Google tracks social and video in Search Console, SEO is a career skill, AI citations backfire on brands, crawled pages go unindexed, and link obfuscation debunked.
Hi Marketers,
Welcome to the new issue of HighDegree*: Cutting Through the Noise in SEO & Digital Marketing
Google just expanded Search Console into territory it has never touched before, letting you track how your Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube content performs in Google Search. That’s a big shift worth paying attention to. Alongside that, this week has a lot of substance for anyone thinking longer-term about their career and their strategy. We’re covering SEO as a transferable skill set, a four-month AI citation experiment with some genuinely surprising findings, a clear guide to why pages get crawled but not indexed, and a measured look at link obfuscation myths.
Let’s jump in.
➞ Digital Marketing This Week
- Google Search Console adds platform properties to track Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube performance
- SEO is a marketer’s superpower, and most people are underselling it
- Self-promotional content in AI SEO can backfire in ways you might not expect
- Why are your pages stuck in “crawled, currently not indexed” and what to do about it
- Google’s John Mueller on first link priority and link obfuscation
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➞ Google Search Console Now Tracks Your Social and Video Content
Google Search Console has traditionally been a tool for website owners. On July 7, 2026, Google extended it to creators who publish primarily on social and video platforms, with no personal website required.
The new feature is called platform properties. You can connect your Instagram, TikTok, X, or YouTube account to Search Console and see exactly how that content performs in Google Search and Discover. Three reports are available once you set one up: a Performance report showing total clicks, impressions, and the specific queries and posts driving traffic; an Insights report giving a high-level view of recent traffic trends and how people discover your account; and an Achievements section that tracks growth milestones, like reaching a new clicks threshold over the last 28 days.
To add a platform property, open Search Console, click “Add property,” select your platform, and follow the verification steps. The rollout is happening gradually over the coming weeks, so the option may not be visible in your account yet.
Read the full report from developers.google.com ➞
Most marketers know how to use search data for their website. The next article makes the case that the skill set behind that data is worth a lot more than most people realize.
➞ SEO Is a Marketer’s Superpower and Most People Are Underselling It
Nicole Lee, Head of Marketing (North America) at Wati, started her career in SEO before moving into product marketing, content, and growth. In a piece for Women in Tech SEO, she argues that what made each transition work was not just the SEO knowledge itself, but the way SEO forces you to think.
Search data tells you what customers are actually trying to solve, not what they say in interviews or click on in surveys. It trains you to connect actions to business outcomes. It builds what Lee calls systems thinking: the ability to see how changing one thing affects other parts of a complex whole, a skill she argues transfers directly to growth, demand generation, and leadership. She also makes a practical point about career positioning.
Describing yourself as an “SEO specialist” puts you in a tactical category. Describing yourself as a marketer who uses search intelligence to drive decisions opens very different conversations. And once she stopped building reports around rankings and started reporting on organic vs. paid acquisition costs and attributed pipeline, she started getting invited into strategy rooms. The framing change was not cosmetic. It changed what she was asked to work on.
Read the full report from womenintechseo.com ➞
Speaking of search intelligence, AI systems are now part of the equation, and a four-month experiment from Ahrefs reveals some things about how they actually work that should change how you approach content strategy.
➞ Self-Promotional AI SEO Content Works, Until It Recommends Your Competitor
Mateusz Makosiewicz at Ahrefs ran a four-month experiment testing whether self-promotional content (product reviews, “best of” lists featuring your own brand) actually helps get you recommended by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot.
Results depended heavily on existing brand awareness. For Ahrefs Evolve, a newer conference, 82% of new brand mentions in previously empty AI response slots came from answers that cited one of their self-promotional pages. For the more established Ahrefs Brand Radar tool, only 6% of new mentions came from their own pages. The rest came from third-party sources.
The most striking finding: in 43% of cases where AI cited a conference-promoting page, it still did not recommend Ahrefs Evolve, recommending a competing event from the same list instead. Getting cited and getting recommended are two different things. Citations also proved temporary, with most pages flickering in and out rather than sticking. The tactic works best when your brand has a genuine awareness gap and clearly belongs in the category. For established brands, it’s unlikely to move much, and can end up promoting competitors more than yourself.
Read the full report from ahrefs.com ➞
If AI content visibility feels abstract, the next article is much more concrete, and it’s one of the most common questions I hear from site owners right now.
➞ Why Your Pages Are Crawled but Not Indexed — and How to Fix It
Marie Haynes, an SEO consultant since 2008, published a breakdown of one of the most common indexing headaches site owners face right now: pages that Google has crawled but chosen not to index, showing up in the “Crawled, currently not indexed” report inside Search Console.
Based on what Google shared at the Search Central event in Toronto and in a recent Search Off the Record podcast with John Mueller and Martin Splitt: Google crawls your page, decides it is not useful enough to index, and moves on. The most common reason is commodity content, pages that cover the same ground as thousands of others without original insights, first-hand experience, or anything a reader cannot get from AI Overviews alone. Technical issues can also cause it, but are much rarer.
Haynes outlines how she assesses these pages: check what’s already ranking for the same queries, run an AI-assisted commodity check, and ask honestly whether your version adds something a reader cannot get elsewhere. Her conclusion is blunt: recovery from large-scale crawled-not-indexed problems is difficult. It requires real effort to make content genuinely different, not just well-written. She has also built two free tools at tools.mariehaynes.com to help filter and audit affected pages.
Read the full report from mariehaynes.com ➞
The indexing question is about whether Google trusts your pages at all. The final story is about a much more specific question, one some site owners are overthinking in ways that can actually hurt them.
➞ Google’s Mueller on First Link Priority and Link Obfuscation
A question surfaced on Reddit’s r/bigseo community: a page links to the same URL twice, once from a navigation button labeled “Services” near the top, and again from an FAQ section with more descriptive anchor text. Which one does Google count? And can you hide the first link so only the second, better-worded one gets read?
Google Search Advocate John Mueller responded. The takeaway is direct. First, Google has never formally defined “first link priority” as a fixed rule. Whatever Google’s system does today is not necessarily what it will do tomorrow. Second, hiding a link by removing it from standard HTML and routing it through JavaScript does not make it invisible to Google, but it does make it structurally different. A URL inside a proper link tag tells Google where it goes. A URL parked in a script element is not technically a link. That distinction matters.
The bottom line: building your internal linking strategy around obfuscation tricks is unreliable. You’re trying to game a behavior Google hasn’t defined, that can change at any time. Clean internal links with clear anchor text are the more dependable path.
Read the full report from searchenginejournal.com ➞
➞ From Google
Everything from Google search this week —
→ Google Images Gets a Pinterest-Like Redesign Focused on Discovery (techcrunch.com)
→ Google AI Overviews Will Let You Create Images (searchengineland.com)
→ Google Search Ranking Volatility Around July 11 (seroundtable.com)
→ Google Reaffirms Include Canonical on Canonical Page Itself (seroundtable.com) → Google Business Profiles New Collected Info (Visuals) (seroundtable.com)
→ Google Faces Another AI Training Lawsuit from Major Publishers (techcrunch.com)
→ Google’s Marvin Clarifies AI Search and Qualified Future Conversions (searchenginejournal.com)
→ Google Tests Sticky Sponsored Results With Gray Curved Borders (seroundtable.com)
→ Google Ads Previews for Assets, Text Customizations & Final URL Expansion (seroundtable.com)
→ Google Ads Conversion Tracking Status Updates (seroundtable.com)
→ Google Merchant Center AI Performance Insights for AI Mode & AI Overviews (seroundtable.com)
→ Google’s New Merchant Listing Structured Data Improves SEO (searchenginejournal.com)
→ Google Search Broke All Usage Records (seroundtable.com)
→ Google Will Now Disclose Which Ads Are Made With AI (techcrunch.com)
→ Google Clarifies Canonicalization Fixes Can Take Up to Two Weeks (searchengineland.com)
➞ AI + Social
Find out what’s happening in the social media and artificial intelligence world —
→ Altman Warns of “Hiccups” With New Flagship GPT-5.6 Sol (axios.com) – Sam Altman flagged potential issues with the upcoming GPT-5.6 Sol model ahead of its broader rollout.
→ OpenAI Set to Launch Most Capable GPT Model After Delayed Rollout (reuters.com) – After delays, OpenAI received approval to begin the broader rollout of its most advanced model yet.
→ ChatGPT Access Tied to 9% Drop in Traditional Search (searchenginejournal.com) – New research links ChatGPT usage directly to a measurable decline in traditional search engine queries.
→ OpenAI ChatGPT Ads Could Miss $100 Billion Revenue Target (searchengineland.com) – Reports suggest ChatGPT’s ad business may fall short of the ambitious revenue projections set for the platform.
→ ChatGPT Ads Manager Gains Attributed Sales Value and Sales ROAS (seroundtable.com) – The ChatGPT Ads dashboard now includes attributed sales value and return on ad spend metrics for advertisers.
→ Spotify Expands AI Push With a ChatGPT-Like Music Assistant (techcrunch.com) – Spotify is building a conversational AI music assistant aimed at deeper user engagement within the platform.
→ Meta Removes Controversial AI Feature on Instagram After Backlash (techcrunch.com) – Meta pulled a new AI feature from Instagram following significant user pushback over privacy and consent concerns.
→ Meta Now Lets Anyone Use Your Instagram Photos in AI Images Unless You Opt Out (wired.com) – Meta has enabled opt-out (rather than opt-in) defaults for using public Instagram images in AI-generated content.
→ TikTok Targets AI-Generated Spam Accounts in High-Risk Topics (searchenginejournal.com) – TikTok announced a crackdown on AI-generated spam accounts operating in sensitive topic areas on the platform.
→ Instagram Reels Adds More AI Translations (socialmediatoday.com) – Instagram is expanding AI-powered translation for Reels, making short-form video content accessible in more languages.
→ LinkedIn Shares Tips on Effective Posting (socialmediatoday.com) – LinkedIn published guidance on what types of posts perform best for reach and professional engagement.
→ Grok Build Tool Was Uploading Users’ Entire Codebase to Cloud Storage (theverge.com) – SpaceXAI’s Grok programming tool was found to be uploading full user codebases to cloud storage without clear disclosure.
➞ Worth Reading
These are the articles that will help you refine your marketing knowledge —
→ Hack: Google AI Performance Reports for Platform Properties (seroundtable.com) → Reddit’s AI Translations Drop Heavily in Google and AI Search (gsqi.com)
→ How to Win SEO Budget Conversations With Your CFO (searchengineland.com)
→ AI Search Optimization (GEO, AEO): What It Is, Common Errors & How to Optimize (youtube.com)
→ Original Data as a GEO Moat: Why Proprietary Research Earns AI Citations (similarweb.com)
→ What Can We Learn from ChatGPT Search Sources? (chrisgreenseo.substack.com) → Google: Cloudflare Content Signals — Robots.txt Directive Has No Effect (seroundtable.com)
➞ What This All Means for Your Strategy
Search is expanding, AI is in the middle of it, and generic content is getting punished for it.
Google now sees your social accounts as search properties, so treat them accordingly. The Ahrefs AI citation experiment showed that getting cited does not guarantee getting recommended, which means quality of content still determines outcomes. And the crawled-not-indexed breakdown is a clear signal that Google is raising the bar on what earns a place in its index.
Be specific, bring experience, and build content that cannot be replicated by anyone with a prompt.
Until next week,
Nishat from HighDegree* Marketing
P.S. Have a question about implementing these strategies? Hit reply – we read every email and often feature reader questions in future issues.
➞ Who is Nishat Shahriyar?
I’ve been a Digital Marketing Strategist since 2007. Today I’m the Product Marketing Lead at Fluent Forms (a WordPress form and lead-generation plugin used by 700K people), FluentPlayer (a WordPress Video Player Plugin) and Ninja Tables (a WordPress table builder plugin used by 80K people). Before that, I led marketing at Fluent Support (a WordPress helpdesk plugin used by 10K people).
Connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on X/Twitter at @rednishat for SEO & Marketing updates.