Link placement and context influence transfer Links positioned in the main “content area” can transfer more equity than those buried in footers or sidebars, acting as a more potent vote of confidence. Google Search recognizes that editorial links within relevant content—like within a blog post or landing page copy—indicate stronger endorsements and more relevance than navigational or promotional links. The surrounding content context matters significantly. A link about “technical SEO audits” embedded within a paragraph discussing site optimization, for example, carries more relevance signals than the “Contact Us” link in the site’s navigational menu at the top of the blog. 

While exact-match anchor text isn’t required, descriptive anchor text helps search engines understand the destination page’s topic and purpose.

External links typically carry more weight per link (often correlating with the linking site’s authority), but internal links offer more control and scalability without veering into black-hat SEO strategy. A well-structured internal linking system can amplify the impact of external backlinks by distributing their equity strategically throughout your site.

Although machine learning is growing in importance, many Google signals are still “hand-crafted” by engineers.

Google’s search index is the crawled content: titles and bodies. Separate indexes exist for content like Twitter feeds and Macy’s data.

Google’s search features (e.g., knowledge panels) each have their own ranking algorithm. “Tangram” (formerly Tetris) aimed to apply a unified search principle to all these features.

Add a “What is” heading.Use an “is” sentence structure.Fully define the topic.Match the featured snippet format.Don’t use your brand name.Don’t use first-person language.Scale featured snippets.Prioritize when you rank in the top five.Iterate your optimizations.

3. Fully define the topic in 2-3 sentences This is the most important rule to follow, in my opinion.  Featured snippets should give users as much information about the topic as quickly as possible. 

An Ahrefs study showed that results ranking in the first position had a 30.9% chance of receiving a featured snippet. Positions 2 and 3 had a 23.5% and 15.9% chance, respectively. 

Google’s Gary Illyes recently said that when it comes to ranking in AI Overviews, all you need to do is normal SEO. He also said that Google won’t be crawling and using the new LLMS.txt files that have become a popular topic in the SEO space

93% related searches. 72% sitelinks. 57% “People also ask” (PAA). 55% reviews. 50% images. 20% knowledge panel. 18% local pack . 18% video.  15% products. 7% AI Overviews. 4% featured snippet. 4% top stories. 1% carousel.

Google saw more than 5 trillion searches in 2024, or about 14 billion per day, giving it a 93.57% market share.

More Google searches. The number of Google searches grew 21.64% in 2024, compared to 2023, based on Datos data.

ChatGPT saw an estimated 37.5 million search-like prompts per day, giving it a 0.25% market share. That’s less than Microsoft Bing (4.10%), Yahoo (1.35%), and DuckDuckGo (0.73%). Google saw ~373 times as many searches as ChatGPT in 2024.

AI Overviews appear in roughly 47% of search results now, up from 25% in mid-2024. 60% of Google searches never leave the results page. When AI Overviews appear, click-through rates drop 34.5%.

But here’s what the doom-and-gloom crowd is missing: 82.5% of marketers increased their SEO budgets in 2024. 

At this stage, the obvious response is to say that the models keep getting better, but this misses the point. Are you telling me that today’s model gets this table 85% right and the next version will get it 85.5 or 91% correct? That doesn’t help me. If there are mistakes in the table, it doesn’t matter how many there are - I can’t trust it. If, on the other hand, you think that these models will go to being 100% right, that would change everything, but that would also be a binary change in the nature of these systems, not a percentage change, and we don’t know if that’s even possible.