Charles Floate

The LEAD search engineer at Google just dropped a brand new blog post that confirms something most SEOs have never even heard of...

Googlebot only fetches the first 2MB of your pages HTML = Everything after that cutoff doesn't exist to Google!!!

Not fetched, not rendered, not indexed.

And the Web Rendering Service is completely STATELESS - Meaning it clears local storage and session data between every request, so if your content depends on cookies or session state to render, Google can't see it.

External CSS and JS files are fetched SEPARATELY with their own 2MB limit per file, and PDFs get a 64mb limit.

So the structure and order of your code literally matters! And is why some CMSs are so much better out the box than others... Make sure you put your meta tags, title, canonicals, and structured data as HIGH as possible in the document. If they're below the 2MB cutoff, Google doesn't know they exist.

Most OnPage SEO guides never take any of this into account, but most OnPage is surface-level.

The real edge is understanding the infrastructure your content passes through before Google even evaluates it.

ANOTHER BIG UPDATE 🚨

We now own and moderate r/LinkBuilding.

We’re rebuilding it into the best place on Reddit for:
- Real link building case studies.
- Digital PR & outreach.
- Automations & AI SEO.
- Networking with people who actually do this on a daily basis!

We’ll also be running AMAs with industry leaders, breakdowns of campaigns, and link/credit giveaways there over time.

All quietly powered by PressWhizz.

If you’re serious about links and the future of the industry, join using the link in the next comments down below 👇

SEMRush stock has been on a consistent decline all year, even with it's pivot to AI and enterprise, and it's a damning tale... One that I am considering shorting 😅

Wall Street once loved SEMRush! It was a nimble SaaS riding the SEO boom while big tech focused on their ad monopolies... Fast forward to 2025 and the stock is down over 50% in six months, guidance was slashed, and is now an injured unicorn simmering on the edge of a sub-billion dollar valuation.

This is all because of a handful of factors:
- There core SMB and freelancer base, the lifeblood of SEMRush’s early growth, is bleeding out, and that's an industry wide problem.
- The enterprise pivot? Still too early, too expensive, and not compelling enough. Large marketing teams already sit inside Adobe, Salesforce, or HubSpot ecosystems...
- They bloated out the platform with too many mediocre tools, becoming a jack of all trades, master of none.


Meanwhile, the macro reality for search is brutal:
CTR from organic is collapsing as Google continues rolling out AI Overviews, AI Mode and pushing zero click experiences whilst publicly saying they will actually increase clicks somehow.

Even if SEMRush builds the best tools in the world, they’re chasing a shrinking TAM. And the market’s noticed.

CAC is rising, LTV is dropping, and EPS just flipped negative (-$0.04 when investors expected positive).

Unless SEMRush can reinvent itself as a data infrastructure layer powering next gen marketing agents, not just another SEO SaaS, this decline isn’t cyclical, it’s existential.

AI hasn’t just disrupted search. It’s rewritten the entire value chain of how marketing intelligence is created, analyzed, and acted on.

And if SEMRush can’t evolve faster than the algorithms it once measured… Then this chart might not be a dip, it might be a preview. 📉