The Edward Show

E1153: Breaking down the debate around AI-written SEO content, Google's ability to identify machine-generated text, and whether AI detection could eventually become a meaningful part of Google's search and training systems.
Google's John Mueller recently liked a LinkedIn post arguing that Google may be moving toward an algorithm designed to target all AI content. That comes after the August spam update, which many site owners reported hit AI-heavy websites particularly hard.
But detecting AI content and penalizing AI content are two very different things.
I also look at an argument from SEO, Dan Petrovic, who explains why Google has little reason to automatically remove content simply because AI was involved in creating it. Google already has sophisticated systems for evaluating content quality, usefulness, and user behavior.
In this episode:
- Why John Mueller liking a post about an AI content crackdown caught my attention
- What the August spam update may tell us about Google's treatment of AI-heavy websites
- How easily Google may be able to detect AI-generated text
- Why AI detection does not automatically mean an SEO penalty
- How Google could use AI detection as one signal among many
- Why user behavior may matter more than whether a human or AI wrote the first draft
- How Google can use post-click behavior, session activity, and other signals to evaluate usefulness
- Why low-quality content existed long before ChatGPT and other LLMs
- How AI-generated content could be treated differently in search results versus AI training data
- Three possible ways Google could handle AI-generated text going forward
- Why Google might allow AI content to rank while excluding some of it from model training
- Why AI content could receive less weight rather than being completely ignored
- How user-generated content from customers, Reddit, reviews, and other sources could become increasingly important
- Why I am still using AI for SEO content
- The difference between using AI as a writing assistant and publishing completely AI-generated articles
- Why short-prompt, publish-without-editing AI content is a bad SEO strategy
- How we use AI for ideation, articulation, summarization, and heavily edited drafts
- Why satisfying search intent still matters regardless of how the content was created
- Why high-intent SEO remains one of the areas where I believe AI can be especially useful
My view is that AI content is not going to disappear from Google Search simply because Google can identify it.
Google has much more information available than authorship alone. It can evaluate whether a page answers the query, whether users find it useful, and whether the website is creating something people actually want.
That means the goal should not be to make AI content undetectable.
The goal should be to use AI carefully, edit heavily, add real information, satisfy search intent quickly, and create pages that deserve to rank.
For us, AI remains a writing assistant rather than a replacement for the entire content process.
⭐️ Ep 1140 - Claude Is Watermarking Everything It Writes. Google Doesn't Have the Key - https://youtu.be/U4WKswNBr0s 
⭐️ Kristine Schachinger on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kschachinger-seo_i-said-it-a-couple-months-ago-and-im-going-share-7498052042116976640-re-G/ 
⭐️ Dan Petrovic: No AI Penalty - https://dejan.ai/blog/ai-penalty/ 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 John Mueller Likes AI Warning
00:54 August Spam Update Fallout
01:21 Can Google Detect AI
01:31 EU AI Act Watermarking
02:48 What If Detection Is Cheap
03:18 Dan Petrovic Takeaways
05:07 Detection vs Quality Signals
07:41 Three Future Scenarios
09:23 How To Use AI Safely
11:43 Wrap
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/
#searchengineoptimization #seo #aiseo #digitalmarketing

E1154: Google's new goto redirects have a lot of SEOs worried that rank tracking is about to become less accurate, more expensive, or much harder to do.
David Quaid joins me to break down what is actually happening, what it means for tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, and why the answer may be for SEOs to start building more of their own tools.
Google's goto redirects add another step between the search result and the destination URL. That creates problems for companies that scrape Google at scale because they may now need to follow redirects instead of simply extracting destination URLs from the search results.
That matters because a huge amount of SEO software depends on collecting SERP data.
David and I discuss:
- What Google's goto redirects actually are
- Why Google may have introduced them
- How they affect rank trackers and SERP scraping
- Why exact ranking URLs may become harder to collect
- Whether tools can still reliably track ranking domains
- Why rank tracking data should not always be treated as exact
- How Google Search Console can provide a second source of ranking data
- Why SEOs may need to combine SERP data with Search Console
- Why David believes most SERP tools are still largely usable
- The problems with checking rankings only once per day
- Why Google's changes could increase data collection costs
- Whether Semrush and Ahrefs can adapt
- Why smaller SEO tools and open-source projects may benefit
- OpenSEO and the growing number of self-hosted SEO tools
- Why SEOs should consider building internal tools
- Using AI coding tools to work with Search Console data
- Why Search Console data may become more valuable
- How Bing Webmaster Tools could become more important
- Why SEO agencies should pay attention to their own data instead of depending entirely on third-party reports
- How ranking data relates to traffic, leads, and client reporting
- What happens when a rank tracker says you rank somewhere but a manual search shows something different
- Keyword cannibalization and how David uses Search Console to identify it
- Why David cares more about ranking domains than exact URLs in many rank-tracking reports
- Google's ongoing fight against scraping and automated search activity
- Whether these changes are aimed at SEO tools, SERP APIs, OpenAI, or all three
- Why Google may be making click-through manipulation harder
- Whether OpenAI is building its own search index
- The changing relationship between Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other search systems
- Why SEO is still worth doing
- Why the next generation of SEO tools may come from individual developers and small teams
David's main point is simple: SEOs should not panic.
Rank tracking is not disappearing.
Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, SERP data, internal reporting, and custom tools can increasingly be combined to create your own view of what is happening.
For SEOs who are willing to build, test, and work directly with their own data, these changes may create more opportunities than problems.
We also discuss the SEO Tool Dev community on Reddit, where developers and SEOs can share scripts, extensions, tools, experiments, and new approaches to SEO data.
⭐️ David Quaid on 𝕏 - https://x.com/DavidGQuaid 
⭐️ David Quaid on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidquaid/ 
⭐️ David Quaid on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@DavidQuaid 
⭐️ David Quaid's agency - https://primaryposition.com/ 
⭐️ SEO Tool Dev Subreddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO_tool_dev/ 
⭐️ OpenSEO 𝕏 post - https://x.com/ihteshamali/status/2093319473914921327 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Goto Redirects Panic
01:11 What Goto Redirects Are
02:09 Scraping War With SERP APIs
07:28 Rank Trackers Break Down
08:43 Future Tools Using GSC
11:51 Open Source SEO Tools
14:30 Short Term Survival Tips
18:09 Costs Rising For SEO Data
19:14 Consulting Shift And Expertise
23:27 Fixing SEO Tool Reporting
26:47 Tracking Domains Not URLs
29:12 Cannibalization Fixes
32:13 CTR Manipulation Crackdown
33:44 Google Versus AI Search
36:27 LLMs And Junk Content
39:41 SERP Tools Future Costs
42:58 Build Your Own SEO Tools
45:27 SEO Tool Dev Subreddit
46:50 Podcast Wrap Up
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #seo #technicalseo #digitalmarketing

E1152: Google Analytics is one of the most widely used analytics platforms on the web, but there is a growing category of traffic it was never really designed to help you understand: bots, AI crawlers, and AI agents.
I sit down with analytics consultant Jason Packer, author of Google Analytics Alternatives, to talk about what GA4 is measuring, what it can miss, and how the rise of AI is changing both analytics and SEO.
We get into AI companies crawling the web, the possibility of companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic developing their own web indexes, and what that could mean if AI platforms increasingly rely on their own infrastructure rather than traditional search indexes.
We also discuss a separate issue that matters to anyone using AI for SEO: detecting AI-generated content.
Jason explains current approaches to identifying AI-generated text and images, including watermarking systems such as SynthID, classifiers, and emerging standards around identifying AI-generated material. We also discuss whether Google can detect AI-generated content and why simply asking whether content was written by AI may be the wrong question.
The bigger question is whether the content is useful, accurate, distinctive, and reviewed by a human.
Topics covered:
- What traffic Google Analytics 4 may be missing
- Why GA4 intentionally filters much bot traffic
- Why AI crawlers and AI agents create a new analytics problem
- The difference between human visitors, traditional bots, AI crawlers, and AI agents
- Why identifying AI traffic from user agents is difficult
- What Cloudflare data can tell us about the growth of AI crawling
- Whether OpenAI and Anthropic could build their own web indexes
- How an AI-owned search index could change SEO
- Why ranking for an LLM may work differently from ranking in Google
- Whether early AI search systems could create new opportunities for SEOs
- Hidden GA4 features and reports that many users overlook
- How modeled users can affect what you see inside GA4
- Using device-based reporting identity to better understand your analytics data
- Creating custom GA4 insights and anomaly alerts
- Using Explore and User Explorer in GA4
- Where GA4 is genuinely powerful
- Why GA4 may not be the right default analytics platform for every website
- Google Analytics alternatives including PostHog, Amplitude, Piwik PRO, Plausible, Fathom, and others
- Whether it makes sense to build your own analytics platform with AI coding tools
- How AI-generated text and images can be detected
- Google SynthID and AI watermarking
- Why interoperability between AI detection systems matters
- Whether Google can identify AI-generated SEO content
- The risks of publishing AI content at scale
- Why human review still matters when using AI for SEO
- How AI can be used without sacrificing usefulness, accuracy, or brand voice
The conversation ultimately comes back to a problem SEOs are going to have to understand: the web is no longer being visited only by humans and traditional search-engine crawlers.
AI systems are increasingly crawling, retrieving, processing, and potentially indexing web content. At the same time, publishers are using those same systems to produce more content.
That creates two important questions for SEO:
How do you measure AI traffic that conventional analytics tools may filter or fail to identify?
And how should you use AI to create content when search engines and AI platforms are becoming increasingly capable of identifying how that content was produced?
⭐️ Jason Packer's website, Quantable - https://quantable.com 
⭐️ Jason Packer's book, Google Analytics Alternatives: A Comprehensive Guide - http://gaalternatives.guide 
⭐️ Jason Packer on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jhpacker/ 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Meet Jason Packer
01:25 GA4 Hidden Insights
02:11 Modeled Users Explained
06:52 Custom Insights Alerts
09:12 Explore Reports Tricks
12:27 Learning GA4 Fast
14:39 Ask Advisor Critique
17:21 GA4 Basics For Beginners
21:40 Attribution And UA Nostalgia
25:19 What Traffic GA4 Misses
28:48 AI Crawlers And Analytics
31:04 Cloudflare Radar Web Crawling
33:05 AI Indexes And SEO Future
38:52 Spam In New Indexes
40:35 GA4 Alternatives Framework
41:20 Best Product Analytics Tools
43:11 Simpler Web Analytics Picks
46:10 Vibe Coding Analytics Risks
48:38 What Analytics They Use
50:19 Detecting AI Text Watermarks
52:42 EU AI Act And Detection APIs
56:09 SynthID Limits And SlopGuard
01:02:40 AI SEO Best Practices
01:07:15 Human Writing With AI Assist
01:11:47 Podcast Wrap Up
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/  
#digitalmarketing #googleanalytics #searchengineoptimization #seo

E1151: Google has started routing search-result links through new google.com/goto redirects, masking the final destination URL for logged-out users.
That sounds like a small technical change. For rank trackers, SERP scrapers, SEO tools, and marketers who depend on Google search data, it creates a much bigger problem.
I'm joined by Jonathan Berthold from Moz to break down what Google changed, why rank tracking is being affected, how SEO platforms are responding, and what marketers should expect next.
We also get into the larger fight happening behind the scenes. Google has been making it harder to collect search results at scale, from the removal of the num=100 parameter to these new Goto redirects. One possible explanation discussed in the episode is that Google is making it more difficult and expensive for AI companies and other automated systems to collect its search data.
The problem is that SEO tools rely on some of the same underlying access.
We cover:
- What Google's new google.com/goto redirects actually do
- Why the destination URL is now hidden in Google search results
- Why this creates problems for rank tracking software
- How Moz is handling the change
- Why other SEO platforms have had to adjust their systems
- Whether simply following each redirect solves the problem
- How additional requests could increase the cost and complexity of collecting SERP data
- Why agencies and consultants may see temporary changes in ranking reports
- What SEOs should tell clients if their reporting starts looking different
- How this could affect competitive analysis and other workflows that rely on SERP data
- Why AI workflows that analyze Google results could also be affected
- How this compares with Google's removal of the num=100 search parameter
- Whether Google Search Console could see downstream effects
- Why Jonathan expects SEO tools to adapt rather than rank tracking disappearing
- The possibility that Google extends these redirects beyond logged-out searches
- What this means for the continuing competition between Google, OpenAI, and other AI companies
- Why AI companies have an incentive to develop their own indexes and alternative data sources
- Why rankings are ultimately a directional metric rather than the final measure of SEO success
- Why revenue, leads, and sales from organic search still matter more than individual ranking positions
Jonathan's main advice for SEOs is simple: be adaptable.
Google can change not only its ranking algorithms, but also the infrastructure that SEO tools use to collect and interpret search results. Rank trackers adapted after the num=100 change, and Jonathan expects the industry to find ways to deal with Goto redirects as well.
The immediate question isn't whether SEO is dead. It's how much these changes affect the reliability, complexity, and cost of measuring search performance.
And the longer-term question is bigger: as Google protects access to its search data and AI companies build their own sources of information, what does SEO measurement look like next?
⭐️ Jonathan Berthold on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanberthold/ 
⭐️ Jonathan Berthold on 𝕏: https://x.com/j_bertho 
⭐️ Moz (my affiliate link): https://edwardsturm.com/refer/moz/ 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Goto Redirect Panic
00:48 What Changed In SERPs
02:47 Why Google Did It
05:15 Costs And Workarounds
07:37 SEO Tool Fallout
10:10 Beyond Rank Tracking
12:08 Fix Timeline And Pricing
14:33 OpenAI Index And Yelp
16:31 Search Console Volatility
17:26 Adaptability Takeaways
19:33 Does SEO Still Work
21:26 Wrap Up And Thanks
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/  
#searchengineoptimization #seo #digitalmarketing #seoagency

E1150: James Dooley and David Quaid return to debate one of the biggest questions in SEO right now: is GEO a separate discipline, or is it just SEO under a new name?
James says he used to agree that GEO was simply SEO with a different label. Then his own team changed his mind. He now runs a separate GEO/AEO department because people who can rank websites #1 in Google can still struggle to get brands cited in ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode and other LLM-driven results.
David pushes back. His argument is that most of the work required for GEO still comes back to strong SEO: understanding query fan-out, creating the right pages, earning links, building authority, controlling more of the search results and getting third-party sites to corroborate what a brand says about itself.
The debate eventually lands on a more interesting point: James believes only about 1% of decent SEOs can actually do GEO well because there are additional layers beyond traditional website SEO.
In this episode:
- Why James created a separate GEO/AEO department after initially believing GEO was just SEO
- Why ranking #1 in Google does not automatically mean you will be cited by ChatGPT or appear in AI Overviews
- James's argument that GEO is closer to SEO plus online reputation management
- David's case that GEO tactics are still fundamentally SEO tactics applied across more surfaces
- Why third-party corroboration matters for AI visibility
- How Yelp, TripAdvisor, Clutch, DesignRush, G2, Capterra, Reddit and other sites can influence what AI systems see about a brand
- Why reviews, awards, case studies and brand reputation matter when a buyer asks AI to choose between two companies
- How query fan-out changes the keywords and pages SEOs need to think about
- Why James says GEO involves different competitors, tracking, KPIs and reporting
- How parasite SEO, supplementary websites and exact-match domains can be used to control more of the information around a brand
- The difference between tactics designed to move Google rankings and tactics designed specifically to increase AI citations
- The role of press releases, social distribution and third-party mentions in getting faster AI visibility
- James's fastest approach to AI visibility and what he considers more sustainable long-term work
- Why building a defined entity, reviews, awards, knowledge panels and consistent third-party references matters over time
- Why some GEO agencies may simply be weak SEO agencies using a new label
- How businesses should evaluate a GEO agency before spending serious money
- Why enterprise companies are moving larger parts of SEO, branding and traditional marketing budgets into GEO
- Whether SEOs should start selling GEO even if they believe the underlying work is still SEO
James and David disagree on where SEO ends and GEO begins, but they agree on one important point: a GEO provider who cannot understand and execute SEO is unlikely to be very good at GEO.
If you work in SEO, run an agency, manage a brand, or are trying to understand how ChatGPT and AI search are changing search visibility, this episode lays out both sides of the argument with specific examples and tactics.
⭐️ James Dooley's website - https://jamesdooley.com/ 
⭐️ James Dooley on 𝕏 - https://x.com/james_dooley 
⭐️ James Dooley on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameszdooley/ 
⭐️ James Dooley on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jameszdooley/ 
⭐️ James Dooley on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/james.dooley1/ 
⭐️ James Dooley on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@JamesDooley 
⭐️ David "The King" Quaid on 𝕏 - https://x.com/DavidGQuaid 
⭐️ David "The King" Quaid on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidquaid/ 
⭐️ David "The King" Quaid on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@DavidQuaid 
⭐️ David "The King" Quaid's agency - https://primaryposition.com/ 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 GEO vs SEO Debate Setup
00:45 Why AI Visibility Differs
02:25 GEO as SEO Plus ORM
05:17 Market Confusion and SEO Is Dead Claims
07:15 Budgets Branding and Off Page Proof
11:55 Can You Do GEO Without SEO
13:27 Yelp Reviews and Local Listings
22:05 Tools KPIs and Claim Frame Prove
26:15 SERP APIs and Query Fan Out Shifts
28:20 Creativity Outranking Listicles
32:54 Black Hat SEO vs LLM Poisoning
39:04 GEO Hype Emotional Marketing
43:17 Big Budgets and Boardroom Criteria
47:37 AEO Off Page Signals
49:12 Vetting GEO Agencies
51:18 Independent Advisor Panels
53:19 Budgets Shift To GEO
55:28 Fast AI Visibility Plays
59:36 Pop Under Traffic Boosts
01:00:50 Sustainable Entity Building
01:01:50 Query Fanout Hacks
01:07:14 Experimentation Mindset
01:10:36 King Of SEO Case Study
01:14:18 Temporal Semantics Explained
01:21:46 Common Crawl Training Test
01:30:58 Final AI Visibility Takeaways
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #generativeengineoptimization #answerengineoptimization #seo