Weekly SEO and Marketing Recap: Dec 23, 2025

Hey Ninjas! 👋

Another week, another batch of Google updates that'll make you question your entire SEO strategy. But that's exactly why you're here.

The gap between what's hyped and what actually makes money has never been wider. Good thing you've got 10 minutes to cut through the noise.

Grab your coffee. Let's get into it.

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Google's AI Mode Just Hit 75M Daily Users (But the Promised Features Are MIA)

Nick Fox confirms massive adoption while admitting that personal context integration is still stuck in internal testing seven months after announcement.

December Core Update Hits Different: 40% Traffic Drops Reported Over the Weekend

SEOs are reporting unprecedented volatility on December 20th with some sites seeing near-zero traffic, while AI spam sites climb rankings.

AI Search Has 75M Users But Sends Almost Zero Traffic to Your Site

Despite the hype around AI Mode's growth, real data shows AI platforms drive just 2-3% of organic traffic while basic title tag optimization and content freshness still deliver the ranking jumps that actually move revenue.

Google Launches War on SerpApi for "Stealing" Search Results

Lawsuit accuses the scraping service of bypassing security to resell copyrighted SERP data, following Reddit's similar legal action against multiple scrapers.

Google Says "No Gemini Ads in 2026" Despite What Advertisers Were Told

Dan Taylor publicly denies Adweek's exclusive report that Google briefed ad clients on 2026 Gemini monetization plans, creating confusion about the chatbot's future.

Your Images Need 30-Pixel Text Height or AI Can't Read Them

Multimodal AI systems now parse images like language, and poor contrast or glossy packaging causes hallucinations that could kill your visibility.

Google Lets You Check If Videos Were Made by AI Right in Gemini

Upload any video up to 90 seconds and ask Gemini to scan for SynthID watermarks in audio and visual tracks to verify Google AI creation.

Half of "Googlebot" Traffic Hitting Your Site Might Be Fake Crawlers

Attackers spoof Googlebot to bypass security and scrape content at scale, with ChatGPT user-agent showing 16.7% fraud rate in recent analysis.

AI Girlfriend Offers Are Pulling $5K/Month With Email Sequences

The $9.5B AI companion market sees affiliates banking 40-50% lifetime commissions through strategic email funnels and psychological pre-sell pages.

B2B Buyers Now Use AI Search More Than Traditional SEO to Find Vendors

35% of B2B marketers rank GEO performance as their #1 success metric, surpassing brand awareness and traditional SEO as AI platforms drive 34% of qualified leads.

📅 Upcoming Event — UK SEO Summit 2026

August 26, 2026 | Holiday Inn London-Shepperton | 10 AM - 7 PM GMT+1

A full-day hybrid conference bringing together 1,000+ SEO professionals, 40 expert speakers, and 50+ companies for hands-on strategies across technical SEO, local search, and eCommerce optimization.

Organized by Skyrocket Marketers, the event offers both in-person networking in London and remote access worldwide, with early-bird tickets now available.

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🧠 QUICK QUIZ: Spot the AI Optimization Myth

Which Statement is FALSE?

1. AI Mode has 75M daily users but sends almost zero traffic to websites ​

2. Images need 30-pixel text height for AI to read them properly ​

3. Google is adding ads to Gemini in 2026 ​

4. Half of "Googlebot" traffic could be fake crawlers ​

Answer: #3 - Google publicly denied this despite advertiser reports

💡 3 HACKS FROM THIS WEEK

Verify Fake Googlebot in 3 Seconds
Run reverse DNS lookup on suspicious crawler IPs - real Googlebot always resolves to googlebot.com or google.com domains ​

Double Your AI Search Citations
Optimize images with 30px+ text height and high contrast - poor readability causes AI hallucinations that omit your content entirely ​

Stop Wasting Time on AI Traffic
Focus on title tags and content freshness that drive 95%+ of traffic instead of obsessing over 2-3% AI referrals

That's it for this week.

Remember: 75M people using AI Mode doesn't mean anything if it's not sending traffic. Focus on what moves the needle - your title tags, your content freshness, and the fundamentals everyone's ignoring while chasing AI trends.

Hit reply if you're testing any of these strategies. I read every response.

Catch you next week.
AffNinja Team