Ime (Israel Medina)

Head of SEO Innovation @hiteintl with a passion for #SEO. I mostly (re)tweet articles, but you'll see my words every so often.

Made in #Nicaragua🇳🇮

[Ime (Israel Medina) @imethecap]

Here is to creating, promoting, developing, and improving a culture of search everywhere. #SEO #SEOGoals.

[Cyrus | SEO AI @CyrusShepard]

Do you want traffic charts that look like this?

Here's how: Simply download them from Ahrefs. No SEO required.

[Keval Shah | Ecom SEO + AI SEO @SEOKeval]

SEO agencies that use technical SEO "errors" to convince businesses to work with them are beyond pathetic.

Brand I work with got cold emailed a Loom video "auditing" their SEO.

Guy in the video goes:

"Your meta titles need to be longer."

"You have an H3 tag above an H1 tag on this page."

"Your blog posts are dated too closely together."

Like, bro...

Do you even know how SEO works?

Fixing these "issues" will have exactly ZERO impact on organic traffic.

In fact, I'd argue that 90% of technical SEO is a complete waste of time.

Unless the site isn't getting crawled and indexed, suggesting technical SEO fixes as a way to improve a site's SEO is a dead giveaway that you don't know what you're talking about.

[DEJAN @dejanseo]

LLMs do not crawl the web, do not maintain indexes, and do not enforce ranking algorithms at internet scale. They operate as presentation and reasoning layers on top of the classic information retrieval (IR) pipeline.

The recent paper Why Language Models Hallucinate (Kalai, Nachum, Vempala, Zhang, 2025) shows why this distinction matters: LLMs inevitably hallucinate due to statistical limits and evaluation incentives. Without grounding in real retrieval systems, they cannot provide reliable search.

https://t.co/Ppkd2Y8bLx

[Ime (Israel Medina) @imethecap]

Got me new reading material #emotionaltargeting @TaliaGw

[Barry Schwartz @rustybrick]

Finding long conversational query data in Google Search Console https://t.co/1oPLv2lX5r via @metehan777 @VijayChauhanSEO @da__kon

[Ime (Israel Medina) @imethecap]

@HeySannidhi @randfish But those are tasks, what's the interest there? I don't want to show up for "book an Uber." BTW "book a restaurant nearby" still requires a search.
Also if that's the case then them new names should have popped up when Discover was launched or Google Assistant, but didn't.

[Rand Fishkin (follow @randderuiter on Threads) @randfish]

NEW post: https://t.co/68x2WS3x9E

<deep breathing...> <prepares for Haterade> People are gonna be angry about this one. Especially those of y'all who've been trying to make AIO, AEO, LLMO, GEO, or EIEIO take off.

See you in the comments 😅😬

[Britney Muller @BritneyMuller]

💥 Bonus AI Mode Research Insights:

🔎 Advanced citation mechanics: AI Output links frequently take you to pages with referenced text highlighted (just like featured snippets occasionally do) - huge clue about what Google values on the page!

📱 Mobile vs Desktop divide: Mobile AI Mode consistently shows ~50% fewer citations than desktop. Definitely optimizing differently for smaller screens.

📊 Citation patterns by intent: Informational queries get minimal citation love - "why is the sky blue," "bitcoin explained," and "how to calculate compound interest" all had just 3-4 citations (the lowest observed).

🧩 Mathematical oddities: Found inconsistencies between number of citations listed vs. actual results shown. System still has bugs/quirks worth exploring.

📸 Thumbnail insights: ~85% of citations display thumbnails - if you're in the 15% without, you're at a significant disadvantage for clicks.

📈 Traditional SEO disrupted: "Book flights" now surfaces competitive blue links that were previously buried beneath Google Flights. OTAs getting unexpected visibility.

🔗 Citation reputation matters: LinkedIn posts dominate citations for "best seo in the world" (Neil Patel's older content heavily cited for "top seos" and "top seo agencies" queries) - historical authority still weighs heavily.

⚠️ UX quirk: You lose the full righthand citation list once you interact with any in-text link citations (the little circle links)

🤔 Google's Positioning: AI Mode works hard to convey Google's real-time + location relevance (their competitive edge) with oddly specific contextual statements like "relevant for someone in Mound, MN, interested in enhancing skills or exploring new subjects in March 2025" for "online courses."

🎯 Brand queries get hyperlocal: "Disney" and "NASA" triggered results about brand-related events near Minneapolis - suggesting high local intent weighting even for major brands.

💰 Infrastructure insights: Occasional "something went wrong with this response" errors suggest Google's still figuring out the cost/infrastructure balance for running LLMs at scale.

🪲 Working Out Bugs: Found entirely random citations (like "Used RVs For Sale in Rutland, MA" showing up for "laptop brands") - suggests some noise in the system that G still has to work out.

🔥 5 Days Left to register for Actionable AI For Marketers (discount link in the comments)

[Britney Muller @BritneyMuller]

Researched Google's New AI Mode So You Don't Have To 🚀

Evaluated hundreds of AI Mode outputs across transactional, navigational, commercial, and informational intents, here's what SEOs and marketers NEED to know:

🔍 It's genuinely AI-powered - the same query "cheap flights" produced seemingly endless variations of output text ranging from 370 to 449 words, with right-sidebar citations varying from 13 to 39 URLs!

📍 Local intent is EVERYWHERE - even for queries where location makes zero sense ("online courses," "subscribe newsletter," and even instances of "youtube login" included unnecessary location context)

🔗 Navigation patterns: Searches for duck duck go, gmail, cnn, youtube, twitter, wikipedia all bypass AI Mode completely, reverting to traditional SERPs with 8-10 blue links.

📊 Commercial & Informational keywords have the longest AI Mode Outputs (looking more like blog posts tbh): "Laptop brands" produced 576 words with 56 citations and "Causes of the French Revolution" produced 512 words with 12 citations. (Reminder: your results will likely differ due to AI variability!)

💥 Inline citations = content marketing goldmine! Interacting with these can inform you and your team with specific insights as to which competitive URLs are bringing what to the table: specific topics, mentions, categories, anecdotes, facts, etc.! Leverage these insights to improve your competing content and fill gaps in your coverage.

🏆 Previously buried page 2 results now occasionally appear as citations - both for queries that produce no AI Mode output (like "Twittter") and for keywords that produce longer citation lists. This is surfacing URLs that were previously hidden beneath featured snippets or pushed to page two.

🖼️ Thumbnail insights: Images get cropped at the centerline to 82x82 px from the most prominent image or on-page headers. URLs without thumbnails stay thumbnail-less until Google finds a usable image. Check your URLs and add relevant, click-worthy images ASAP!

📱 Local Brand winners emerging: Best Buy (if you have one semi-nearby) is crushing it in commercial searches (especially with local intent), while SmartAssist set the record for most blue links within an AI output for "mortgage rates". Note: you'll likely have different locally referenced winners for your area.

🚀 Blue link records: "Lightweight hiking boots reviews" produced the highest amount with 21 blue links (with anchor text) within one AI Mode output (and only 3 right-sidebar citations so majority of these were a high volume of repeat URLs)! Massive opportunity if you can create supporting content for Google to cite within AI Outputs that produce higher in-text citations.

💡 What this means: The rules of SEO are being rewritten. There's a massive opportunity to learn how Google is integrating AI technology and optimize for AI Mode citations before your competitors.

Previously buried sites now have a fighting chance through:
🔍Evaluating AI output content and topics
🧭Studying citation patterns for your keywords
✍️Revamping content to better compete
📸Adding relevant, eye-catching images (remember they'll be cropped square at the center!)

Want to dive deeper? My Actionable AI for Marketers Course starts next week with early access to my Chrome extension to help track AI Mode patterns. Get hands-on with specific AI marketing workflows and put them into action early to maximize your impact!
#GoogleAI #Marketing #SEO #DigitalMarketing #SearchMarketing #AIStrategy

[Rand Fishkin (follow @randderuiter on Threads) @randfish]

2015: Traffic was our primary marketing KPI.
2025: Traffic is a vanity metric.

How we measure marketing has to change because how platforms hoard vs. send out traffic has changed. IMO, this is the new path 👇

[Britney Muller @BritneyMuller]

✍️Brand mentions are the new backlinks in the age of AI search. While Google counts links, AI counts conversations. The game has shifted from link-building to voice-building.

🔗Here's what's fascinating: AI doesn't need hyperlinks to understand authority, it reads context more like humans do.

📢Authentic voices will rise to the top in a world drowning in AI-generated sameness. Your digital footprint is now measured by who's talking about you, not just linking to you.

🎯 The secret? Being genuinely quotable beats being technically optimized. While everyone is creating AI slop, the winners will be those brave enough to stand out with original insights, unique opinions and bold perspectives.

💫This isn't just a shift in search; it's a return to what actually matters: saying something worth repeating.

[Google Business Profile @GoogleMyBiz]

You can now add WhatsApp and text messaging to your GBP! This much-requested feature makes it easy for customers to connect with you directly for inquiries, bookings, support + more. Available worldwide, excluding PH, VN, TH, TW, JP, KR, & CN. Learn more: https://t.co/7Hg7zerIDK

[Rand Fishkin (follow @randderuiter on Threads) @randfish]

Umm... marketers... why aren't we helping more brands appear in AI answers?

We know how LLMs work.
We know how to influence their responses.
We know how to do this kind of PR.
What gives?

[Cyrus | SEO AI @CyrusShepard]

LOL. I applied to list our company with @designrushmag—which claims to have very high standards

They rejected our app because I wouldn't *add a link* to them from the homepage of our website

High standards indeed!😅

[Aleyda Solis 🕊️ @aleyda]

The Role of SEO in making branding understood by search engines and AI - An excellent guide from @gfiorelli1 going through a topic that will only gain importance in SEO: Branding. Read it now: https://t.co/hbMOAxyQso

[Patrick Stox @patrickstox]

Tech SEO Connect, the conference made for technical SEOs by technical SEOs, is just over 2 weeks away!

Here's a 🧵about why I'm excited for the conference.

Bonus - reshare this post to enter a giveaway for a free ticket. I’ll announce a winner at the end of the week.

[Ime (Israel Medina) @imethecap]

@aleyda @Suzzicks Could this also mean that URLs that have never been visited from a Chrome browser may have a harder time getting a good position in search (given that JS and user data from Chrome would not be available)?

[Aleyda Solis 🕊️ @aleyda]

Wow! This is a mind blowing research and finding by the amazing @Suzzicks about how Google is actually using Chrome to not only crawl (which explains how they’re able to render JS) but to also collect users data for so many of their services, including ads 🤯 a must watch 👇

https://t.co/xwJhunPqZ2

[Lily Ray 😏 @lilyraynyc]

Google tells us in the “your search & this result” module which terms appear prominently on the page - an easy hack to appear for keywords that are relevant to you 👏🏽👏🏽

@Johanstormarn @smx

[Google Search Central @googlesearchc]

Today we released the August 2024 core update. It continues our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.

https://t.co/T6Qt0JUoWt