The Insights

Vibe coding and SEO have a problem with each other, and on Search Off the Record episode 110, Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt finally said it out loud. Sites built by AI tools like Lovable, Bolt.new, v0, Cursor, and Replit AI Studio look great in the editor, ship in days, and routinely fail at […]

Key Takeaways Gemini Tripled Its User Base While ChatGPT’s Growth Slowed The Datos/Semrush State of Search Q4 2025 report tracks desktop AI tool usage across the US, EU, and UK. The biggest competitive shift in 2025 wasn’t a new entrant. It was Gemini quietly tripling its user base while ChatGPT’s growth trajectory flattened. In the […]

Key Takeaways Search Query Length Is Shifting Toward Longer, More Specific Phrasing The Datos/Semrush State of Search Q4 2025 report tracked search query length distribution for the first time, covering 15 months of desktop data across the US, EU, and UK. The results show a consistent shift: users are typing longer, more detailed queries into […]

AI search destination domains reveal a different web than traditional Google search. Clickstream data from Q4 2025 shows GitHub at #3 after AI search (absent from Google top 15), while Wikipedia and Facebook dominate Google but vanish from AI destinations.

Key Takeaways Google AI Mode Clickstream Data Shows Steady but Tiny Growth The Datos/Semrush State of Search Q4 2025 report includes Google AI Mode clickstream data for the first time. The numbers tell two stories at once: consistent monthly growth and a share so small it barely registers on the chart. In the US, AI […]

Claude Code's entire source code was exposed this morning through a source map file left in their npm package. Security researcher Chaofan Shou spotted it...

The Datos/Semrush State of Search Q4 2025 report surfaced a stat that most coverage overlooked: Google searches per desktop user dropped nearly 20% year...

A little hyperbole, I know. Google's 2 MB HTML crawl limit has been widely covered as a technical SEO concern since the documentation update in February...

Claude Mythos is an unreleased AI model from Anthropic that was never supposed to be public yet. On March 26, 2026, Fortune reported that a misconfigured...

Google's crawling infrastructure has been misunderstood for over two decades. In episode 105 of Search Off the Record, Google engineers Gary Illyes and...