Clicks. Code. Coffee. Repeat.

ClickLife Monthly Roundup - Fall SEO Highlights

Let's jump into the top ten stories from search engine world making waves in September 2025:

Top 10 Search & Marketing Stories (September 2025)

Let's start with the top three featured stories of the month:
1. We asked many in the social community if they think yes or no: Is GEO Real? To get a clearer picture, we asked practitioners across the industry how they're approaching GEO today. Are these early experiments producing ROI, or are we still in the spray-and-pray and the your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine stage?
2. Does Buying Clicks Actually Improve Google Rankings? We put it to the test.
3. Is your site Ready for Agents - they are coming.
• OpenAI introduced Instant Checkout in ChatGPT to Buy In Chat The system runs on an open Agentic Commerce Protocol co-developed with the big Stripe. Merchants keep in control of pricing, fulfillment, returns, and the customer relationship, while ChatGPT handles the conversation and routes payments securely to the ecomm producer.
• OpenAI also rolled out ChatGPT Pulse Morning Briefing, your daily roundup of news and events that ChatGPT has access to.
• A timeline tracking of Google's Zero Click Timeline.
• Microsoft is readying a new Publisher Content Marketplace. Seemed everyone was quiet about this one, but it has some legs if Microsoft can make it work.
• More on How to Track Traffic from AI Overviews and Featured Snippets in GA4.
• Lots of talk last month about Bots vs. Your Website: Which Ones to Allow and Which to Block?.
• Our top traffic post of the month was our review of What is the Common Crawl Database, and Why should a Site Owner Care?
• Big story out of ChatGPT was a New Study out - How People Use ChatGPT.
• Our big review of AdSense Alternatives, and Discussion on WebmasterWorld.
• And finally, keep with the theme, our big review of Top Traffic & Logging Services Not Named Google Analytics.

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Thank you to Nick Stamoulis and the team at BrickMarketing for jumping on board. Brick Marketing also just released their new free E-Book Wear 'Em Down Marketing' Strategy Book

Top WebmasterWorld SEO Community Discussions Sept 2025

• Aug/Sept Google update thread. The big takeaway for SEOs and site owners: prioritize quality and user-first content.
• Webmasters think that Google escapes unscathed. Google users think the search remedies ruling is a total whiff
• Humorous thread pointing out that Google AIO violates almost all of Google content guidelines
• AdSense Sept: The monthly AdSense post on WebmasterWorld discusses continued user's frustration with Google AdSense's

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Pubcon News

We announced in our Facebook Group, that our next event will be next spring. We looked hard at doing Vegas this fall, but the situation with international travel makes that difficult. Numerous keynotes we talked to from UK, Canada, and Europe passed on invitations to speak (It floored me as we have never been turned down before).

Meanwhile Vegas is cheaper than ever for rooms (but not events). Things like F&B and AV have went up 30-45% in just the last 2 years (this on top of the post covid increases). Pre-Covid, we used to think in terms of event F&B/AV being $100 per person per day, and in 2024 that was $200, and now that is closer to $300 per day. That's just hard costs before you even consider overhead (insurance, speakers, etc). So the post-covid realities make the economics of it take precedence.

NewsRaid and PHD Software

Slowly bringing this back online. Have a look, and let us know if we can help. Also, put this public for the first time in 10 years...

Until next time, keep innovating and adapting - the only constant in this industry is change. See you soon.

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