The SEO Turtle journal
What we’re working on, what we’re learning, and the questions worth spending a little more time with.
Preferred Sources moved into AI Overviews and AI Mode this summer, and Google has said it wants to use those picks as a ranking signal. That turns a settings toggle into search infrastructure. Our read on what it rewards, why the adoption numbers matter more than the feature, and what a business should actually take from it.
Two studies published this summer found the same split from opposite directions: ChatGPT over-retrieves English pages, and Google AI Overviews almost never leaves the language of the question. If you run a Greek and English site, or English and Spanish, you have two different blind spots and one bad reflex to avoid.
On September 4 Google starts removing Assistant from Android phones, tablets, watches and Android Auto, with no way to switch back. Gemini takes over, and it answers local questions using Google Maps and Business Profile data. Here is what changes for businesses and what to fix before it lands.
People are using AI search more and trusting it less. New research puts the drop at 28 points in a year, and half of US shoppers now fact-check AI product recommendations on Reddit before buying. The answer box is no longer the finish line. Here is what to put in the verification step.
ChatGPT did not crawl its way to better local recommendations. It signed a deal. With Yelp reviews, Tripadvisor listings and booking inventory now feeding answers directly, the businesses that get recommended are the ones whose data sits in the corpus that got licensed. Here is our read on what that means for a local business in Cyprus or the US, and the part of the work that still belongs to you.
AI engines are linking to your content without ever saying who wrote it. New research puts the rate at around 40 percent of citations, and above half on Perplexity. That gap breaks the way most businesses measure AI visibility, and it changes what you should be writing.
Google quietly added a line to its review snippet documentation banning fake and undisclosed incentivized reviews. Most coverage framed it as a rich results risk. That misses the point. Review text is now a primary input into the systems that recommend businesses in AI answers, which means a discount-for-a-review habit has stopped being cosmetic and started being structural.
Google published data on how people actually use AI Mode, and the fastest-growing query type is not what SEO teams have been building for. Planning and brainstorming searches are pulling ahead, and the average business site has nothing that answers them. Here is what those queries look like and what to build.
Everyone is optimising for Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT. Meanwhile a second network of answer engines runs on Microsoft's index, and most businesses have never once checked whether they are properly crawled and indexed there. It is the cheapest visibility audit in SEO and hardly anyone does it.
On the 25th birthday of Google Images, Google added image generation to AI Overviews. Search can now draw the picture instead of showing yours, with no photographer, no attribution and no click. Here is what actually changes for image SEO, and the part of visual search a model still cannot fake.
At I/O 2026 Google showed Generative UI: Search assembling its own calculators, comparison tables and dashboards in real time, rolling out free to everyone this summer. If your site earns traffic from a tool or a handy interactive page, Google is moving into that layer. Here is our practitioner take and what to actually do.
On July 16 2026 the European Commission ordered Google to share search data with rival AI assistants and open Android's assistant features to competitors. Everyone is reading it as an antitrust story. For anyone who cares about being found, it is a search visibility story, and Cyprus and the rest of the EU feel it first.
For years the assumption was simple: rank on page one and Google's AI will quote you. That link is breaking. Multiple 2026 studies show the overlap between top-10 rankings and AI Overview citations has collapsed from roughly three-quarters to under a half. We break down why ranking and citation have become two different games, and what a Cyprus or US business should actually do about it.
Google just made Search Console the first property you can verify without owning a domain. You can now see how your Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube posts perform in Search and Discover. We explain why this quietly confirms your social content is search inventory, and what a Cyprus or US business should do about it.
The GEO crowd is selling paragraph chunking as the way to get cited by AI. At Search Central Live Milan, Google called it useless and pointed somewhere else entirely. We break down what Google actually said, why AI citation is a whole-site trust decision rather than a formatting trick, and what a Cyprus or US business should do instead.
Google just gave AI Mode the ability to act inside a handful of partner apps, not only answer questions. Instacart, Canva and YouTube got the first slots. We break down what this action layer actually is, why the partner list matters, and what a business that will never be on that list should do about it.
A new kind of visitor is showing up on your website. It clicks, scrolls, fills forms, and completes tasks, and it is not a human. Agentic browsers like Perplexity Comet, and the ChatGPT agent that replaced Atlas, are still a small slice of traffic, but they change what a website is for. Here is our practitioner read on the agent layer and what a Cyprus or US business should do now.
ChatGPT stopped being just a place to check out and became a place people browse and compare products. If you sell on Shopify or Etsy in the US, your catalog is likely already eligible. But being in the index is not the same as being recommended. Here is our practitioner read on what the product feed actually rewards and what a Cyprus or US business should do about it.