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📸 Snapshots | This Week’s Updates

Quick hits: This week's sharpest content marketing, search, and social articles.

1/ Is Google really getting worse? (Actually, it’s complicated) (SEL)

Everyone seems to think Google Search is broken. Social media is full of complaints, and even seasoned SEOs are fed up. But the truth? It’s a lot messier than a hot take.

This sharp, thoughtful piece digs into why search feels worse, even if it isn’t. It looks at conflicting data, the pressures shaping Google’s strategy, and the rise of Reddit, TikTok, and AI as search disruptors. It also challenges the loudest complaints, questions user bias, and makes a compelling case: maybe the web is changing faster than Google can keep up.

If you’ve ever said “Google sucks now,” you should probably read this first.

2/ 10 Tips for Writing Awesome Website Content in 2025 (Semrush)

Semrush’s latest guide breaks down 10 practical tips for creating high-performing website content—and a few are especially worth bookmarking:

• Know your audience inside out: Don’t guess what people want. Use data tools like One2Target to understand what your audience really cares about—then write to them, not just for them.
• Improve time to value: Ditch the fluff. Lead with key takeaways so readers get what they came for fast. This is good for engagement and great for SEO.

And that’s just scratching the surface. The rest of the guide covers everything from content structure and visuals to SEO optimization, original research, and how to make your content more trustworthy with expert insights.

If you want your content to stand out in a noisy, AI-saturated world, this is worth the full read.

3/ How to Create a Content Marketing Mission in 3 steps + examples (CMI)

This guide walks you through a dead-simple, 3-step framework to define your content marketing mission—complete with real brand examples. It shows you how to clarify your audience, sharpen your purpose, and make your stories actually resonate. If you want to stop publishing forgettable filler and start building something meaningful, this is where you begin.

4/ The Rise and Fall and Recovery of Forbes Advisor (BuzzStream)

After a devastating Google penalty, Forbes Advisor lost nearly all its traffic, but it’s making a slow comeback. The rebound isn’t just from cutting freelancers; it’s rooted in more helpful content and deep digital PR work that built strong category-level authority.

5/ Crawling a Million Websites in Search of LLMs.txt (Chris Green)

Heard of LLMs.txt? It's a simple idea with big potential: package your site's content into a clean markdown file to make it easier for AI models to crawl, especially when JavaScript gets in the way. Adoption is tiny (we’re talking 15 out of a million sites), but interest is quietly growing, and some early signs hint that it might just become the next robots.txt… or not. Curious where this is going? Keep reading.

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🎙 Real Talk | What’s Working & Flopping

Honest wins, fails, and takeaways from the trenches.

✅ What's working (Andreessen Horowitz). Most content strategies fail because they’re aimed at the wrong people. Check out this 16z framework for refining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), which can double as a playbook for content marketers who want their work to actually drive growth. The most effective content marketing starts with clarity: Who is your content for, what do they need, and where does your product solve their problem better than anyone else? Nail that, and your strategy shifts from “publishing” to profitable.

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🤖 AI Corner | What the Bots Are Doing

Google is turning up the visibility on AI Mode with a bold new experiment—replacing the classic "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on the homepage with an AI Mode button and adding it directly inside the search bar. While hitting "Enter" still runs a standard query, this prominent placement signals Google’s push to get more users engaging with its generative AI experience. The feature has been spotted by several industry watchers, and it looks like this is just the beginning of deeper AI integration into everyday search.

Semrush AI Overviews Study: What 2025 SEO Data Tells Us About Google’s Search Shift (Semrush) Google’s AI Overviews are transforming search from a ranking game to a visibility game—if your brand isn’t part of the answer, it might as well not exist.

According to Cloudflare’s CEO, AI is gutting the web’s business model by breaking the content-for-traffic trade. If creators can’t get value back, the internet’s content engine grinds to a halt.

​Klarna and Duolingo went “AI first” to cut costs—but now Klarna is rehiring humans, and Duolingo is facing fierce backlash. Turns out, replacing people with AI might win headlines, but it can lose trust.

​Google’s AI Max is redefining content in search ads—shifting from static keywords to dynamic, intent-driven messaging. Winning marketers are feeding the AI high-quality inputs (like varied RSA copy and optimized landing pages) and treating AI like a collaborator, not a shortcut.

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🔥 Spicy Takes

Hot takes, bold moves, and content that’s stirring things up.

​Level 343: The real danger of AI content isn’t hallucination—it’s blind agreement. When AI starts echoing your beliefs instead of challenging them, you don’t just risk getting facts wrong—you risk weakening your voice, credibility, and critical thinking.

​iPullRank: Legacy content audits are broken, and traffic metrics alone won’t save you. iPullRank's Relevance Engineering flips the script by blending AI-powered semantic analysis with real SEO data to make smarter, faster, and more strategic content decisions at scale. This sharpens your site’s identity in a way that search engines (and your audience) can actually recognize.

​Ahrefs: According to Ahrefs, 74% of new webpages now contain AI-generated text. Human-only content is quickly becoming the exception, not the rule. And that raises serious questions about originality, trust, and how we define quality in the age of machine-written everything. (I'm not sure about the reliability of this study, tho, considering AI tools are wildly inaccurate).

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