Aleyda Solis 🕊️

Update: I shared earlier in the week that something was off about the data in GSC (beyond scrapers) - Google has now confirmed this. An update has now been added to the data anomalies page related to Search Console, suggesting that this has been an issue from May 13th 2025 onward. That goes back almost a year, with the latest obvious increase (primarily in impressions) being something that will likely be addressed over the next few weeks. There are two parts of this notice that are important for us to highlight as SEOs: 1. This has been an issue for almost a year With this in mind, I would expect a drastic drop in impressions to occur within the performance report in the near future. So when that happens, don't panic with the knowledge that it is approaching. 2. The notice is only for impressions (which goes against what I reported on) An example that was included in my post from earlier in the week explained that several sites in the US had received merchant listing CLICKS for the query "product", which makes zero sense. There are also no merchant listing-related results that show for this query. In any case, you're now aware of some upcoming changes to your GSC impressions data in the near future, which I would expect to also have some influence over a smaller number of clicks if Google is able to address the root cause of the data anomalies.

@jamescrawford Thanks for the heads up! Will definitely check out :)

@aleyda You should bring Finchling to the AMEC Summit in Dublin and look at all the latest thinking in this space for intel and contacts @aleyda

🏆 Best April's Fools PR Campaign? The KitKat Heist Tracker 👇 Spotted by Finchling via its PR campaigns tracker functionality: "KitKat published an online tracker where consumers can enter the 8‑digit batch code on a pack to check whether it was part of a recent 12‑ton theft of over 400,000 bars; promoted via its social account, the tool was framed as a playful, news‑hooked way to join the conversation around the heist while Nestlé reassures there’s no supply risk. This is a smart, culturally reactive stunt: it turns a viral news moment into an accessible consumer interaction, inviting social shares and coverage without selling a product. Journalists and audiences get a neat visual hook and a simple, quirky action to try." PS: Did you know that you can easily track your competitors PR campaigns via Finchling and avoid being chronically online monitoring them? Give it a go finchling(.)com

Christina Koch was a firefighter at the South Pole at -111°F before she ever applied to be an astronaut. That was maybe the fourth most interesting line on her resume. She grew up in North Carolina, got three degrees from NC State, and her first real job was building deep-space instruments at NASA. Then she left for Antarctica. Spent three and a half years bouncing between the Arctic and Antarctic as a research scientist, including a full winter at the South Pole base. That means going months without sunlight or fresh food, with a crew of about 50 people and no way out until flights resume. While she was down there, she also joined the glacier search-and-rescue team. After coming back, she went to Johns Hopkins and built instruments for two NASA missions (one of them is still orbiting Jupiter right now). She figured out how to start a tiny vacuum pump that NASA designed for a future Mars rover. Johns Hopkins nominated it for their Invention of the Year in 2009. Then she went back to the field. More time in Antarctica and a stretch up in Greenland. A government research station in northern Alaska, near the top of the world. Then she ran another one in American Samoa, near the equator. In 2013, NASA selected her from 6,300 applicants. Eight people got in. Her first space mission was supposed to be a normal rotation on the International Space Station, but NASA extended it. She ended up staying 328 straight days and orbiting Earth 5,248 times, covering about 139 million miles (roughly 291 round trips to the Moon). Up there, she ran over 210 experiments, including tests of cancer drugs in zero gravity and 3D printers that can build structures close to human tissue. Six spacewalks, 42 hours floating outside the station. She learned Russian for the training. She flies supersonic jets. Right now, Koch is on Artemis II, heading for a flyby behind the far side of the Moon. The crew launched on April 1 and is on track to travel about 252,000 miles from Earth, which would break the all-time human distance record of 248,655 miles set by Apollo 13 in 1970. That record has stood for 56 years, and it was set during a disaster that nearly killed the crew. Fred Haise, one of the Apollo 13 astronauts, is 92 now. He told Koch: "I heard you're going to break our record." Nobody had left Earth's neighborhood since December 1972. Koch and her three crewmates are the first in 53 years, and they are coming home at about 25,000 mph. That is faster than any crewed spacecraft has ever come back through the atmosphere.

Almost finishing the last details of the next #SEOFOMO meetup 🙌 can you guess where in the world is it going to be? 🌍 PS: If I’ve actually told you, please don’t say it 🤫🙏

This photo was taken by the crew of Apollo 17 19,473 days ago. If everything goes well, we should have a new one in 6 days.

Great promo for MS Outlook 🫠 NOT

Did you know you can now connect your GA data directly to LLMs like Gemini? ✨📊 By setting up the new Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, you move from manual reporting to strategic, AI-powered analysis. ▶️ Hit play to see the complete setup process → goo.gle/47CsGrA

@lilyraynyc Yayyy Lily! Super excited for you 👏😎⭐️ long due! Go go go 💪

Big announcement! After 16 years in SEO, today I'm launching something I've been building toward for a long time. 🥳 Introducing Algorythmic: my new SEO and AI search consultancy. For the past decade+, I've led award-winning SEO teams at agencies. I've spoken at ~100 conferences. I've spent thousands of hours analyzing Google algorithm updates, studying E-E-A-T, and more recently, figuring out how brands can show up well in AI-driven search. Now I'm channeling all of that into something of my own. Through Algorythmic, I'll be selectively working with brands 1:1 on SEO consulting, AI search optimization (AEO/GEO), E-E-A-T strategy, content quality audits, Google Discover, algorithm update recovery, hourly training, and more. I'm also excited to announce that as part of this launch, I will be continuing my role as VP of SEO & AI Search at Amsive, where I still oversee an incredible team of 30+ SEO experts (who won "Best Enterprise SEO Team" in 2025, according to the Search Engine Land awards!). Algorythmic will allow me to take on solo projects that are a strong personal fit for my skills and experience. Check out the comments for the link to my new site. BTW, if you're curious about the name Algorythmic: it's a mashup of "algorithm" and "rhythm." If you know me, you know those are the two things that have defined my entire life (especially 'rhythm'). The full origin story (involving a fictional SEO-themed deli my Amsive team created in 2019) is on the blog - link also in comments. I'm being very intentional about the work I take on through Algorythmic. If you think we'd be a good fit, I'd love to hear from you. Check out the new site and get in touch!

✅ The AI Search Winning Brands Assessment Checklist: I've created an easy to use checklist (available to copy and use for free) to assess the main characteristics of AI winning brands based on the infographic I shared yesterday! For each characteristic, it provides: * Validation Items * Why This Matters * How to Verify * Scoring level As an outcome you obtain an AI Search Readiness scoring via a Summary Dashboard : 🟢 80–100%: Strong AI search readiness: Focus on maintaining and refining. 🟡 50–79%: Moderate readiness: Prioritize weaker characteristics. 🔴 Below 50%: Significant gaps: Start with Accessible, Useful, and Recognizable. Access the checklist, along with further explanations of each characteristic to facilitate your AI search audits 👇 aleydasolis.com/en/ai-search/a…

Gemini's Brand Authority Map authority.dejan.ai These 2,883,072 brands live rent-free in Gemini's parametric memory, ranked by frequency and personalised pagerank. Basic interface for now with plans to develop it further. For brands not known to Gemini we show common crawl as fallback stats.

🚀 Remember how in SEO we say there's only so much we can do if the product is broken? AI search shifts this dynamic further: there's only so much optimization can do if the brand and product experience are weak. The core interaction model in traditional search is still largely a ranked list of sources, where users compare options and make decisions for themselves. AI platforms also compare, synthesize, and sometimes recommend. In traditional SEO, brand and product quality are strong multipliers. In AI search, they are increasingly closer to prerequisites, especially for prompts where the system is helping users evaluate options. You can improve technical accessibility, make content easier to extract, and build topical authority. But if the broader signals around your brand point to weak trust, poor satisfaction, or unclear differentiation, that can limit how often you're surfaced and how confidently you're described. There are still technical and content levers that matter. But when AI systems act more like recommenders than indexes, strong brand and product signals become much harder to compensate for. Welcome to the branding era of search.

Help us find them. Use the Stolen KitKat Tracker. Link in bio.

🤖 The 10 Key Characteristics of (Long-Term) AI Search Winning Brands 👇 What makes a brand consistently show up and get recommended across AI search platforms? After analyzing the patterns, these are the 10 characteristics that AI search winning brands share: 1. Accessible AI systems can only cite what they can reach. If your content can't be crawled, retrieved, and parsed by AI platforms, nothing else matters. 2. Useful AI systems tend to surface content that demonstrates clear utility beyond keyword relevance. If your content doesn't add genuine value, it is less likely to be surfaced. 3. Recognizable The stronger and more consistently reinforced your entity is across the web, the more likely AI systems are to identify and represent your brand accurately. 4. Extractable Your content needs to be organized in ways that machines can reuse, since many AI systems retrieve and process information in chunks. If your key insights are buried, they're unlikely to be surfaced. 5. Consistent AI systems build confidence through repeated and aligned signals across sources. The same positioning, terminology, and brand facts need to appear across all your digital touchpoints: your site, third-party profiles, directories, social platforms, and earned media. 6. Corroborated Independent sources need to validate your expertise and claims. Repeated references across credible sources strengthen the likelihood of inclusion. 7. Credible Visibility in AI search is supported by real expertise, evidence, and trust signals, not just claims. Brands with consistently negative sentiment or weak trust signals may be less likely to be recommended. 8. Differentiated If your positioning is indistinguishable from competitors, AI systems have fewer signals to select and represent your brand as a distinct recommendation. 9. Fresh Important content needs to remain current and useful. Freshness can play a role in AI citation selection, particularly for time-sensitive or evolving topics, as many systems incorporate retrieval mechanisms that consider recency. 10. Transactable For ecommerce brands specifically, product data needs to support AI-driven discovery, comparison, and, where supported, purchase flows. Read more: aleydasolis.com/en/ai-search/a…

📣 This Week's PR Campaigns & Opportunities [March 31st, 2026] from #TrendingCampaigns 👇 🔥 Top PR Campaigns of the Week This Week’s Standout PR Campaigns 1. Longest Cheesesteak Record at PHL by MarketPlace PHL It's a simple idea built around a recognisable icon. Easy to picture, easy to share. The Guinness record and the giveaway add a human angle that makes it worth covering. 2. Solo Travel Index by Quotezone Original research packaged as a ranking is an easy-to-pickup journalist hook that generates headlines and social shares; it positions the insurer as travel-aware without overtly selling insurance. Simple, media-friendly data stunts like this reliably attract mainstream travel coverage. 3. Remitly 'World's Most Polite Countries' Survey This is an interesting, classic data-led PR story. Simple, shareable, and tied to culture. Rankings like this are easy for journalists to run and tend to get picked up widely. 📣 Top PR Opportunities News Hooks for PR Campaigns 1. Day-one Statutory Sick Pay and the Fair Work Agency launch The TUC estimates 4.7 million women will benefit, with over 830,000 eligible for SSP for the first time — costing employers around £450m a year (about £15 per employee). With the Fair Work Agency launching at the same time, there’s a short window for brands to speak on workplace health and readiness before it shifts to enforcement. Many briefings blur 2026 and 2027 changes, so getting the timeline right is a simple way to stand out. 2. Harry Potter trailer breaks HBO records This is one of the biggest entertainment marketing moments of the year, landing nine months before the show airs. The scale of engagement signals a sustained fandom cycle through Christmas — giving consumer brands multiple windows (trailer drops, casting reveals, premiere) to tie into nostalgia, family entertainment, and gifting narratives. 3. Landmark verdict finds Meta and Google liable for addictive app design This is being called Big Tech's "Big Tobacco moment" — platforms judged like defective products, not protected speech. A federal trial follows in June. Brands positioned around digital wellbeing, youth safety, or ethical tech have a sustained policy tailwind, not a one-day story. Read it all here: trendingcampaigns.com/posts/this-wee… 👇 and subscribe to trendingcampaigns(.)com to avoid missing out.

🤖 How AI Systems Surface Your Brand:
From Inputs to Outcomes 👇 Before a brand can perform well in AI answers, AI systems need three things from it: 1. Access: They need to be able to reach and process your content. 2. Usefulness: They need relevant content worth reusing. 3. Recognition: They need enough signals to connect that content to a credible brand. If one of these inputs is weak, your chances of being included, cited, or represented accurately are lower. Once those three inputs are in place, you can assess the four outcomes they produce in AI answers: 1. Presence: Do you show up? If your brand does not appear in relevant AI-generated answers, the rest matters less. 2. Position: How prominent are you? Not all visibility is equal. A brand that is central to a recommendation, comparison, or cited explanation has more impact than one that is mentioned in passing. 3. Perception: How are you described? A brand can be visible and still lose if AI systems describe it in weak, generic, or inaccurate ways. 4. Influence: Do you shape the answer? Influence is the highest level. It goes beyond being mentioned. It's when your brand's data, concepts, definitions, or frameworks help shape how the category is explained. I'll be going through how to optimize and measure these through an AI Search Brand Authority framework in the following days that I'll share over here and in more in seofomo(.)co (subscribe now to avoid missing out) 👀

People are asking me how Finchling is different from the usual news alerting tools that PRs and content marketers use, so here’s a good example from an opportunity surfaced today for a travel brand from the expected Easter travel disruption across Europe and the UK 👇 A typical news alerting tool would usually just tell you this is happening. But for PR and content teams, that’s only the starting point. The real work is understanding whether it is relevant for the brand, why it matters, what angle could be taken, and whether there is actually a story worth pursuing. That’s the part we want Finchling to help with! In this case, Finchling didn’t just surface the news: * It gives context on the importance to facilitate the assessment: With a summary and explanation about why it mattered and had been flagged for this travel brand. * For inspiration: it also suggested specific data story angles to explore, and... * It pointed to the type of data that could be analyzed for each. That’s the difference with Finchling: not just monitoring the news, but helping PR and content teams get faster to angles they can actually explore, pitch, and cover. And there's so much more that will complement this and we're launching very soon 😉💪 Check it out: finchling(.)com

🚨 Google Search Updates, Latest SEO News & More [From Today's #SEOFOMO - March 29, 2026] 👇 * Google March Combo Updates: They released and completed the rollout of the March 2026 spam update and Began Rolling Out March 2026 Core Update * ​Google Adds Google-Agent User Agent​ Google has added a new user-agent to the user-triggered fetchers named Google-Agent. Google said the user agent is rolling out over the next few weeks and will be used by Google agents hosted on Google infrastructure to navigate the web and perform actions upon user request. * ​Google Adds AI & Bot Labels To Forum, Q&A Structured Data Google updated its Discussion Forum and Q&A Page structured data docs with new properties, including digitalSourceType, to label AI and machine-generated content. * ​Bing AI Performance dashboard gets a new feature that connects the grounding Queries and Page Views * How to bulk export the Grounding Query x Page Mapping from the Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance report by Jérôme Salomon * How Google Click Signals Drive SEO Rankings and AI Answers by @CyrusShepard * ​New Research: Influence Happens Everywhere, an analysis of the 5,000 most-visited sites on the mobile and desktop web by @randfish * ​Google Search Console MCP: Step by Step Setup Guide (OAuth + 20 Free Tools) by @suganthan * ​How AI-generated content performs in Google Search: A 16-month experiment by Bogdan Babiak: Google indexed most pages quickly, but without authority, unique insight, or trust signals, rankings collapsed within months. * Your GEO Strategy Might Be Destroying Your SEO: Many tactics designed to win in AI search can undermine SEO performance - which is, ironically, necessary for success in AI search. by @lilyraynyc * ​4 Prompt Tracking Mistakes — Whiteboard Friday: Are you measuring AI visibility wrong? Tom Capper shares the 4 biggest mistakes in AI prompt tracking and 4 creative ways to expand your list of prompts. * Plus SEO jobs, events, tools... and more! Thanks to today's sponsor @Conductor 🙌 Check the latest edition: seofomo.co/posts/google-s…

🚨 How Google Click Signals Drive SEO Rankings and AI Answers - A must read piece by @CyrusShepard going through how Google is trying to answer three broad questions from user click data: * Is this result relevant? * Is the content useful to answer the question? * Does this completely satisfy the user search? ... and what can we do about these! Check it out: signal.zyppy.com/p/google-click…