#BlinkTank: Transparency, failure, and the first hump day of the year
It is the 7th of January, and we have officially hit the first hump day of the new year. I wish peace upon your calendar, that your heating is adequate, and that your energy levels remain as good as can be expected.
In terms of platform news, there is unsurprisingly little going on. The Shopify changelog hasn't been updated since the 20th of December, so things are still waking up.
A note on nuance
I have been thinking a lot about goals for the year ahead. To be honest, I have struggled with how we approach our content for a while now - for example, on LinkedIn the feed is often full of noise, shouting, and "do or die" advice that lacks any real context.
We have tried to play that game in the past, but it has never felt authentic to who we are. The reality is that the work we do is specialist; it creates specific challenges, and it isn't a magic fix for everyone.
So, this year, we want to try something different. We want to step back from the noise and focus on bringing some nuance back to the conversation. Expect a measured tone, a bit more calm, and a lot more honesty about the realities of operating in this space.
Why do Shopify SEO projects fail?
With that spirit of honesty in mind, we are kicking off the year with a topic that isn't exactly the standard "New Year, New You" hype. We are talking about failure.
Specifically, we want to explore why Shopify SEO projects go wrong. We just published a new piece on the Blink blog that dives into this. It is part of our drive for transparency - an attribute I'm sure we can all agree is often missing in the SEO world.
📝 https://blinkseo.co.uk/blogs/news/why-do-shopify-seo-projects-fail
A prompt for hiring agencies
January is typically the time when brands start reviewing their agency relationships.
LinkedIn used to be a great place to find partners, but now it is often a wall of noise. If you are a brand looking to hire a new agency this quarter, we have built a prompt to help you cut through that.
You will still get spammed, but it should make it significantly easier to filter out the noise and identify the credible partners.
📎 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sam-wright-17b6ab6_im-looking-for-an-agency-prompt-notion-activity-7413984384518656000-1JXa
Google December Core Update complete
The Google December 2025 Core Update looks to now be complete, as reported by Search Engine Land.
The impact across the stores we work with appears to be pretty mixed. For the most part, changes have been negligible. However, we are seeing some interesting signs regarding AI content.
We are noticing lower performance for collection pages relying on AI-generated text. Please treat this observation as strictly anecdotal for now.
What is notable here is that the content isn't necessarily "bad" or spammy - it is just average. It feels like the parameters are shrinking; Google is getting better at identifying low-effort content, even if it isn't actively broken.
📝 https://searchengineland.com/google-december-2025-core-update-rollout-is-now-complete-466362
Ads: The aggressive push for AI Max
We are a bit late to the table with this one, but in early December, Google published their "Google Ads Highlights 2025." A clear theme has emerged: the rollout of AI Max for Search and a new level of aggression in auto-generated assets.
For example, legacy "automatically created assets" are being upgraded into the AI Max framework. This gives Google’s generative models significantly more leeway to create video and image creatives when you don't supply them.
The risk here is simple: if you treat your product feed as a static "data dump" rather than a marketing asset, you are handing creative control over to a machine that has to guess. If the input data is weak, the AI-generated creative will be too.
It is now more important than ever to view your feed data as the primary source of truth for your brand's creative direction.
📎 https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/16756291?sjid=12854052083456230060-EU
Google sues SerpApi
Google has filed a lawsuit against SerpApi, a popular tool used by developers to scrape search engine results.
Google alleges that SerpApi is circumventing their security measures to resell copyrighted content and search data.
This is a significant development because so many third-party SEO tools rely on services like SerpApi to function. If Google wins this case, it could fundamentally change the economics of SEO data and how we track performance across the industry.
📝 https://searchengineland.com/google-sues-serpapi-466541
Planning an exit?
As a final note for this week, we have partnered with ecomswap.io.
If you are an e-commerce brand owner thinking about a full sale this year, getting an accurate valuation is the first step. You can get in touch with them directly for a confidential chat, or use their valuation calculator below to get a benchmark figure.
📎 https://ecomswap.io/business-valuation-calculator
See you next week, and all the best!
Sam