Search answers more questions itself
Google started showing AI Overviews to everyone in the US in May 2024 and has expanded them since. For many informational searches the answer now appears before the first link. Pages that get cited tend to answer a question directly, show who wrote them, and add something the summary cannot: original data, a worked example, first-hand experience.
More on this in my guides to generative engine optimisation and answer engine optimisation.
Experience and authorship count
Google added Experience to its quality guidelines in December 2022, turning E-A-T into E-E-A-T. In practice that means real authors with real profiles, author pages that connect to them, and content written by people who have done the thing. See my notes on E-E-A-T.
Helpful content is part of the core algorithm
Since the March 2024 core update, the helpful content signals are part of Google’s core ranking systems rather than a separate update. Thin, repetitive or off-topic pages can hold a whole site back, which is why pruning and merging content is often the fastest win on older sites.
Site reputation abuse
From May 2024 Google began acting against third-party pages hosted on strong domains to borrow their rankings, often called parasite SEO. It matters most in competitive niches like iGaming, where this tactic was common.
INP replaced FID
Interaction to Next Paint became a Core Web Vital in March 2024. It measures how quickly a page responds to every tap and click, not only the first one, so heavy scripts and page builders show up in the numbers.
Fewer rich results
In August 2023 Google limited FAQ rich results to a small set of well-known government and health sites and phased out HowTo results. The structured data is still useful for understanding a page, but it is no longer a shortcut to a bigger listing.
What I would do this year
- Audit old content and merge or remove what no longer earns its place
- Make authorship visible: author boxes, an About page and Person schema
- Answer the main question near the top of each page, in plain words
- Measure INP on mobile and cut scripts that slow down interaction
- Build links that a reviewer would be comfortable seeing