The Edward Show

E1144: Google's August 2026 spam update has officially finished rolling out, and we're seeing clear patterns in who got hit, who recovered, and who is winning.
The update launched August 18 and completed just three days later on August 21. But the volatility started well before Google officially announced it. Throughout August, sites were reporting major ranking swings, sudden traffic losses, and unexpected recoveries.
One of the biggest patterns: scaled content sites are getting crushed.
I break down what happened during the August spam update using real sites, Google Search Console screenshots, Reddit posts, Ahrefs & Semrush data, and examples being shared throughout the SEO community.
Topics covered:
- How the August spam update started affecting sites before its official August 18 launch
- Sites publishing 500 to 1,000 pages per day suddenly losing rankings and traffic
- The difference between legitimate programmatic SEO and scaled content abuse
- Google's policy against scraping, stitching, and combining content without adding meaningful value
- A site getting roughly 2,200 organic users per day before its traffic started collapsing
- Guru99 falling from an estimated 14 million monthly organic clicks in 2021 to roughly 50,000 today
- The pattern of sites rapidly increasing their number of pages while their organic traffic falls
- Why "Mount AI" happens when sites use AI to rapidly scale low-value content
- Mike King's explanation for why Google may not need to detect AI-generated content directly
- How user behavior and site-quality signals can eventually expose bad scaled content
- Why generative AI at scale is not inherently spam if the pages actually provide value
- An expired-domain case that some SEOs initially blamed on the spam update
- Why redirects from acquired or expired domains aren't automatically expired domain abuse
- The importance of maintaining search intent when migrating or redirecting pages
- SaaS sites that appear to be winning during the August volatility
- Why short bottom-of-funnel landing pages are continuing to work
- Sites previously hit by Google spam systems suddenly reporting recoveries
- Whether this spam update could be followed by another Google core update
I revisit Mike King's explanation of Mount AI. His argument is that Google doesn't need to reliably identify whether content was written by AI. Google can initially rank a large new set of pages, collect signals about how searchers respond, and then adjust the site's visibility based on those signals.
Publishing 100,000 pages isn't automatically the problem. Publishing 100,000 pages that don't give searchers unique value is.
There is a legitimate way to do programmatic SEO at scale. The underlying data, usefulness of the pages, search intent, UX, and reason for those pages to exist all matter.
Meanwhile, I'm seeing encouraging movement from SaaS sites. Our own vibe-coded SaaS has been growing throughout August without aggressively scaling content, and I share another newer SaaS using short bottom-of-funnel landing pages that has also been gaining organic clicks.
The August spam update is finished. Now we get to see whether the volatility settles down or Google has something else coming next.
⭐️ SE Roundtable: Google August 2026 Spam Update - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-august-2026-spam-update-done-41906.html 
⭐️ Reddit: Who got hit - https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO_Marketing_Offers/comments/1vsln4q/comment/p4mlfam/ 
⭐️ David Quaid - https://x.com/DavidGQuaid/status/2090046206290386970?s=20 
⭐️ Expired Domain Comment - https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1vrv11e/breaking_google_august_2026_spam_update_is/ 
⭐️ Ep 1141 - Can You Launch 100,000 Pages and Survive Google? - https://youtu.be/wNtiygMsRfg 
⭐️ Donmend0 on 𝕏 (site recovery) - https://x.com/donmend0/status/2090438229635879068 
⭐️ Ganesh_S_007 on 𝕏 (site recovery) - https://x.com/Ganesh_S_007/status/2090502537741029874 
⭐️ Ep 1127 - Google's Biggest SEO Leak Changed Everything… But Almost Nobody Adapted - https://youtu.be/fIs1ZSmEJGU 
⭐️ James Dooley - https://youtu.be/EOkrLkKNDrY 
💎 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 Spam Update Recap
01:03 Scaled Content Fallout
03:32 Spam Policy Breakdown
04:11 Programmatic SEO Wipeouts
05:31 Guru99 Case Study
08:15 Mount AI Explained
10:32 Expired Domain Confusion
12:49 SaaS Sites Winning
13:54 Recoveries and Core Rumors
15:13 Durable SEO
17:06 Episode Wrap Up
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #seo #programmaticseo #seopodcast

E1143: He Did 2,000 Podcasts in a Year Just for SEO Rankings
James Dooley has published 2,000 unique podcast episodes this year and is on track to hit 3,000 by the end of the year.
But he's not doing it to build a traditional podcast audience.
He's doing it for SEO.
James breaks down the system he uses to turn short, keyword-focused podcast episodes into Google rankings, video rankings, backlinks, leads, and mentions across AI platforms.
His episodes are typically only 5-15 minutes long. Instead of making broad, entertainment-focused shows, he treats each podcast episode like an SEO landing page: one search query, one tightly focused topic, and questions built around the attributes of that topic.
We get into exactly how this works, including how James chooses topics, structures episodes, distributes them, and uses podcast syndication as part of a larger SEO strategy.
We also discuss why he deliberately targets bottom-of-funnel searches such as "best lead generation company for plumbers," how he approaches competitor keywords, and why video has become such an important part of his search strategy.
James explains how his team:
- Creates podcast episodes around individual search queries
- Keeps most SEO-focused episodes between 5 and 15 minutes
- Structures podcast conversations similarly to SEO pages
- Targets bottom-of-funnel keywords designed to generate inquiries
- Uploads the video to YouTube before distributing the podcast
- Uses Transistor to syndicate episodes across podcast platforms
- Identifies podcast platforms that provide dofollow and nofollow links
- Links podcast descriptions back to highly relevant pages
- Works to get syndicated podcast URLs crawled by Google
- Uses transcripts to reinforce entities and relationships between topics
- Publishes supporting press releases and guest posts
- Distributes episodes through social platforms
- Uses IMDb as part of his entity and knowledge-panel strategy
- Tests publishing similar videos across multiple YouTube channels
- Uses slightly different titles and thumbnails when testing distribution
- Tries to trigger Google video carousels for targeted searches
- Targets competitor names, alternatives, and comparison searches with video
- Uses podcast content to support Google rankings and AI visibility
We also talk about an important distinction between ranking a video and getting a video recommended by YouTube.
James isn't necessarily optimizing these podcasts to become viral YouTube videos. His goal is often much simpler: when someone searches a commercially valuable query, he wants his video to appear.
That changes how he thinks about everything from episode length to entertainment value.
James also explains why podcast syndication matters beyond YouTube. While YouTube transcripts may primarily be accessible within Google's ecosystem, publishing transcripts and related content elsewhere gives search engines and large language models additional text-based sources connecting people, companies, products, and topics.
We get into:
- Podcast SEO vs. traditional YouTube growth
- Google video rankings
- AI search and LLM visibility
- Podcast backlinks
- Entity SEO
- Knowledge panels and KGMIDs
- Semantic triples
- Press release syndication
- Google News and Google Discover
- AI-generated podcast videos
- HeyGen, ElevenLabs, and Higgsfield
- Podcast sponsorships and monetization
- Why James is publishing 3,000 episodes this year
- How he built a team to handle editing, thumbnails, uploads, and distribution
James also shares why he's doing such an extreme amount of content in the first place.
After writing eight books in a year, he set himself the goal of producing 3,000 podcast episodes so that when he asks the business owners he works with to publish one episode per week, he can show that he practices what he preaches.
This is a detailed look at what happens when podcasting is treated not only as content, but as an SEO distribution system.
⭐️ 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 
💎 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 2000 Podcasts Results
01:41 Keyword First Podcast Model
03:27 Bottom of Funnel Queries
05:58 Syndication Stack Setup
08:21 IMDb Entity Boosting
10:11 Backlink Lift Explained
12:19 Episode Content Blueprint
15:13 Titles Descriptions Workflow
18:06 Transcript Keyword Seeding
20:38 AI Generated Episodes
24:09 Multi Channel Upload Tests
29:27 Video Carousel Domination
32:17 LLM Transcript Visibility
33:15 Transcripts Press Layers
34:22 Knowledge Panels Per Episode
36:10 Entity Indexing Proof
37:45 Press Release Providers
38:54 Old Google News Hacks
40:54 Podcast Transcript SEO
43:47 Scaling 3000 Episodes
47:34 Guesting and Podmatch
51:01 Monetizing With Sponsors
01:02:14 Avoiding Top Funnel Waste
01:04:39 Wrap Up and Next Debate
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #seo #backlinks #seopodcast

E1142: Reddit citations in ChatGPT just totally collapsed.
Promptwatch data shows Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations dropping dramatically in August, falling to below 0.5% after previously sitting around 3-4%.
This is the third major Reddit citation drop we've seen, and it raises a bigger question for SEOs: what happens when an AI search strategy built around one platform can disappear overnight?
Klaas Foppen, co-founder of Promptwatch, joins me to break down what changed, what may have caused it, and what SEOs should do next.
We cover:
- Why Reddit citations suddenly fell in ChatGPT
- The difference between an AI citation, source, mention, and visibility
- Why Reddit can still be accessed by ChatGPT even though it is being cited far less
- The August 8 query fan-out change that appears to have reduced Reddit citations
- The much larger August 14 drop that Klaas believes may have involved a more deliberate adjustment
- Why nobody outside OpenAI knows whether licensing negotiations, user feedback, search quality, or another factor caused the change
- How this same dramatic Reddit decline is not showing up across Google AI Overviews and AI Mode
- Why SEOs should not abandon Reddit just because ChatGPT is citing it less
- The danger of building an entire AI search strategy around Reddit, parasite SEO, or any single third-party platform
- Why your own website remains the part of your SEO and AI-search presence that you control
- How technical SEO, complete product information, feature pages, comparison pages, landing pages, and fresh content can affect AI visibility
- Why listicles are still frequently used for commercial-intent AI queries
- Why product pages and landing pages may become more important as AI systems increasingly search official websites directly
- Why old-school evergreen informational content may be less valuable when an LLM already knows the answer without searching the web
- How OpenAI, Bing, Meta, Exa, and other companies developing or using different search indexes could reshape SEO
- Why new AI search indexes could create opportunities for SEOs before their spam detection becomes as sophisticated as Google's
- Whether PDFs, research papers, and sites like arXiv could become important sources for AI systems and training data
- Why AI search is much less stable than traditional SEO and why tactics that work today can change very quickly
The biggest takeaway is not that Reddit is dead.
It's that "post on Reddit and get cited by ChatGPT" was never a durable AI search strategy.
Reddit can still be a valuable marketing channel. But if your visibility depends entirely on Reddit, another social platform, or one AI search tactic, a single change can wipe out much of that advantage.
Build the website. Get the technical fundamentals right. Publish the information customers and AI systems need. Earn mentions across multiple sources. And treat AI search as a moving system that needs to be watched rather than a fixed formula.
⭐️ Klaas Foppen on 𝕏 - https://x.com/forgebitz 
⭐️ Klaas Foppen on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/klaas-foppen/ 
⭐️ Promptwatch - https://promptwatch.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 Reddit Citations Vanish
00:38 Why The Drop Happened
02:11 Citations Vs Mentions
05:04 Deals And Partnerships
09:25 Other LLMs And User Backlash
11:10 Will Reddit Return
12:39 Diversify Your Marketing
14:02 Future Search Index Shakeup
19:53 What Content Works Now
23:09 Training Data And PDFs
26:10 Query Fanout Direction
27:23 On-Site SEO Foundations
29:53 Promptwatch New Automation
31:59 Wrap Up And Thanks
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#generativeengineoptimization #answerengineoptimization #searchengineoptimization #seo

E1141: Can you launch a brand-new website with 100,000 pages and survive Google?
That's the question at the center of today's episode with David G. Quaid.
A listener sent me a problem he and his friends keep running into: they launch programmatic SEO sites with 10,000 - 100,000 URLs, organic traffic shoots up, and then the sites collapse back to zero.
So David and I dug into whether large-scale programmatic SEO is still possible in 2026, where Google may draw the line between a legitimate database and scaled content abuse, and what separates sites that survive from sites that get wiped out.
We cover:
- Whether launching 10,000 or 100,000 URLs at once is automatically dangerous
- Why David might launch a new marketplace or database slowly
- The difference between legitimate programmatic SEO and scaled content built primarily to capture search traffic
- Why empty location, category, job, or marketplace pages can become doorway-page problems
- Why proprietary data can completely change the equation
- Whether a site with genuinely useful data could launch at massive scale from day one
- Why backlinks, press coverage, branded searches, and other signs of a real business may matter
- Why user satisfaction could be one of the biggest differences between programmatic sites that survive and sites that collapse
- Click-through rate, pogo-sticking, return searches, and other user signals we think Google may be evaluating
- Why publishing 100 pages, checking performance, and then scaling may be safer than immediately publishing 100,000
- How to use Google Search Console to identify pages and queries that may be producing poor user signals
- Why misleading page titles can create problems even when they initially generate more traffic
- David's prediction for what Google's August spam update could target
- Why some publishers may be blaming AI Overviews for traffic losses that are actually ranking losses
- How to separate traffic lost to AI Overviews from traffic lost because Google moved your pages down
- Why HubSpot's organic decline may have more to do with rankings and changing user behavior than AI simply taking its clicks
- Whether Google Search has actually gotten better or worse over the last few years
- How far a site can expand into adjacent topics before weakening its existing topical relevance
The main question throughout the episode is simple:
If you have 100,000 pages that genuinely deserve to exist, can you make all of them available immediately without Google assuming you built the site to manipulate search?
David thinks there are conditions where it can work. The harder question is what signals Google needs to see before it trusts you enough to let it work.
⭐️ 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/ 
💎 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 Programmatic SEO Today
00:17 Listener Database Launch Dilemma
01:12 Spam Updates and Scale Risks
03:18 Slow Rollout Strategy
04:25 Empty Pages and Manipulation
07:51 What Scaled Abuse Means
08:34 Proprietary Data Launch Debate
09:39 Grokipedia as Edge Case
12:31 Authority and Brand Signals
14:46 pSEO Example Book Calculator
20:34 Doorway Pages and Permutations
28:09 Phased Scaling and Testing
31:27 When Big Brands Can Launch Huge
32:46 pSEO Shortcut Mentality
33:17 When Programmatic SEO Fails
33:40 Localization and Scalable Pages
34:39 Finding Real Value Add
35:35 Brand Search Entity Mixups
39:28 Crawlers and Cloudflare Blocks
40:20 August Spam Update Predictions
42:15 Recovering From Traffic Drops
45:01 Free vs Freemium Titles
46:04 GSC Iteration Playbook
48:56 Are Google Results Better
50:23 HubSpot and User Signals
55:27 Expanding Into Adjacent Niches
01:00:49 Can 100k URLs Work
01:02:27 Wrap Up and Next Episode
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #seo #programmaticseo #seopodcast

E1140: Claude is now watermarking everything it writes, and the SEO community is worried about what this means for AI content and Google rankings.
But there's an important detail: Google likely doesn't have the key needed to verify Claude's watermark.
I break down what Anthropic's new watermarking system does, why it's being implemented, what it can and can't prove, and whether any of this should change how SEOs use AI-generated content.
Anthropic is adding machine-readable marks to Claude's output as part of its compliance with the EU AI Act. The watermark can remain in text that has been copied and pasted, and Claude-generated files can include provenance metadata. The system is being rolled out across Claude, including its API and third-party platforms.
But a watermark doesn't necessarily mean Claude wrote something from scratch. If you give Claude your own writing and ask it to fix grammar, translate it, summarize it, or otherwise process it, the resulting text may still contain the mark. And if no watermark is detected, that doesn't prove Claude wasn't involved.
In this episode:
- Why Anthropic is watermarking Claude's output
- How AI text watermarking works
- Why the EU AI Act matters here
- Why switching from Claude to another major AI model won't solve anything
- What Claude's watermark can and cannot tell you
- Why short passages and heavily edited text are harder to verify
- Why Anthropic's secret detection key matters
- Why Google currently can't validate Claude's watermark
- Whether Google could use AI watermarking as an SEO ranking signal
- What Ahrefs' research says about AI-generated pages ranking in Google
- Why AI content and bad content shouldn't be treated as the same thing
- Where AI watermarking could matter for agencies, clients, and contracts
- The potential EU disclosure requirements for publishers
- Why human review and editorial responsibility matter
- My take on whether this changes anything for SEO
- Why generic AI content could still create problems even without an AI-content penalty
- Why trust, original data, strong opinions, fact-checking, and editorial review matter more than whether AI touched the content
- An example of AI-generated content that I genuinely enjoyed
- How we're using AI-assisted SEO content on a new SaaS while targeting bottom-of-funnel keywords
I also discuss Ahrefs' data on AI content in Google. Their research found AI-generated and heavily AI-assisted pages ranking throughout the search results, including at the top. The bigger issue appears to be something SEO has dealt with long before generative AI existed: bad content.
My view is simple: if the output is enjoyable, novel, useful, accurate, and properly reviewed, the fact that AI was involved doesn't automatically make it bad content.
The bigger long-term question is what happens to brands that publish large amounts of generic AI content without developing a recognizable voice, adding original information, taking meaningful positions, or earning trust with their audience.
AI can help make great content. It can also make a lot of mediocre content very quickly. The difference is what the person using it actually puts into the process.
⭐️ Ahrefs: Claude Now Watermarks Everything It Writes - https://ahrefs.com/blog/claude-now-watermarks-everything-it-writes/ 
⭐️ My post on 𝕏 - https://x.com/edwardeachday/status/2089307227064500665 
⭐️ Ep 1110 - Google's Next SEO Apocalypse: The Scaled AI Content Crackdown Is Coming - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w66ME9-IRQ 
⭐️ Ep 1124 - YouTube's AI Detector Is Punishing Real Creators - Is Google Search Next? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33QKtsBy9As 
⭐️ Super Mario Bros 3 Jazz Lo-fi Remix - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNjuiOd1c1I 
💎 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 Claude Watermark Panic
00:31 What Watermarking Means
01:58 EU AI Act Compliance
03:08 How Text Watermarks Work
03:58 Limits and Detection Keys
04:25 Google Rankings Impact
06:07 SEO Community Reactions
07:22 My Skeptical Take
08:49 Real Risk Reputation
11:23 AI LoFi Success Story
13:24 Using AI for SEO
14:54 Wrap Up and Thanks
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #seo #digitalmarketing #seopodcast