Diggity Marketing News Roundup—August 2025
This month was huge for marketing, with big SEO, AI, and ad changes. In the top stories of the month, you’ll learn about the completion of the last core update, stats on the behavior of AI assistants, and what it may mean that Amazon has stopped spending on Google ads. After that, you’ll learn why AI search traffic is ignoring mobile strategies and see some of the results of some of my own fun experiments with AI SEO. You’ll also discover why brands dominate AI mode but seem to struggle in AI Overviews. At the end, you’ll learn why Google CTRs are crashing and how to avoid penalties with programmatic SEO. Let’s jump in! Google June 2025 Core Update Completed – Did It Destroy Your Site? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNh8_Yl6cPY Barry Schwartz brings you the news that the most recent core update (which ran from July 2nd to July 17th) is now over. As he notes, it was one of the biggest core updates in a long while. In this video, he lays out what he saw from the update and speculates on whether another one is likely this year. So, what are site owners saying? Barry says many of them are reporting some of the most significant boosts they’ve seen in a while. He takes you through some of the posts made by site owners, including some who reported the return of the results to the front page. Several site owners reported seeing an upward trend for sites initially hit by the Sept 2023 through August 2024 Update. These pages were finally starting to recover with the latest one. Several site owners reported complete recoveries after being hit. While recovery is the story for many sites, Barry is skeptical that most sites can even come back after all of the changes SERPs have undergone. AI Overviews and other news SERP features have captured a lot of traffic that isn’t going back to organic results. Barry doesn’t believe it’s likely that there will be another core update this year. He notes that the pace of updates seems to have slowed as Google focuses more on letting the results cook for a bit before making big changes. The next story may have some good information for you if you’re looking to compete under these new conditions. It contains some hard data on the results that AI assistants prefer. New Study: AI Assistants Prefer to Cite “Fresher” Content https://ahrefs.com/blog/do-ai-assistants-prefer-to-cite-fresh-content/ Ryan Law and Xibeijia Guan bring you this deep look into what kind of content AI assistants prefer to deliver. They analyzed over 17 million citations that were recorded across seven different AI platforms. The team was looking for certain information, including: The results were conclusive. The research showed that AI assistants prefer citing fresher content. The team found that the average age of URLs cited by AI assistants is 1064 days, compared to 1432 days for URLs in organic SERPs. Of the tested AI assistants, ChatGPT was the most likely to cite newer pages, and both Perplexity and ChatGPT preferred to order their references from newest to oldest (giving the newer links a preferred place). The researchers noted that Google SERPs and AI Overviews are the most likely to prefer older content. However, on average, older content is only 16 days older. Check out the complete article for a much deeper look. It includes an analysis of all the major assistants and their behavior. At the end, you’ll also find some helpful advice and caveats. Next, Amazon is making considerable changes to its ad spending. Amazon Stops Spending on Google Shopping Ads – Report https://seekingalpha.com/news/4474402-amazon-stops-spending-on-google-shopping-ads—report Ahmed Farhath brings you this report from multiple research analytics firms that track Google’s ad “Auction Insights” tool. This tool provides data on the top 10 advertisers and their share of impressions. Amazon typically appears on this list of the top advertisers, but it stopped appearing in late July. Advertising analysts are taking this as a sign that the company is no longer bidding to appear for Google Shopping inventory. Several ad specialists were quoted, confirming the work of the analytics firms. This is not the first time that Amazon has dropped out of these ads. As the author notes, they last did so in the early days of the pandemic in 2020. This time, Amazon is not announcing any reason for cancelling the ad spend. This may create an opening for some new opportunities for you if you advertise in related shopping niches. Next, you’ll learn why mobile strategy may not be the best targeting AI search traffic. The AI Desktop/Mobile Divide: 90% Of AI Search Traffic Ignores Mobile Strategy https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ai-desktop-mobile-divide-ai-search-traffic-ignores-mobile-strategy/549122/ Lemuel Park brings you this look at why marketers need to rethink device strategy. He presents some crucial stats from BrightEdge on how AI users are changing the focus for strategies that rely on AI traffic. Mobile-first strategies have been popular for several years, but the rise of AI may be making mobile a lower priority. The surprising reason is that over 90% of AI-powered search referrals originate from desktop devices. As he shows you, ChatGPT leads the desktop concentration, with 94% of referral traffic coming from desktop devices, leaving just 6% for mobile users. It’s not just ChatGPT, though. Perplexity, Bing, and Gemini also have desktop traffic that exceeds 90%. Lemuel has several theories for why this may be happening. First, he points out that AIs work differently when delivering results for desktop and mobile users. For example, LLMs like ChatGPT direct desktop users to other sites when a link is clicked. However, ChatGPT keeps users in the app when the same link is clicked on mobile devices, along with previews and other features. Lemuel also suspects that desktop and mobile AI users have different user intents. He suggests mobile users prefer to look for quick answers, while desktop users are more likely to be engaged in research or other tasks that need attention and focus. He recommends building device-specific AI strategies to serve desktop and mobile users more effectively. He also predicts that mobile will soon be a far more important source of AI traffic. Next, I tried several of the oddest AI-SEO techniques I could find. Find out whether any of them are worth mixing into your own strategies. I Tried 3 Weird AI-SEO Techniques. Trash or Smash? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EItVZ5W5FUc I bring you this look at some of my most recent AI-SEO tests and how they worked. The written guide is also available here. For this set of tests, I focused on some of the weirdest techniques I’d heard about, but the results were staggering. The tests ended up being worth a 1400%+ increase in AI traffic and 150+ newly-ranking AI Overview keywords. Even organic search traffic doubled! I cover how these methods can be used to get AI to stop ignoring your content, how to get AI to cite you, and what format makes ChatGPT love your content. First, I cover log analysis. This highly tedious task has recently been simplified greatly with AI assistants. I fully explain these log files and what they can tell you, including which pages AI loves, which content is more important, and which pages probably need to be fixed. I’ve already used this technique to massively increase traffic to one of my clients’ pages. The video contains the prompts I used to search the log files and generate the insights I needed. Next, I experimented with upgrading the schema on lagging pages. AI often needs help to understand the intent of content, and it won’t serve content to users that it can’t understand. In addition to some examples of schema I provide, I also recommend using: Adding these to my test content more than tripled the referrals I received from AI sources. Check out my full video to go deeper into the changes I made and the kind of results that were possible. Next up, there’s more AI research, and some big implications for brands. Brands dominate Google AI Mode, struggle in AI Overviews: Study https://searchengineland.com/google-ai-mode-overviews-brands-study-459754 Danny Goodwin brings you this look at how brands perform in Google’s two major AI search modes: AI Overviews and full AI Mode search. First, he presents the results of the test. Danny argues that this matters a lot because search is no longer just about ratings but presence. AI Mode gives brands a great platform, but AI Overviews appear far trickier for brands to penetrate. This may be due to a difference in how these modes operate. Danny points out that AI mode is meant to be used as a broad, stable discovery engine. However, AI Overviews are more meant to be quick, selective calculators. Check out the complete story to learn more about what these differences may mean for your brand strategy. Next, Google click-through rates (CTRs) are dropping. Google CTRs Are Crashing: Position #1 CTR Down 32% Post AI Overview Rollout https://growthsrc.com/google-organic-ctr-study/ Swapnil Pate brings you this study covering the long crash Read More Read More
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