SEO updates you ✨NEED✨ to know [30 Sep]: ⚠️ ​Google has updated its spam policy with several notable changes, including talking about sites using "extensive automation to product content", likely meaning human-tweaked AI content. via @Marie_Haynes 📊 ​Some recent recoveries after the August core update are being reversed. The volatility continues as some sites that were hit particularly hard by last year's HCU are now seeing their small gains disappear again. via @abbysuegleason 🎠 ​Google is testing a 'from small businesses' carousel. This is being tested on mobile and is likely connected to the 'small business' attribute in Google Business Profile. via @rustybrick 🧠 ​Cloudflare launches Speed Brain, a speculative model that can reportedly reduce LCP by up to 75%. It does this by prefetching the most likely next pages' content and is now available for all Cloudflare users at no extra cost. 📉 ​Forbes Advisor has recently lost rankings for over 1.7 million queries. This may be the result of a manual penalty and related to the huge parasite SEO problem Forbes has had recently. via @glenngabe 🏷️ ​Google is testing 'For You' and 'Preferred Source' labels. This appears to be another step towards the personalisation of the main SERP that we've seen previously in Google Discover and Google News. 🚫 ​WP Engine has been banned by WordPress. If you're using their plugins, tools or hosting, you may want to look for an alternative solution even though the ban is being temporarily lifted. ✨ ​Google now highlights content creators and their expertise in Knowledge Panels. This label may be a significant boost in credibility for content creators as trusted online sources. via @jasonmbarnard 🗳️ ​SearchPilot confirms no benefit to using JSON-LD or Microdata for your markup. Despite Google listing JSON-LD as best practice, there appears to be no advantage or disadvantage either way. via @rida_a95 🤖 ​Cloudflare's AI Audit will allow sites to charge AI bots for scraping content. This is a step in the right direction of offering some compensation for content creators whose work is being "stolen" by LLMs and AI-powered search. 💰 ​Google adds support for sale pricing and priceType structured data. This should make it easier for users to specify sale prices and directly compare them to the full price, original listing. 🔍 ​Google removes the cache: search operator. Google had previously announced this in March 2024 and has since reacted by including links directly to the Internet Archive (which I covered two weeks ago) via @martinibuster 💌 If you like these kind of tldr SEO updates and don't want to miss them, I send them out every Monday along with SEO deeps and a deep dive podcast - Just Google: Core Updates newsletter Links to everything in the comments ⬇