ChatGPT's Effect on Google's Index

March 5th, 2025

Hey! I did a thing some of you might appreciate:

I made it so you can select if you want to receive a little email everyday (the default), or you can select to receive one email every Saturday that contains most of the stories from the week.

If you want to only receive a weekly email, here’s how to do it, it takes literally 2 clicks:

First, click this link in the footer:

Next, click this button that says “Weekly”

And that’s it! You’ll now hear from me once a week instead of daily. Please note that this is just for The SEO Newsletter, not Rank Theory, which is independent of this newsletter. 🙏🏻

A WORD FROM CONTENTBRIEFS.COM

Human-created Content Briefs Are A Great Way To Write Actually Good Content

Whether you give these to your team of writers or lazily paste them into Claude 3.7, our content briefs will make your life (and your content) much better (PS: I, Sean Markey, own ContentBriefs.com so def. check it out, it’s gooood)

SECTION

An Indexing Study of 16 Million Pages

Looking at how the indexing of content changed with the introduction of ChatGPT is super interesting to me.

IndexCheckr, a… an index checking tool? Here’s what their subheadline says:

The ultimate Bulk Website Index Checker tool for SEOs to check if URLs are indexed by Google.

They did a study of 16 million URLs that have been submitted to their tool and had some interesting takeaways—the most interesting to me was of the possible indexing reaction to the introduction of a massive amount of AI bullshit into Google’s index lol:

Here’s the chart they’re talking about:

It’s interesting to consider that the ‘22 (and later 2023) HCU event may have been a big correction to deal with the wave of “everyone can now produce content with the power of a content marketing team of 11 with absolutely zero talent and voice.”

It’s an interesting post with other data and takeaways you can dig into, if you’re into that.

For example, it was interesting to see that taking 33,000 unindexed pages and submitting them to an indexing tool only yielded an indexation rate of about 30%—that’s way lower than I would have guessed.

Anyway, if you’re a big nerd for SEO data + indexing, this is a post you’ll love.

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That’s it for today’s newsletter.

Thanks for reading and subscribing. Hopefully these little emails provide a bit of interesting education every now and then (and that it’s easy enough to skip the ones you’re not feeling IDK).

I continue to work on my next Rank Theory newsletter—the big deep dive.

Also apparently I misspelled one of the links to Ranks.com in yesterday’s newsletter. What a champ.

Here’s the (correctly spelled) link to sign up for Rank Theory.

Until tomorrow…

sean