Tag

seo-strategy

16 articles

What 54 Studies Say Actually Drives AI Citations: Brand Mentions Beat Backlinks 3 to 1

A late-June meta-analysis by Cyrus Shepard on Zyppy Signal aggregated 54 AI-citation studies. Brand web mentions correlate about 3x more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks, AI-cited content runs 25.7% fresher than organic top-10 results, and 76.4% of ChatGPT's most-cited pages were updated within 30 days. Meanwhile the overlap between Google's top 10 and AI citations has collapsed to 17-38%. Here is what that evidence means for a small store's roadmap.

Google's June 2026 Spam Update: A Two-Day Rollout That Reaches Into AI Search

Google's second spam update of 2026 rolled out June 24 to 26. Volatility trackers spiked harder than usual for a spam update, some sites reported organic drops above 25%, and per Search Engine Land the updated spam policies now cover manipulation of AI-generated search responses. How to tell a spam hit from a core update hit, and what recovery actually looks like.