The Edward Show

E1156: Google Preferred Sources was originally introduced around news publishers, and that is still causing a lot of SEOs to dismiss it. That is a mistake.
I go directly through Google's own documentation and explain why Preferred Sources now appears relevant far beyond traditional news sites.
Google says any website that publishes fresh content is eligible. The feature is available globally in Top Stories and can also influence what users see in AI Mode and AI Overviews. Google Discover documentation also specifically references creator and source preferences.
I also tested SaaS websites, local businesses, and ecommerce sites in Google's Preferred Sources tool. They were eligible.
In this:
- Why people keep saying Preferred Sources is only for news publishers
- What Google's current documentation actually says
- Why SaaS, ecommerce, local, and other commercial websites can be eligible
- How Google does not require a news sitemap, RSS feed, or Google News Publisher Center setup
- Google's statement that any website publishing fresh content is eligible
- Why Google says people are twice as likely to click through to a preferred source
- The significance of more than 345,000 unique sources already being selected
- How Preferred Sources can affect AI Overviews, AI Mode, Top Stories, and Google Discover
- Why I think Preferred Sources is an important behavioral signal
- How this could matter even if Preferred Sources itself is not a direct ranking factor
- Why I compare selecting a preferred source to subscribing to a YouTube channel
- How increased visibility and clicks could create downstream SEO effects
- How to add a Preferred Sources button to your website in five minutes
- Where I placed Preferred Sources buttons on my own site
- How I customized the buttons to match my website
- Other placements you can test, including your header, footer, inside articles, and pop-ups
- How to create a reusable global widget so you can place the button throughout your site
The biggest point is simple: do not dismiss Preferred Sources because its original rollout focused on news.
The current implementation is broader than that.
And because adding it to a website is so easy, the potential upside makes it worth testing now rather than waiting until everyone agrees it matters.
⭐️ My article - https://edwardsturm.com/articles/google-preferred-sources-seo-ai-visibility/ 
⭐️ Google Preferred Sources - test your site - https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=edwardsturm.com 
⭐️ Google Developers: Help your readers find your site through preferred sources in Google Search - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/preferred-sources 
⭐️ Google Developers: Discover Core Update - https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/02/discover-core-update 
⭐️ Google Blog: Original High-Quality Content in Search - https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/original-high-quality-content-search/ 
⭐️ Search Engine Journal: Google's Preferred Sources Is Now A Global SEO Signal - https://www.searchenginejournal.com/googles-preferred-sources-feature-is-now-a-global-seo-signal/573591/ 
⭐️ Google Developers: Preferred Sources Documentation - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/preferred-sources 
⭐️ Preferred Sources button example on a blog post - https://edwardsturm.com/articles/parasite-seo-how-to-succeed-on-any-platform/#endingpreferredsource 
💎 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 Preferred Sources Revisited
00:43 What Preferred Sources Does
01:44 Viral Clip And Backlash
02:40 Docs Prove Eligibility
03:30 Not Just News Sites
05:42 Potential Ranking Signal
06:54 Add The Button Fast
07:29 Design And Placement Ideas
09:19 Worth Doing Anyway
09:59 Wrap Up
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #seo #contentmarketing #digitalmarketing

E1155: A roofer in South Florida donated a free roof through Habitat for Humanity.
The charity wrote about it and linked to his business.
Then a local news station picked up the story, his Facebook post was shared more than 200 times, and one act of goodwill produced the kind of links and attention that are extremely difficult to buy.
That is goodwill link building.
I break down how businesses can do genuinely useful things for people, nonprofits, organizations, and other companies, then turn that work into backlinks, partnerships, mentions, and press.
The important part most businesses miss is simple: ask for the link.
Businesses already sponsor youth sports teams, donate products, support nonprofits, volunteer their services, and contribute to community projects. But because they are not thinking about SEO, they often get a logo or plain-text mention and never ask for a backlink.
I cover real examples and practical ways to use this strategy across SaaS, e-commerce, and local services.
In this episode:
- How a donated roof turned into a nonprofit backlink, local press, and 200+ social shares
- Why sponsorships and donations frequently create easy backlink opportunities
- The two-minute follow-up email most businesses never send
- How Lily Ray generated a large number of links through a pro bono marketing project during COVID
- How SaaS companies can give free accounts to nonprofits and earn relevant partner links
- How to get links from companies whose products you already use
- Why publicly saying something positive about another company can lead to a case study or customer-story backlink
- How e-commerce brands can donate products to relevant causes
- Why recurring donations can produce links from multiple pages over time
- How returned or lightly damaged inventory can become a link-building asset instead of waste
- How e-commerce businesses can donate their expertise, not just their products
- How local service businesses can provide free work to nonprofits or newly opened businesses
- How disaster preparation and disaster response can create legitimate local press opportunities
- Why third-party tips to journalists often work better than pitching your own company
- How one goodwill project can produce backlinks, social shares, partnerships, and press at the same time
The bigger idea is that backlinks work best when they look like real marketing.
Instead of inventing artificial reasons for websites to link to you, do something that actually gives another organization a reason to mention you.
Support something meaningful. Give away something useful. Solve a problem. Share somebody else's business. Donate your expertise.
Then ask for the backlink.
⭐️ Bodhi- Local SEO's roofer post and comments - https://x.com/irentdumpsters/status/2092371437365461368 
⭐️ Lily Ray's post - https://x.com/lilyraynyc/status/2092672103283613939 
💎 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 Goodwill Link Building Intro
00:34 Habitat Roof Story
01:44 Ask For The Link
03:16 SaaS Goodwill Ideas
05:11 Ecommerce Donation Plays
07:21 Local Services Givebacks
07:58 Turn Good Deeds Into Press
10:08 Student Results Example
11:20 Daily Podcast Wrap Up
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #seo #linkbuilding #backlinks

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