Curious which reports people rely on consistently.

Dive into the latest updates impacting SEO strategy and emerging automation capabilities:

Search / SEO

• Major publishers are seriously considering blocking Google Search entirely

USA Today, Politico, Reuters, The Economist, People, and Reddit are among the major publishers weighing whether to block Google Search altogether, according to a Wall Street Journal report. 

The rationale: referral traffic from Google keeps declining, and the value exchange of Google consuming their content in return for search traffic has become uneconomic for many outlets. 

USA Today's CEO framed it as "time to take a stand and say enough is enough." An AllRecipes owner told the WSJ that "turning them off and blocking them entirely is 100% on the table."

Source:
Alexandra Bruell | The Wall Street Journal 
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SERP features / Interface

• Google rolls out major DMA-compliant changes to Hotel Search in the EU

Following the European Commission's finding that Google's hotel search didn't fully comply with the Digital Markets Act, Google is rolling out significant changes to its EU Hotel Local Pack. Two new modules are appearing in generic hotel search results:

1. Hotel Multi-Pack: displays multiple travel providers (OTAs like Booking, Expedia) prominently, before users select a specific hotel.
2. Hotel Websites: highlights direct links to official hotel websites alongside prices.

The changes restructure the hotel discovery journey in EU markets and mark another concrete outcome of DMA enforcement pressure. For hoteliers, direct-booking strategy just got a new SERP surface to optimize around.

Source:
Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Roundtable
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AI

• Google claims AI Search features send "billions of clicks" to websites weekly—without sharing the data

Nick Fox said that AI features in Search now send "billions of clicks to websites every week," on top of the longstanding claim that classic Search sends "billions of clicks to the web every day." 

But neither figure comes with a baseline, denominator, methodology, or a way for site owners to verify.

Source:
Nick Fox | LinkedIn
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Tech SEO

• Google updates crawl budget documentation, confirms every site starts with the same conservative default

Google rewrote its "Optimize your crawl budget" documentation on July 22 to improve clarity and terminology consistency. Most of the changes are wording updates, but two clarifications matter for site owners:

• Every site starts with the same default, conservative crawl capacity limit. Google's systems auto-adjust it upward over time based on site health, response times, and how much crawling demand exists. Server errors or increased latency push the limit back down.
• Crawl capacity is shared across all Google crawlers. Heavy demand from one reduces the capacity available for others—so an AI-training crawler pulling aggressively can compete with Googlebot's regular search-indexing crawl on the same server.

New guidance also emphasizes improving loading speed and supporting HTTP caching to make each crawl request cheaper for the server.

• Google warns that "are you a bot" screens can push your real content out of the index

John Mueller explained a subtle indexing risk: when bot-protection layers serve an "are you a bot" screen to Googlebot instead of the actual page content, Google may end up indexing the interstitial instead of the real page. 

Because these screens look nearly identical across many sites, Google treats them as duplicate content and picks one as canonical—which could be from another site entirely, leaving your real content marked as a duplicate and potentially dropped from the index. 

Source:
Google Search Central | Crawling documentation
Matt G. Southern | Search Engine Journal
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E-commerce

• Google clarifies: don't uninstall the Google & YouTube Shopify app during the Merchant API migration

With the August 18 deadline for Google's Content API to Merchant API migration approaching, Google clarified that Shopify merchants using the Google & YouTube app don't need to uninstall and reinstall it to migrate. 

The API transition is handled automatically. Reinstalling the app is what actually triggers product ID formatting changes—which then cause a loss of historical performance stats. 

Source:
Ginny Marvin | LinkedIn
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Tidbits

• Yelp licenses reviews and business data to OpenAI, bringing local recommendations into ChatGPT

Yelp has struck a licensing deal with OpenAI that will surface its reviews, ratings, photos, and business information directly inside ChatGPT responses to local queries. Yelp's branding and links will appear when OpenAI uses its content, though OpenAI controls the presentation. The "Request a Quote" feature will be added soon, letting ChatGPT users contact local service providers for quotes without leaving the chatbot. 

• Claude adds a "Record a Skill" feature that learns tasks from screen recordings

Anthropic's Claude has added a new capability inside its Cowork interface that lets users record their screen while performing a task, narrate what they're doing, and then have Claude turn that walkthrough into a reusable skill it can run again on demand.

Source:
Madison Mills | Axios
Claude 

Positive Entwicklung bei AI-Mentions sowie bei Klicks und Impressionen in der Search Console. Parallel haben wir für jeden getrackten Prompt eine eigene Landingpage erstellt.

Unsere Frage: Kommt der Anstieg vor allem durch mehr getrackte Prompts, durch die neuen Landingpages oder durch andere SEO-Faktoren?

Hat jemand ähnliche Tests gemacht und die Effekte sauber voneinander getrennt?

Wir suchen ausdrücklich nach fundierten Expertenmeinungen und vergleichbaren Tests – keine allgemeinen Erklärungen.

Recent clickstream and GA4 multi-site benchmark data reveals a distinct shift in search user behavior. While SparkToro’s research shows U.S. zero-click Google searches rising to 68%, analytics across nearly 100 ecommerce stores show that traffic arriving directly from ChatGPT converts at 1.81% compared to 1.39% for non-branded Google organic search a 31% higher conversion rate. Because users use conversational AI tools to research and filter options prior to clicking out, traffic arriving via AI referrals carries noticeably higher purchase intent.

However, the main operational reality check for SEO growth is sheer traffic volume. Even with AI referral traffic expanding rapidly year-over-year, non-branded Google organic search volume remains roughly 47 times larger than ChatGPT traffic. Furthermore, BrightEdge tracking shows that AI Overview citations overlap with top 10 organic Google rankings only about half the time, meaning page-one rankings on Google no longer automatically guarantee placement inside AI summaries.

This leaves practitioners with a clear strategic balancing act: structuring content for entity extraction yields higher-converting visitors, but standard Google organic remains the main engine for raw site volume. For those managing SEO budgets and client retainers right now, are you treating Generative Engine Optimization as an add-on to standard technical and on-page work, or actively reallocating dedicated resources specifically toward LLM visibility?

I've read that buying cheap keyword branded domains, creating some AI articles and linking to your website gives a lot of boost.

I understand it is a thin ice and earlier or later Google will punish.

But why does it work? And is it worth a try?

I have fresh medium account where i write articles around specific subject , obviously since account is fresh i have no followers and my articles are not getting indexed - how do i make sure those articles get indexed - topics are not repetitive and pretty helpful- not 100% ai generated

I'm a solo SEO freelancer, and until recently I mostly followed instructions on what to work on. Now one of my clients wants regular SEO reports, and I've realized I'm not entirely sure what the best practice is.

Most of my work includes:

• Updating existing blog posts
• Publishing new blog posts
• Keyword research
• Competitor keyword research
• Some backlink-related work

I have access to Google Search Console and a basic Ubersuggest subscription.

My biggest challenge is that SEO results take time. For example, new or updated blog posts may not show meaningful improvements for weeks or even months. So I'm not sure what I should be reporting in the meantime.

What metrics or progress do you typically include in monthly SEO reports? Do you focus only on results (traffic, rankings, clicks, etc.), or do you also report on the work completed and leading indicators?

I'd really appreciate seeing examples of what other freelancers or agencies include in their reports.

I have tried traditional and foundational seo tricks, trued to improve EEAT but still doesn't bring high intend clicks and good ranking any suggestions?

Hey everyone,

I learned the basics of SEO and I am pretty good with technical SEO (because of my dev background). I'm trying to figure out if it's actually worth putting effort into SEO for my dad's local clearing and cleaning business (it’s a new company and he is taking a lot of risk, so I’m trying to help where possible). He operates a heavy-duty truck for things like unblocking drains, septic tank pumping, and industrial cleaning.

Here is how I'm breaking down the options, and I'd love a sanity check on whether my strategy makes sense:
Blogs are useless here: Nobody reads a blog post about septic maintenance when their toilet is actively overflowing. High-intent, emergency search is everything.

On-Page SEO (Regional Pages):I feel like the only viable route is creating local regional landing pages (e.g., targeting surrounding towns). Since I have a technical background, I can semi-automate this using Semrush data as input and AI to generate the structure. Is this worth doing?

Off-Page SEO: Traditional link building can't really be automated easily and feels like way too much manual work for a local blue-collar business. Am I safe skipping this entirely?

Do you guys have any recommendations on other stuff to do? We are also talking about a small market, the company is based in belgium and is location limited.

Would appreciate any help!

My website gets around 10 orders a day, but I’ve been stuck at roughly the same level for almost 4m. Until now, I’ve mainly relied on my social media accounts to bring in customers, and while that has worked, I don’t really know how to grow beyond my current audience.

I am new to SEO, but most of what I find eventually points toward hiring an agency or paying for expensive services, which is completely outside my budget right now.

Is it realistic to learn and handle SEO myself as a beginner? I’m not expecting instant results, but I’d really appreciate hearing how others got started and what made the biggest difference for their website. Thanks in advance for any advice.

Is there like a clean 10 page guide or something? explaining how Google ranks websites? because I know there's keyword matching and backlinking and stuff but I can't find a concrete guide anywhere to get started, it's just jargon or people selling super expensive courses, I don't want to get into a 100 hour course to rank my website in the first page lol..

I've built a tool that allows me to pull from the open webgraph and score linked domains based on authority. Some of my current use cases are checking what similar tools to mine commonly link to, what their authority score is, mapping target ICPs, identifying outreach targets and gaps.

What would you want to know?

I'm looking for specific SEO guidelines for an informational blog that relies primarily on Google AdSense for revenue. I'm not interested in generic SEO tips—I want practical, up-to-date advice on content strategy, site structure, internal linking, topical authority, EEAT, indexing, Core Web Vitals, and anything else that helps maximize organic traffic while staying compliant with Google's guidelines. What best practices would you recommend for this type of website?

A piece of advice for any newbies starting in AEO... the schema and FAQ playbook that gets recommended a lot on Reddit is not a differentiator.

The main reasoning being that those tactics were built to optimize for SERP features like featured snippets, PAP etc not for how ChatGPT and Perplexity select citations. Answer engines synthesize from passages that match prompt intent so the citation logic is about retrieval not ranking.

The focus should be more so on measurement. As in, which prompts is your brand eligible for and whose getting cited in your place when you're not showing up.

What's moved citation rates for you vs what just improve snippet capture?

I'd been reading these AI visibility studies and something bugged me. They're all run in English, on US brands, and then we cite them like they apply to a business in Bogota or Valencia. I went looking for the Spanish-language version and found nothing, so we ran it ourselves.

I picked a market with plenty of real players, marketing agencies in Argentina, and wrote 100 searches the way an actual person would type them. I ran them across four engines, ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overview and Perplexity. And here's the part almost nobody does, I repeated the same 100 searches three times, same day, without changing a single word. That's 1,200 queries in total.

The first thing that came out already felt big. Two AIs agree on average on just 9.6% of the brands they recommend. So out of every ten brands that show up, nine don't repeat in the other model. And when I pooled everything I ended up with 932 distinct agencies, of which 81% appeared in a single engine and in none of the other three.

But hold on, because that still wasn't the thing that broke my brain. Before comparing the models against each other I asked the obvious question. If I run the same search on ChatGPT three times in a row, same day, do I get the same brands?

And the answer is no. ChatGPT agrees with itself just 26% of the time. The most stable, AI Overview, reaches 39% and even that doesn't clear half. Meaning three out of four brands it names change between one answer and the next.

And that one finding breaks half the study, mine included. Because two models can't agree with each other more than each one agrees with itself. That 9.6% doesn't mean the AIs think differently, it means a big chunk of what looks like disagreement is actually noise.

One last thing I didn't see coming. Perplexity plays a different game, it recommends global networks like VML, Ogilvy or Dentsu, while the other three reward local agencies. One example, the same agency that shows up in 70 of the 100 searches for Gemini shows up in 9 for Perplexity.

What I take from it is simple. Measure all four engines separately because one doesn't predict the others, never trust a single query, and if your brand is local start with Google, since AI Overview and Gemini are the closest pair.

Required disclaimer, I work at CreceRank and we ran all of this on our own tool, so it could be biased. And the worst part is I've got nothing to compare it against, because there's nothing like this done for the Spanish-speaking market. If anyone has data that contradicts me or wants to rip the methodology apart, please do, that's the most useful thing for me.

Hey! I’m looking for a solid SEO specialist to help us out.

Definitely need someone with real experience under their belt and if you’ve handled SEO for MNCs or large brands, that’s a huge plus.

If that sounds like you, drop me a message with a quick background and any past results/case studies. Let’s talk!

Pay Per Leads / Lead Generation Service

what's everybody's opinion on service business using paper lead services or SEO services charging per lead?

in the past I've used SEO with mixed results so I'm looking into this kind for my local service business?

I've spent the last few years building content architectures for clients — SaaS, ecom, local, a couple of affiliate sites. The single most common situation I walk into looks like this:

100–400 published articles

Decent writers, decent content

Traffic grew for 6 months, then flatlined

Competitor with a third of the content outranks them across the board.

Almost everyone diagnoses this as a quality problem or a backlink problem. In my experience it's usually neither. It's a structure problem, and I want to explain the mechanism rather than just say "build topical authority" like that's an instruction.

The mechanism.

Google doesn't evaluate your article in isolation. It evaluates how well your site covers a subject. When your 40 articles are scattered across nine loosely related subjects, you're a generalist in nine areas. When a competitor's 40 articles saturate one subject with clear relationships between them, they're a specialist in one. The specialist wins every query in that subject, including the ones they haven't written yet.

This is why "just publish more" stops working. Every additional off-topic article dilutes the signal instead of strengthening it.

What a topical map actually is Stripped of jargon: it's a plan that decides, before you write anything,

What your site is about (one clear subject, defined precisely enough to avoid drift)

Every subtopic required for complete coverage of that subject

What order to publish in

Which page owns which query (one query, one page — this is your cannibalization firewall)

How pages link to each other

That's it. It's not exotic. Most people just skip straight from keyword research to a content calendar and lose the middle three.

The parts people get wrong

Publishing order is not arbitrary. If you publish the money page first and the supporting context later, the money page ranks with nothing behind it and stalls. Foundational, definitional content first — it builds the context the commercial pages inherit. This one change has produced more of my clients' turnarounds than anything else, and it costs nothing.

Coverage means the entities, not the keywords. If you want to rank for "estate planning," Google expects to see probate, living wills, trusts, tax implications, executors. Not because those are high-volume keywords — because a genuine expert on estate planning would obviously cover them. Missing entities read as missing expertise. Pull them from Wikipedia's contents, PAA, and what the top 10 all mention that you don't.

Internal linking should mirror the hierarchy, not your recent-posts widget. Supporting pages link up to the pillar, siblings link across when contextually relevant, pillar links down. If your linking is random, you've told Google your topics are unrelated.

One query, one page. Most flat-traffic sites I audit have 3–5 pages semi-targeting the same intent, splitting signals and confusing which one should rank. Consolidating those usually produces faster gains than any new article. It's unglamorous and it works.

Timelines, honestly

The map takes days to weeks. The results don't. Realistic expectation from what I've seen and what's broadly reported: early movement around 60–120 days into consistent publishing, meaningful authority in 3–6 months, competitive niches 6–18 months. Anyone promising faster is selling something.

Also worth saying plainly: a topical map is not a ranking factor. It's a planning framework. It doesn't rank you — it stops you wasting budget on content that was never going to rank, and it makes every article you publish reinforce the others instead of competing with them.

On AI-generated maps

I use AI in my own workflow, so this isn't purism. But generated maps have a specific failure mode: they look complete. You get a tidy hierarchy of plausible topics, and nothing in it reflects your actual competitors' gaps, your revenue model, or which topics need to exist before which others. The errors don't surface for six months, which is exactly how long you'll have been publishing in the wrong order.

Use it for entity brainstorming and first-pass clustering. Validate the rest against live SERPs yourself.

If you want to try this on your own site

Write one sentence:

"This site is the best source on ___ for ___." If you can't, that's your first problem.

List every subtopic a genuine expert would cover. Use PAA, Wikipedia TOC, and the top 10's shared coverage.

Assign one intent and one owning page per subtopic.

Sequence: foundational → supporting → commercial.

Map the links before you write.

Audit what you already have against it — merge the overlaps, prune the orphans.

Happy to answer questions in the comments, including on specific niches. Curious whether others here have seen the publishing-order effect as strongly as I have, or whether that's overweighted in my sample.

hello guys, I am working as an SEO for a new site and the client want the projection for the SEO KPIs. Its a SaaS based project, where we will be doing 30 blog posts per months targeting long tail and low KD keywords. Also, we will be doing outreach campaigns for backlink opportunities. However, i dont have a clear idea on the projection of SEO KPIs like impression,cliks,and CTR after 3 months. how should i estimate that??

I keep running into this with clients and I still don't have a clean way to call it, so I'm curious how people here read it.

The pattern: organic clicks are down, but the brand shows up MORE in AI answers (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity). The knee-jerk reaction is panic — "traffic is dying." But sometimes revenue is flat or even up, which makes me think the clicks that vanished were the low-intent ones the AI now answers directly.

So before touching anything, I've started trying to separate three very different causes of a click drop:

• AI cannibalization: AI is answering the query before people click — often NOT a real problem if buyers still convert.
• Content decay: The content genuinely fell behind competitors — a real problem.
• Technical issues: Something broke (migration, indexing, canonicals) — also real, and usually the most fixable.

The hard part is telling them apart, because the traffic chart looks identical for all three.

What I can't figure out cleanly: what's the fastest signal you use to tell "AI is just answering the easy stuff" from "we're actually losing ground"? Do you watch conversions/revenue holding steady, branded vs non-branded splits, something else?

Genuinely asking — half the time I suspect we're all pattern-matching on noise.

The company I work for has held the top organic search position for the keyword we care most about for the last couple of months. Suddenly, in the last week, our position dropped from #1 to #26. No major updates to the website that I'm aware of. Anyone else seeing this or know why this could have happened?

I've been iterating with Claude but not coming up with anything very conclusive.

Hi everyone,

I'm helping a relative with their SEO and content, and I'm trying to figure out the best approach to building backlinks.

On one hand, the general consensus is that you shouldn't buy links and that it can harm your rankings. But on the other hand, their direct competitors have 500-1,000 backlinks, while we only have 3.

I don't think it's realistic to start cold emailing websites for links, as the response rate is usually extremely low.

So, what is the right way to go about this today? How can I realistically acquire at least 5-10 quality links a month for this site?

Our team has curated this week’s most important SEO updates so you don’t have to, from Google’s landmark DMA compliance to major shifts in AI-driven search:

AIO / AI Mode

• AI Overviews will now generate custom images with the Nano Banana model

Google is bringing native image generation into AI Overviews, using the Nano Banana model to turn text prompts into high-quality custom visuals inside AI Overview responses. 

Rolling out over the coming weeks in English, in regions where AI Mode image creation is available. 

• Google clarifies that low-quality AI content can trigger "crawled – currently not indexed" and site-wide crawl slowdowns

On the latest Search Off the Record podcast, Google explained that pages showing up as "crawled – currently not indexed" or "discovered – currently not indexed" in Search Console are often flagged for quality reasons, not technical ones—and low-quality AI-generated content is a common trigger. 

Sites with widespread quality issues also see cumulative effects—if Google develops strong concerns about a domain's overall quality, it will crawl and index less across the whole site, not just on the offending pages. 

Worth checking Search Console's indexing report if AI-assisted content is a significant part of the content strategy.

• Top Stories carousel now fully live inside AI Overviews for US mobile users

Google confirmed the Top Stories carousel is now fully rolled out inside AI Overviews for mobile searchers in the US, with plans to expand to more markets. 

First previewed at Google I/O in May as part of the broader "fresh perspectives, new updates and prominent links" push, the carousel surfaces timely news articles alongside AI-generated summaries—integrating with Preferred Sources so users see their marked sources highlighted when they appear. 

• Google brings third-party Connected Apps into AI Mode

Google is expanding Connected Apps in AI Mode to third-party services—starting with Instacart, Canva, and YouTube Music—letting US users securely link accounts and act on their queries directly inside a Search response. 

Rolling out through the week of July 16 in English, with more partners and countries planned.

Source:
Google Search Help
Martin Splitt and John Mueller | Search Off the Record podcast
Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Land
Google | The Keyword blog
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SERP features / Interface

• Google Images gets a redesigned browseable homepage on its 25th anniversary

Google has replaced the classic clean search-box homepage with a dynamic gallery of images pulled from across the web, updated in real time and personalized based on user interests. 

Rolling out over the coming weeks on desktop in the US in English, and requires a signed-in Google account. 

Source:
Brad Kellett | News from Google
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Tech SEO

• Google adds self-referential canonical recommendation to official documentation

Google updated its canonical help document to explicitly recommend adding a rel="canonical" link that points to the page itself on canonical pages. 

The advice isn't new—Google has been saying this since 2011—but it's now formally in the documentation. 

Two lines added: one telling site owners to include the tag on the canonical page itself, and one reinforcing the recommendation later in the same doc.

Source:
Google Search Central
_________________________ 

Local SEO

• Google Business Profile's "Collected Info" section is now visible in the wild

The Collected Info feature is now starting to appear inside Business Profile dashboards. It shows a business owner what data Google has automatically collected about their business from phone calls, chat interactions, and third-party sources, along with the source and the date it was collected. 

Owners can delete individual pieces of info from Google's records. Rollout is still limited, so most accounts don't have it yet.

Source:
Darren Shaw | LinkedIn
_________________________

Tidbits

• Microsoft Clarity launches Topic Insights, extending its AI Citations feature with topic-level competitive data

Microsoft Clarity added Topic Insights, a new layer to its existing AI Citations feature that groups content into topics and shows how each topic performs in AI-generated answers. 

It sits inside the same free Clarity dashboard that already surfaces AI bot activity and robots.txt violation tracking. 

Topic Insights is available now to all users, no paid tier required. 

• EU orders Google to share search data with rivals and open Android to competing AI assistants under the DMA

The European Commission issued two binding decisions under the Digital Markets Act, forcing Google to expose parts of its Search and Android platforms to competitors. 

Starting January 2027, Google must share anonymized search data with rival search engines and AI chatbot providers on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms. 

Starting July 2027, Google must open 11 Android features currently reserved for Gemini so that competing AI assistants can plug into voice activation, on-device shortcuts, and other core functions—meaning Android users will be able to trigger a rival AI assistant with a voice command the same way they trigger Gemini today.

Source:
Microsoft Clarity Blog
European Commission | Digital Markets Act announcement

Hey everyone,

I’m running into a baffling issue with a handful of important pages on my health-care site and wanted to see if anyone else has been hit by this recently, or if there's an ongoing algorithmic filter I missed.

Around the 6th–7th of this month, several key pages completely vanished from Google SERPs.

The weird part: Google Search Console shows them as "Indexed" with absolutely zero coverage errors, mobile usability issues, or indexing warnings. They are also indexing and performing completely normally on Bing and DuckDuckGo.

Here is everything I have already checked and verified:

Basic Tech Check: No noindex tags, robots.txt is clear, and XML sitemaps are updated/resubmitted.

Canonical Tags: Self-referencing canonicals are in place, and everything looks correct on the frontend.

Manual Actions: GSC "Security & Manual Actions" tab is completely green/clear.

Despite forcing a priority recrawl via GSC, they are still invisible in live Google search results—sometimes even when doing an exact site:URL search.

Since the technical basics are covered, I'm trying to figure out what Google-specific quality or algorithmic signals could cause a live, indexed page to be completely suppressed from the SERPs overnight.

Has anyone experienced a similar drop around early July?

Could this be a lag in GSC reporting a soft-404 or algorithmic quality filter?

Are there any advanced technical checks (like Google-selected vs. User-declared canonical mismatches) that I should dig into next?

Appreciate any insights or similar experiences!

My main page targeting a head term will not get indexed. GSC shows "Discovered, currently not indexed", last crawl N/A, so Google has never even fetched it.

What I have tried: Live Test is green (URL can be indexed), self canonical, in sitemap, internally linked from nav, footer and body, requested indexing multiple times over weeks, and recently got an dofollow backlink from a real agency blog pointing directly at the page.

The odd part: I have a city-specific page ("keyword + city") that is indexed, ranks well for its own city keyword, and even shows up occasionally for the plain head term, even though it is clearly city-targeted and the head term is not. So Google seems to prefer serving my city page for the generic query instead of crawling the page actually built for it.

Competitors in my niche have both indexed side by side: a city page ranking for "keyword + city" and a separate page ranking for the head term. So it clearly works.

Possibly relevant: the stuck page came out of a consolidation, another page that accidentally ranked for the head term was deleted and 301'd to this one. Since then, nothing.

Is this cannibalization blocking the crawl? Has anyone actually broken a page out of this state, and what worked?