TheSEOTalkers, founded in 2013, is one of the oldest digital marketing community based in India. It was founded by Malhar Barai, Jaydip Parikh & Parth Suba, the platform fosters engagement through Twitter Chats, Spaces, Podcast and webinars.
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π Top 4 This Fortnight
01
AI Search
Google starts paying publishers whose content feeds AI answers Google's AI Contribution Pilot is now live with around 100 publishers. When a publisher's content "contributes significantly" to an AI-generated response in AI Overviews, AI Mode, or Gemini, they earn a payment visible in a new Search Console earnings widget. The key word is "significantly." Simply being linked or confirming a fact after generation does not qualify. Early participants report payments in the range of less than 0.1% of their existing ad revenue, and Google holds weekly partnership calls with pilot members. For publishers, this is the first direct revenue signal tied to AI search. For SEOs, it confirms that Google internally distinguishes between content that shapes an AI response and content that merely appears near one. That distinction will matter. Read Barry Schwartz's report β02
Algorithm
Google's September 2026 spam update gets the longest rollout of the year The fourth spam update of 2026 began on September 24 and is expected to take up to two weeks to complete, making it the longest spam rollout this year. The March, June, and August updates each finished in under a week. No new spam policies were announced, but early reports from the SEO community suggest significant weekend impact, particularly on sites in competitive affiliate and content-heavy verticals. If you saw sudden drops over the last weekend of September, compare your GSC data against September 24 before assuming a content problem. Spam updates target policy violations, not quality signals. Read the full SEJ report β03
Industry
Cloudflare now blocks AI crawlers by default, and some of those blocks are hitting Googlebot On September 15, Cloudflare changed its default settings to block "mixed-use" AI crawlers on ad-supported pages. Mixed-use crawlers serve both search indexing and AI training. The problem: Googlebot is classified as mixed-purpose. Reports from Relevant Audience and IPRegistry confirm that some Cloudflare-protected sites are now returning 403 errors to Googlebot because the blocking logic cannot always distinguish between a crawl for search indexing and a crawl for AI training. If your site uses Cloudflare and you have seen unexplained indexing drops since mid-September, check your crawler access settings. This is not theoretical anymore. Read the Relevant Audience analysis β04
Industry
Search Central Live returns to India. Bengaluru, October 30. Free, but apply now. Google's Search team is coming back to India for the first time since 2023. Search Central Live Bengaluru is set for October 30, 2026. The event is free but application-based, and registrations close on October 15. If you are based in southern India or can travel, this is a rare opportunity to hear directly from Google's Search Relations team. Past Search Central Live events in India have drawn senior Googlers including John Mueller and Gary Illyes. Apply before the deadline. Read Google's announcement β RSVP now β
βοΈ From the SEOTalk Blog
SEOTalk Spaces Recap
Query Fan-Out and Keyword Research: What Changes When AI Rewrites Your Query When someone asks ChatGPT a question, the model does not search the web the way a human would. It breaks the original prompt into multiple sub-queries, runs them simultaneously, retrieves pages from each, and then synthesises the answer. This process is called query fan-out, and it changes how keyword research works. The keywords you optimise for are no longer the only queries that determine whether your content gets cited. The article explores how traditional keyword research misses the sub-queries that AI systems actually use to find and evaluate content. If your page ranks for "best CRM for small business" but does not clearly answer the fan-out queries around it (pricing comparisons, integration specifics, migration difficulty), a competing page that does will win the citation. The practical shift is straightforward: map the sub-questions around your target topic, not just the primary keyword. Think of it as keyword research for the queries your audience never types but that AI systems generate on their behalf. Read the full article β
π¬ Conversations Worth Reading
Two pieces of research that put numbers on how AI search actually works.
Zyppy Signal
Cyrus Shepard Β· Founder, Zyppy
Cyrus surveyed 131 SEO experts on what drives Google rankings in 2026. Relevance, backlinks, and content quality topped the list, but the most striking finding was the consensus on AI content: experts draw a hard line between using AI to publish ten times more content and using AI to improve quality. The former does not work. The survey also signals a companion study on AI citation factors is coming, which will be worth watching closely.
131 experts on what actually moves rankings
Read the full survey β
Relevant Audience
Crawler classification is now a ranking problem
Cloudflare's September 15 default change was supposed to protect publishers from AI training crawlers. Instead, it created collateral damage. Relevant Audience documented cases where Cloudflare-protected sites started returning 403 errors to Googlebot because the system classified it as a mixed-use crawler. IPRegistry's analysis confirmed the issue is an IP-level verification problem. If you use Cloudflare and have seen unexplained crawl or indexing drops, this report explains why.
How AI crawler blocking is breaking Googlebot access
Read the report β
π₯ Hot Take of the Fortnight
From the SEOTalk community
"Google paying publishers for AI contributions sounds like progress. But if your content is worth paying for when it trains an AI answer, it was always worth paying for. The pilot is not generosity. It is Google admitting the value exchange was broken. Watch the payment formula, not the press release." Agree or disagree? Reply to this email or join the debate on X with #SEOTalk
β SEOTalker Spotlight
Want to be featured? Reply to this email and tell us one thing you're working on. We feature one member every two weeks.
𧩠Fortnight Challenge
This fortnight: The fan-out query audit
Pick one of your most important pages. Ask ChatGPT the question that page is supposed to answer. Then install FanoutFox (it is free) and look at the sub-queries ChatGPT actually ran. How many of those sub-queries does your page answer? How many go to a competitor instead? If your page only covers the primary query and ignores the fan-out layer, you are leaving citations on the table. Write down the three biggest gaps and pick one to fix this week. Share what you found with #SEOTalk β
π οΈ AI SEO Tool of the Fortnight
Worth a Look
FanoutFox fanoutfox.com βIf this fortnight's blog on query fan-out made you curious about what ChatGPT actually does when it searches, FanoutFox lets you see it in real time. Built by Suganthan Mohanadasan (co-founder of Snippet Digital and Keyword Insights), this free Chrome extension reads the undocumented JSON fields from your own ChatGPT sessions and shows the rewritten queries it ran, the pages it fetched, which ones got cited, and which competing pages lost specific claims. The runner-up ledger is the standout feature: it reveals the pages that were retrieved but not cited, which is the closest thing available to an AI answer rank tracker. All data stays local on your machine. No information leaves your browser unless you opt into optional domain rating lookups. The extension has over 1,000 users and is actively maintained, with Perplexity and Gemini support planned. Install FanoutFox (free) β
π One Resource Worth Your Time
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TheSEOTalkers
TheSEOTalkers, founded in 2013, is one of the oldest digital marketing community based in India. It was founded by Malhar Barai, Jaydip Parikh & Parth Suba, the platform fosters engagement through Twitter Chats, Spaces, Podcast and webinars.
Check out the latest happenings in the world of SEO Marketing and recap of conversation from SEOTalk Community Coming Up On SEOTalk Monthly Webinar First, we had SEO. Then came AEO, promising visibility in answer engines. Now GEO is the latest conversation, with everyone chasing AI citations and mentions. And suddenly, marketers are being told they need three different strategies, three sets of tools, and perhaps even three different budgets. But here's the question: Has search fundamentally...
π Top 4 This Fortnight 01 AI Search Reddit's ChatGPT citation share collapsed 86% in a single week Reddit held a steady 3.8% share of ChatGPT Search citations from July 18 through August 7. On August 14, it dropped below 1% and stayed there. Promptwatch tracked the collapse to a change in ChatGPT's query fan-out behaviour: the use of site: operators jumped from 0.4% to nearly 17% of all fan-out queries on August 8, directing ChatGPT toward official sources instead of UGC platforms. YouTube...
π Top 4 This Fortnight 01 Research 68% of Google searches now end without a click β SparkToro's most alarming number yet Rand Fishkin at SparkToro, using Similarweb's clickstream panel across JanuaryβApril 2026, found that 68% of US Google searches ended without a click to any website β not even to Google's own properties. That's up from 60% in 2024, a 7.5-point jump in just two years. Even more striking: an Ahrefs tracker of 75,000+ sites with professional marketers actively fighting for...