Every month, roughly 970 agencies turn the same three news stories into a LinkedIn post saying "this changes everything, book a call". It almost never changes anything. So here's the news, and here's what it actually means for you.

Hi, I'm Nikki Pilkington. My site is https://nikki-pilkington.com/ and in this episode of "SEO F**king What", I'm trying something new — a monthly news roundup. Three stories: what happened, what the LinkedIn gurus say it means, and what it actually means for a business with fewer than 10 staff and a website that gets 400 visits a month. Most months the honest answer will be "this changes fuck all for you, carry on", and I'd rather tell you that than invent a crisis.

Here's what I'm covering: — Ahrefs studied 331,000 pages to find out if Google hates AI content, and what they actually found (54.7% of top-ranking pages are under 20% AI) — Why there is no AI penalty, and why the two camps screaming about this study are both wrong in exactly the same way — Why heavily AI-generated pages really do perform worse, and why it has nothing whatsoever to do with the tool — The rule underneath all of it: you can't judge writing about your industry unless you already know your industry — Why you should not run your own website through an AI detector this week (I've been flagged as a robot, and I can promise you I'm not) — Search Console now reports on your social posts — what it genuinely is, and why "the dawn of social SEO" is nonsense — Why the four platforms Google picked are completely arse about face for a B2B service business — AI Overviews on 43% of searches, why there's no such thing as separate "AI SEO", and why your traffic can drop while your visibility improves

I also give you a proper piece of homework. Three jobs, 20 minutes total. Not the "might do that one day" kind — the actual do-it-this-week kind, including the cheapest AI visibility tracking on Earth.

If you know someone who's about to panic-rewrite forty pages because a detector gave them a scary number, send them this. It'll save them a fortnight.

Get found. Make money. Stop stressing. And if anybody tries to sell you an AI detector this month, tell them Nikki said no.

Links mentioned:

Non-Wanky SEO Courses (On-Page toolkit free right now): https://nonwankyseo.com

The Ahrefs study — "Google Doesn't Punish AI Content; It Punishes Bad Content": https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-doesnt-punish-ai-content/

Google Search Console: https://search.google.com/search-console

TechCrunch on the Similarweb AI Overviews data: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/27/googles-ai-search-is-rapidly-becoming-the-default-new-data-shows/

The episode on why ranking number one is useless: https://seofuckingwhatpodcast.co.uk/episode/ranking-number-1-on-google-is-useless-ffs-let-me-explain

Follow Nikki: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikkipilkington/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikkipilkington/

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/nikkipilkington.bsky.social

AI overviews now show up on 43% of Google searches.

A year ago, it was 15%.

instead of setting fire to a monthly retainer.

This one's a bit different because I'm trying something new.

Once a month, I'm gonna try and do a kind of news episode 'cause every

month, there's a bunch of SEO news, and every month, roughly 970 agencies

turn that news into a LinkedIn post saying, This changes everything.

Book a call." But it doesn't change everything.

It pretty much never changes anything.

But you don't know that because the only people telling you about

it want to sell you something.

The problem is there's not enough meat in most of those stories to make

even a 10-minute podcast episode.

So here we are with my John Craven's Newsround kind of roundup of a few things

that have happened recently and how they affect you as a small business owner.

three stories.

What happened, what the LinkedIn gurus say it means, and what it actually means

for a business with fewer than 10 staff and a website that gets 400 visits a month

Nell, is it?

And most months, the honest answer will be this changes fuck all for you.

Carry on.

And I'd rather tell you that than invent a crisis.

Let's go.

Story one, Ahrefs studied 331,000 pages to see if Google hates AI content.

They published a big study at the end of July.

It's probably the most useful thing anyone's put out in months,

which is exactly why it's about to get misrepresented by everybody.

So they pulled a million pages from the top 10 results across

100,000 searches in June.

About 150,000 of those million pages had enough text on them to

run through an AI detector, which is a whole other story in itself,

but we're not gonna go into it now.

What they found was that just over half, so 54.7%, of the top ranking

pages had less than 20% of AI content.

Pages with under half AI content accounted for about 82.2% of the top three rankings.

But fully AI-generated pages do rank.

5.3% of top-ranking pages were 100% AI-generated.

And when it comes to indexing, which let's not forget is not ranking, it's just

being included in the Google index, low-AI content pages got indexed about 49% of the

time, and very high-AI content about 40%.

So what's gonna happen to this study?

We're gonna have camp one, the stop being a dinosaur lot.

They'll scream that Google doesn't penalize AI content, so crack on, spin

up 400 blog posts, nobody's checking.

And then you'll have camp two, the doom merchants.

They'll scream that AI content ranks worse and gets indexed

less, so buy their human-written content package at £350 a post.

They're both wrong, and they're both wrong in the same way.

They're reading a correlation and calling it a rule because what the study actually

tells you is this: Google is not sitting there with a machine that goes, "Beep,

this was written by a robot. Into the bin with you." There is no AI penalty.

That's over.

Stop worrying about it.

But heavily AI-generated pages do perform worse on average,

but it's not because they're AI.

It's because of what they are.

Think about who produces a page that's 100% AI with no human touching it.

Someone doing volume, someone who doesn't know the subject, someone who

typed, "Write me a 1,500-word blog post about commercial insurance,"

and hit publish without reading it.

That content is shit for reasons that have nothing to do with the tool that made it.

And the ones in the 5.3% that do rank, well, somebody who knew what

they were talking about probably looked at the output and fixed

it, and that's the difference.

Which brings me back to the thing that I will keep banging on about until I'm dead.

You cannot judge writing about your industry unless you

already know your industry.

you can't tell whether a model has given you something useful or

something plausible-sounding and wrong unless you already know the answer.

If you're a chartered surveyor using AI to draft something on party wall agreements,

you'll spot the bollocks in four seconds because you've been doing it for 20 years.

Fix it, publish it, fine.

If you're that same surveyor using AI to draft something about, let's

say, SEO, you've got no idea whether it's right, and that's how you end up

publishing bollocks with your name on it.

There's one practical thing about this one.

Ahrefs used their own AI detector for this, and they said outright

that it has limitations and it isn't exactly what Google's doing.

So don't go and run your own website through an AI detector this week.

They're unreliable.

They flag human writing as AI constantly.

I have my own stuff flagged as robot written, and I can promise

you I am extremely fucking human.

Run your site through a detector, get a scary number, rewrite 40 pages in a

panic, and you've wasted a fortnight and probably made your website worse

Let's move on to story two.

Search Console now reports on your social posts, and it's live for everyone.

Google announced this on the 7th of July, and it's been trickling out since.

As of the 29th, it's live globally, so no more waiting.

You connect your Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, never X, or YouTube account

to Search Console, and you can see how those posts perform in Google Search

and in Discover and Google News.

You can see clicks, impressions, and the search terms bringing

people to your posts.

Google's also published a guide on reading the data.

There's one kind of interesting bit on this one.

Until now, every Search Console property has needed you to

prove that you own the domain.

This one doesn't.

You can connect an account.

So if your whole business lives on Instagram and you've never bought a

domain, which kind of raises the point of why the fuck are you listening to this?

But hey, hey.

You can now get real Google search data.

And that tells you who Google built it for.

They built it for creators.

They didn't build it for website owners.

And the reaction about it has been, "Oh my God, slightly deranged." " It's

the dawn of social SEO, a new era for search." Mate, it's a report.

Your social posts have been showing up in Google results If you search

a business name, you get their Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn.

That's been happening forever because Google understands your business as an

entity, a thing that exists in the world, with your website and your profiles

all connected together in its head.

The posts were already there.

The connection was already there.

Google's just given you a dashboard.

And here's my prediction.

Give people a scoreboard and some of them start playing to it.

We're about to get a wave of social posts written for Google instead

of for the humans scrolling past.

We've already got keyword-stuffed captions.

They're gonna get worse.

Posts that read like a meta description.

Google's already published a guide on optimizing social content for

search, which is a hell of a fast turnaround on that particular prophecy.

One last thing on this one, and it's why I'm not more excited.

The four platforms are Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube.

No LinkedIn, no Facebook.

For a B2B service business, that list is completely arse about face.

LinkedIn is probably where nearly all your social effort goes, and it's not on it.

Google says the four are a starting point and it might grow.

So the businesses most likely to get something useful out of this

are the ones who can't have it yet.

Make of that what you will

Story three, 43%.

Back to the number that was at the top of the episode.

Similar web data, which was reported by TechCrunch on the 27th of

July, says that AI overviews now appear on 43% of Google searches.

A year ago, that was 15%.

Their take is that this stopped being a layer on top of search and

became part of the search journey.

Google drops you into an AI overview.

You carry on into AI mode from there, asking questions conversationally.

I did an episode a while back about ranking number one being useless.

that argument has aged frighteningly well, and it needs updating.

It's not just about whether position one earns a click anymore.

On nearly half of searches, there's a summary sitting above

everything, answering the question before anyone reaches the results.

But don't let anyone use this number to sell you something, because

that's mostly what's gonna happen.

Some chancer is gonna put 43% in a slide deck and flog you an AI visibility

retainer off the back of it What it means for you is that to get cited in

an AI overview, you have to be in the index and ranking, and the work is the

work you were already meant to be doing.

There's no separate AI SEO.

But what it does mean is that if you measure success by traffic alone,

your numbers will look worse, even when your visibility improves.

That's not you failing.

That's the search results changing shape underneath you.

So that's the news.

Now the actual to-do list.

Three things, 20 minutes total.

Stay with me.

So your homework.

One, connect your social accounts to Search Console.

It's live for everyone now, so no excuses.

Log in, property drop-down, add property, pick whichever of the four you use.

Five minutes.

Then leave it.

Data takes a few days to appear.

So if you're staring at an empty chart tomorrow and conclude

that Google hates you, don't.

When it does arrive, look at one thing, the search terms

bringing people to your posts.

Not the volume, the terms.

If people are finding your Instagram through searches you

never expected, that's content ideas for your actual website.

Two, take one page you drafted with AI and do the parts you skipped.

Just one, not all of them.

Your most important service page or your most recent blog post.

Read it properly, out loud if you can.

Ask one question all the way through.

What do I know about this that the LLM or the chat didn't?

The specific client situation, the thing that always goes wrong on this type of

job, the price range nobody publishes, the bit customers always get confused about.

Go back, put that in, and cut out anything that could have been written

about any business in your sector.

That's the difference between AI content that ranks and AI content that doesn't.

It's not the tool.

It's whether somebody who knows the subject went in afterwards.

Three, search your top three money terms and look at what's above the results.

Open an incognito window, type in the three searches you most

want to be found for, and look at the screen before you scroll.

Is there an AI overview?

Yes or no?

Are you cited in it?

Yes or no?

Write it down.

That's your baseline.

Do it again in three months.

Cheapest AI visibility tracking on Earth, and roughly £900 a month less than the

tools being sold to you right now And that's your lot for the first news one.

Tell me if you want more of these because if nobody likes it, I'll happily go back

to shouting about meta descriptions.

Make sure you're following SEO Fucking What in whichever app you're listening

to so the next one turns up on its own.

And if any of this made you realize you've got no idea what's going on

with your own website, that's what the Non-Wanky SEO course is for.

It's at nonwankyseo.com.

The non-wanky Onpage SEO toolkit is currently free.

Go and sign up for it.

It's 10 lessons, a couple of modules.

Perfect SEO for your website.

Until next time, get found, make money.

And if anybody tries to sell you an AI detector this

month, tell them Nicky said no