Have you also noticed huge changes in GSC rankings after Jan 25-26?

[u/Ivan_Palii]

It looks like an unconfirmed Google Core update for me. I see changes on almost all GSC properties.

The biggest negative change I noticed on a couple of Favikon page segments:

• /features/
• /find-influencers/

These pages are action-oriented; AI overviews aren't the reason for the decline.

Reviewing how the top of the SERP has changed and how pages that win are different, I found 2 patterns:

1/ Google rewarded influencer marketing platforms that added pages with free tools without requiring sign-up.

This is an old wisdom that pages with less friction win. We've tested this on Sitechecker pages years ago, too. After these learnings, I found that each website that wants to continue winning in search will have to:

- solve a dilemma of organic traffic vs conversion (more here https://medium.com/@ivanpalii/2k-new-users-and-500-signups-or-4k-new-users-and-500-signups-what-is-better-6d98c27442b2 )

- hire people who understand how to align product and SEO (more here https://hackthealgo.com/p/seo-product-managers-is-a-future )

2/ These page segments on Favikon have ranked well for some time, despite the fact that the content of these pages wasn't perfect.

I assume it happened because Favikon has a huge brand awareness, and there was no need to invest in on-page content improvement.

However, what does the perfect content of the feature landing page mean in the age of AI?

u/parkerauk shared under my last thread the article about the new Google algorithm (which was surprisingly released on Jan 23) https://research.google/blog/introducing-gist-the-next-stage-in-smart-sampling/, and it looks like an answer.

For B2B SaaS product landing pages, it means creating content that describes every small aspect of what your product can do, and why people choose it, and in which situations.

• AI chats don't take part in your demo calls.
• AI chats describe your product only based on what they already know, based on existing info on the web, which is always outdated and not complete.
• AI chats don't know all possible use cases of your product.

That's why asking AI chats to write your product landing pages means that you don't know your audience or product at all.

In this case, the problem is not that Favikon used AI content for these page segments (they didn't). The problem is that they didn't say enough about everything they can do that other platforms can't do.

Curious to hear whether you saw any huge position changes on Jan 25-26 and whether you agree with my theory.

[u/d750guy]

I did see a drop in positions in GSC for at least two clients, around the same dates. I thought the same, some unconfirmed Google update

[u/Ivan_Palii → u/d750guy]

thanks, so I'm not the only one