🐹 Hamsterdam Part 83: Weekly SEO & AI News Recap (1/27 to 2/2, 2025)
By Ethan Lazuk
Last updated:
A weekly look-back at SEO & AI news, tips, and other content shared on social media & beyond.
Opening notes, thoughts, and musings:
- Welcome to another new week of Hamsterdam! 🐹
- I appreciate you being here, and look forward to sharing the week’s news! 🙌
- I wrote a new blog post this week in Hamsterdam Research: How users use LLMs vs. Search for informational tasks.
- Enjoy the Pro Bowl games, just down the street from my apartment!
If you’re in a rush, hop down to the news portion. 📰
Or continue reading for two vocabulary lessons plus an introduction.
And we’re off …
🧑💻 Marketing word of the week: “Referral Traffic”
Those backlinks and AI chatbot mentions matter when it comes to referral traffic.
Referral traffic is traffic to your website that comes via external website links. It’s especially important to monitor to gauge the value of your backlinks (beyond PageRank) and your traffic from AI chatbots.
You can track referral traffic in GA4. I recommend setting up a custom view so you can see traffic from Gemini, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and Claude.
Referral traffic isn’t generally the focus of SEO monitoring — that’s organic traffic, like you’ll see reported for AIO visibility in GSC. However, in a world where visibility matters more thank rankings, given all the surfaces your content can surface in organically, it’s equally as important to monitor and understand referral traffic as it is organic.
Note that some referral traffic will show up as direct traffic. Consider that when you do your reporting.
🤖 AI word of the week: “RAG”
RAG stands for retrieval augmented generation, an advanced field in natural language processing (NLP) that combines information retrieval with text generation.
LLMs are limited to their training data. RAG allows for the retrieval of precise and/or fresh information to help prompt the LLM for a more accurate or timely response.
RAG underpins a lot of AI chatbots today (see the introduction below), so it’s important to understand how it works for modern SEO.
In a nutshell, the user inputs a query or prompt, the retrieval module searches an external knowledge base, like the internet or a corpus of internal documents, to retrieve documents or passages relevant to the prompt, then the retrieved information is fed into the generative model, along with the original prompt, to generate a response.
😄 Introduction to week 83: GraphRAG
I’ve been really into retrieval augmented generation lately, or RAG for short.
Not only does RAG underly how AIOs, Copilot, ChatGPT Search, or Perplexity work, but the retrieval aspect is helpful to learn about to capture the basics of information retrieval and understand how search engines work.
My latest explorations have been into GraphRAG, or the combination of baseline RAG with a knowledge graph.
It seems quite plausible that GraphRAG is being used in some form at Google given the company’s emphasis on its knowledge graph since 2012.
If you’re curious about GraphRAG, I put a video in the Old Stuff section below that gives a nice summarization.
But at a minimum, if you’re looking to learn how Search works or understand the technology behind today’s AI chatbots, you can’t go wrong learning about RAG in all its iterations.
Thank you for supporting Hamsterdam and the cause of SEO & AI learning. 🙏
Enjoy the vibes:
Missed last week? Don’t worry, I got you! Read Part 82 to catch up.
🌟 Other great sources of weekly SEO news:
- The SEO Weekly – Garret Sussman, iPullRank
- SEOFOMO – Aleyda Solis
- Weekly Video Recaps – Barry Schwartz, SER
- Weekly SEO News YouTube channel – Olga Zarr, Seosly
- Niche Surfer – Yoyao Hsueh
Time for our weekly review of SEO social posts, articles, & more …
Now, let’s step inside the white flags of Hamsterdam …
⏩ Jump to a section:
- News, Google updates, & SERP tests
- SEO tips & tidbits
- Fundamentals & resources
- Articles, videos & case studies
- Local SEO
- Technical SEO
- Content marketing
- Local SEO
- Data analysis & reporting
- AI, LLMS, & machine learning
- Miscellaneous & general posts
- Older stuff that’s good!
Or keep scrolling to see it all. ⏬
📰 SEO news, Google updates, SERP tests & notable posts
Notable updates or news related to Google Search or related SEO topics.
🍟 SEO tips & tidbits
Actionable tips, cool tidbits, and other snackable findings and observations that can be teaching moments.
Essential information, concepts, or resources to learn about SEO or AI.
Longer-form content pieces shared on social, in newsletters, and elsewhere.
🧑💻 Technical SEO
Everything from basics to advanced moves (and also tools).
✍️ Content marketing
From what is helpful content to user journeys and beyond.
📍 Local SEO
From Google Business Profiles or reviews and more!
📊 Data analysis & reporting
Showing that what you’re doing is helping.
🤖 AI, machine learning, & LLMs
News related to models, papers, and companies.
🤔 General marketing & miscellaneous
This is for great content that isn’t necessarily SEO or marketing-specific. PPC, PR, dev, design, and social friends, check it out!
💎 Older stuff that’s good!
Not everything I find worth sharing is new as of this week, so these are gems I came across published in the past.
Great job making it to the end. You rock! 🪨
🤝 Want help with your SEO strategy?
I’m an independent SEO consultant focusing on custom audits and holistic strategies for brands. Don’t hesitate to reach out, or visit my about page for more information.
Let’s connect!
Hit me up anytime via text or call at 813-557-9745 or on social or email:
Cheers! ✌️
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