applied to social platforms.

The data includes:

• Additional traffic sources such as Image Search, Video Search, News Search and Discover
• Total reach, showing clicks and impressions from Google Search to your social profiles
• Content performance, highlighting top performing and trending social posts
• Search queries that lead users to your social profiles
• Audience location, showing which countries users are searching from

This keeps the focus on search driven visibility rather than in-app social metrics.

How social channels are added

There is no manual setup process yet.

If your site is eligible, Search Console will automatically detect social channels it believes are associated with your website. You will then be prompted to review and add them within the Insights report.

If you are not prompted, there is currently nothing you can do to enable it.

Why this matters for digital marketers

For marketers, this update is less about new metrics and more about context.

Being able to see website and social performance side by side helps teams understand how search visibility supports social growth and vice versa. It also reinforces how important social profiles have become within Google Search itself.

One thing to note is that Search Console data can sometimes be delayed. When reporting is up to date, this combined view could be genuinely useful for content planning and performance reviews. Google says the goal is to help site owners better understand their combined performance across channels. If the experiment proves successful, it is likely we will see a wider rollout in the future.

Google has quietly introduced a new behaviour on its home page: users can now upload a file or image directly into the main search bar, and instead of opening a standard results page or Google Lens, they are taken straight into AI Mode. It is a small visual change with a significant implication. The experience users see after uploading something is no longer the familiar list of search results but Google’s expanding AI driven interface.

What is AI Mode in Google

AI Mode is Google’s more conversational and generative search experience. Instead of showing a list of traditional links, AI Mode uses Google’s Gemini model to produce direct answers, summaries and recommendations. Users can then refine their query within a chat style interface.

The core idea is that Google handles more of the thinking for the user. Rather than searching through multiple webpages, AI Mode interprets intent and provides a single structured response. This makes the experience faster for users but offers fewer opportunities for websites to receive clicks.

A subtle update that changes user journeys

Previously, uploading an image through Google would trigger Google Lens or a traditional image search. The new upload button routes people directly into AI Mode. This reflects a wider pattern. Google has increasingly been guiding searchers towards AI Mode in multiple parts of its ecosystem. Examples include AI Overviews appearing more frequently, the AI Mode tab becoming more prominent, and even the Chrome address bar offering AI Mode as a pathway.

Although Google once stated that AI Mode would not become the default search experience, its product decisions suggest the opposite direction. Every new feature seems to reinforce AI Mode as the primary interface for search, discovery and query resolution.

Why this matters for digital marketers

For marketers, the shift brings real consequences. AI Mode does not behave like a standard results page. Users see fewer traditional links, and click-through rates are lower. The journey is more conversational and less oriented toward visiting websites.

This means brand visibility inside AI Mode becomes increasingly important. Marketers need to understand:

• How their brand or content is being cited within AI Mode
• Whether their site is referenced at all
• How rankings differ from traditional search

The performance you see in classic SERPs may not translate into this new environment. AI Mode often answers a query directly without sending users away, which makes measurement and optimisation more complex.

Preparing for an AI first search landscape

Although the shift is gradual, the direction is clear. Google is shaping a search experience where AI Mode plays a central role. Digital marketers will need to adapt strategies to ensure visibility in both traditional results and AI generated responses.

Checking your presence in AI Mode should now be a routine part of search monitoring. As this becomes a bigger part of how people search, early understanding will give brands an advantage while others wait for the shift to become impossible to ignore.

Google is quietly testing a new feature inside Google Ads called Website Optimiser, and it’s already capturing the attention of performance marketers. While the tool isn’t widely available yet, early indications suggest Google is preparing to bring website testing and optimisation back into its ecosystem, something advertisers have been missing since the phase-out of earlier tools. If launched broadly, Website Optimiser could give marketers a more streamlined, data-driven way to improve landing page performance without relying on external platforms.

A Modern Take on a Familiar Concept

For seasoned marketers, the name “Website Optimiser” may feel like a throwback. Years ago, Google offered a tool by the same name that eventually evolved into Google Optimise. With Optimise discontinued, many teams lost a simple, native way to run controlled experiments. This new iteration appears to reintroduce that capability, but in a more integrated form. Placing the tool directly inside Google Ads and potentially automating some setup steps, suggests a focus on ease of use and faster activation.

Why This Matters for Advertisers

If Website Optimiser performs as expected, advertisers could benefit from a centralised, more efficient workflow. Testing landing pages, user experiences, and conversion paths directly inside Google Ads would reduce technical barriers and help teams iterate more quickly. It also has the potential to give marketers a clearer view of performance by connecting ad data and on-site behaviour within a single environment. Ultimately, that means better insights, smarter optimisation decisions, and the ability to increase ROI without adding more tools to the stack.

What Marketers Should Watch For

While excitement is building, key details are still unknown, including how flexible the testing options will be and how soon they will roll out. Even so, the appearance of this feature signals Google’s renewed commitment to supporting experimentation. For marketing teams focused on continuous improvement, Website Optimiser could soon become a valuable tool in the arsenal. Keeping an eye on updates now will ensure you’re ready to take advantage of it as soon as it becomes available.