The SEO Turtle journal
What we’re working on, what we’re learning, and the questions worth spending a little more time with.
For a year the comfort blanket has been that AI Overviews only strip out low-value bounce clicks you never wanted anyway. A new randomised field experiment says that's wrong. The lost clicks were just as engaged as the ones that stayed.
Google's Personal Intelligence pulls a searcher's Gmail and Photos into AI Mode, so the answer they see is shaped by who they already are. That quietly turns owned relationships into a ranking input, and it changes what you can and can't optimise for.
Google finally published its own guidance on optimizing for AI Overviews and AI Mode, and it quietly dismantled half the GEO playbook vendors have been selling. Here is what the guide gets right, the part it conveniently leaves out, and what a Cyprus or US business should actually do this quarter.
Cloudflare's new default blocks AI training and agent crawlers on ad-supported pages from September 15. Most coverage misses the important part: it does not remove you from AI Overviews. Here is what to check and what to leave alone.
Everyone chasing AI citations is optimising for the moment ChatGPT searches the web. New data says that moment only happens on roughly a third of prompts. The other two-thirds are answered from the model's memory, which is a completely different game with a completely different playbook. Here is how to compete in both.
We got this one wrong in July, along with most of the industry: Google AI Mode did not need to come to Europe. It reached the EU, Greece and Cyprus in October 2025, in Greek as well as English, and AI Overviews are live here too. The runway is not the rollout. It is how few local businesses have adjusted. Here is the corrected timeline and how to spend the gap before your competitors notice.
AI Overviews show up on roughly a third of informational searches and almost none of the transactional ones. That split, not the raw scare stats, is the thing to build your strategy around.
The June 2026 spam update rolled out on June 24 and the panic was instant: AI content is dead. It is not. Google does not care how a page is made. It cares whether the page exists to help a person or to game a ranking. Here is the practitioner read for businesses in Cyprus and the US.
At I/O 2026 Google launched Universal Cart, a single basket that works across Search, Gemini, YouTube and Gmail. For years SEO was about winning the click to your site. Universal Cart removes the click even for buyers. Here is our practitioner read on what actually changes and the unglamorous feed work that decides who wins.
Google quietly shipped a switch that removes your site from AI Overviews and AI Mode while leaving your normal rankings untouched. It sounds like a gift to anyone watching AI eat their clicks. We explain why it is a regulatory escape hatch built for a handful of publishers, not an SEO lever, and why flipping it makes most businesses invisible exactly where attention is heading.
For 25 years the deal was simple: ads sat at the top, organic links sat below, and everyone knew which was which. In May and June 2026 both Google and OpenAI started weaving ads into the AI answer. We break down what actually changed, why it makes organic citations more valuable rather than less, and what a business in Cyprus or the US should do about it right now.
For 25 years the Google search box recorded the question you already had. The new AI search box helps you write a better one, suggesting and reshaping your query before you finish typing. That moves the decisive moment of search upstream, off the results page and into the box. Here is our practitioner read on what it changes and what to do now.
Google's May 2026 core update wrapped on June 2 after nearly twelve volatile days. The old recovery playbook still applies, but there is a twist most businesses miss: the same content quality that wins back rankings is what gets you cited in AI Overviews and AI Mode. They run on the same systems. Here is how we are reading it for clients in Cyprus and the US.
On May 7, 2026 Google stopped showing FAQ rich results, then told everyone in its new AI search guide that special schema is not needed for AI features either. Both moves point the same way. Here is our practitioner read on what structured data is actually for now, and what to stop wasting time on.
LLMs do not rank your page, they lift a passage from it and quote it. That single change rewrites how you should write. Here is our tested, practitioner read on structuring content so AI answer engines extract and cite you, what the controlled research actually proves, and the schema and llms.txt myths to stop wasting time on.
A whole industry has sprung up promising to get your brand cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. In May 2026 Google quietly redrew the line, putting paid and inauthentic AI mentions inside its spam policy. Here is our practitioner read on what is fair game, what will get you burned, and what actually earns citations that last.
At I/O 2026 Google introduced information agents, background bots that monitor the web around the clock and ping their owner the moment something matches. That quietly breaks the model SEO was built on, the single search moment. Here is our practitioner read on what it changes and what to do now.
Within three weeks, Google gave SEOs two things: a scoreboard for AI search inside Search Console, and a blunt reality check on the GEO tricks people have been selling. We break down what the new report shows, the big gaps it leaves, and why Google's myth-busting guide matters more than the report.