Diggity Marketing News Roundup—July 2025
You shouldn’t miss anything that changed for SEO, AI, LLMs, and more last month. First, you’ll learn about the most recent Google update, the steps Cloudflare is taking to fight scraping, and the results of a major AI-SEO test. After that, you’ll catch up on why Google has de-indexed millions of pages, and get some perspectives from major SEOs on the future of LLMs, the state of link building, and how Google’s search share is holding up against AI. At the end, you’ll find the headlines on Google’s direction. There are fresh numbers on the performance of overviews, new features for Google Ads, and fresh moves from the company to avoid hefty fines in the EU. These changes may affect you. Google June 2025 Core Update Just Dropped Google June 2025 Core Update Just Dropped Barry Schwartz brings you this look at Google’s latest core update and the changes that arrived with it. This core update was one of the largest in recent history and included many changes that will affect publishers and other online marketers. “For decades, the Internet has operated on a simple exchange: search engines index content and direct users back to original websites, generating traffic and ad revenue for websites of all sizes. This cycle rewards creators that produce quality content with money and a following, while helping users discover new and relevant information. That model is now broken. AI crawlers collect content like text, articles, and images to generate answers, without sending visitors to the original source – depriving content creators of revenue, and the satisfaction of knowing someone is viewing their content. If the incentive to create original, quality content disappears, society ends up losing, and the future of the Internet is at risk.” First, Barry walks you through the details of this announcement. Google has claimed that the update focuses on content and is designed to surface relevant and satisfying content more effectively. Barry points out that the announcement was very similar in wording to the March 2025 announcement, with one notable exception. Google claimed the March update was meant to surface more relevant content from creators. However, that word no longer appears in the June announcement, suggesting Google may be strategizing to bypass creators and provide “satisfying” results from their own sources. Barry predicts that many sites will see disastrous ranking declines from the update. As he points out with graphs, the number of searchers diverted to AI overviews is only going up with each update, and Google has not signaled any changes in priority. As of July 17th, the core update is confirmed to be over. Data is still being gathered about the effects of this update, and should be ready for the next update. Next, you’ll learn how one hoster is helping publishers fight back against AI. Cloudflare will block AI web crawlers by default, and introduces new Pay Per Crawl scheme that means AI companies will have to fork out for the privilege to scrape https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/cloudflare-will-block-ai-web-crawlers… Jess Kinghorn brings you this look at how the Cloudflare company is giving site owners the power to fight back against aggressive scraping by AI bots looking for free content. Cloudflare is a domain registrar that offers a range of other network services. It has many website publishers as clients and has been offering those clients more ways to protect themselves from having their content stolen in recent updates. Last year, Cloudflare started by giving customers a one-click solution to block AI bots from their websites. That tool showed users lists of bots that could be blocked, and helped site owners find cases where their content was being republished. Now, Cloudflare has taken it a step further by automatically blocking AI crawlers. In an announcement published on July 1st, the company claims that all users can now decide how they want AI crawlers to interact with their sites. The statement uses surprisingly strong language to describe the intentions of this policy. In it, Cloudflare accuses AI crawlers of destroying the healthy cooperation of publishers and search engines. “For decades, the Internet has operated on a simple exchange: search engines index content and direct users back to original websites, generating traffic and ad revenue for websites of all sizes. This cycle rewards creators that produce quality content with money and a following, while helping users discover new and relevant information. That model is now broken. AI crawlers collect content like text, articles, and images to generate answers, without sending visitors to the original source – depriving content creators of revenue, and the satisfaction of knowing someone is viewing their content. If the incentive to create original, quality content disappears, society ends up losing, and the future of the Internet is at risk.” Cloudflare calls this new policy a “permission-based model” and has already received many encouraging statements from other major publishers, including ADWEEK, The Associated Press, The Atlantic, and others, which can be found at the end of the statement. This may be just the beginning of publishers fighting back. Either way, we all need to be prepared for a new world. I started by developing my own AI-SEO that I’ve now tested across multiple sites. I did AI-SEO for ChatGPT and Google AI. Here’s what happened… I did AI-SEO for ChatGPT and Google AI. Here’s what happened… I spent the last 6 months trying to determine how websites get featured in Google’s AI overviews, ChatGPT, and other AI-generated search results. Now, I think I’ve cracked the code, as proven by AI mentions that have jumped by as much as 2,000%+ for my clients! In this video, I cover why you want to optimize for AI, how you can identify all the AI opportunities that are available to you, how to optimize them, and how you can monitor how well your strategies are working. I’ll show you what I did through the example of one client. This client was responsible for running a website for a high-quality brand. Despite a good reputation, this brand wasn’t showing up for any AI results. As I show you through several examples, this isn’t even an uncommon problem. Many high-quality brands aren’t mentioned in AI answers and are still struggling to find out why. After much testing, I realized that AIs are most likely to link to sites from which they source information, so I started looking for ways to build content that AIs want to use in their answers. The recently launched Ahrefs tool Brand Radar can be very handy for determining which AI answers to target. Just enter your brand name and the names of some competitors to find out how often you’re mentioned, and what keywords are most associated with your brand. With that information in hand, I started developing tactics to get mentioned by AI. I refined 12 of them that were successful, including— Check out the complete video to learn more about how AI learns to trust your brand and the tactics that truly work to get mentioned. Next, you’ll learn what it means that millions of results are now getting de-indexed by Google. Google De-Indexing Millions of Pages: What’s Happening? Google De-Indexing Millions of Pages: What’s Happening? Edward Sturm brings you this report on Google’s quiet purge of indexed pages. This issue first became known when an SEO in the French market documented the loss of hundreds of thousands of pages for that language last June. Other SEOs soon spotted the same trends in their regions. This may have been going on for a while. First, Edward provides you with a timeline of SEO chatter on the issue, discovering that the issue was causing complaints as early as May. SEOs involved in those cases reported seeing active websites with good content lose page after page to deindexing. Edward has some theories for why this may be happening. After reviewing a lot of community chatter, it seems arguable that this mass de-indexing is a result of changes in how Google measures topical authority. These lost pages may reflect areas where Google no longer feels you are an authority on that topic. If this is the case, it’s important not to simply reindex all the pages. This may be a waste of time in the first place, but even if you intend to reindex the pages, it’s probably not worth it unless you can prove your topical authority through links and better content. Edward tracked some good news from some site owners. Even when they lost less topically relevant pages, the remaining pages saw improved authority. This suggests that excellent content may benefit overall from the fact that Google is taking this action. Now that you have some fresh insights on how Google assesses content, you’ll want to get the latest on links. The next piece summarizes everything you need to know about the last year. The State of Link Building | 2025 https://editorial.link/link-building-statistics/ The writers and researchers Pawel Tatarek, Hanna Lebedeva, and Adelina Karpenkova bring you Read More Read More
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