Search advertising is one of the most effective tools for reaching potential customers with high intent. Appearing at the exact moment someone is searching for what you offer is incredibly powerful. But recent findings show that a lack of transparency in Google Ads could be quietly draining your budget, and small brands are likely paying the highest price.

The Unseen Drain on Performance

An independent analysis of over $20 million in Google Ads spend has uncovered a major issue: hidden search terms. These are user queries that trigger ads but aren’t reported back to advertisers. The performance gap is significant:

• $0.85 in waste per $1 spent on hidden terms

• 52% higher CPCs
• 44% lower CTRs

Despite claims that these terms are excluded due to low volume, there’s minimal structural difference between hidden and visible queries. This suggests the exclusion isn’t just about rarity — it may reflect lower-quality traffic that advertisers cannot assess or control.

Impact on Strategic Execution

When performance data is obscured, campaign optimisation becomes guesswork. Budgets are allocated without clarity. ROI tracking becomes fragmented. And the strategy shifts from precision to reactive adjustments.

Brands operating with tight budgets and narrow margins are particularly vulnerable. Without access to full search term data, they lose the ability to fine-tune bidding, refine targeting, and eliminate inefficiencies. In short, they lose control over performance.

Why Visibility Matters More Than Ever

Transparency in performance data isn’t a bonus feature — it’s the foundation of intelligent strategy. The ability to analyse, test, and refine campaigns depends entirely on access to real, actionable information.

Without it, even the best media plan becomes reactive. Marketers deserve better than hidden inefficiencies. They need data they can trust, tools they can control, and platforms that prioritise outcomes, not just impressions.

New data shows that around 13% of the answers in Google’s “People Also Ask” boxes are written by Google’s AI, not pulled from websites. This change could affect how much traffic your content gets from search, but it also points to new opportunities.

What is the People Also Ask box?

When you search on Google, you often see a drop-down box with related questions such as:
“People also ask: What is X? How does it work?”

This feature helps users dig deeper into a topic without doing new searches. When someone clicks a question, Google shows an answer, usually taken from a third-party website, with a link to that page.

Why it matters for marketers:

• It’s a valuable source of organic traffic, especially for informational content (like blog posts or service pages).
• Being featured in these answers helps build visibility and authority for your brand in search results.
• It often appears high on the page, sometimes even before standard links, so ranking here gives you prime real estate.

What are Google AI Overviews?

AI Overviews are summaries that Google generates using artificial intelligence. Instead of linking to a website, Google’s AI tries to answer the question directly, based on what it has learned from scanning the web.

You’ll often see these appear at the very top of a results page, especially for more complex or multi-part questions.

• These AI answers can replace or push down traditional links in search results.
• If Google answers a user’s question directly, they may never click through to your website, which can hurt your traffic.
• At the same time, they give clues about what information Google thinks is missing, and that’s a signal you can use to shape your content.

What’s happening now?

An analysis of over 8.4 million English-language “People Also Ask” results found that 12.6% of answers are now AI-generated, rather than pulled from existing web pages. That’s according to Mark Williams-Cook, founder of SEO tool Also Asked.

This shift impacts both SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and content marketing.

• Less visibility: If Google’s AI answers a question, fewer people may click through to your site even if you’ve written great content.
• New opportunities: If AI is stepping in, it likely means no page fully answered the question. This shows where you could step in and create a better, more complete piece of content.

When did this start?

Google began inserting AI-generated answers into People Also Ask boxes in November 2024. This is the first large-scale data showing how common it has become. What should you do about it?

• Review your content: Are you answering key questions clearly and completely?
• Fill content gaps: Use tools like Also Asked or Answer the Public to find what users want to know, then answer it better than AI can.

Google is changing how it delivers answers using AI to fill in where it sees gaps. For marketers, this is both a warning sign and an opportunity. If you can produce the most helpful, complete content, you still have a chance to earn visibility even in an AI-first search world.

Yoast SEO is launching an add-on to Google Docs to provide users with accessibility to enhance their writing with SEO recommendations in real time.

What is Yoast?

Yoast is a plug-in developed to add SEO functionality to websites, improving the way they are seen on search engines. Yoast has a number of features to help SEOs, including:

SEO Analysis – When you add written content to your site, Yoast can analyse it to make sure that it meets SEO specifications, giving recommendations to improve your content so it drives new traffic.

Crawling and Indexing – Yoast allows you to adjust which pages on your site are crawled and indexed. You may not want search engine crawlers to see all of your pages in search engines, such as a paginated page or a page with similar content to another, for example. You might want Google to see the content on a page and the links.

Sitemaps – Sitemaps are used to allow search engines to understand and crawl and index websites more easily. Yoast automatically generates a sitemap for your site to help with your pages’ search engine rankings.

Redirections – Sometimes internal and external links to pages expire as the pages that were being linked to no longer exist. Yoast allows you to redirect to the links to new relevant links so users aren’t sent to an error page (404).

Yoast and Google Docs

Yoast has recently announced their latest feature, which will mean their SEO analysis and readability feature will be available with an add-on within Google Docs. The SEO analysis tracks how well your content is optimised for a specific keyword phrase, including the presence and frequency of the keyword and making sure there is no keyword stuffing. The readability tracks how well written your content is, including sentence and paragraph length and structure.

This latest feature will allow SEOs to make improvements to their content in real time and speed up the process of creating optimised content for their sites.

Tags and categories are labels we use on a website to create order across content, particularly on per-collection pages, where multiple pieces of content are stored. These pages are typically assigned as product category pages or blogs.

There is a distinction between categories and tags, with some similarities shared between the two and some major differences in the way they serve the search engine and the reader.

What are categories?

There are roughly 5-10 categories prescribed to a per-collection page, and the category serves as a label for a specific group, type or subject. For instance, a clothing shop will have the category of tops.

It’s used as an umbrella tag, or a starting point in the search. This means that it will likely include content or products which are more broadly defined than just the category itself.

What are tags on a website?

That’s where tags come in; they help qualify that search further by adding a label including the detail. So, to touch back upon the example from before, within the top category, you could have the unique product pages tagged with:

• Crop-tops
• Long-sleeve tops
• Vest tops
• Short-sleeved tops

The tags allow you to label that content further, so when someone is looking for a specific niche aspect in content.

Why do we use categories and tags on websites?

Tags and categories help keep content on your website organised for both those searching and search engines crawling your site. It’s a brilliant tool for creating a structure, allowing you to easily pull related tagged or categorised content for it to be displayed to the reader.

We use tags and categories to make sense of the content we put out, which allows people to easily search through a particular type of content, without being inundated with other non-relevant content.

What are the benefits of implementing categories and tags?

Structure – Brings structure to your site by grouping content that shares related topics.

Simple navigation – Allows the reader and search engines to efficiently navigate to and understand the subject of the content.

Enhanced user experiences – User experience is prioritised when content is organised, saving the time spent searching your site, and reducing dissatisfaction with irrelevant content being displayed.

Increasing the chance of discoverability – Using this content structure can make it easier for other content relating to the same category to be discovered. Typically, a category page will be made, where all the products and content are assembled onto one page, making it more discoverable.

How to properly assign categories and tags?

The best approach to take when assigning categories and tags on your website is to use a structured process.

Identifying your categories

You’ll need to begin by outlining the various products and subjects your pages include. This will allow you to narrow down your categories. For instance, a retail brand may categorise by the type of product, whereas a blogger may categorise by topic.

In some cases, sub-categories may need to be introduced, which creates a hierarchical structure between content pages. An example of where subcategories may be used is with a retail brand; they may have an overarching shoe category, then subcategories for each type of shoe.

Incorporating categories and tags on WordPress

To add a category or tag in WordPress, you need to begin by navigating to the posts section. If you’re uploading fresh content, navigate to add a post. This opens up the post creation page, which has a toolbar on the right-hand side.

On the toolbar is a section where you can create categories by simply selecting Add category. The same can be done for the tagging to, you simply need to scroll down on the toolbar to find the tag section and begin to type in your answers.

So whilst tags and categories share similarities, the way they help sort content on your website differs. Each helps to improve the structure of your site, ultimately improving the user’s experience navigating content.

In Google Ads, choosing between broad match and exact match keywords can make or break your campaign performance. Exact match means your ads show only when people search for your keywords exactly as you’ve set them—great for precision and control. Broad match, on the other hand, lets your ads appear for searches that include variations, related terms, or even synonyms of your keywords—giving you a wider reach but sometimes less relevance. 

Knowing which match type drives the best results is key, and that’s where experiments come in.

Simplified Experiment Setup

Google is rolling out a new way to test broad match keywords directly within existing campaigns, aiming to deliver faster results with fewer mistakes. Instead of duplicating your entire campaign to run an experiment, you can now split traffic and budget inside one search campaign. 

Google says this new setup avoids common experimentation errors and speeds up insights by eliminating the need to manage separate campaign copies.

Built-In Control and Treatment

The updated system allows you to assign a portion of your existing campaign’s traffic as the control group—using your original keywords—and another portion as the trial group, where broad match keywords are tested alongside your originals. 

This feature is available only for campaigns using Smart Bidding, though portfolio bid strategies aren’t supported. The new approach ensures experiments are simpler, more accurate, and easier to manage.

Easier Analysis and Next Steps

Once the experiment finishes, results appear in the “Experiments” tab, now with an expanded “Experiment summary” page for a clearer comparison of control and trial performance. If you’re happy with the results, you can click “apply the experiment” to add broad match versions to your live campaign seamlessly. 

This streamlined process makes it easier for advertisers to find the right keyword strategy without the hassle of duplicating campaigns or juggling multiple setups.

What is keyword cannibalisation?

Keyword cannibalisation occurs when multiple pages on your website target the same keywords, causing them to compete against each other in search engine results. Rather than boosting your visibility, this overlap can dilute your SEO efforts and hurt your rankings.

Why is keyword cannibalisation such a problem?

Keyword cannibalisation directly impacts your content. Here’s how it directly impacts your SEO efforts:

Impacting your rankings – the greatest issue with keyword cannibalisation is the impact it can have on your rankings. Negative Impact on ranking decreases the chance of content being displayed, clicked on and engaged with.

Decreasing page authority – when your content is directly competing with more of your content, it can negatively impact your authority. It dilutes the authority you have potentially established on one page by redirecting your audience to another.

The spending of unnecessary crawl budget –if you have multiple pages targeting the same keywords, it can impact the chances of other important pieces of content being crawled. This is because Google determines the crawl budget, meaning other pieces of important content can be directly impacted because of keyword cannibalisation.

Negatively impacting conversion rates – if two pieces of content are competing with each other and one ranks higher than the other, it is going to have a higher click-through rate. You never want to compete with your content, as the goal is to create unique pieces of content that perform consistently.

Preventing and fixing keyword cannibalisation

Prevention

The key is to define the intent of your content; your intent will directly influence the way your content is ranked on search engines. Using long-tailed keywords allows you to directly answer and cater to different search intents, which would be one of the key factors in content not being ranked against other pieces of your content.

Avoid repeating the same keyword sets, diversify the words you target to make sure your content isn’t competing against each other. Coupling this with pinpointing your intent will ensure there’s no content battling to be ranked.

Monitor your content after it’s been created and look at how your content ranks for your keywords. If it’s ranking poorly, the content may need to be optimised to add more value and demonstrate to search engines it’s worth displaying.

Fixing keyword cannibalisation

Once you’re certain keyword cannibalisation is your problem, you can begin to strategise how to move forward with your different pieces of content. 

The best approach is to consolidate your content. Merging your content into one comprehensive piece can be beneficial for preserving content. You can do this by implementing 301 redirects, which will allow the original link to still exist but funnel it back into the new consolidated content.

If you think your content serves different audience intents, then optimise the content to cater to that intent. You can do this by adapting the copy and integrating more long-tailed keywords.

If you decide you need to keep the content as well as needing to keep the pages separate, then canonical tags may be the best approach for you. A canonical tag lets the search engine know which page to prioritise for ranking and indexing.

What not to do…

Whilst some scenarios might call for you to delete the page to fix a cannibalisation, its not an ideal solution. Not only can you lose the value that piece of content added to your site, but any links embedded on the page are lost.

In Summary
Keyword cannibalisation can quietly damage your SEO performance if left unchecked. By planning strategically, optimising with intent, and auditing your content regularly, you can ensure each page has a distinct purpose, helping search engines and users alike navigate your site more effectively.

Google has begun rolling out its June 2025 core update, the second major algorithm refresh of the year. It launched globally on the morning of 30 June, and the rollout is expected to continue for around three weeks, affecting websites in all regions and languages.

This is what Google calls a “regular update” to its core search systems. It doesn’t introduce anything dramatically new, but it is still significant, with the potential to cause noticeable changes in how sites perform in search results.

What is a core update?

Google’s core updates are part of its ongoing efforts to improve the quality of search results. They are not designed to punish sites but to reassess which pages best match user intent based on what people are searching for today.

Rather than targeting specific websites or content types, this update looks at all types of content across the web. It includes changes to how Google ranks and surfaces content not only in standard search results but also across features like Google Discover and featured snippets.

The company has described it as an update that helps surface “relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites.” In other words, it aims to reward web pages that deliver strong user value and elevate them in the rankings.

If your rankings change, here’s what it means

If your website experiences a dip in visibility during this period, it’s important not to assume you’ve done something wrong. Core updates are not penalties. Instead, they are an opportunity for Google to highlight content it considers more useful or authoritative based on the latest data from real users.

However, if you’ve seen a significant drop, especially in key landing pages or traffic-driving content, now is a good time to take stock. Google’s advice remains the same: review your content with a people-first mindset. Does it demonstrate clear value? Is it original, well-written, and useful to your audience? Are you genuinely meeting the needs of the people landing on that page?

While Google has said there’s nothing specific you need to “fix” after a core update, the most successful sites are those that invest in content improvements with long-term users in mind. Thin, outdated, or SEO-driven content that lacks substance may be at a disadvantage when compared to pages that focus on clarity, depth, and authority.

How long should you wait before reacting?

Google’s core updates take time to fully roll out. In this case, it will take up to three weeks, so it’s best to wait until mid to late July before making any firm conclusions. Search visibility can fluctuate during the rollout, and traffic shifts may not settle until the update is complete.

Once the update has finished, review your data using tools like Google Search Console or GA4. If particular pages have seen a decline, assess them in terms of quality, usefulness, and clarity, not just keyword usage.

Google’s long-term approach

Google has also confirmed that it will continue to refresh this update periodically, meaning its systems will keep learning and evolving in the background. However, future refreshes may not always be announced, so some fluctuations may occur quietly over time.

John Mueller, Search Analyst at Google, described the June 2025 core update as a “bigger” search update in a comment on Bluesky. That said, it still falls within the regular rhythm of Google’s ongoing efforts to improve how it ranks content across the web.

Recent update history

This is the second major update of the year. The previous one ran from 13 March to 27 March 2025. In 2024, core updates occurred in August, November, and December, with the March 2024 update standing out as the most impactful in recent memory.

If your site has been affected, don’t panic. Avoid making surface-level changes in a hurry. Focus instead on making your content more useful, more focused, and more relevant to real users. Google continues to emphasise helpfulness, trustworthiness, and user satisfaction above all else.

Treat this update as a reminder to audit your most important content. Look for opportunities to answer searchers’ questions more clearly, add depth to existing articles, and remove or consolidate outdated material. Improvements made today may not yield immediate results but can position your content more competitively for future updates.

Google introduced a new algorithm that they say speeds up retrieval, ranking and improves accuracy. The Multi Vector Retrieval Algorithm (MUVERA) can be used for search as well as YouTube, and will have an effect on the way content appears if implemented as the new algorithm on search.

What Google have said

Google’s current system uses a system called RankEmbed to embed the content on the SERP. Rank Embed is a model that is extremely useful for common queries but often falls short when users have long-tail queries (more detailed, longer questions). MUVERA is said to improve upon RankEmbed and as a multi-vector system, is much better at answering long-tail queries. The Google announcement had this to say about the new MUVERA system:

“Unlike single-vector embeddings, multi-vector models represent each data point with a set of embeddings and leverage more sophisticated similarity functions that can capture richer relationships between data points.”

While this multi-vector approach boosts accuracy and enables the retrieval of more relevant documents, it introduces substantial computational challenges. In particular, the increased number of embeddings and the complexity of multi-vector similarity scoring make retrieval significantly more expensive.

In ‘MUVERA: Multi-Vector Retrieval via Fixed Dimensional Encodings’, we introduce a novel multi-vector retrieval algorithm designed to bridge the efficiency gap between single- and multi-vector retrieval.

…This new approach allows us to leverage the highly optimised MIPS algorithms to retrieve an initial set of candidates that can then be re-ranked with the exact multi-vector similarity, thereby enabling efficient multi-vector retrieval without sacrificing accuracy.“

What does this mean for SEOs

Modern algorithms such as MUREVA are more sophisticated and can create more sophisticated leaps between queries and their intent. This means that targeting specific keywords that SEOs have previously been focused on might be a thing of the past, with content being focused more on the overall context and creating it with answering the intent of specific queries in mind.

In 2025, search is changing faster than ever. With the introduction of AI Overviews, ChatGPT and more, it is imperative that marketers adapt their content to appear on the AI driven search page so they don’t get lost in the shuffle. This is especially important for local businesses who thrive on appearing high on local searches to attract customers to their business. In this article, we will discuss how AI is reshaping local search visibility in 2025 and how to stay ahead of the pack.

Discovery in Local AI Search

In order for your content to be found in LLMs and on AI dominated searches it is imperative that marketers adapt their content for AI models. There are a number of recommended strategies that can be used to enhance local search performance through AI.

• Audit search and LLM – Auditing the content that is appearing in AI searches and Large language models, such as ChatGPT, allows marketers to adapt their content to meet the needs of the audience (and AI) for their specific search queries by understanding what is already working and following suite.

• Optimise local listings – Optimising your local listings and make sure they are up to date with relevant NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) information has always been important in local search and remains imperative in the AI era. There are several local listings you can claim including Google Business Profile, Apple Maps and Bing Places. Google’s AI mode uses Google Business Profile data when generating responses, as well as links to your profile or website which is helpful for generating increased traffic levels.

• Local Business Markup – Local business markup is a type of schema (structured data that helps explain your web page to search engines) provides AI Overviews with valuable data about your business like your NAP information that are displayed in your local listings.

• Online Reviews – Reviews are crucial for getting your business into AI overviews. If users ask search engines for recommendations for local businesses e.g. best local restaurant in my area, AI overviews will rely heavily on reviews to formulate to understand the quality of local services. Encouraging your users to leave reviews can be an important step to gaining more customers who see reviews as a credible source of information.

What does this mean for marketers

Many of the tips for appearing high in local searches remain consistent with what was seen before the introduction of AI Overviews such as optimising local listings, employing schema markup and using online reviews, as AI also uses these functionalities to understand the reputation of a website. However, it is very important for marketers wanting to expand their customer base for local businesses in today’s AI dominated world to continually monitor the content being produced by search engines and LLMs for local queries and adjusting or creating new content to reflect this.

Google could soon face new rules in the UK that may change how businesses appear in search results and how digital ads are bought and displayed, particularly as AI becomes a bigger part of search.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which ensures fair competition between businesses, is investigating how Google runs its Search and Advertising services. Their main focus is on Google’s new AI-powered search features, which often show AI-generated answers instead of a list of website links.

The CMA has raised concerns about:

• Whether Google is ranking websites fairly in search results
• High costs for advertising on Google Search
• Use of other websites’ content in AI-generated summaries without clear permission

To deal with this, the CMA is considering giving Google a label called Strategic Market Status (SMS). If applied, this status would allow the CMA to enforce specific rules on Google without needing to prove the company has broken competition laws.

This status would apply to Google’s AI search features, although not to Gemini, its AI assistant tool.

Why this matters for digital marketers

If Google is given this new status, it could lead to:

• Changes in how ads are placed and displayed in search results
• Shifts in how visible your website or content is on Google, especially when AI summaries appear instead of traditional links
• Potential changes in ad pricing, which could impact your digital marketing budget

These changes could increase competition in the search market, which may benefit smaller businesses. However, they may also bring new compliance issues and require updates to your marketing strategies.

What Google is saying

Google has criticised the CMA’s proposals, calling them too broad and unfocused. The company warned that unclear rules could get in the way of progress in AI development.

“Evidence-based regulation will be essential to avoid turning a roadmap into a roadblock,” Google said.

What’s next

The CMA’s current review ends on 13 October 2025. If they move forward, a second, more in-depth phase will begin in early 2026. This next stage could look at other areas of Google’s business, such as:

• Its dominance in the ad market
• How it works with publishers
• How it treats rival search engines

If your work relies on Google ads or organic search traffic, it’s worth keeping an eye on these developments.