Search Engine News — March 2023 Recap

Every month our team clips the search news that will change how you work, and drops the rest. Here is the March 2023 edition.

Top Moves This Period

The March 2023 cycle brought the usual mix of ranking updates, AI Overviews expansions, and quieter algorithm shifts. We only surface items that changed a real client site.

What to Change This Week

Nothing on this list is emergency work — but pushing it now will keep you ahead when the next quarter's changes stack.

• Re-check canonicals on paginated archives.
• Refresh JSON-LD Article authors for E-E-A-T.
• Audit AI-Overview candidate pages against the current answer format.

What We're Watching Next

Signal quality across AI surfaces is still the dominant story. Model-specific citation patterns are stabilizing enough to design for.

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Speakable JSON-LD — voice + AI answer surfaces

• Install WBP Omni SEO Pro on staging and run the scanner against one silo.
• Approve the first 10 low-risk fixes (missing alt text, canonical, breadcrumbs, schema).
• Roll one fix back on purpose to feel the safety net before you scale.
• Verify with Bot Tracker that GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot have re-crawled the fixed URLs.
• Promote the workflow to production and schedule the weekly per-silo run.
• Add /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt at the site root — they are read by ChatGPT and Claude.

Inside WBP Omni SEO Pro: Microsoft Clarity Integration

Why this matters for "Search Engine News — March 2023 Recap": Engagement signals now feed both classic SEO and AI ranking — without behavioural data, you're optimising blind.

Manual vs. audit-tool vs. agentic

Best practices worth stealing

• Ship the fix as a diff, not a screenshot — reviewers can approve in seconds.
• Log every applied change with user, timestamp and before/after payload.
• Cap batch sizes at 250 URLs so rollback stays surgical.
• Re-crawl within 24h of any apply so attribution stays clean.

Quick example scenarios

• A publisher with 8k evergreen posts turns on Microsoft Clarity Integration and clears orphan pages in a single approval batch.
• A SaaS site adds FAQ schema across product docs and starts appearing in AI Overviews within two crawl cycles.
• An agency runs a per-silo 90-minute audit weekly instead of a quarterly PDF audit.

Paired module: Contextual Internal Linking Engine

Suggests contextually relevant internal links from a live topic graph, respects silo boundaries and repairs orphan pages during publish. Manual internal linking scales to hundreds of posts, not thousands — and unmanaged linking flattens silos.

• Open Linking → Suggestions in the post sidebar
• Approve suggestions inside or across the current silo
• Enable Orphan Repair to auto-link newly published posts
• Cap link density per URL to avoid over-optimisation

Real-world examples

Three shapes this problem takes in the wild — and what the fix looked like when a team applied the GEO, AEO & AIO playbook end-to-end.

The workflow at a glance

Final thoughts

The playbook above is the same one WBP Omni SEO Pro runs every night on production sites — Detect, Explain, Fix, Approve, Apply, Track, Rollback. Ship the workflow once and geo, aeo & aio becomes a background process, not a fire drill.