We have a special guest this week and a half hour long interview with San Diego based SEO, Nick Musica in which we get to geek out on the sweeping changes in search and how they affect Technical SEO. Also, Google finally released a post AI Mode Core Update earlier this week. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger discuss what might be coming in the July 2025 Core Update. The world's largest CDN, Cloudflare, is creating a means to charge LLMs for access to your data, to block LLMs entirely, or to continue allowing free access. We'll see what other CDNs do in response. Google introduced MUVERA, an improvement on multi-vector retrieval. According to a Similarweb study, nearly 70% of searches for info from news sites ended in a No Click search result. Google's AI mode is showing inconsistencies in sourcing material but is also experimenting with adding site names to citations. All this and more on a long summer's day edition of Webcology.

The search industry mourns the loss of foundational SEO Jill Whalen. Jill's impact on the earliest decades of SEO set the template for the industry we know today. Every old school SEO was directly touched by her in some way, most of us learning how to think about content through her and the High Rankings forum. We also learned to form a strong sense of SEO ethics because of Jill. Her influence on the industry was and remains enormous. We also mark the passing of former Clix Marketing CFO and partner of PPC Rockstar Davis Szetela, Wils Murphy. Wils was a wonderful soul who was a beloved part of the early conference speaker scene.

The show covers a range of topics, starting with Google's head of search, Liz Reid's thoughts on the transition to the AI era, the effect of AI Overviews on clicks, the effects of AI on critical skill sets, Google's legal battles in Europe and the United States, the loss of copyright protections in a recent lawsuit filed by Sarah Silverman against Meta, and a lot of SEO related stuff.

Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about the decouplings happening in the SEO industry and in tech in general. A major topic is the decoupling of click activity vs. impressions seen in Google Search Console as AI Overviews are rapidly creating a zero click search environment for research and informational queries. At the same time, parts of our society are decoupling with reality, an example being the concept that funding rural broadband Internet access might be an example of a "woke handout...". We also talk about Google SEO, Google's anti-trust cases, Meta offering Open AI engineers massive bonuses to poach top talent, the future of government by AI, Google AI Mode, Google URL structure, and more...