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I wrote a little something on how to fix some of the (direct / none) traffic in #googleanalytics with the help of #gtm. omt.tips/recover-direct… And I'd love to thank a few people for their help 1/2
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The war to protect big G's index are heating up dataforseo.com/update/new-got…
dataforseo.com Google’s New GoTo URL Limits and How This Affects Your Results – DataForSEO Google has introduced new restrictions on resolving GoTo URLs into direct destination URLs in SERP results. Below, we explain what's changed and how it This is something I have been wondering about. Excellent work @dejanseo
dejan.ai/blog/google-st…
We rewrote the alt text on Google Store's Pixel Watch 5 page. Its images went from a 30% to an 84% match.View quoted post on X
Amen
Too many people are still thinking about AI in terms of traffic. cut it out. It's about purchase consideration. Put a survey on your site post purchase. You'll see that AI is a top 3 result for how people decided on your brand.View quoted post on X
Building their own search engine is my take from this. But that's quite the job. Interesting times!
We've been reviewing around 1.5 billion server requests, so I thought I'd share a few observations.
There's been some interesting discussion recently about how much traffic AI assistants actually send to websites.
Worth checking out the research and perspectives from @Marie_Haynes , Kevin Indig, The SEO Works, @randfish and Michael King. Different datasets, methodologies and opinions, all worth reading.
Firstly, AI referral traffic remains small compared with Google organic. Our findings broadly agree with the other studies. However, server logs reveal another layer of activity that traditional analytics doesn't capture.
Some interesting changes we've observed since mid-August:
✳️ ChatGPT live reads: Verified ChatGPT-User requests have fallen by approximately 80%.
✳️ OpenAI crawling: Verified OAI-SearchBot requests have more than doubled over the same period.
✳️ Claude Code: We recorded approximately 26x growth in distinct sources accessing websites between June and September, predominantly technical documentation.
The change in ChatGPT's behaviour is particularly interesting. It's consistent with a shift towards crawling and indexing content in advance, rather than fetching pages during individual conversations.
Of course, an AI agent fetching a page doesn't mean someone saw a recommendation, let alone made a purchase. But that doesn't make the activity irrelevant either.
It highlights why referral traffic, agent activity and indexing need to be considered separately.
Interested to hear whether others analysing server logs are seeing similar patterns.View quoted post on X
