Bree Sharp | Full-Stack Dev & Tech SEO @bree_sharp

Places Sites is basically Google being forced to do what structured data advocates have argued for years: treat third-party entity data as a first-class feature, not just a ranking eligibility signal. In the US, the local pack is Google properties top to bottom — aggregators and directories are nearly invisible on high-intent local queries. The EU feature is worth studying as a model for schema-first local strategy regardless of whether DMA-equivalent pressure ever lands here. The architecture question it answers (what does structural data look like when it actually surfaces?) is one we don't get to ask in the US market right now.

Authorship markup launched 2011, deprecated 2014. Google+ for publishers — same trajectory. The pattern with Google social/creator features is consistent enough to be a reliable prior. The one variable that could make Search Profiles different: if they're actually feeding entity-level E-E-A-T signals at scale rather than just being a content showcase. But Google hasn't signaled that directly, so the default is with your prediction.

The mechanism is right but I'd push on the framing slightly. The web became page-driven because of how browsers, servers, and CMSs were built — SEO exploited that structure but didn't invent it. What's worth asking: freeing websites from page-based architecture benefits AI models that synthesize across unstructured content at least as much as it benefits publishers. Fewer structural anchors = better machine understanding, but also fewer attribution points. The 'weirdly human' creative web scenario depends on whether publishers come out of that shift with more visibility or less.

HCU-affected sites recovering while core/spam-hit sites stay flat suggests Google is treating these as separate signal types — recovery from one doesn't carry over to the other. On "don't get hit in the first place": in audits, the sites that consistently clear update cycles aren't always the ones with the best content. They're the ones without the accumulated flags — thin paginated sections, crawl depth problems, inconsistent schema, untagged AI content mixed with editorial. Those pile up quietly until a core update reclassifies the whole section.

This specific page is Google's answer when site owners search "should I hire an SEO?" Adding AEO/GEO to that documentation signals to the market that this is a hireable skillset, not just practitioner jargon. Clients will start asking for it by name before most practitioners have a clear methodology for it.

Same thing plays out in SEO right now. Tools can generate technically clean content at scale. What they can't generate is the audience signal underneath — real-use behavior, brand search volume, repeat visitors — that tells Google the content is worth keeping. The sites getting cleaned out in core updates aren't just the ones with bad copy. A lot of them had decent traffic. They just didn't have a real audience behind it.

The bounce-then-fall pattern after back-to-back core updates usually means the same thing: the second update shifted weighting in a way that temporarily suited that site's profile, but the underlying quality problem is still there. If February's drop was a quality signal, a May bounce off a different update doesn't mean the quality improved — it means something shifted that temporarily helped them. The next update confirms the first read.

Sunday thought: most of what moved my work forward this year wasn't a big strategic leap. It was finishing the unglamorous thing I'd been avoiding. The redirect nobody wanted to map. The 80-line script I kept saying I'd write "later." The schema cleanup that changes nothing you can see. Shipped beats clever almost every week.

More warnings

Glenn Gabe @glenngabe

a day ago

Heads-up, two new updates from Google in their docs. First, Google just updated it's "Do you need an SEO" page in the documentation with mentions of "Optimizing for generative AI". It now contains guidance advising site owners to check if advice on optimizing for AEO/GEO aligns

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The architectural reason: Google AI Mode does live retrieval on indexed content, ChatGPT blends training data with Bing browsing, Perplexity runs its own live crawl with different source prioritization. Different inputs, different citation patterns. You can't optimize "AI visibility" as a category. You can fix specific content gaps for specific engines — which requires knowing which ones are actually driving traffic, not an averaged score.

4 days after rollout completion isn't the same as 4 days after recovery stabilization. Sites that took a hit mid-rollout often don't fully recover — or fully crash — until 2–4 weeks after the official end date, particularly if Google's reprocessing happens in waves. Early pattern reads tend to capture winners more clearly than losers. Recoveries take longer to confirm.

The equity framing is right. But content goes stale, competitors update theirs, and technical debt accumulates — SEO doesn't have an ad bill, but it does have a maintenance cost. Better version: SEO builds something you own. Ads build reach you rent. Both require ongoing investment. The difference is where the asset lives when you stop.

212 impressions over 60 days is about 3.5 per day — that's Google still calibrating what the site is, not a sign the strategy isn't working. Worth checking in Search Console what queries generated those impressions. If they're mostly branded, one-off long-tails you didn't target, or navigational queries, the fix is a content targeting problem. If you're actually ranking page 2 for the right terms, that's a different problem entirely — CTR and authority. The diagnosis changes the whole approach.

The gap between "readable by humans" and "parseable by agents" is mostly structure. Humans fill in context from visual layout — agents don't. They need heading hierarchy that actually maps the content, anchor text that means something out of context, and explanations that don't rely on "as shown in the chart above." Schema helps at the metadata layer, but the bigger gap is usually docs written for human eyes that assume too much from surrounding layout.

Quick weekend check: open your homepage, right-click an image, hit Inspect, and look for alt text. If it's empty or says something like IMG_4821.jpg, Google can't tell what the image is and neither can anyone using a screen reader. Write one plain sentence describing what's in the photo. Ten seconds an image. Helps real people and image search at the same time.

Made my SEO tools free with no email wall. No "enter your work email to see results." You run the check, you get the answer. The email-gate model treats a useful tool as bait. I'd rather the thing just be useful and let people come back because it was, not because I'm holding their results hostage.

The mechanism makes sense even before you see the data. When an AI Overview appears, users aren't getting a simple answer — they're getting a summary that prompts verification or follow-up questions. That's a different kind of search session than clicking result one and bouncing. The question for site owners: are they capturing any of that extended attention, or are users just going deeper into Google's own UI?

@gaganghotra_ Internal linking and schema have always been about crawl efficiency. Now they're also about whether an AI agent can follow the reasoning chain across your site.

aThis is E-E-A-T made more legible.Google has been rewarding author authority signals for a while — author schema, byline pages that have actual content on them, links back to the author's broader web presence. The Search Profiles feature feels like Google surfacing what it's already been calculating.Practical implication: author pages on your site shouldn't just be a name and a photo. They need to function as entity documents.This is E-E-A-T made more legible. Google has been rewarding author authority signals for a while — author schema, byline pages that have actual content on them, links back to the author's broader web presence. The Search Profiles feature feels like Google surfacing what it's already been calculating. Practical implication: author pages on your site shouldn't just be a name and a photo. They need to function as entity documents.This is E-E-A-T made more legible. Google has been rewarding author authority signals for a while — author schema, byline pages that have actual content on them, links back to the author’s broader web presence. The Search Profiles feature feels like Google surfacing what it’s already been calculating. Practical implication: author pages on your site shouldn’t just be a name and a photo. They need to function as entity documents.

70% concentrated in one section is a structural risk I flag in audits before any update lands. It usually means the content strategy drove everything into articles because that's what ranked — and the rest of the site got neglected. Product and service pages thin, homepage too broad, no real internal linking strategy. When Google adjusts how it values that section, for any reason, there's nowhere to fall back to. The distribution problem predates the update problem.