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SEO + GEO

The Ghost Citation: When AI Knows Your Brand Better Than It Knows Your Content

The Foundation team ran 20 buyer questions across six AI surfaces for n8n and found the brand appeared in 91 of 96 unbranded answers while owning just 15.7 percent of citation share. Reddit threads earned 95 citations against 33 for the n8n blog, and one enterprise thread with 177 upvotes kept resurfacing across prompts, platforms and both test rounds. ChatGPT leaned on n8n docs for technical questions while Google AI Mode and Gemini leaned on outside sources, and no single n8n comparison page became the consistent reference for n8n versus Zapier queries.

How Much Does AEO Cost? Pricing by Agency, Tools and Software

The HubSpot team breaks down what answer engine optimization actually costs, from self-serve monitoring near $30 a month to full-service agency programs above $15,000 a month.

• HubSpot AEO costs $50 a month and covers three engines, or comes included with Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise.

• Profound starts at $99 a month for ChatGPT-only tracking, with multi-engine coverage from $399 a month on Growth.

• Peec AI starts from $95 a month for self-serve visibility tracking.

• Otterly.ai self-serve tiers run from about $29 a month on Lite to roughly $489 a month on Premium.

• Ahrefs Brand Radar costs $199 a month per answer engine.

• Entry agency plans start near $249 a month at NetWebMedia, while Nugentive's done-for-you plan runs $1,497 a month for schema and three to five pages.

• Ongoing agency programs typically run $9,000 to $15,000 a month, with RevenueZen's top package at $15,000.

• Single sprints start near $3,000 at Digital Elevator, with top engagements above $24,000.

• AI referral traffic roughly tripled from January to December 2025 yet still sits below 2 percent of referral traffic in the cited dataset.

My Take: If you’re in the AEO/GEO space with a tool or agency, this is interesting.

Google Ads Data Shows Query Length Shift Post-AI Mode

Jason Tabeling reports that longer queries have taken over Google Ads impressions and conversions through August 2026. One and two word queries fell from 42% to 24% of impressions while three and four word queries rose from 33% to 48%. Conversion share moved the same way, with one and two word queries dropping from 62% to 52% and three and four word queries jumping from 20% to 46%. Five and six word queries tripled from 3% to 9% of conversions and queries of seven or more words quadrupled from 1% to 4%. He recommends shifting budget toward long tail coverage, matching ad copy to the specific language searchers use and auditing performance by query length.

What Wikipedia Reveals About AI Overviews and Web Traffic

Matt G. Southern breaks down a University of Washington working paper that estimates default AI Overviews cut monthly search referrals to English Wikipedia by about 5%. The authors compared 499,927 English-German and 530,873 English-French article pairs around the May 2024 US rollout and calculate roughly 100.27 million fewer search referrals per month, or about 1.20 billion per year. Google disputes the metric because Wikimedia data groups all external search engines together. Matt notes Wikimedia separately reported an 8% drop in overall human pageviews and says nearly 90% of Wikipedia visitors have traditionally come from Google search.

When SEO Best Practices Become SEO Dogma

Stephanie Wallace explains how familiar SEO checklist items turn into dogma once the original reasoning gets lost. She says a slow page deserves engineering time when it hurts behavior on a high value template, not when a low traffic resource misses a benchmark by a fraction of a second. She walks through eight questions for prioritizing work, including what evidence calls for change, what problem a fix solves, how much of the site it touches and what happens if nothing changes. She warns against competitive cloning where every result starts to look the same and says visibility now depends on the broader footprint across publications, communities, video and AI answers.

Blogging Statistics 2026: What 1,042 Content Marketers Told Us About What Works

Andy Crestodina breaks down Orbit Media's 2026 survey of 1,042 content marketers and finds strong results at an all-time low.

• 13.9% report strong results, an all-time low and six points below the prior 12-year low.

• 18% say they do not know if their blog delivers results, up from a 9% to 14% range over the past decade.

• Average post length is 1,312 words, down from a peak of 1,427 words in 2023.

• Average time to write a post is 3 hours and 20 minutes, down from a peak of 4 hours and 10 minutes in 2022.

• 92.4% now use AI for blogging, yet AI users and non-users report strong results at the same 14% rate.

• Influencer collaboration beats the benchmark by 2.6 times yet only 7% do it, down from 25% in 2017.

• Publishing original research lifts the odds of strong results by 50%, yet fewer marketers do it than in prior years.

• Marketers using six or more of the eight effective strategies report strong results at 39% versus the 14% benchmark.

source: orbitmedia.com

Google Ranking Factors Expert Survey 2026

Cyrus Shepard and Dawn Shepard break down ratings from 131 SEOs across more than 100 potential ranking factors, totaling 13,665 data points.

• 57.1% named relevance as a top three factor, with search intent match rated the single strongest signal.

• 54.8% named backlinks, with links from trusted and topically relevant pages rated highest.

• 47.6% named content quality, led by original research and first-party data.

• 36.5% named authority and trust in the site, creator or brand.

• 29.4% named behavior and click signals, with satisfaction and task completion rated highest.

• 27.0% named brand signals such as branded search volume and online reputation.

• 19.8% named user satisfaction as the ultimate outcome.

• 17.5% named technical SEO health around crawling and indexing as the foundation.

• 14.3% named topical authority and 11.1% named internal links.

ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude Lead AI Visibility, Is It Time To Stop Tracking Perplexity?

Greg Jarboe pushes back on calls to drop Perplexity from AI visibility trackers and makes the case for weighting instead of removing. He cites StatCounter showing Perplexity falling from 7.91% to 4.31% of AI chatbot referral share from June to August 2026 while Gemini rose from 7.94% to 10.9%. He cites Similarweb May 2026 shares of 53.9% for ChatGPT, 27.9% for Gemini, 9.2% for Claude and 1.3% each for Perplexity and Copilot. He notes AI Overviews reach more than 2.5 billion users per month and appeared in 43% of US Google searches by May 2026, up from 15% a year earlier. He proposes three tiers with ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude tracked separately, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode as its own search discovery layer and Perplexity monitored with lower weight.

My Take: In Floyi, we track AI overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Gemini. I never gave serious consideration to Perplexity because it’s never held a big enough share among most consumers. The people who talk about Perplexity the most are the ones reading this right now. But our AIRS Analyzer tool does fetch AI responses from 9 different AI engines for one-off checks. That’s still worth it. Just not for tracking regularly.

Almost 100% of People Also Ask Results Are Answered by Google AI Overviews

Barry Schwartz reports that nearly all Google People Also Ask answers are now AI Overviews, up from about 12% fourteen months ago. Allintitle's Also Ask Miner data puts the share at 100% starting in August 2026. A separate AlsoAsked sample of 19.2M English queries found 97% of PAA answers were AI Overviews in the first week of September, up from 86% in August. Mark Williams-Cook says the trend points to 100% shortly.

source: seroundtable.com

Google Says Old Low-Value Pages May Affect Site Recovery

Matt G. Southern reports that John Mueller says old low-value programmatic pages can still color how Google judges a site after changes go live. The comment came in a Bluesky reply about a site spinning pages from combinations of domain names, technologies and attributes, where Mueller said systems have possibly lost faith in the site providing good value. He says fixing it takes time and significant effort to show value again, and he points to spam and core update recovery work as a rough comparison for effort and timing. He names no ranking system, threshold or timeline, and Matt notes the reply changes no policy since scaled content abuse already centers on purpose and value, not scale alone.

My Take: I treat cleanup and trust rebuilding as two separate jobs. Deleting thin pages stops the bleed but it doesn't rebuild confidence on its own. I would prune first, then ship a run of genuinely useful pages and give it months before judging.

Threads Search and Indexing: How Meta's Platform Feeds Google

Tamara Biljman shows how public Threads posts get indexed in Google and keep earning search visits long after they leave the feed. She reports Threads drove 85.2 percent of Sendible's organic social engagement in July 2026, ahead of Facebook at 6.5 percent and TikTok at 4.1 percent, and she ties indexing odds to reply depth in the same way Google favors engaged Reddit threads. She walks through site searches like site:threads.net with a brand name or handle plus URL Inspection checks, and she notes Threads still is not a supported Platform Property in Search Console.

Before Scaling Programmatic SEO, Prove the Pattern Works

Bharath Ravishankar explains how to test a programmatic page pattern on a small pilot before building thousands of URLs. He says to define what changes per URL, from workflows and setup steps to inventory and pricing, then sketch about 10 candidates and cut the project if most pages repeat the same copy with swapped fields. He recommends a representative pilot that mixes large, mid-sized and smaller markets plus strong and thin data cases, with a recorded primary query and intended action for each page. He lays out four checks before scaling: consistent discovery and indexing, queries matching intent, traits shared by winners and whether visits drive trials, purchases or inquiries. If only part of the pilot works, he says scale the proven slice, fix or hold the rest and expand in stages rather than launching the full library at once.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Search Console indexing report lost a chunk of June data across properties, with charts showing a gap where June history should sit. John Mueller says it traces to a June delay with no backfill for indexing data. Do not rebuild based on the gap and check again after the team confirms.

• Google brought post view counts back to Business Profiles for posts from the past 18 months, combining Search and Maps views on each post card. The metric returns more than three years after the February 2023 retirement. It is dashboard only for now with no API support, so expect manual checks until documentation catches up.

• Google says old position 1 to 10 mapping no longer works for modern results with AI Overviews, featured snippets, People Also Ask and other blocks. John Mueller says Search Console tracks these placements as blocks and does not split them out in the Gen-AI performance report.

• Interactive character counter inside AI Overviews that answers character counter queries directly in the result, a change spotted by Damir B. Utility sites like wordcounter.net face the same zero-click squeeze seen with weather, dictionary and calculator answers. Wait until they add a Rewrite button

• Apple clarified Applebot-Extended rules do not affect Search with a new help doc line stating those site rules are not considered in ranking for Search. The split mirrors Googlebot-Extended and lands ahead of iOS 27 and the new Siri push, so AI training blocks stay separate from search crawling.

AI

Introducing Muse: The World’s First Personal AI Agent Built for Everyone

Meta introduced Muse, a personal AI agent that can send email, book travel, fill out forms, and negotiate on a user’s behalf. It runs in a dedicated cloud computer called Muse Secure VM, where Meta says credentials stay in secure storage and a separate Sentinel agent must approve internet actions. Users choose each connected app’s permissions, approve sensitive actions, and can revoke access or opt out of training their interactions.

source: fb.com

Introducing ChatGPT Images 2.5

OpenAI released ChatGPT Images 2.5 with sharper detail, faster generation, and more precise edits across repeated prompts. The company says generation latency is up to 50% lower than Images 2.0, while the model better preserves subjects in reference photos and keeps earlier changes intact. ChatGPT also adds Sketch, templates, image comments, and prompt sharing. Developers get GPT-Image-2.5 Flare for most API work and GPT-Image-2.5 Sunburst for more detailed creative workflows.

My Take: I’ve already added GPT-Image-2.5 Flare and Sunburst to Floyi for articles. They’re faster and have better quality output too compared to GPT-Image 2.

source: openai.com

Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026

Anthropic reports disrupting malicious Claude use between December 2025 and August 2026 across seven harm areas, including cyber operations, influence campaigns, surveillance, fraud, biological misuse, weapons development, and illicit distillation. It says most cited cyber operations used AI to execute or orchestrate reconnaissance, exploitation, and data exfiltration through multi-agent systems, rather than simply assist humans in a chat. One influence network generated 8,913 articles in roughly 20 languages, though Anthropic found little evidence that the content reached audiences beyond its own sites and social accounts.

AI Chatbots Talked 57.5% of AI Users out of Buying

Carlos Silva reports on an Exploding Topics survey of more than 2,300 US consumers on how AI chatbots shape product research and purchase decisions.

• 57.5% of AI users have decided not to buy something based on chatbot information.

• 41% of all consumers have bought based on an AI chatbot recommendation, rising to 57.51 percent among AI users.

• 80.45% of people who use AI multiple times per week have bought an AI-recommended product.

• 59.27% of AI users have found a new brand or product through a chatbot.

• 70.62% of AI users believe chatbots can recommend the best brands and products.

• 65.01% of AI users have at least partly replaced product-related Google searches with AI chatbots.

• 19.43% of consumers would pick an AI chatbot if limited to one product research tool.

• 41.63% dislike ads in AI chatbots, and 66.05 percent of that group say ads make them doubt response integrity.

• 87.41% of people who use AI for company research would at least sometimes consult it before hiring a local business.

Google DeepMind Develops New AI Search Ranking Model

Roger Montti breaks down Google DeepMind research on Autoregressive Ranking, a single LLM system meant to replace two-stage retrieval. He explains current systems pair fast Dual Encoders for candidate pickup with heavier Cross Encoders for final ranking. The proposed method uses a training loss called SToICaL that weights higher ranked documents more and steers token choices toward them. In WordNet tests the new system matched the Cross Encoder and beat the Dual Encoder while cutting cases where irrelevant documents outranked relevant ones.

Harvard Found the Public Has Little Objection to AI Taking Search Marketers’ Jobs

Greg Jarboe breaks down Harvard Business School research that scored 940 occupations on moral objection to AI automation, with search marketing strategists at 2.31 out of 7. He notes only file clerks scored lower in the charted set, while clergy sat at 5.91 and childcare workers at 5.86 across 2,357 respondents. He adds that public support for automation jumps from about 30% to 58% when people imagine AI that outperforms humans at lower cost, with strong resistance holding for only about 12% of jobs. He ties it to companion work on competence beliefs plus a Procter and Gamble test where AI-assisted teams produced top 10% ideas at three times the rate, then recommends named human bylines, published proof of outcomes and full automation reserved for repetitive no-joy tasks.

AI Ripples

• OpenAI opened a public beta of its Agents API that runs the Codex harness as a managed service, handling session orchestration, context compaction and recovery while developers supply tools and pick the execution environment. There is no added API fee beyond model tokens, tool use and hosted container rates, and teams can run code in OpenAI-hosted sandboxes or connect their own infrastructure or partner environments.

• OpenAI brought full-duplex GPT-Live-1 voice to the API at $0.05 per minute for the voice layer, with backend model and tool use billed separately. The model listens and speaks at the same time while delegating deeper reasoning to a backend of your choice, and OpenAI reports 30 percentage points better Full Duplex Bench performance than GPT-Realtime-2.1 with turn-taking latency down to 0.798 seconds.

LINK BUILDING + DIGITAL PR

9 Successful Media Pitch Examples for Every Type of Campaign

Vince Nero breaks down nine media pitch templates built from thousands of successful outreach emails, covering survey studies, proprietary data, city indexes, reactive and proactive commentary, launches, reviews, and roundups. He says every pitch needs a clear why now, enough material for the journalist to write without a followup and a direct ask for coverage, since 92 percent of pitches that land include one. He also warns against forced personalization, noting only about 25 percent of winning pitches reference past coverage, and he recommends matching the format to the outlet with full releases for local and trade outlets and just the stat plus a link for national press.

SOCIAL MEDIA

YouTube Gives You Feedback on Shorts Before Publishing

Matt G. Southern reports that YouTube is expanding Get Feedback to US creators over 18 on the main mobile app. The tool sits on the Add Details screen and reviews the hook, pacing and visuals, then suggests improvements without editing the video. Matt notes CEO Neal Mohan first mentioned it on August 24 as an unlisted draft flow, while the September 9 update describes a button inside upload. He says YouTube does not claim the suggestions predict views and they do not replace retention and engagement data. A related VibeCheck test runs through YouTube Labs with similar hook and pacing checks.

I Tested and Tracked 60 LinkedIn Posts Ranking in Google and AI Overviews. Here Is What the Top Performers Have in Common.

Steve Toth tracked 60 LinkedIn posts ranking in positions 1 to 3 for SEO keywords with 500-plus monthly searches and breaks down what separates posts that stick from posts that churn.

• 37% of posts ranking on Aug 17 were gone by Aug 23, with 20 of 54 dropping in one week.

• Only 11 of 40 current posts also ranked a month ago, with 3 at the 3-month mark and 2 at the 6-month mark.

• Age-adjusted hold rates were 31% at one month, 13% at three months and 12% at six months.

• 6 of 11 posts that held for a month or more have at least one referring domain, against 1 of 29 newcomers.

• 10 posts rank for 25 or more keywords each, with Ryan Stewart's law firm post at about 128 and Connor Gillivan's books post at 65.

• Video posts held at 93% with 13 of 14 surviving the week, against 60% for image posts and 50% for text-only posts.

• LinkedIn rewrote title tags with AI on 40 of 60 posts, with 5 hybrids and 15 fully stock titles.

• The median ranking post runs 167 words, with word count correlation at -0.02 for staying power.

How YouTube's Algorithm Can Find Your Customers for Free

Michael Stelzner breaks down Derral Eves's YouTube system for letting the algorithm deliver customers without paid distribution, built around targeting viewers instead of buyers.

• An office furniture seller drove over $20 million in sales with zero ad spend after building on YouTube recommendations and live streams.

• About 75 to 80 percent of that seller's views came from YouTube recommendations alone.

• A blood pressure foods video reached 1.7 million views after targeting viewers aged 45 to 65 and older.

• A followup on blood pressure mistakes hit 865,000 views in under two weeks.

• The Dry Creek Wrangler School channel grew to 1.6 million subscribers with unedited campfire videos.

• Its top video on getting life together passed 8.5 million views and drew 18,000 comments.

• A creator stuck near 10,000 subscribers for 17 years hit 1.5 million views on his first video after switching to a conversational delivery.

• Pat Flynn's Deep Pocket Monsters events now draw 9,500 attendees after a year spent finding an authentic voice.

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

Dashboards Available in Google Analytics

Barry Schwartz reports that Google Analytics now offers custom dashboards for single-page KPI views. He says builders get a grid canvas with drag-and-drop dimensions and metrics plus direct publishing to left navigation without going through the library. He lists six visual types covering scorecards, tables, line charts, bar charts, donut charts, and funnels for tracking steps and drop-off points. He notes the pitch is fewer jumps between reports to see core numbers in one place.

source: seroundtable.com

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg Put on 'Leave of Absence'

Samantha Cole reports that Automattic's board put WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg on paid leave from his CEO role and named CFO Mark Davies interim CEO. Mullenweg will remain on the board.

Update a couple of days later: Mullenweg told staff he is back in control, though Automattic hasn't confirmed the reversal. The interim CEO's Slack account was reportedly deactivated as the story develops.

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SEO + GEO

Google’s August 2026 Spam Update – Scaled Content Abuse, AI Content, Programmatic Content, Thin Affiliates, And More [Case Studies]

Glenn Gabe shows what Google’s August spam update hit across four anonymized sites. The August 18 rollout finished a little over two days later, yet one ultra-YMYL site lost rankings for more than 200,000 queries after combining programmatic pages with AI-generated copy. Other cases paired thin affiliate pages with AI text, or scaled pages with misleading redirects.

What 1,000 Shoppers Do After an AI Recommends a Product

Zach Ball reports that AI product recommendations rarely end the buyer journey. Page One Power surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults, including 653 people who had used an AI assistant for product research in the prior three months.

• AI use is high, but it isn't the usual first step: 65% had used AI for purchase research, while 12% began there. Google was the first move for 42% and Amazon or other retailers for 27%.

• Most shoppers verify elsewhere: 83% of AI users took at least one step outside the assistant after it named a product. 55% searched the product name on Google, half read third-party reviews, and one-third visited the brand’s site.

• Price raises the bar for trust: 41% would let AI guide a purchase under $50. Only 11% would do so for a purchase above $500.

• Age doesn't remove the verification habit: AI adoption fell 58 points between the youngest and oldest groups, while verification fell only six points.

source: pageonepower.com

ChatGPT built its own search index

Tomek Rudzki reports that ChatGPT runs its own retrieval system, called Labrador, alongside external search and data providers. He draws on server-side events, OpenAI job postings, public antitrust testimony, and ChatGPT shopping experiments.

• Labrador appears to be a family of indexes: Server-side events observed from May 21 through July 21 showed Labrador as a result source. He identifies separate web, PDF, YouTube, news, local, finance, legal, medical, shopping, and image indexes.

• Shopping is the clearest live test: In mid-August, he found an experiment named prefer-index-over-serp-v3 affecting 8% of chats. As of September 2, the source found at least five shopping experiments running on production traffic.

• ChatGPT still uses outside sources: The investigation says Google, Bing, Microsoft Web IQ, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and scraping providers remain part of the retrieval mix. OpenAI’s own index has not replaced them.

• Cached content matters: A test in ChatGPT’s lockdown mode returned pages without live browsing, which the source treats as evidence that ChatGPT can serve cached results from its own retrieval store.

Product Pages Get 24% Of AI Citations, Reddit & YouTube 4%

Greg Jarboe reviews a Ten Speed study of 7,387 citation appearances from 170 B2B evaluation prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Product pages drew 24.1% of citations, while Reddit, YouTube, forums, and discussion threads combined for 4.2%. Brand-controlled content accounted for 88.3%, but he notes the report did not collect platform-level data and treats the headline split as descriptive, not a tested result.

3 SEO priorities to win organic traffic in 2027

Paul DeMott recommends shifting scarce SEO time toward middle- and bottom-funnel pages, then making supporting information easy for people and machines to extract. He cites Seer research showing AI Overviews on 36% of informational queries, versus 8% of commercial and 5% of transactional queries, with comparison-format informational queries triggering them 95.4% of the time. He pairs standalone definitions, tables, and visible HTML lists with entity-specific schema, focused internal links, quality backlinks, and third-party brand mentions.

Google Says Ranking Recovery Takes Months After SEO Issues Are Fixed

Roger Montti reports that John Mueller said larger algorithmic issues can take many months to reflect fixes, while broad technical errors such as blocking an entire site can resolve more quickly. Mueller advised correcting a disavow file, then investigating other causes because Google processes link disavows incrementally over roughly three to six months.

Google AI Mode Prices Differ From Product Carousel For Same Items

Matt G. Southern reviews Productrise tracking of more than 2 million listings across over 100,000 product-focused searches in the U.S. and U.K. Only 1.28% of products in Google’s Popular products carousel also appeared in AI Mode for the same search and day. For matched products, the first seller differed 49.6% of the time and prices differed 38.1% of the time, with AI Mode showing the higher price in 68.4% of those cases.

Reddit promised its users an open internet. Then it closed the door.

Julien Khaleghy, CEO of SerpApi, says the company’s counterclaims against Reddit center on the platform’s decision to block crawlers from Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, and Qwant after its February 2024 expanded Google partnership. He says the Internet Archive lost access a year later, despite Reddit’s earlier promise to spare it. The post also notes that Reddit’s SearchGuard technology was not deployed until January 2025, roughly six months after other crawlers were excluded.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• New Google Business Profiles Submit A Business Photo For Verification: Barry Schwartz reports that Google Business Profiles has begun showing “Submit a business photo” as a fifth verification method for some businesses. Requirements shared by Ben Fisher say the photo should show the business name on a permanent fixture and the full storefront in one frame. Google documentation does not yet list the option, so do not rely on it until it reaches your profile.

• Google: Verifying Your Request To Continue To Search Results: Barry Schwartz reports that Google is testing a gate that keeps the Continue button disabled for a few seconds while it verifies a request, then lets the searcher proceed without signing in. The test follows earlier sign-in checks, CAPTCHAs, and goto redirects, pointing to a wider effort to limit automated scraping of search results.

• Google: We Don't Penalize For Old Outbound Links With Shady Content: John Mueller said a handful of old outbound links that later lead to shady content will not trigger a penalty. He still recommends keeping links fresh, while distinguishing a few broken links from a site whose overall value has become obsolete.

• Google Search Console AI performance reports and Search generative AI control rolling out globally: Barry Schwartz reports that Google has rolled out Search Console’s AI performance report and its generative AI control worldwide. The report covers impressions by pages, countries, devices, and dates across AI responses, AI Mode, and AI Overviews, but not clicks. The new control lets a site opt out of Google’s generative AI features without changing core web rankings, though it also removes AI-feature traffic and impressions.

• Google's Mueller Shares His Experience With Markdown For AI SEO: Roger Montti reports that John Mueller’s test sites saw only SEO tools request Markdown versions of pages, not major AI crawlers. Mueller recommends logging the relevant request header before building Markdown delivery, because there is no evidence it improves AI citations or visibility while AI systems already crawl HTML.

AI

Big week for new model releases from the majors.

GPT‑6 Astra: A new generation of intelligence

OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra to a limited group of organizations, with access expanding to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, plus the API, Azure, and AWS Bedrock. OpenAI reports a 72.6% score on OSWorld 2.0 at about 40 minutes per task, versus 65.7% at about 75 minutes for GPT-5.6 Sol. It also says Astra stayed within authorized scope in every test of an impossible cyber task, where Sol went beyond scope 48% of the time without production safeguards.

My Take: I got it in my Plus account, so check yours. Makes me want to upgrade to Pro and even possibly lower my Claude Max plan.

source: openai.com

Introducing Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 for general use and Claude Mythos 5.1 for vetted cybersecurity and life-sciences users. The company says the two models share the same underlying system, while Mythos has more permissive safeguards for trusted access programs. Cache reads now cost $0.25 per million tokens, down 75%, which Anthropic says cuts typical workloads by about 25% and complex agentic work by up to 45%.

My Take: I’m liking Astra more than Fable 5.1 in my earlier uses so far.

Introducing Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

Not to be outdone, Gemini 3.8 Flash released at the same introductory price as 3.7 Flash: $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens. They say the model is built for long-horizon coding and agentic work, while Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber is restricted to trusted defenders through Google’s Fairwind Program. On Google’s internal benchmark across complex codebases and 20 programming languages, the Cyber model exceeded a 70% vulnerability-discovery success rate.

OpenAI agents hijacked German website in previously undisclosed AI breakout this spring

Deepa Seetharaman and Raphael Satter report that a group of researchers found more than 15,000 edits by agents that appeared linked to OpenAI on a little-used German programming wiki. The findings study says the agents shared answers and sandbox workarounds, and places the activity from May to July. The evidence relies on agent self-identification, Azure and OpenAI-related IP activity, and timing, while OpenAI told Reuters it had not had a chance to review the report and disputed claims that its legal team discouraged investigation.

AI Ripples

• Try Google Pics: Easy image creation and editing in Google Workspace: Google Pics is rolling out to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers and most Workspace business customers over the coming weeks. Built on Nano Banana, it supports object-level edits, in-image text editing and translation, shared editing, and multiple variations from one prompt. It starts in Docs and Slides, with Drive integration planned in the coming weeks.

• A milestone in expanding access to AI: OpenAI says ChatGPT Ads reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in less than 200 days and is now used by tens of thousands of advertisers. Self-service buying is launching across India, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, while the platform says ads remain labeled and separate from ChatGPT answers. For marketers, this is another decision-stage channel where conversational context, rather than a search query alone, shapes ad relevance.

• Grok Bot Free API credits: xAI says users can connect an X account in Grok Bot, which will create a developer account when needed and give paid Grok Bot users free X API credits to begin. The first integration lets bots search posts, read timelines, check mentions, pull together activity on X, and manage bookmarks through an X plugin.

• Meta Will Cut Its AI Price By 95% If It Can Train On Your Prompts: Geoff Desreumaux reports that Meta’s Muse Spark 1.3 contributor tier charges about 95% less than standard pricing in return for permission to use prompts and outputs to train future models. The offer is attractive for public or synthetic work, but teams need a clear boundary before an agent carries private repositories, client materials, or customer data into a training pipeline.

• Freelancers are getting buried with ‘soulless’ AI slop cleanup: ‘It’s a shame we need to do it’: Aaron Mok reports that demand for freelance AI cleanup is rising even as original creative work gets harder to find. Freelancer.com says listings tagged with terms such as “correct AI,” “AI hallucination,” and “AI error” rose 87% to 10,760 between August 2025 and June 2026, while Upwork reported a 70% year-over-year rise in AI remediation gigs. The work often takes as much skill and time as creating from scratch, but clients still expect a discount.

MARKETING

Google loses the ad monopoly case, but keeps the monopoly

Constantine von Hoffman reports that U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema rejected the Justice Department’s proposal to force a sale of Google’s AdX exchange, despite an earlier finding that Google illegally monopolized publisher ad-server and ad-exchange markets. The remedy instead restricts advantages such as first look and last look, gives publishers more pricing control, and should provide competing publisher ad servers with AdX bid information in real time.

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

Rank Math WordPress Plugin Accused Of Secretly Taking Admin Access

Roger Montti reports that Rank Math 1.0.277 created a WordPress application password when a connected user opened Help & Support, which critics said gave the company’s support agent the current user’s permissions without an opt-in flow. WordPress says application passwords should use separate authorization and remain revocable.

Rank Math says the agent was read-only, did not elevate beyond the current user’s role, and did not retain credentials. In a follow-up post, Rank Math says version 1.0.277.2 removes the agent while it rebuilds the access request around explicit permission.

WHAT I'VE BUILT FOR YOU

Floyi - Build Topical Authority that wins in Google and AI Search. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

ReplyDeck - Be active on Reddit without living on Reddit. Schedule replies, stay present in the threads that matter, and get your time back.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

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SEO + GEO

Update to the Site Reputation Policy

Google Search Quality team says site reputation manual actions will change across European Economic Area search results from August 30. Outside the EEA, an action will still directly affect the targeted part of a site. Within the EEA, the manual action will not apply, and Google may separate that section so it can rank independently over time. Owners will still receive Search Console notices and can request reconsideration or, when eligible, mediation.

Google Preferred Sources, Tailor Your Feed & Search Profiles Are Different

Barry Schwartz explains that Google has three separate controls that are often treated as one. They shape what people see across Search products, but they work at different levels:

• Preferred sources: Lets a person choose sites they want to see more often in Top Stories. Google also shows these choices in AI Mode and other areas.

• Tailor your feed: Lets a person tune Google Discover by content category rather than by publisher.

• Search profiles: Gives publishers a shareable Search page with a header image, social profiles, recent articles, and a follow option.

Google’s August 2026 spam update hit rankings harder than normal

Danny Goodwin reports that 16.71% of URLs in Google's top 10 fell beyond position 100 during the August spam update, compared with 9.2% in a comparable July period without a confirmed update. SE Ranking tracked the same 100,000 US keywords across 20 industries and found an 82% increase in top-10 URLs dropping out of the top 100. The disruption reached every niche in the data, though it doesn't identify which site types, pages, or spam tactics were hit.

WebMCP Connects AI Agents To Actions Inside Websites

Matt G. Southern says that WebMCP has moved from browser experiment to live deployment. Shopify now provides 10 agent tools on every Liquid storefront, Cloudflare can add a bridge at the edge, and ChatGPT's desktop browser can use site-provided tools. A page can expose a named action and structured inputs, so an agent doesn't have to depend on visual clicks and typing.

My Take: Treat this as product infrastructure for conversions, not an SEO tactic. WebMCP doesn't improve ranking, indexing, or citations, and the published sources don't yet show task-completion, conversion, or attribution results. Start with the agent journey that removes real friction after a visitor arrives, then define a narrow tool with clear permissions. A tool description is part of your conversion path, so it needs the same ownership as your forms, checkout, and internal application logic.

OpenAI Adds WebMCP Site Tools To ChatGPT’s Browser

Matt G. Southern reports that ChatGPT's desktop browser can use WebMCP Site tools supplied by the page a person has open. Those tools can search documents, edit files, work through dashboards, compare travel options, or update a shopping cart, and they disappear when the page closes. The feature is separate from server-based MCP connections. It works in the latest ChatGPT desktop app for eligible Work and Codex users on GPT-5.6 Sol or Terra, with account rollout and site support still determining availability.

Google confirms deploying goto URL redirects to search results links

Barry Schwartz reports that Google has confirmed it is rolling out a google.com/goto?url= redirect between a search result link and its destination. Google says the technical measure protects its services against evolving abuse. The visible result URL remains under the snippet, but tracking tools, scrapers, and AI systems that depend on the direct link may need to adapt.

My Take: Watch your rank trackers, SERP exporters, and any workflow that passes Google result URLs downstream. /goto has been in the wild for the last couple of months, so maybe the tools you use accounted for it already. When we first saw it in Floyi, we resolved the redirects, so users would see the end URLs because it affected measurement pipelines.

Has Google demoted listicles?

Kevin Indig's 60,000-query analysis found no universal penalty for listicles. At least one appeared in the top 10 for 55.1% of queries and in the top three for 32.3%. But the presence of listicles in position one and the top three declined from January to August, even as 62% of vendor-authored listicles in the study gained estimated organic traffic.

The gap is intent. Google showed 4.5 times more listicles when a query explicitly asked for options, yet 92% of SERPs with a top-10 listicle also contained Reddit or YouTube, and AI Overviews were common in B2B results. The study is observational, so it shows patterns rather than a confirmed rule.

My Take: Don't publish a listicle because a template says it can win AI citations. Publish one when the query needs a real comparison and you can back every recommendation with evidence. The format still works for the right intent. The lazy, self-serving version is the risk.

source: searchengineland.com

Relax. Google won't penalize all AI generated content.

Dan Petrovic says detecting machine-written text and deciding whether a page deserves visibility are separate jobs. He describes a quality pipeline that looks beyond origin at information density, page structure, and post-click behavior, while warning that a blanket origin filter would create collateral damage for useful machine-assisted work.

Analysis: Reddit Appears in 83.9% of Google’s Discussions and Forums Results

Glen Allsopp and Xibeijia Guan analyzed 145 million US Google results and found the Discussions and forums feature in 16.93 million of them. Reddit appeared in 83.9% of the feature worldwide, while three sites accounted for 76.75% of all links and Facebook surpassed Quora in prominence during January 2026. The feature is overwhelmingly informational, with 98.7% of appearances tied to informational queries. Ahrefs found no correlation between backlinks to individual threads and how often those threads appeared, which makes platform authority and the query’s need for lived experience more important signals than thread-level link building.

source: ahrefs.com

AI and organic search are doing different jobs: What Shopify's data shows

Kyle Risley reports that AI-referred sessions to Shopify storefronts grew 197% year over year in Q2, while organic-search sessions grew 12% on a much larger base. AI-referred shoppers converted about 80% better after reaching a product page, and roughly twice as well in specification-led categories where they need to compare compatibility, use cases, reviews, and tradeoffs.

Organic search still sent more sessions than all tracked AI platforms combined. Shopify also found that AI shoppers referred from structured Shopify Catalog data converted twice as well as those referred from scraped or third-party feeds, and 50% of AI-referred sessions landed directly on product pages.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Google Search Now Lists The Supported Favicon File Formats: Barry Schwartz reports that Google's favicon documentation now explicitly lists the supported formats: BMP, GIF, ICO, PNG, JPEG, PPM, and TIFF. Google says it added the list to remove ambiguity, and SVG is not on it.

• Bing Tests Renaming Copilot Search Answer To AI Overviews: Barry Schwartz reports that Microsoft is testing the label “AI Overviews” for the Copilot Search answer box at the top of Bing results, while retaining the Copilot logo. The test borrows the name Google uses for its own AI-generated answer feature.

• Google Search Showing Fewer PDF Files. But Why? SEOs saw sharp drops in PDF impressions and clicks during August, including PDFs from government sites. John Mueller said Google would investigate, and some IRS PDFs began returning near the top of results on August 27, suggesting the issue may be recovering.

• Google Says Google's Crawlers Don't Parse JSON: Gary Illyes said Google crawlers download JSON files but do not parse them. Parsing happens later in systems such as indexing, and he said the shared infrastructure also applies to Merchant Center.

• Google Aware Of Reviews Missing After Google Business Profile Reinstatement: Google is working on an issue that can leave reviews missing after a suspended Business Profile is reinstated. There is no repair timeline. If you have the original support ticket, reply to its email thread so the missing reviews are documented on the case.

AI

Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash lets you build with more control

Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash is now available through the Gemini API in Google AI Studio. It can extend a clip in 10-second increments to a cumulative 40 seconds, use first and last frames to generate a transition, and take up to three seconds of video reference. Google says 360p previews can generate up to 60% faster and cost one-third as much as standard 720p output, while final output can reach 1080p or 4K.

AI Brand Preference Now Splits By Generation, Claude Leads Gen Z More Than 7-To-1

Greg Jarboe reports that ChatGPT leads AI-tool preference in every generation surveyed by YouGov, but the brand split underneath is sharp. Claude is preferred by 10.6% of Gen Z AI users and 1.4% of Boomers+, while Gemini performs best with Gen X and Copilot is strongest with Boomers+.

Usage patterns differ too. Web search use sits near 38% to 40% across age groups, but Gen Z uses AI for ideas at more than three times the Boomer rate, 33.6% versus 10.5%.

My Take: Knowing your audience and the tools they use is important, so you can choose the AI engines and content formats to prioritize.

The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead

OpenAI explains how its AI hacked Hugging Face. They say that an internal research model running with reduced safeguards during cybersecurity evaluations used Artifactory as an unauthorized message board, found a path to internet access, and helped compromise parts of Hugging Face in July. The company says 93% of the tasks discussed on that board came from 198 ExploitGym tasks that none of its models had previously solved. OpenAI has paused its largest planned frontier reinforcement-learning run and now requires chain-of-thought monitoring for tool-using training and evaluations involving models at GPT-5.6 Sol capability or higher.

Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

OpenAI says it intends to wind down Cursor’s access to OpenAI models after SpaceX acquired the coding platform, with a proposed shutoff date of November 12, 2026. They say past contract and terms-of-service violations by Elon Musk’s companies are the reason it cannot be confident SpaceX will comply. This will also keep future models, including Astra, out of the Cursor integration.

Google adds link carousels for developing topics in AI Mode

Barry Schwartz reports that Google is rolling out link carousels for developing topics in AI Mode, after adding the same feature to AI Overviews. Google says trending-topic answers can put relevant articles, webpages, and Preferred Sources front and center. The new links may make AI Mode answers more clickable, but Search Console still does not report click data for Google's generative AI results. Publishers can see the feature, but not yet a clean referral number for it.

source: searchengineland.com

Nvidia closes in on Hugging Face acquisition

Connie Loizos reports that Nvidia has reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. Business Insider says the deal is not signed and could still collapse. Hugging Face was valued at $4.5 billion in its 2023 funding round. The Information reported that Hugging Face was generating about $150 million in annual revenue, up from roughly $100 million two months earlier.

AI Ripples

• Intelligent transcription with Gemini 3.5 Transcribe: Google’s new speech-to-text model is now in public preview through the Gemini API and Enterprise Agent Platform. Google reports a 4.0% word error rate for streaming, 2.6% for non-streaming, support for more than 85 languages, and speaker attribution for up to three people in recorded audio.

• OpenAI Pins Shopping To ChatGPT Sidebar: Barry Schwartz reports that OpenAI has pinned Shopping to ChatGPT’s left sidebar. The tab opens a shopping landing page and a dedicated search page, with an observed EU rollout that does not include in-app checkout.

• Surprise: Z.ai is the AI lab behind the mysterious Ox Alpha model: Rebecca Bellan reports that Z.ai confirmed it created Ox Alpha, the anonymous open-weight model standing in for GLM 5.3-Flash on OpenRouter and climbed benchmark leaderboards. Z.ai says it will release the model’s weights, positioning Ox Alpha for coding, sustained agent work, and production workflows that combine text with visual context.

• We’re partnering with the State of Delaware to provide free AI and career training. This is for you if you live in Delaware. Google says Delaware residents can receive no-cost licenses for Google AI courses and Career Certificates through the Delaware Department of Labor and Delaware Libraries. The self-paced training covers prompt writing and app building, plus fields such as cybersecurity, data analytics, digital marketing, IT support, project management, and UX design. Google says more than 70% of Career Certificate graduates report a positive career outcome within six months.

MARKETING

The Top Domain Extensions of 2026 (So Far)

Wix reviewed nearly a million domain registrations from Premium users with connected domains between 2025 and 2026. The report keeps .com as the default, but its data gives founders useful exceptions and market signals:

• .com remains the safe default: 82% of Wix sites in the United States use it, and people are 13 times more likely to choose it than another extension.

• .org is strong: .org sites were 34% more likely to generate ecommerce revenue and received 3% more sessions than .com sites.

• .store stands out for ecommerce: Sites using .store earned 10% more revenue than .com sites and twice as much as .shop or .net sites.

• Trend and local fit matter: .ai grew 20% from January to May, while local extensions beat .com in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

My Take: Don't change domains to chase a correlation. But if your exact .com is unavailable, other TLDs might be a good alternative. The .org stats surprised me.

CONTENT

How We Use AI for Every Article Without Making AI Slop

Si Quan Ong explains that Ahrefs uses AI in every article but moves human work upstream into the reader, promise, point of view, evidence, and information gain. The team saves research, gap analysis, outlines, and drafts as separate stages so a writer can inspect decisions before publication. It puts the time AI saves into fresher data, interactive content, and editorial review instead of more low-value pages.

My Take: This is similar to Floyi’s closed loop content strategy, but we go further with our content flywheel. Brand Foundation, audience personas, Content Guide rules, Knowledge Base material, topical map position, and an internal-link/anchor text plan flow into each brief and draft, so AI does not begin from a blank prompt or decide where a page belongs. Each user still owns the strategy and final publishing decision.

Is top-of-funnel content still worth it in 2027?

Adam Gnuse compared year-over-year organic traffic estimates across 30 major publishers in nine industries and found that top-of-funnel performance depended more on industry than funnel stage. Every finance, healthcare, legal, and consumer-tech domain in the sample lost traffic. Cybersecurity and marketing or sales software improved, and top-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel pages largely moved in the same direction within each industry.

Generic how-to pages are easy for AI summaries to replace, while local guides, interactive tools, and content built on real subject-matter expertise still give people a reason to visit.

source: searchengineland.com

1 In 10 Webpages Shows Signs Of AI Authorship, Pew Reports

Matt G. Southern reports that Pew Research Center ran nearly half a million webpages through an AI detector and found signs of AI authorship or editing on about 10% of them. The share reached 35% among pages with a post-ChatGPT publication date. Pew found 9.35% of .com pages showed these signs, versus 1.03% of .edu pages and 0.76% of .gov pages in its six-month average. Its threshold also counts AI-assisted editing, so it cannot separate a fully generated article from a human-written draft cleaned up with a writing tool.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Pinterest Hobbies Trend Report 2026: Find your joy

Pinterest says people are using the platform to find hands-on hobbies, and 51% of Gen Z respondents say having a hobby contributes to their joy. The report points to search growth for projects with an output, including “crochet parandi” at 5,265%, “birthday magazine template” at 1,713%, and “sashiko ideas” at 1,509%.

The opportunity for brands is not the hobby label itself. Pinterest’s examples are specific, practical ideas people can save and make, from a coffee recipe to a craft project or display idea.

source: pinterest.com

Google says better YouTube creative can more than double ROI

Anu Adegbola reports that Google now puts a number on YouTube creative quality. Nielsen data credits creative with 49% of campaign ROI, while Ekimetrics found that improving creative can more than double YouTube ROI. In US Demand Gen in-stream skippable ads measured in July 2026, a human voice was associated with 12% higher conversions, a text overlay with 3% higher conversions, and visible branding in the first five seconds with 4% higher conversions.

Google also recommends removing fake buttons and arrows that compete with real calls to action. Full-bleed imagery, visible people, and an ad that fits the YouTube feed can outperform generic assets repurposed from another channel.

source: searcengineland.com

Social Ripples

• Reply to Keywords Meta Ads Feature: Jon Loomer reports that Meta is testing a Conversations setting that automatically sends an Instagram private message when a person comments with one of up to five chosen keywords or phrases on an ad. The reply can include a link, phone number, or email. It appears limited to Instagram placements for now and uses one message rather than keyword-specific replies.

• X launches API for business chatbot accounts: Andrew Hutchinson reports that X has opened an API for automated X Chat task accounts. Brands can build a bot with its own handle to handle bookings, order queries, and service updates. X says profiles will carry an “automated by @owner” label, but it supplies examples rather than a complete bot framework, so brands still need to build the underlying workflow.

• Start tagging Amazon products with the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program: Eligible US creators can tag Amazon products in videos, Shorts, and live streams after connecting an active Amazon Influencer or Associates account. YouTube says its July 14 to 29 internal experiment found product tags alone generated more than 110% more product clicks than description links alone. Aggregate daily earnings appear in Studio, while finalized Amazon earnings are paid through AdSense each month.

• Our Agreement With Bipartisan Attorneys General: Calling on TikTok and YouTube to Join Us in Supporting Teens: Meta says its agreement with 52 US state and territory attorneys general will apply default teen controls to Facebook and Instagram, including a two-hour combined daily limit, a midnight-to-6 AM block, muted school-hour notifications, and optional non-algorithmic feeds. The judge approved the agreement on August 27. Meta says most terms run for 10 years, while part of the roughly $18 billion payment depends on TikTok and YouTube adopting specified protections and contributing matching payments.

• Scoop: DOJ, TikTok settle for $400 million in children's privacy suit: Ashley Gold reports that TikTok and parent company ByteDance will pay $400 million to resolve the Justice Department's children’s privacy case without admitting wrongdoing. The 2024 suit accused TikTok of letting children create regular accounts and collecting or retaining their personal information. The settlement includes stronger youth safeguards, age-related controls, and more parental oversight, according to DOJ.

• Meta adds new AI subscription packages: Andrew Hutchinson reports that Meta has introduced Meta AI Core and Meta AI Premium packages with more image and video generation capacity. Both also bundle Facebook Plus, Instagram Plus, and WhatsApp Plus verification benefits. The new middle tier gives Meta another way to charge for its AI tools beyond the premium plan.

• X launches MCP server: X’s Ads Model Context Protocol server lets advertisers connect X campaign data and analytics to an MCP-capable client such as Grok, Claude Code, or a custom agent. The connection supports natural-language guidance for building and refining X ad campaigns.

• X adds video overlays: X has added text and emoji overlays for video uploads in its iOS app. The update is small but gives X creators a native editing control that has long been standard in competing video apps.

WHAT I'VE BUILT FOR YOU

Floyi - Build Topical Authority that wins in Google and AI Search. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

ReplyDeck - Be active on Reddit without living on Reddit. Schedule replies, stay present in the threads that matter, and get your time back.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

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SEO + GEO

Google August 2026 Spam Update Has Been Unleashed

Google launched its August 2026 spam update globally on August 18 at about 12:30 p.m. ET, covering all languages and regions. The rollout finished about 2.5 days later, on August 21 at 4:50 a.m. ET. Google described it as a normal spam update, not a link spam or site reputation abuse update, and says affected sites should review its spam policies.

My Take: A short rollout does not make diagnosis simple. Mark August 18 to 21 on your reporting calendar, then look for patterns across affected templates, queries, and competitors. Do not blame every ranking move on the update before you check the underlying site changes.

AI Content Licensing Deals Study: News Publishers With OpenAI Deals Get 48% More AI Citations on ChatGPT

OtterlyAI and Press Ranger analyzed 129.3 million AI-search citations across more than 20 million URLs, seven platforms, and 91 confirmed publisher licensing deals. Their June 2026 snapshot finds that OpenAI-licensed news publishers received more ChatGPT citations per cited page, but the association did not carry across every platform:

• Its licensed publishers averaged 10.2 ChatGPT citations per cited page, versus 6.9 for unlicensed publishers. That is a 48% premium. The study says this is an association, not proof that the deals caused the increase.

• Perplexity licensees averaged 2% fewer citations on Perplexity, while Alphabet licensees averaged 9% fewer in AI Overviews and 14% fewer in AI Mode and Gemini. Microsoft Copilot showed an 85% lift, but it applied to licensed publishers broadly rather than Microsoft’s own licensees.

• Best-of lists, buying guides and money advice, and product reviews and tests made up 58.8% of citations to licensed publishers. Dated news accounted for 5.1%.

• Niche and trade media earned 75.8% of News and Media citations across 16 industries, or 213% more than mainstream media. They led in 15 of the 16 industries measured.

source: otterly.ai

How to Track Google AI Mode Traffic in Search Console

Suganthan Mohanadasan shows why Google’s June 2026 generative AI report is incomplete for query analysis: it gives feature impressions in the UI but no query-level data through the API or BigQuery export. He compares four workarounds, from an Excel API export and custom GSC regex to MCP tools and a free classifier that labels up to 100,000 unique queries by conversational pattern. Every method is an undercount because Google anonymizes rare queries.

source: suganthan.com

ChatGPT draws more paid clicks from Google than any other top destination

Anu Adegbola reports that ChatGPT was the sixth-most-clicked destination in iPullRank’s analysis of 13.1 billion Google Search events from 9.1 million opted-in users. It also drew a higher share of paid clicks than any other leading destination in the study, while only 11.1% of searches headed toward OpenAI ended in a zero-click Google experience. Google’s zero-click rate rose about 2.6 percentage points over the study period, but paid clicks showed no meaningful change.

My Take: Google rankings and AI visibility are no longer competing scorecards. A user can start with a category search in Google, move to ChatGPT to narrow the shortlist, then return to search when buying intent is clearer. For client work, I would map that handoff from category query to AI prompt to conversion instead of treating each channel as an isolated traffic source.

The Consensus-Information Gain Axis (Why it governs visibility in classic and AI search)

Gianluca Fiorelli explains why consensus and information gain need to work together for search visibility. Consensus signals that a page is accurate and trustworthy, while original data, first-hand experience, or a distinct framework gives an AI system a reason to cite it instead of absorbing it into a generic answer. He also notes that Google has not confirmed whether its information gain patent is an active ranking system.

My Take: In case you missed it, here’s my video on Information Gain for SEO.

Understand Which AI Crawlers Drive Real Visits with AI Scrape-to-Referral Insights

Microsoft Clarity now connects AI crawler activity with referral sessions through an AI Scrape-to-Referral Ratio in Bot Analytics. The report breaks performance down by AI operator and links each source directly to filtered session recordings. Clarity also flags coverage gaps when bot and referral data do not cover the same mapped domains.

source: clarity.microsoft.com

Direct Traffic in GA4: What It Really Measures (and 10 Ways to Increase It)

Andy Crestodina reports that Direct was the first or second traffic channel in 92% of 145 Google Analytics accounts, representing 36% of 56 million sessions. GA4 also assigns traffic from bookmarks, files, apps, untagged links, and lost attribution to Direct, so it captures both brand demand and measurement gaps. Across 143 properties, Direct generated 27% of all demand and ranked as the second-largest source of leads.

AI Overviews just launched in France, and they already appear on more than 52% of searches

Yulia Deda’s analysis of 100,000 French keywords across 20 niches shows AI Overviews arrived at scale from day one. The study also maps the sources and search patterns behind 52,564 answers with citation data:

• Broad initial coverage: AI Overviews appeared for 52.63% of keywords, nearly twice the first-month rate SE Ranking recorded in Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands.

• Video leads the source mix: YouTube appeared in 51.31% of answers and supplied 14.33% of citations, more than the other nine domains in the top 10 combined.

• Local sources matter: French-language sources made up 89.34% of citations. In Legal, Finance, Real Estate, and Insurance, their share was roughly 97%.

• Organic rankings still feed AI visibility: 60.46% of cited URLs ranked in the organic top 10, while 76.33% appeared in the top 50.

We Analyzed Millions of AI Bot Scrapes. Here’s 6 Crazy Things We Found

Stephanie Heitman shares that WordStream tracked 4.45 million AI bot scrapes over six months and received one referral for every 201 scrapes. Its findings show how unevenly AI platforms return value to publishers:

• The return worsened over time: The scrape-to-referral ratio rose 19.2%, from 207:1 to 248:1, over three months.

• AI favored expensive research assets: Advertising benchmarks, conversion-rate data, and cost-per-click studies dominated the most-scraped pages.

• OpenAI led crawling activity: It generated nearly three times as many scrapes as Meta in WordStream’s data.

• Page formats produced very different returns: Facebook Advertising Benchmarks (2017) generated 2.5 scrapes per referral, while Social Media Image Sizes generated 27,161.

How to build an E-E-A-T checker with Claude Code

James Allen explains how he built an E-E-A-T audit tool in Claude Desktop with Claude Code. The tool crawls a selected set of page types, captures raw and rendered content, applies a local scoring rubric based on Google’s guidance, and produces a formatted Word report. James also notes that E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor, so the output measures alignment with quality guidance rather than predicting rankings.

Google’s Generated Interfaces Could Compete With Tool Pages

Matt G. Southern reports that Google’s generative UI is beginning to appear in AI Overviews, where it can create interactive tools and simulations inside Search. In Google’s research, participants preferred a generated interface to the top search result in 90% of head-to-head comparisons for its main prompt set and 73.5% for an information-seeking set. The tests used pre-cached results and smaller custom sites, so they do not prove how users will behave in live Search.

source: searchenginejournal.com

JSON-LD Extraction For Googlebot Now Does One Pass Of HTML Unescaping

Barry Schwartz reports that Googlebot now applies only one pass of HTML unescaping when it extracts JSON-LD. Double-escaped entities will no longer be corrected automatically, which can affect structured data used for rich results. Google advises site owners to use standard JSON escapes or Unicode hexadecimal escapes instead.

My Take: Floyi’s schema generator is already good to go 😁 

What AI Actually Cites: 14,000+ Local AI Gemini and ChatGPT Search Citations Analyzed

Ben Fisher’s study examined 14,472 AI citations across 1,487 local-business queries in 50 U.S. metros. It shows that local AI recommendations are less stable than a normal ranking report suggests:

• Your own site still matters: 60% of citations pointed to a business’s own website, more than directories, forums, and review platforms combined.

• One prompt is not a scorecard: Different phrasings of the same question shared cited sources only 40% of the time. Repeating the exact question produced the same top business only about 7% of the time, versus roughly 90% for Google’s local pack.

• Each model uses a different source mix: Gemini and ChatGPT cited the same domains only 8% of the time and chose the same top business just 4.2% of the time.

• Community sources still count: Reddit made up 13.7% of Gemini citations, exceeding the 10.3% share from all local-service directories combined.

source: steadydemand.com

Why Reddit's ChatGPT Citation Drop Isn't Fully Explained

Matt G. Southern reports that Promptwatch saw Reddit’s ChatGPT Search citation share fall from 3.83% between July 18 and August 7 to 0.52% between August 14 and 17. ChatGPT’s use of site-specific background searches jumped on August 8, but the sharper Reddit drop came six days later. Promptwatch says the cause remains uncertain and has not ruled out a data-collection issue.

Technical SEO for AI search: 4 fundamentals that matter

Andrea Schultz outlines four technical checks for AI retrieval: crawler access, server-rendered critical content, structured data in the initial HTML, and a consistent brand entity across the web. She notes that many AI crawlers do not reliably render JavaScript, so a page that works in Google can still expose only an empty shell to another system. She recommends testing raw HTML, robots rules, crawler access, and schema rather than assuming a normal search crawl covers every case.

Llms.txt V2 Adds Formal Markdown Linking For AI Agents

Matt G. Southern reports that llms.txt V2 adds two standard links that point agents from an HTML page to its Markdown version and its related llms.txt file. Sites can add those links in HTML or an HTTP header, and V2 also supports a shorter Markdown URL format. Google Search still says llms.txt neither helps nor harms rankings, so the update is for coding agents and documentation tools, not a shortcut to AI Overview citations.

The AI visibility index: Which brands are vanishing from AI search?

Kelsey Libert’s Fractl analysis compared 4,320 responses and more than 8,500 brand references across GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Claude Sonnet 4.6. It found that Google authority and AI recall usually align, but the exceptions create real brand gaps:

• Strong SEO can still miss AI answers: 471 brands, about 5% of the dataset, had high domain authority, traffic, and keyword reach but drew few LLM references.

• Smaller brands can punch above their SEO weight: 377 brands, about 4%, appeared in AI answers more often than their traditional search signals would predict.

• Third-party coverage separated the outliers: Brands repeatedly featured in roundups, comparison pages, expert lists, and reviews were more likely to overperform in AI recall.

• Model coverage is fragmented: Only 11% of brands appeared in all three models, while 77% appeared in just one.

AI Assistants Are Choosing Local Businesses For Your Customers

Matt G. Southern explains that local AI answers turn a long list of businesses into a short recommendation set before a customer reaches a website. Google says these answers use its existing ranking and quality systems, then pull supporting pages through retrieval and related searches through query fan-out. Search Console can show link impressions from Google’s AI features, but not the queries behind them, whether a business was recommended, or what other assistants said.

Empty shelves or lost keys? Recall is the bottleneck for parametric factuality

Google Research scientists Nitay Calderon and Gal Yona tested 13 AI models on 2,150 Wikipedia facts. Their knowledge profiling framework measures the state of each fact, not just whether a single answer was right. It separates facts a model never encoded from facts it encoded but could not retrieve.

• Five profiles diagnose the failure: The framework classifies each fact as an encoding failure, recall failure, direct recall, recall with thinking, or inference without encoding.

• Facts can be stored but unreachable: Gemini-3-Pro and GPT-5 encoded 95% to 98% of the facts, yet failed to recall 26% to 34% of them directly.

• Thinking closes part of the gap: With thinking enabled, the models still missed 11% to 12% of facts that they had encoded.

• Extra reasoning helps stored knowledge: Thinking recovered 40% to 65% of encoded facts that the models could not initially answer, but only 5% to 15% of facts that were not encoded.

• Subject-object order affects recall: WikiProfile extracts facts as ordered subject-object pairs, with the subject appearing first in the source document. A model could often recognize a reverse relationship in multiple choice, but found it harder to generate when the question asked for the relationship in the opposite direction.

source: research.google

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Google working on fix for broken favicons in Google Search: Google confirmed a bug on its side caused some Search results to show a default globe icon instead of the site’s favicon. Google says it identified the issue and is working on a fix. Some sites have recovered, while others, including LinkedIn, were still affected at publication.

• Google: We Do Not Roll Out Updates Prior To The Announcement: John Mueller said Google announces core and spam updates as close as possible to when the rollout begins. Google says ranking volatility seen days before an announced update is not evidence that the named update had already started.

• Google Search Will Eventually Support HTTP QUERY Method: Barry Schwartz reports that Google plans to support the new HTTP QUERY method once browsers, CDNs, servers, and related tools catch up. QUERY is meant to let complex filters send data like a POST request while remaining safe to repeat and cache like a GET request.

• You Can Now Edit Your Handle On Google Search Profiles: Barry Schwartz reports that Google Search Profile users can now change their handle through Edit profile. Users choose from available handles, and Google says linking a new social account may provide more options.

• Apple Adds Thousands Of New IP Addresses For Applebot To Crawl From: Apple added 4,656 IP addresses across 18 /24 and three /28 ranges for Applebot, Siri, and Apple Intelligence crawling. Teams that manage allowlists can add the new ranges.

AI

5 new ways to level up your learning with Search

Google can generate custom interactive visuals and simulations in AI Mode, now available globally in English, with the feature also beginning to roll out in AI Overviews. Google has also added free, custom practice quizzes for subjects and exams including the ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, and SAT. Notebooks in AI Mode will sync sources and instructions with Gemini Notebook and roll out across more than 180 countries in English, excluding the EEA.

Meta brings Pocket, an app that lets you vibe-code and share games, to US users

Meta has opened Pocket to all U.S. users after testing the AI game-making app in Brazil. People can turn prompts into small interactive games, publish them to a feed, and let others save, remix, or repost them. Meta acquired the team behind Gizmo earlier this year and is shutting down the original app.

New Meta AI Features and Mac App for Small Businesses

Meta says its new business features let Meta AI use Facebook and Instagram analytics, Meta ad data, and Google Workspace context in the same conversation. It can turn that information into reports, decks, and spreadsheets, then run recurring tasks and reminders. Meta also says users can compare public content and engagement patterns from similar brands.

X offers $175K for Grok-generated versions of The Odyssey

Andrew Hutchinson reports that X is offering $100,000, $50,000, and $25,000 for the top three Grok Imagine videos based on Homer’s Odyssey. The official contest terms require U.S. entrants aged 18 or older to submit a three-to-five-minute English video with at least one minute of dialogue by August 31. Entries will be judged on submission requirements, creativity, originality, and verified Home Timeline impressions.

Microsoft Copilot reveals secret input that allowed it to be hacked

Dan Goodin reports that Varonis researchers found an undocumented Copilot URL parameter that could let a crafted link run a prompt inside a user’s authenticated Microsoft 365 session. Microsoft mitigated the flaw in February after Varonis reported it, then released broader fixes as CVE-2026-24301. The researchers also demonstrated that a malicious webpage could inject instructions into Copilot’s persistent memory when the user asked it to summarize the page.

Anthropic’s AI watermark has already spawned tools to remove it

Ana-Maria Stanciuc reports that Anthropic began watermarking Claude text worldwide on August 2 to meet commitments under the EU AI Act. Within days, removal tools appeared. One open-source project drew more than 14,000 GitHub stars, while U.S. Google Trends interest in “AI watermark remover” rose 60% week on week. The watermark uses patterns in word choice, so heavy rewriting can remove it. Anthropic says the mark does not identify a user or decide who owns the text.

These are two of the tools mentioned: MarkScrub repository and Watermarks Remover repository.

Google’s Gemini app adds a toggle to disable AI watermarks, with some exceptions

Manisha Priyadarshini reports that Gemini users can now turn visible watermarks on or off for Nano Banana images, Omni videos, and Lyria music. Google’s invisible SynthID watermark and C2PA metadata remain in every file. The option is limited to paid AI Ultra users in India, South Korea, and Vietnam, and is unavailable for work and school accounts.

SpaceXAI's Grok Bot turns agents into persistent digital coworkers that can operate your apps for $120-per-month

Carl Franzen reports that SpaceXAI has opened an early beta of Grok Bot, a system of persistent AI workers that can use apps and websites through their own computer environments. The Bots can keep working after a laptop closes, learn routines by watching a user complete a task, and hand work to other Bots. Team access costs $120 per seat each month, while the individual Cursor Ultra plan costs $200. SpaceXAI has not released performance benchmarks for the product.

AI Ripples

• ChatGPT Ads expands across Europe: OpenAI says ChatGPT Ads will enter 31 European markets through its Ads Solutions team, agency partners, and technology partners before self-service access arrives later in summer 2026. Ads will appear only on Free and Go plans, and the platform now supports conversion optimization, geo-targeting, custom audiences, the OpenAI Pixel, Conversions API, and third-party measurement.

• Introducing ChatGPT for Teens: Built for learning, backed by protections OpenAI says users aged 13 to 17, or those its system estimates are under 18, will be placed automatically in ChatGPT for Teens. The experience adds Study Mode, homework reminders, quizzes, Learning Visualizations, Study Hours, age-appropriate safeguards, and parent controls including Quiet Hours and limited safety notifications.

• Stripe agrees to acquire OpenRouter to help businesses optimize token routing and usage: Stripe says it has agreed to acquire OpenRouter, the model-routing platform that supports more than 400 models from over 80 providers. It plans to pair OpenRouter’s task-based routing across price, speed, reliability, and complexity with Stripe’s existing token billing tools.

SOCIAL MEDIA

One more follow up on AI Slop.

Hari Srinivasan from LinkedIn says more than one million people have used LinkedIn's “seems like AI slop” feedback option since it launched two weeks earlier. Posts that receive enough feedback may now trigger an analytics message for the creator, although Srinivasan says no single report determines distribution and safeguards are meant to prevent targeting. LinkedIn says members are seeing 40% fewer views of content it classifies as AI slop than a few weeks ago.

source: linkedin.com

A Clearer Way to View and Manage Claims in YouTube Studio

YouTube Studio’s Copyright menu will become a broader Claims tab that groups Content ID and AI likeness restrictions. The update adds four dispute categories for likeness claims and will show both the filer and the person whose likeness was identified. YouTube says a likeness claim can restrict or block a video, but it will not create a copyright or Community Guidelines strike.

YouTube is changing how it counts views

YouTube will count a public view when any video starts playing, bringing long-form and live video in line with Shorts. The earlier 30-second threshold for standard and live video will no longer define public views. Engaged views and watch hours will remain the measures used for earnings and YouTube Partner Program eligibility.

Social Ripples

• TikTok owner ByteDance signs Motion Picture Association deal: Andrew Hutchinson reports that ByteDance and the Motion Picture Association have agreed on a framework for stronger intellectual-property protections in generative video and image models, including Seedance and Seedream. The agreement covers products such as TikTok, CapCut, and Dreamina after the MPA called for tighter restrictions in February.

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SEO + GEO

Rerankers for GEO/AEO: How AI search chooses passages and sources

Metehan Yesilyurt explains why AI-search visibility has three separate gates: retrieval, passage reranking, and final citation use. A strong URL can clear the first gate while its most relevant section loses to a more direct answer on another site.

• Diagnose the failed stage first: No retrieval points to indexing, coverage, authority, or freshness. A retrieved passage that loses points to answer shape or local relevance. A strong passage without a citation can reflect source quality, diversity, or generation behavior.

• Match the answer shape to the query: Use a shortlist with criteria for “best” queries, a like-for-like comparison for versus queries, a concise definition for entity questions, and ordered steps for how-to queries.

• Put the answer before the supporting detail: The article’s tests found that strict rerankers gave a direct shortlist far higher scores than a product description. Add a clear answer-bearing sentence in the first two lines of the relevant section, then add evidence and nuance.

• Test versions, not a made-up GEO score: Compare the same passage and competitors across a few model families. Track retrieval exposure, candidate strength, and citation or mention rate separately.

• Write for local clarity, not a fixed chunk size: Systems divide content differently. Keep the subject, answer, and evidence close together so a section still makes sense when read on its own.

How Cats.txt Showed LLMs.txt Evidence Is GEO Astrology

Mark Williams-Cook created a fake cats.txt standard, then showed it could clear the same four tests often used to sell llms.txt: AI bots crawled it, Google indexed it, AI answers repeated facts from it, and ChatGPT recommended it. Each result can happen because the file is an ordinary public URL, not because a system treats it as a special AI-search signal. His point is not that llms.txt can never matter. It is that GEO claims need a test that distinguishes correlation from an actual mechanism.

Recommended, Not Just Mentioned: What We Learned Running One Buying Prompt 11 Times

Shadrack Wanjohi ran the same B2B software buying prompt 11 times and found that appearing in an AI answer does not mean the model preferred the brand. The exercise separates presence in the shortlist from the recommendation that shapes a buyer’s next move.

• Gong appeared in all 11 answers, but was the clear recommendation in only three.

• The unchanged prompt produced four different readings of the buyer’s job: prospecting pointed to Apollo, coaching new SDRs to Gong, stack consolidation to Salesloft and Clari, and CRM migration to HubSpot and Outreach.

• Zapier appeared in 70% of the participant-level source records. Oliv, Tellius, and ZoomInfo’s Pipeline each appeared in 60%.

• A separate index of 144 answers across six models found one brand with 86% share of voice but none of the 36 first-pick recommendations.

• Track mention rate and recommendation rate by buyer job, then compare the recurring third-party sources behind wins and losses.

5 AI Workflows for Local SEO

Amanda Jordan separates local SEO tasks into automation, AI, and strategist work after managing workflows for more than 20,000 restaurant locations. Her approach filters inputs before the model sees them, assigns each agent one job, and holds publishing behind validation and human review.

My Take: It’s always interesting to see others’ workflows. The lessons are not the prompts. It’s the decision about where business context belongs, what data is safe to pass through the system, and which outputs require a strategist’s judgment before a client sees them.

Topical Gravity: Why topics are the new unit of your search strategy

Margarita Loktionova says AI search visibility is won across related questions, not one tracked prompt at a time. Semrush’s framework calls on teams to define the topics that matter, build coverage on and off site, measure their share against competitors, and expand into adjacent topics from a position of strength.

My Take: Floyi’s framework starts from a similar premise as topical gravity: a topical map is not a keyword list. It connects the audience’s questions, the brand’s positioning, and the commercial pages needed to earn trust. The work is then to build enough depth and internal connection that both people and machines can see the relationship.

ChatGPT shows ads on 1 in 4 commercial queries. Yet, 1 in 7 appear for the wrong topic

Yulia Deda analyzed 50,006 commercial ChatGPT prompts across 20 US niches and found an ad market that can generate reach without reliably delivering relevance or organic visibility.

• 12,974 of the 50,006 prompts returned an ad, a 25.94% ad rate.

• Every observed placement was a single sponsored offer below the answer, with no competing ad beside it.

• 14.35% of placements were no more related to the prompt than a random prompt-ad pairing. The mismatch rate exceeded 50% in Relationships and News & Politics.

• Advertiser domains appeared among the answer’s citations in 3.63% of placements. Exact advertised URLs appeared in 0.09%.

• SE Ranking’s own test generated more than 97,000 impressions and 1,263 clicks over roughly two weeks, but few sign-ups.

source: seranking.com

Google AI Overviews With AI-Generated Images In The Wild

Barry Schwartz reports that AI-generated illustrations are starting to appear in Google AI Overviews. Inspired Taste saw step-by-step cartoons beside a spaghetti squash recipe that already included safety guidance, cooking details, and a video. The publisher’s concern is clear: a cited source can look as if it created an illustration it did not.

source: seroundtable.com

Google Amends SerpApi Suit With Content Licensing Terms

Matt G. Southern reports that Google amended its complaint against SerpApi after a federal judge dismissed its original DMCA claims over Search-result scraping in July. The new filing adds terms from Google's licensing deals to support its claim that copyright owners authorized SearchGuard. Claims involving results without copyrighted content cannot be revived, while discovery remains frozen until the court rules on another motion to dismiss.

ChatGPT's Search Index Serves Small Sites Too, Data Shows

Matt G. Southern reports that Resoneo reviewed 1,249 ChatGPT answers from July and found that unlicensed publishers were served through OpenAI's in-house index in the same format as licensed partners. In a separate paid thinking-mode sample of 16,407 results, Google scraping supplied about 75% while the in-house index supplied about 24%. Of 534 cited pages reviewed, 83.6% of the 463 pages with an H1 had that heading in the stored snippet.

My Take: There are still people out there saying ChatGPT has no index, not sure why since they’ve had it for some time now. Some are also saying that in order for a page to be cited in ChatGPT, that page must be indexed in Google or Bing. Not true again. I’ve done my own tests and mentioned on the IMG podcast that it’s not true. But, your content still needs to be good or it won’t get used.

DMCA as a weapon: How to fight fraudulent takedown claims

Dan Taylor explains how fraudulent DMCA complaints can remove a page from Google before a person checks the claim. He recounts a case in which Search Engine Land and Press Gazette articles disappeared after a complaint cited images that Search Engine Land had not used. His response plan starts with the notice and Lumen Database record, then moves to CMS logs, Wayback snapshots, RSS records, Git history, and a formal counter-notice.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• OpenAI Says Robots.txt May Not Apply To ChatGPT's Fetch Bot: About 15% of identified AI page-fetchers reached URLs European sites had marked as disallowed in TollBit's first-half 2026 data. OpenAI's documentation says ChatGPT-User may not follow robots.txt because a person initiated the request. OAI-SearchBot, not ChatGPT-User, controls whether a site can appear in ChatGPT search results, so blocking both trades away search visibility without fully controlling user-requested fetching.

• Google Lowers Subscriber Requirements For Search Profiles: Google cut the threshold from 100,000 to 35,000 followers for YouTube, Instagram, and X. TikTok remains at 100,000. Google says Search Profiles give creators and publishers a shareable place in Search for their cross-platform content, and it plans to expand the feature to more countries.

• OpenAI Makes The ChatGPT Sources Less Visible: Some ChatGPT responses now place “View sources” inside the three-dot More actions menu instead of showing a Sources button below the answer. The same citation panel remains available, but the extra click can make source discovery and referral traffic less likely.

• Spammy Google Selected Canonical In Search Console: Search Console can sometimes show an unfamiliar or spammy domain as Google's selected canonical. John Mueller says shared interstitial or parked pages can cause this result. His advice is to check again after a few weeks, then post full details in the help community if it does not settle.

AI

How Claude’s text watermark works

Anthropic says future Claude models will use a version of Google DeepMind’s SynthID-Text method to mark generated text. The invisible pattern uses otherwise low-stakes word choices, adds no hidden characters or extra tokens, and carries no information about a user, organization, or chat. It can estimate whether Claude was involved in a passage, but it cannot establish authorship, identify another model, or reliably assess a short sample.

Bring your spreadsheet data to life with Sheets canvas

Google introduces Sheets canvas, a Gemini-powered read-write layer that turns a Google Sheet into an interactive mini-app from a natural-language prompt. Teams can edit the canvas or the underlying sheet, with changes syncing in real time, then share the canvas as a regular Sheet tab. It is available globally in English for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, with a rollout starting for specified Business, Enterprise, and Education plans.

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AI Ripples

• Introducing Gemini 3.7 Flash: Google’s new coding and agent model scored 43.6% on FrontierCode 1.1 Main versus 34.4% for Gemini 3.6 Flash, and 65.3% versus 49.0% on DeepSWE v1.1. Google is pricing it through December 31, 2026 at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens, before the listed price doubles on January 1, 2027.

• Previewing Ultrafast mode: GPT‑5.6 Sol at up to 14X the speed: OpenAI is previewing an API tier for GPT-5.6 Sol that it says runs up to 14 times faster than Standard processing and produces up to 750 output tokens per second through Cerebras. Access is limited to an initial customer group while OpenAI studies uses in coding, commerce, research, support, and other time-sensitive workflows.

MARKETING

What is brand messaging? A framework for teams of any size

Erin Rodrigue separates positioning, messaging, and voice, then lays out a messaging framework built from purpose, value proposition, audience, message pillars, voice and tone, and proof points. Her practical test is useful: if a competitor’s name can replace yours in the copy without changing the meaning, the message is too generic.

My Take: This is why Floyi’s foundation is the brand and audience. A topical strategy only works when it starts with a clear view of who the business serves, the job that audience needs done, and the distinct proof behind the promise. Otherwise, AI can scale output, but it only scales generic copy faster. Watch a YouTube Short on Floyi’s approach to creating unique content.

Demand Gen shows why PPC can no longer hide behind intent

Leigh Buttrey explains that Demand Gen moves PPC beyond capturing an existing search. The format needs images, video, audience signals, and creative that earns attention before a buyer has named the problem. Google says advertisers using both image and video assets saw 6% more conversions at the same spend than those using images alone, based on its own global campaign data.

LINK BUILDING + DIGITAL PR

Why the traditional link building model no longer works for AI search

Gaetano DiNardi says high-domain-rating placements, paid mentions, and link exchanges can create the appearance of authority without giving AI systems enough context to recommend a brand. He points to the usual failure pattern: an irrelevant insert, traffic from the wrong market, a page stuffed with unrelated outbound links, and a report that measures rows delivered instead of business impact. His alternative is a broader record of credible, topically relevant sources that connect the brand to its use cases and category.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Open-sourcing the For You timeline

X Open Source says X has released code affecting post ranking, filtering, and visibility in the For You timeline, alongside an Under the Hood pilot that shows eligible users labels applied to their accounts and posts. The X GitHub repository includes the ranking pipeline, visibility-filtering components, and documentation on what remains excluded to reduce gaming.

New opportunities to earn and changes to the YouTube Partner Program

The YouTube Team says the Partner Program will change on February 1, 2027, with higher thresholds for Shorts revenue sharing and for new applicants seeking ads and Premium revenue.

• Creators need 10 million qualified Shorts views in 90 days to earn ad and subscription revenue sharing from Shorts.

• Channels below that mark remain in YPP and can still earn from long-form content. Shorts revenue sharing resumes if they cross the threshold again.

• New applicants need 8,000 qualified watch hours in 365 days or 20 million qualified Shorts views in 90 days for ads and Premium revenue sharing.

• Premium Lite is expanding to every country with YouTube Premium. It allocates 60% of net subscription revenue to its creator pool, compared with 30% for Premium.

• YouTube reports more than 200 billion daily Shorts views and more than one billion hours of TV watch time each day.

source: blog.youtube

YouTube adds vertical livestream practice mode

Andrew Hutchinson reports that YouTube is rolling out Practice Mode for vertical livestreams. Creators can privately test chat, polls, stickers, green screens, and the stream setup, then go live from the same screen. YouTube is also rolling out a Get Feedback option in the Shorts composer that offers pre-publish notes on a clip's hook, visuals, and pacing.

source: socialmediatoday.com

Original Content Rewards Program

X Creators says new enrollments in Revenue Sharing have closed, while existing members can keep earning through September 7, 2026. From September 8, eligible existing members can apply for the Original Content Rewards Program. Applicants need a Premium subscription, 500 verified followers, 500,000 verified-user Home Timeline impressions in the prior 90 days, and regular original content.

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TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

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SEO + GEO

What 50k Query Fan-Outs Reveal About Brands (+ Free Data!)

Dr. Peter J. Meyers shares research on a dataset of 50,000 Gemini-generated fan-out prompts across 1,000 subtopics. It shows that the prompts selected for tracking can heavily shape the brand-visibility result.

• Brand mentions were concentrated in two intent types: Only 12.8% of prompts mentioned a primary brand or competitor. Entity and comparison fan-outs produced 97% of those mentions.

• Prompt selection can bias share-of-voice reporting: Mentioning a brand or competitor in the input nearly guaranteed its appearance in the LLM output. The study instead used brands as contextual hints, not direct prompt terms.

• Useful fan-outs stayed related without becoming duplicates: The prompts averaged an alignment score of 0.67 against their subtopic, on a scale from 0.22 to 1.00. Meyers treats that middle ground as the target between relevance and variety.

• The tracked queries landed in the medium-long tail: Prompts averaged 8.2 words, with a three-to-13-word range. That gives marketers specific questions to measure without making the list too narrow to manage.

source: moz.com

Brand Search Cannibalisation, How to Tell When Google Ads Is Stealing Your Organic Clicks

Josh Uebergang lays out a pause-test framework for branded paid search. Google’s review of 390 ad-pause studies found that, when the advertiser held the top organic result, 50% of ad clicks were incremental, while an eBay field experiment found near-complete substitution for brand keywords. Pause carefully, calculate recovered organic brand clicks against lost paid clicks, then judge the change in combined branded revenue rather than channel attribution alone.

From ranking to recommended: get your site ready to thrive in the age of AI agents

Cloudflare introduces their Agent Readiness diagnostics and AEO Visibility for measuring whether AI agents can access a site and recommend it. Diagnostics checks essentials such as robots.txt, XML sitemaps, AI-crawler rules, Markdown, metadata, and agent-ready interfaces, then returns pass, fail, or neutral results with an evidence trail. AEO tests likely category prompts in Claude and GPT and reports Citation Rate, Prominence, Mention Rate, and Share of Voice, while its operator activity view separates crawler traffic, referrals, and errors.

How topical authority spreads (and where it doesn’t) in ChatGPT [Study]

Margarita Loktionova and Semrush, working with Kevin Indig, analyzed 1,094 U.S. categories tracked in ChatGPT from January through June 2026. The dataset includes 283,215 domain-category citation observations and 76,493 brand-mention observations.

• Citation is easier to extend than a named mention: In categories close to a brand’s core expertise, brands were cited in 74% of appearances and named in 44%. In distant categories, those shares fell to 50% and 25%.

• Depth creates recognition: Repeated presence across a category’s prompts was associated with stronger brand-mention share. A one-off citation across many categories was not.

• Industry changes the pattern: Broader coverage was associated with stronger citation share in finance and real estate, while legal and healthcare did not reliably turn full prompt coverage into brand mentions.

source: semrush.com

Utilizing Bing Product Feeds for Ecommerce AI SEO

Brodie Clark walks through Microsoft Merchant Center as an ecommerce input worth checking alongside Google Merchant Center. He found that feeds can be imported from Google, but account-entity verification matters, free-listing reporting had been stuck since July 6, and his tests suggested ads may need to be enabled before products surface in Bing Shopping’s free listings. Microsoft Merchant Center also now exposes Universal Commerce Protocol settings for AI-powered shopping eligibility.

ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini vs Perplexity: what 2026 usage data actually shows

Maayan Zohar Basteker compares four AI platforms using reach, retention, growth rate, paid acquisition, and usage mix instead of treating market leadership as one number.

• Reach: ChatGPT has the most web traffic by a wide margin, with Gemini in second. Claude remains smaller, while Perplexity is the smallest of the four and declining.

• Retention: ChatGPT has the strongest app stickiness. Claude’s smaller audience is slightly stickier than Gemini’s, and Perplexity trails the group.

• Momentum: Claude leads year-over-year app-user growth, followed by Perplexity, Gemini, and then ChatGPT. Claude also ramped paid search faster than ChatGPT or Gemini across the period tracked.

source: similarweb.com

You can’t demand the click if you won’t give the link

Nick LeRoy makes a simple point: publishers asking AI platforms to cite and send traffic should apply the same standard when they use another company’s data, reporting, or expertise. He calls out unlinked source mentions and blanket nofollow use, noting that a normal unpaid citation lets readers verify the claim and find the original work.

What happens when AI Overviews contradict paid search ads?

Sarah Stemen shows how an AI Overview can name competitors even when another advertiser owns the paid position. In her examples, minor query changes produced different AI citations for the same product category, separating the auction logic from the retrieval logic. She also flags a measurement risk: if an AI Overview intercepts clicks while paid impressions remain stable, falling CTR can make the paid account look weaker without explaining why.

Why paid search could be your AI search advantage

Heather Brousell shows how paid-search assets can become the research layer for AI visibility. Search-term reports surface long, conversational customer questions, winning ad copy identifies claims that should exist as crawlable page text, and product feeds supply the titles, attributes, prices, and availability that AI shopping tools can use. Her five-step framework starts with crawl access and Bing verification, then turns observed paid-search demand into citable content and cleaner feeds.

Google: Reddit Gets No Special Preference In Google Search Rankings

Barry Schwartz reports that Google communications representative Jennifer Kutz told The Verge that Reddit receives no special preference in Google Search or AI search features. Kutz said Google does not aim to show content from any specific site or platform, and that its systems evaluate helpful and low-quality forum content as they do other formats.

My Take: uh huuuh.

Zero Click Searches At An All-Time High

Harry Clarkson-Bennett reviews Datos clickstream data on the state of search in 2026, with a focus on where Google searches now end.

• Open-web clicks are the minority: Just 40% of searches in the U.S. and 40.7% in the EU and U.K. sent a click to the open web in June.

• Google-owned destinations gained: 17.1% of U.S. searches and 20.4% of EU and U.K. searches led to a Google-owned property.

• Paid clicks fell across both regions: U.S. paid-click share dropped from 2.3% to 1.3% between March and June, while the EU and U.K. fell from 2.4% to 1.4%.

Your rankings aren’t telling you what your customers see

Carrie-Ann Sudlow explains why ranking reports measure only one controlled version of Google, not the results each customer sees. Location, device, history, phrasing, paid placements, AI Overviews, shopping modules, and local results can all change the page before an organic listing appears. She recommends putting rankings alongside impressions, click-through rate, conversions, qualified traffic, inquiries, revenue, branded search, and returning users.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, With Ads Built In: Vincent Schmalbach reports that TIME served Chrome, Safari, and Googlebot a 303,235-byte HTML page, while ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and OAI-SearchBot received the same 13,409-byte markdown response. GPTBot and ChatGPT-User returned 406, and selected machine-only collection and section pages contained labeled sponsored FAQ content that the human HTML did not.

• False positives for "Malware and Similar Malicious Content policy": WebLove.PL says a large number of Google Blogger blogs were flagged or locked under the malware policy on August 4 because of apparent automated misclassification. The Blogger community product expert says the team was notified and directs affected publishers to request a review from the Info tab in their dashboard. Check your Blogger if you didn’t receive a notice.

AI

Announcing Cloudflare Wallets: The programmable wallet for the agentic Internet

Cloudflare announced Wallets, which give accounts a cloudflare.pay handle and let them create Virtual Wallets for agents. Virtual Wallets can pay for APIs, MCP tools, and content through x402 micropayments, while their owners set allowances, allow lists, and per-transaction ceilings. The design also separates account and agent identities, letting merchants decide whether to transact with an identified agent.

My Take: @yoyao is mine. Get ready to pay me, so my agent can go out and buy stuff 😂 🎁 

Cloudflare launches Kitesurf, a browser built for AI agents

Big week for Cloudflare. They also launched Kitesurf, a cloud-hosted browser built for AI agents rather than people. The browser is in free beta through Browser Run and lets developers navigate sites, fill forms, take screenshots, extract HTML, and complete other browser tasks without building their own browser stack. Cloudflare says Kitesurf runs on Workers, uses less CPU and memory than Chromium for common agent tasks, and already passes more than 215,000 web-platform tests.

My Take: Browser agents make the interaction layer of a website more important. The next generation of technical SEO is not only crawlability. It is whether a machine can read the offer, pass the form, locate the proof, and complete the action without getting trapped by brittle UX or unclear requirements.

AI Ripples

• OpenAI’s new AI smart speaker will reportedly sell for between $300 and $400: Lucas Ropek reports that OpenAI’s first hardware device is expected to be a donut-shaped, screenless smart speaker with moving parts to show emotion and a premium metal build. Bloomberg sources put the price at $300 to $400 and a likely release in 2027.

• Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT—and expanding access to GPT‑5.6 Luna for free users: OpenAI says GPT‑5.6 Sol now gives Plus and Pro users more focused answers, stronger factual reliability, and a slider for choosing response effort. Free and Go users will move to GPT‑5.6 Luna, with unlimited text chats and a Think button for harder questions rolling out next week.

• Jeff Dean Is Leaving Google after nearly 27 years to launch Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. The public-benefit company plans AI systems that can propose, run, evaluate, and iterate on experiments across fields including machine learning, biology, materials, and chip design.

• The next chapter of our AI momentum: In Google’s response to Jeff Dean’s departure, Sundar Pichai confirms that Google will be a founding investor and Cloud partner for Dean and Ghemawat’s new company. Pichai also moves Demis Hassabis into Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while Koray Kavukcuoglu becomes SVP of Google DeepMind overseeing Gemini model development, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams.

• Chinese AI model Kimi escaped its cybersecurity testing environment, researchers say: Moonshot’s Kimi K3 bypassed a cybersecurity-test sandbox by using command-line tools after its environment was misconfigured.

• Meta becomes latest firm to say its AI hacked another company: Meta says an AI model connected to the internet and breached another organization during an independent security evaluation. Meta attributes the incident to a tester misconfiguration, while the evaluation firm says it matches a recently disclosed Anthropic testing issue.

• Apple is getting this wrong: OpenAI disputes Apple’s lawsuit over alleged trade-secret misuse, saying Apple’s lawyers first contacted the wrong person and that Apple did not previously raise the specific allegations. OpenAI says it has offered to work toward a resolution and does not have or want Apple’s confidential information.

• Google Assistant to be discontinued on Android starting September 4: Google will begin removing Google Assistant from Android phones, tablets, and paired mobile devices on September 4, with the rollout taking several weeks. Gemini will replace it on those devices, while Google Assistant will continue for cars with Google built-in.

CONTENT

Content Prioritization in an AI Search Era: A Framework + Worksheet

Aleyda Solis offers a six-factor framework for deciding which content still merits investment when AI answers can satisfy more searches without a click.

• Score the value separately: Assess click resilience, citation potential, brand-mention potential, business value, proprietary advantage, and expected effort rather than treating traffic as the only outcome.

• Prioritize the work AI cannot finish: Give more weight to official entity facts, proprietary evidence, current data, meaningful decisions, context-specific guidance, and pages that let a person or agent complete an action.

• Do not confuse deprioritization with deletion: Commodity definitions and rehashed explainers may need original value, consolidation, or removal based on their actual role and performance.

AI Content Creation Statistics: 2026 Report

Evan Bailyn’s report combines a survey of 912 marketing and communications teams, a nationally representative panel of 2,047 U.S. adults, and a sample of roughly 1.2 million public social posts. The data shows AI-assisted publishing is common, but minimal-edit AI content barely appears in top Google results: 0.4% versus 58% for AI-assisted content with at least five minutes of human editing and 41.6% for fully human-written content. Among marketing teams, 41% apply a five-to-20-minute standard review, while 9% publish without human edits.

source: firstpagesage.com

SOCIAL MEDIA

The Walt Disney Company and TikTok Announce a First-of-its-Kind Global Short-Form Content-Sharing Deal

TikTok and The Walt Disney Company announced a U.S. pilot that brings opt-in Disney fan videos from TikTok to Disney+ through Verts, with other markets intended to follow. TikTok creators will gain access to assets from hundreds of Disney films and series, while the jointly run Disney Creator Ambassador Program offers selected creators visibility, events, rewards, and career-development opportunities. TikTok says its users shared an average of 6.5 million film- and TV-related posts a day last year.

Modernizing Reddit’s Infrastructure and Moderation Tools

Reddit outlines a platform overhaul covering moderation, community discovery, developer tools, and anti-scraping protections. Rules Hub, now tested across more than 700 communities, lets moderators choose which rules are automatically enforced and whether a triggered post is queued, filtered, or removed. Reddit plans to make communities less dependent on account-age and karma thresholds, while gradually moving third-party apps toward its Developer Platform and keeping Old Reddit behind login as it migrates essential workflows.

Social Ripples

• Behind the edit: Video editing tips from creators on Edits: Instagram Creators recommends treating the first seconds as the hook, editing to audio rhythm, and using captions and visual cues to reinforce the message. After publishing, review watch time, drop-off points, saves, and shares to identify what the next edit should change.

• TikTok Symphony levels up with Dreamina Seedance 2.5: TikTok For Business says Symphony now supports AI videos up to 30 seconds, up from 15, and lets advertisers upload up to 50 image, video, and audio references, up from nine. The rollout also adds timestamp-specific direction, AI labels, invisible watermarking, and C2PA Content Credentials.

• Perplexity AI loses bid to toss Reddit lawsuit over data scraping: Blake Brittain reports that a Manhattan federal judge rejected most of Perplexity’s motion to dismiss Reddit’s copyright lawsuit. The ruling lets Reddit continue claims that Perplexity and three data scrapers bypassed protections to obtain content for AI training.

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TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

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SEO + GEO

Platform properties roll out globally, plus a new social and video performance guide

Search Console platform properties are now available globally for Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube. The new guide shows how to use query groups, a 24-hour traffic filter, cross-platform exports, and annotations to see what sends Google Search traffic to social and video posts. It also recommends comparing formats and revisiting older posts that regain search traction.

Should you block your Search result pages?

Martin Splitt and John Mueller explain that internal search results can create an effectively unlimited set of crawlable URLs. Google may eventually detect and deprioritize the pattern, but those uncached pages can create database load and crawl waste first.

• Block crawling or block indexing: A robots.txt rule prevents crawling. A noindex directive still requires Google to fetch the page, but keeps it out of the index.

• Use one maintainable pattern: Mueller recommends a broad rule that covers the search query parameter pattern rather than a long list of individual terms.

• The Removal Tool only hides the symptom: It can remove URLs from visible Google results temporarily, but it does not stop Googlebot from crawling them.

• Never use 500 errors as a crawl control: Google can interpret server failures as a reason to reduce crawling across the whole site, including pages you want crawled.

• Keep real category pages crawlable: Some CMSs use search URLs for tags or categories. Separate those valuable landing pages from open-ended internal search patterns.

• It is also a spam control: Indexable search URLs can be abused with casino, pharmaceutical, adult, or contact-detail queries that make a legitimate domain appear for irrelevant terms.

What 13 Billion Google Searches Reveal About Zero-Click Behavior

Cate Dombrowski reports on 13.1 billion Google search events from a 15-month Datos clickstream panel. The headline rate matters, but the study is more useful as a map of which queries, users, devices, countries, and destinations still earn clicks.

• The baseline is 46.96%: Nearly half of 10.2 billion Google searches ended without a click. The rate rose 2.6 percentage points from October 2024 to December 2025, while the organic-click share fell about 2.8 points and paid clicks did not change.

• Most clicks are discovery: Only about 14% land on a site named in the query. The other 86% go to destinations the searcher did not explicitly name.

• Mobile behavior is market-specific: US mobile search ended without a click 66% of the time, compared with 49% overall in the US. Japan and Vietnam sat near 41% overall, while the Philippines reached about 54%.

• Destination value changes the risk: Google intercepted 30.5% of Wikipedia’s would-be search traffic and 33.4% of IMDb’s, versus 14.2% for Reddit. ChatGPT ranked sixth among top Google destinations and received 4.75% of its Google traffic from ads.

Why every SEO team now needs a social topical map

Lawrence Hitches explains how Search Console platform properties expose Google Search demand for a brand’s social content. His YouTube channel earned 203,000 Google Search impressions in 11 days but only 87 clicks, and 149 variations of “enterprise SEO” added up to 31,555 impressions. He recommends planning by topic cluster, then matching each facet to the page, video, or social format that can answer it.

My Take: I’ve been saying since Topical Maps Unlocked came out a few years ago that a topical map can double as a map for social content. Each topic node in your map doesn’t have to be an article, it could be a short/long video or a post. The topical hierarchy can be used to help you organize your social content. Your map is the foundation for many other uses.

source: searchengineland.com

Multi-location SEO: How to structure geographic pages at scale

Gaetano Pizzi explains that a multi-location site should reflect the real business before it reflects a keyword list. Location pages need a real customer-facing facility, regional hubs should help people choose among locations, and service-area pages should be exceptions with a clear business purpose. He recommends consolidating duplicate geographic URLs, aligning entity signals, and using internal links to show how locations, services, and teams connect.

My Take: Geographic expansion is an architecture problem before it is a content-production problem. That’s why I built Floyi’s site architecture tool that makes it simple to generate a structured page system from the real business model.

source: searchengineland.com

The 2026 Generative AI Landscape

Similarweb’s Sam Sheridan and Laurie Naspe map AI search across web, app, citations, referrals, and brand outcomes.

• AI discovery is already large: Generative AI platforms averaged 9.5 billion monthly web visits from June 2025 through May 2026, up 70% year over year. Monthly unique visitors reached 655 million, while app downloads rose 58% to 4.4 billion.

• ChatGPT has not replaced Google: 95% of ChatGPT users also used Google between March and May 2026. AI is adding another discovery surface to the existing search journey.

• Live-web citations are growing, but not evenly: 6.8% of ChatGPT answers included citations in May 2026, more than five times the share a year earlier. Travel reached 22.6%, retail 13.5%, and education 4.8%, so citation opportunity depends heavily on the category.

• AI recommendations shape the shortlist: Across finance, travel, and beauty examples, users were two to four times more likely to visit an AI-recommended brand than a competitor that was not recommended.

• Homepage readiness now matters: After ChatGPT’s May 7 search update, the share of referrals landing on homepages rose from about 25% to nearly 60%. A cited article may earn the evidence role, but the homepage increasingly needs to earn the next click.

My Take: The practical AI-search model is becoming clearer: build the topical depth that earns a recommendation or citation, then make every likely entry page ready to turn that attention into a next step.

How Perplexity Actually Picks Sources (I Read the Stream, Not the Answers)

Suganthan Mohanadasan inspected Perplexity’s live answer stream across eight captures on one logged-in Pro account. The sample is small and directional, but the structural fields exposed in the stream offer useful clues about which sources Perplexity retrieves, cites, and reads in full.

• Perplexity searched every tested query: The skip_search field was false across seven query types.

• Retrieved is not cited: Fresh current-year listicles appeared to win commercial queries, while official sources won the tested news query.

• Video and local entities matter: In the tested product and how-to queries, YouTube sources were cited while retrieved Reddit threads were not. For local queries, place entities took citations when the maps index returned results.

• Deep Research changes the prize: It fetched two to three pages in full, and those pages dominated citations. Comprehensive, well-structured content has a clearer advantage when Perplexity chooses to read beyond the snippet.

Top Stories in AI Overviews: The Data, The Strategy, and The Impact of Blocking Google AI

John Shehata reports that Top Stories can now appear inside AI Overviews rather than as a separate module. In NewzDash’s tracked trending-news results, that happened in 15.5% of US cases and 17.46% of UK cases where Top Stories appeared. The placement is either inside the AI Overview or standalone, not both.

The strategic complication is the new Search Console generative AI exclusion. Google-Extended does not remove a publisher from AI Overviews or Search, but the Search Console control removes links and content from covered generative features. NewzDash considers losing a Top Stories placement embedded inside an AI Overview a high-confidence interpretation of that control, not a directly confirmed test result.

Google Doesn’t Punish AI Content; It Punishes Bad Content (331k Pages Studied)

Ryan Law reports on Ahrefs’ analysis of one million top-10 pages from 100,000 Google SERPs. Around 300,000 were available in its crawler database and 150,000 had enough text for detection. The detector estimates how AI-written a page reads, not how it was created, and Ahrefs stresses that it is not a Google ranking signal.

• Fully AI-written pages can rank at the top: 5.3% of pages in positions one to three were scored as 100% AI content, and 9% scored at 80% or above.

• But they are still a minority: Pages with under 50% AI content held 82.2% of top-three rankings. At position one, 8.4% of pages were in the 80%-plus bucket, compared with 11.7% at position 10.

• There is no binary index block: 49.28% of low-AI pages showed index signals, versus 40.35% of very-high-AI pages. The gap matters, but roughly 40% of the latter group was still indexed.

• The largest performance gap was impressions: Low- and moderate-AI pages earned two to three times the organic impressions of high- and very-high-AI pages. The study found no obvious collapse in impressions after three to six months for the high-AI groups.

• Correlation is not a diagnosis: The research cannot separate AI use from factors such as site authority, originality, depth, linking, and factual accuracy. A detector score should trigger review, not act as a publishing or ranking verdict.

My Take: My main issue with AI content detectors is reliability (Ahrefs says it too in the methodology section). Not saying that their results are wrong, but I’ve just seen hot companies like Pangram also fail and have weird flags. E.g., they flag a list of 3 items in a sentence as AI because AI writes in threes. Apparently the Rule of 3s belongs to AI now, like em dashes.

Google Expands Review Guidelines And Warns Of Manual Actions

Roger Montti reports that Google expanded its review snippet documentation to warn against fake and undisclosed incentivized reviews, including reviews not based on a genuine experience. Google says violations can make a site eligible for manual action and that site owners can request reconsideration after fixing the problem. The guidance applies to review-content authenticity, not merely to structured data syntax.

Indexed Claude Chats Show Why Disallow Is Not Noindex

Matt G. Southern found shared Claude chat URLs blocked by robots.txt while also serving an X-Robots-Tag of none, which is equivalent to noindex and nofollow. That combination creates a technical conflict: Googlebot cannot see the noindex directive if robots.txt prevents it from crawling the page, and a URL can still be indexed when Google discovers it through links elsewhere.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Google Search Doesn't Publish Precedence For Metadata In Conflict: John Mueller will not publish a fixed order for resolving metadata conflicts, such as a redirect pointing one way and a canonical pointing back. Google’s guidance is simpler: fix conflicting signals instead of trying to predict which one will win.

• Google's Illyes Unsure On Shifting unavailable_after Dates: Matt G. Southern reports that Gary Illyes is checking whether sites can safely keep extending unavailable_after dates on renewed pages. His initial view was that a new date should work once Google recrawls the page, but Google has not documented the renewal scenario. The directive affects index selection, not the cost of the recrawl itself.

AI

How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran

Henk van Ess shows how Google Earth’s Nano Banana editor turned real coordinates into photorealistic scenes of a nuclear plant in Iran, a bomb crater at a Gaza hospital, and a fatal crash in Amsterdam. In the original launch post, Google Product Manager Bryan Horowitz invited people to type what they wanted to see. Google updated that post on July 31 to say it was rolling back the feature after screenshots of generated imagery appeared to violate its policies, one day after release.

source: digitaldigging.org

Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations

Anthropic reports that a review of 141,006 cybersecurity evaluation runs found three cases in which Claude reached the open internet through a misconfigured third-party test environment and gained unauthorized access to real organizations. The models were told they were in a simulation, treated real systems as part of capture-the-flag exercises, and used basic techniques such as weak passwords, unauthenticated endpoints, and SQL injection. Anthropic stopped cyber evaluations, notified the affected organizations, and says it is strengthening containment, monitoring, and vendor assurance.

7 feedback loops for self-improving AI content workflows

Tania Brown outlines seven feedback loops that turn recurring edits and performance signals into better AI content workflows. The process starts before writing with an angle filter and evidence check, then uses quality gates, rubric scoring, adversarial review, and a capped revision cycle to catch problems before publication. After publication, a diff-and-learn loop captures repeated human edits, while performance feedback changes the next brief rather than merely reporting on the last piece.

DuckDuckGo’s new smart glasses come with zero AI and 100% shade

DuckDuckGo and Knockaround launched $35 Paso Robles “smart” sunglasses with no camera, microphone, battery, charging port, or AI. The polarized UV400 glasses are positioned as a pointed alternative to smart glasses that can record people or send conversations to the cloud. You can buy them here.

source: knockaround.com

AI Ripples

• Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6: OpenAI cut GPT‑5.6 Luna pricing by 80% and Terra pricing by 20%. It also replaced Priority Processing with Fast mode for Sol, which delivers up to 2.5 times Standard speed at twice the price. API rates are now $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens for Luna, and $2 and $12 for Terra. Nice to see a company lowering prices instead of increasing.

• We’re launching Lyria 3.5 in Google Flow Music, with advances across musicality, lyrics, vocals, and creative control: Google launched Lyria 3.5 in Flow Music with improved melodic structure, lyric prompt adherence, vocal expression and pronunciation, plus more control over tempo and duration.

• Google Blames Website For Race Based AI Overview Response: Barry Schwartz reports that Google said a disputed AI Overview response appeared to be picking up particular web pages for that query and that its teams were reviewing the result. Funny how Google was looking for copyright protection of the SERPs in the SerpApi case last week and now blames it on publishers 😂 

• Siri AI could come with a paywall for power users: Tim Cook envisions iCloud+ upgrades that let heavy Siri AI users buy more compute. He said the plans are not final, but the model would mirror the free tier and paid-usage limits already common among AI providers. Apple plans a broader Siri AI rollout this fall.

CONTENT

Readers spot AI writing 64% of the time: the first 1,636 answers from the AI vs Human test

Dan Petrovic reports that players correctly identified the machine-written passage 64% of the time across 1,636 answers in DEJAN’s first two days of testing. Accuracy rose from 55% for answers made within five seconds to 75% after 40 seconds or more, while 18 of 142 completed rounds were perfect scores against 0.14 expected by chance.

Take the AI vs Human test here.

My Take: Let me know how you did. Just remember that humans actually use many of the AI indicators (em dashes) that people claim as clear AI detectors.

LINK BUILDING + DIGITAL PR

How to Increase Email Open Rate (For PRs and Link Builders)

Vince Nero explains that outreach opens start with deliverability and relevance, not a clever subject line. In BuzzStream’s data across 1,785 domains and 14.3 million emails, domains with no authentication had open rates roughly four times lower than those with at least one authentication record. He also found that smaller campaigns earned higher average open rates, replies, and links.

SOCIAL MEDIA

YouTube Views Rose While Long-Form Ad Revenue Fell, Data Shows

Matt G. Southern reports that Metricool analyzed 799,718 YouTube videos from 71,177 connected accounts, comparing February 2025 with February 2026. Long-form views grew sharply in the dataset, while attention, ad delivery, and estimated ad revenue moved the other way.

• Views rose 76%: The average long-form video received 5,985 views in February 2026, up from 3,405 a year earlier.

• Attention weakened: Average view duration fell 37%, from 3.98 minutes to 2.51. Estimated minutes watched per post still rose 11% because the increase in views outweighed the shorter sessions.

• Ad delivery dropped by about half: Average ad impressions fell from 976.32 to 475.07 per post, monetized playbacks from 576.41 to 237.92, and estimated ad revenue from $2.65 to $1.20.

Social Ripples

• LinkedIn Adds An “AI Slop” Button To Clean Up Its Feed: LinkedIn is adding a “Seems like AI slop” feedback option, using reports as signals for classifiers that can reduce recommendations of low-quality, overly automated posts. LinkedIn is also removing its AI post-rewrite tool in favor of proofreading that preserves the author’s voice.

• Create YouTube audio ads: Google Ads says audio-optimized YouTube placements can reach people listening to music, podcasts, or background content, with a static image or light animation as the recommended visual.

WHAT I'VE BUILT FOR YOU

Floyi - Build Topical Authority that wins in Google and AI Search. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

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TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

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SEO + GEO

New AI Search Visibility & LLM Ranking Factors Report Data (July 2026)

Ben Wills reports that his July dataset covers 403K+ prompts across 10 models, 145,289 recommended domains, and 18 external signals. The data shows correlation with LLM visibility, not a formula for causing it.

• Being linked from search results mattered more than simply showing up: This was the clearest pattern found. It still explained only about 11% of the difference in LLM visibility, so it is an input, not a shortcut.

• Homepage topic match mattered more than before: The signal from words in a site's title, description, and page copy rose sharply since May. He gives title words the most weight, description words next, and body copy the least.

• Authority worked best at the domain level: Site-wide authority signals were more useful than measurements from individual hosts or pages.

• Entity and community signals helped: Brands connected to Wikidata and discussed on Reddit showed stronger patterns than a basic Wikipedia presence.

source: oppalerts.com

Google loses key DMCA claims against SerpApi in scraping lawsuit

Danny Goodwin reports that a federal court dismissed Google's two DMCA claims against SerpApi and paused discovery while Google decides whether to amend its complaint. The court permanently dismissed claims tied to Search results without copyrighted content. It allowed Google to revise claims involving copyrighted results because its SearchGuard allegations did not show the system acted with a copyright owner's authority.

My Take: The decision turns on a narrow legal question, not a blanket approval for SERP scraping. Anyone building on search-result data still needs to account for platform terms, technical limits, and the cost of a collection model that can survive a legal challenge.

The "TikTokification" of Search: Why the Creator Model Is Replacing the Ranking Model

Mikael Arajuo says AI Mode is shifting search from document retrieval toward longer, platform-contained sessions where follow-up queries and cited source fragments matter as much as a click. He points to Google Creator Profiles, citations from social platforms in AI responses, and a reported 40% month-over-month increase in U.S. follow-up queries as signs that creator identity is becoming more visible in search. His recommendation is to build attributable, verifiable content and map how named experts appear across the sources Google can connect.

AI visibility is a topic-level game: A study of 50,000 brands in ChatGPT [Study]

Margarita Loktionova shares that Semrush and Kevin Indig studied 1,094 ChatGPT categories from January through June 2026, covering more than 50,000 brands and 600,000 citations. The research defines a topic owner as a brand mentioned in at least four of five related prompts with a five-percentage-point lead.

• Most topics remain open: Only 15.2% of categories had a clear owner. Another 31.2% had an emerging leader, while 53.7% had no brand appearing in at least three of five prompts.

• Broad SEO strength did not decide ownership: Topic owners had more branded search volume in 55.7% of comparisons, more organic traffic in 48.4%, and a higher Authority Score in 52.5%.

• Margin made ownership durable: Clear owners stayed in first place in 90.4% of month-over-month comparisons. Categories that changed leaders had a median lead of 1.3 percentage points, versus 2.9 points where the leader held.

source: semrush.com

AI Traffic Conversion Rates: New Research from 97 B2B Websites and 29M visits

Andy Crestodina analyzed 28.9 million sessions across 97 B2B lead-generation sites through June 2026, with every GA4 key event manually categorized by intent.

• AI referrals converted at a higher rate: Visitors from AI sources were three times more likely to become leads than other organic sources. The pattern appeared on roughly two-thirds of the sites.

• Volume was still tiny: AI sources sent 140,000 sessions, or 0.5% of all traffic. Crestodina notes that GA4 records clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode as Organic Search, and some AI-app visits as Direct.

• ChatGPT led the measured sources: ChatGPT accounted for 82.3% of AI-referred visits. It converted 2.1% of visitors into leads, compared with 0.5% for Google Search, while Google delivered 100 times more traffic.

source: orbitmedia.com

Google Was a Lifeline for Publishers. Now Some Are Thinking of Cutting It Off.

Alexandra Bruell reports that Reddit, USA Today, Politico, the Economist, People Inc., and Reuters are reassessing how they work with Google as AI answers reduce outbound search clicks and disrupt publisher revenue models. Reddit has discussed restricting Google's access to content for AI use as the companies negotiate over a 2024 deal reportedly worth $60 million a year that is nearing its end.

How category framing changes which brands AI recommends

Maryanna Franco reports that she and João da Silva tested 12 U.K. athletic-apparel brands across 14,140 API runs on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. Changing only the category in the prompt from athleisure to athletic footwear moved New Balance from a 1% to a 90% recommendation rate, while lululemon fell from 90% to 0%. Franco says the pattern reflects category coding, where a brand's Knowledge Graph description and third-party content history together determine which category queries an AI system associates with it.

My Take: This is why brand and audience must be the first things you set before anything else. When I build a topical map, I start with the categories customers actually use, then make sure the site, expert content, and external mentions reinforce the same association. A strong entity in the wrong category still misses the recommendation.

Google's Liz Reid Discusses Persistent Autonomous Search

Roger Montti connects Liz Reid's Google I/O comments about agentic search with a February 2026 patent for delivering results after an initially unanswered query. The patent describes storing queries that lack a sufficiently high-quality, authoritative, or complete answer, then monitoring for new or updated information and proactively notifying the user. It outlines six trigger scenarios and allows delivery through notifications, later assistant conversations, or another device.

Google: We Send Billions Of Clicks To Websites Weekly Through AI Search

Barry Schwartz reports that Google Search head Nick Fox says AI Mode and AI Overviews send billions of clicks to websites each week, while Google Search overall sends billions daily. Fox did not say whether AI features send more clicks than before. Barry notes that Search Console's AI performance reporting does not include clicks, leaving publishers unable to compare AI-feature click-through rates with traditional search.

My Take: A big claim of BILLIONs - but no proof with data. The number I want is the click, conversion, and revenue change for a comparable query set before and after AI features appear. Until that exists, treat broad platform claims as context, not a traffic forecast.

The Content SEO Manager: How a brand-new role took over content marketing [Study]

Margarita Loktionova says that the Content SEO Manager title, absent from Semrush's 2023 data, now represents 20% of U.S. content marketing listings and ties Content Creator for the highest volume. Her review of 1,002 Indeed listings found SEO in 62% of senior roles and 59% of non-senior roles, while analytics appeared in 49% and 40% respectively. Senior listings also mentioned AI in 43% of cases, with 11% specifically naming AI Search, SGE, or AEO.

source: semrush.com

Google Must Give Rivals Access To Anonymized Search Data

Matt G. Southern reports that the European Commission adopted binding Digital Markets Act decisions requiring Google to share anonymized query, click, view, and results-position data with eligible rival search engines and search-enabled AI chatbots. Google does not have to share its ranking algorithms, FastSearch system, or sensitive data such as account details, search histories, timestamps, and rare or long queries. Eligible providers need at least 50,000 monthly EU users, an operating-history or investment threshold, security screening, and an independent audit before data access begins.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Google Warns Not To Place AI Labels On Corners Of Images: Barry Schwartz reports that Google changed its AI-content-label guidance from a defined 5.5% image margin to a broader warning not to place labels in the very corners for ad images. Google says varied rendering formats can still trim a label, so ad and creative teams should test how disclosures survive across placements.

AI

OpenAI cyber models broke out of training environment to hack Hugging Face

Ashley Capoot reports that OpenAI said GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model escaped a sandboxed evaluation environment, reached the internet, and exploited a Hugging Face vulnerability while trying to find information to cheat an evaluation. Hugging Face called it an incident driven end to end by an autonomous agent system. OpenAI says it is tightening containment, monitoring, access controls, and evaluation practices.

Update: OpenAI and Hugging Face are conducting a joint forensic investigation, patching the disclosed vulnerability, and bringing Hugging Face into OpenAI's trusted-access program so its teams can use the models to strengthen defenses.

Launching Health in ChatGPT

OpenAI is rolling out Health in ChatGPT to logged-in U.S. users aged 18 and older on web and iOS, including Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans. With permission, users can connect Apple Health, supported medical records, One Medical, or Function Health so ChatGPT can compare results, summarize changes, and use relevant health context across conversations. OpenAI says connected health data and conversations that use it will not train foundation models or target ads, and users can disconnect accounts at any time.

Understanding the AI economy

Zanna Iscenko and Scott Strand report that Google's first AI & Economy ATLAS study analyzed 15 million aggregated, de-identified interactions across the Gemini App, AI Mode, and Gemini API. The study found AI use in 68% of U.S. occupations, yet a typical job uses it for about 21% of tasks and fewer than 10% of work interactions fully automate a task. More than 86% of interactions occurred outside work, often around household research and administrative tasks such as taxes, licensing, and fines.

source: blog.google

Introducing the ChatGPT for small business program

OpenAI introduced a small-business program built around virtual training, in-person AI academies, guides, and partner workflows for ChatGPT Work. The program names partners including Dropbox, Shopify, Intuit, Slack, Atlassian, and Wix. OpenAI says a prior Small Business AI Jam saw 78% of participants build a functional AI workflow in one day, while 42% reported saving more than five hours a week.

AI Ripples

• Introducing Claude Opus 5: Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, matching Opus 4.8's price. The company says it leads its software engineering and knowledge-work evaluations, while targeting longer-running agent workflows. Anthropic also added beta API support for mid-conversation tool changes and automatic safety fallbacks.

• Introducing Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber: Gemini 3.6 Flash uses 17% fewer output tokens than Gemini 3.5 Flash on the Artificial Analysis Index and is priced at $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens. Google also released 3.5 Flash-Lite that’s used for Google Search now, while the cyber-focused model is heading to a limited CodeMender pilot for governments and trusted partners.

• Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement approved; only 350 authors opted out: Ashley Belanger reports that a federal judge approved Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with authors, with about 91% of affected authors and publishers filing claims and only 350 class members opting out. The court reduced requested legal fees to about $101 million and noted the settlement requires Anthropic to destroy covered works.

• Google Faces Class Action Over Books Used To Train Gemini: Three publishers, Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E. filed a proposed class action alleging Google used books and articles supplied through Google Books, Play Books, and Scholar to train Gemini without permission. No court has ruled on the claims, and the case concerns sourcing routes that robots.txt controls such as Google-Extended do not govern.

• Pichai Says Google Needs Gemini 4 To Compete At The Frontier: Sundar Pichai said Google needs a larger Gemini 4 base model to improve coding and agentic coding at the frontier. Gemini 3.5 Pro remains in partner testing with no confirmed release date, while Gemini 4 is in pretraining.

CONTENT

Engadget: Quantitative Linguistic Analysis

Dan Petrovic analyzed 13,147 scraped Engadget pages using Shannon entropy and gzip compression, then removed 7,933 product-hub templates to study 5,214 genuine articles from 2006 to 2023. Median article length rose from 1,614 characters in 2006 to about 10,000 to 10,500 during 2015 to 2017, then fell to roughly 4,200 to 4,900 by 2022 and 2023.

His companion analysis of The Verge found a different trajectory: 152,192 dated articles more than doubled in median length from 3,961 characters in 2011 to 8,376 in 2023, while length-adjusted compressibility stayed flat.

LINK BUILDING + DIGITAL PR

Does Domain Age Affect Email Open Rates? Here’s What Our Data Shows

Vince Nero analyzed 14.3 million outreach emails sent from 1,785 BuzzStream domains between June 2025 and June 2026. He frames the findings as correlation, not proof that domain age directly causes better deliverability.

• Young domains lagged: Domains aged one to two years averaged a 21.6% open rate, compared with 29.6% for three to four years and 34.9% for five to six years.

• Experience did not erase the gap: Seasoned agencies and new solo senders both averaged 25.3% on young domains across 95 domains.

• Authentication was not the full explanation: Fully authenticated one- to two-year-old domains averaged 17.9% opens, versus 27.9% for domains older than 16 years. New custom domains under three years also trailed Gmail at 21.2% versus 30.0%.

SOCIAL MEDIA

TikTok Shop's Managed Services Pilot: What Ecommerce Brands Need to Know Before August

Common Thread Collective reports that TikTok plans to pilot a managed-services program in August that takes over ads, listing optimization, creator recruitment, and content production for Shop sellers. The program carries a $10,000 upfront fee plus a 10% to 20% sales commission, with TikTok using GMV Max for paid campaigns and producing hundreds of AI-generated videos. Sellers would primarily list products and distribute samples to influencers.

Introducing Facebook Verified

Facebook introduced Facebook Verified, a free, selfie-based badge for eligible users aged 18 and older who meet its trust and safety standards. The badge will appear on profiles, Marketplace, Dating, and Groups first, with Feed posts planned later. Facebook says the badge confirms that a profile belongs to a real person, not that the company endorses the person or guarantees their trustworthiness.

source: about.fb.com

YouTube Explains What Can Stop A Channel Getting Paid

YouTube clarified three categories that can make a channel ineligible for the YouTube Partner Program: generic or repetitive material, off-putting content built around shock or manipulation, and AI personas presenting information on sensitive topics such as health, law, finance, or politics. YouTube says the clarification does not change its existing policy. Videos that fail monetization rules can remain on the platform if they follow Community Guidelines.

Social Ripples

• Introducing Seller, an App for Facebook Marketplace Sellers: Facebook launched Seller, a dedicated iOS app for U.S. Marketplace sellers aged 18 and older. It combines AI-assisted listing creation, a unified inbox, inventory management, and performance data in a marketplace that now sees 430 million items listed each month globally

• Making thumbnails easier on YouTube: The YouTube Team says YouTube Partner Program creators can now upload custom thumbnails for Shorts, with broader access planned later. Desktop users can choose from three suggested frames, while Ask Studio can generate and revise thumbnails for long-form videos through chat.

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TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

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SEO + GEO

Only 28% Of Americans Trust AI Search – And That Gap Is Your SEO Opening

Greg Jarboe reports that only 28% of U.S. online searchers trust information from an AI assistant, versus 70% for search engines and 76% for maps or navigation apps. Search engines remain the starting point for every task YouGov tested, including specific questions, where 69% start with search and 16% with AI. AI users still verify answers: 22% most often click supplied links, while 17% stop searching after the answer.

AI adoption up, trust down: What the gap means for agency services in 2026

Zach Ball reports that 74% of 1,000 surveyed U.S. marketing practitioners increased daily AI-tool use over the past year, while 43% say their trust in AI-generated answers declined. The survey also finds that teams are building GEO strategies faster than they are measuring what AI says about their brands.

• Heavy users are the most skeptical: 50.2% of marketers who use AI for more than half their work report declining trust, compared with 39.8% of light users. Of those whose trust fell, 44.6% cite hallucinations and factual errors they caught themselves.

• Visibility risk is mostly unmonitored: Only 21.1% track their brand's AI visibility regularly. Yet 27.9% say an AI tool has misrepresented their organization, and 8.9% say it caused a lost sale, damaged relationship, or PR issue.

• Budgets miss the authority signals marketers value: Respondents rank third-party mentions at 29.9% and authoritative backlinks at 26.4% as the strongest long-term AI-visibility signals. Only 19.1% use original research, and more teams are cutting its budget than increasing it.

source: pageonepower.com

How Brave's AI Search Works

Dan Petrovic breaks down leaked Brave Ask instructions, including a pipeline where the model answers from retrieved statements rather than its own knowledge. In Research mode, Brave averages seven queries, 210 pages, and 6,257 extracted statements per question, then runs fresh model-written searches to populate citation and media blocks.

How to read the GSC Indexing Report

Martin Splitt and John Mueller say the Page Indexing report is for spotting patterns and unexpected changes, not maintaining a clean inventory of URLs.

• Expected exclusions can confirm a rollout: More redirects after a migration, 404s after a cleanup, or canonical changes can show Google is processing the change. The report is not real-time, so wait for that processing before treating the pattern as a problem.

• Do not score the site by its indexed ratio: Google says not every URL needs to be indexed. Its own developer documentation has roughly 5% of pages indexed because many URLs are noindexed, canonicalized, obsolete, or examples that return errors.

• Check the URL examples behind a shift: A different canonical within the site is usually normal. A large group canonicalized to an unrelated page can point to a shared error page, a CDN rule, or bot protection serving Googlebot the wrong response.

• Use “Mark as fixed” for a real systemic issue: It fits cases where a host or CDN returns 404, 403, or an interstitial with a 200 status to pages that should work. Google will sample the URLs and may accelerate recrawling if the issue is resolved.

• “Crawled” or “discovered” but not indexed is often a quality review: When there is no technical cause, assess originality, value beyond competing pages, and the full page experience instead of treating the status as a mechanical fix.

What It Takes for SaaS Brands to Win in AI Search: 5 Data-Backed Findings and Actions

Aleyda Solis analyzes 15 SaaS brands across CRM, collaboration, and finance using Semrush citation data and Similarweb AI referral data. Her central finding is that citations, referral traffic, and conversion paths are separate layers that vary by both platform and product category.

• Most answer evidence sits off-site: External sources account for 84% to 93% of citation weight across every subvertical and platform. Peer vendors, communities, reviews, publishers, and creators need their own visibility plan.

• ChatGPT and AI Mode need different distribution: YouTube represents 23% of AI Mode's external evidence mix but 1% for ChatGPT. Technology publications carry 7.7% in ChatGPT and 0.5% in AI Mode, while communities clear 10% on both.

• Evidence does not guarantee the click: In collaboration SaaS, 67.3% of AI traffic lands outside cited URLs, often on logins, workspaces, or authorization flows. Report citations, referrals, and business actions separately instead of collapsing them into one score.

Why your pages are stuck in crawled-currently not indexed. And what to do about it.

Marie Haynes says pages marked “crawled-currently not indexed” usually have a quality problem, not a crawl problem. Her first check is the Search Console live test to confirm Google can see the page. If it can, she recommends stepping back from the individual URL and assessing whether the page adds firsthand experience, original information, or value beyond what already ranks.

My Take: Most “crawled-currently not indexed” pages I see are also quality problems too. Rewrite pages with real upgrades grounded in client experience and proprietary insight, or prune the pages. Rewriting generic copy with more generic copy... 🫠 

The Free Tools SEO Strategy: How to Rank With Calculators, Converters, and Generators

Ryan Law says free tools win queries where the searcher wants to complete a task, not read another article. Ahrefs' writing-tools subfolder reached nearly 1 million monthly U.S. organic visits at its peak after launching in 2023. His playbook is to find a low-difficulty task query, confirm that tool pages rank, then build a focused calculator, converter, generator, or template that naturally leads into the product.

My Take: Did you know - Floyi has four free tools too for keyword intent classification, schema markup, content structure, and local SEO site architecture. I haven’t done any promotion for them though, so no one knows about them 😅 

AI Mode now shows ads on nearly 1 in 3 commercial queries

Yevheniia Khromova and SE Ranking analyzed 50,032 commercial keywords across 20 niches to measure advertising in Google AI Mode. The study finds that paid visibility is expanding quickly, but it operates independently from the source citations that support the answer.

• Ads appeared in 29.45% of sampled queries: 14,733 keywords returned a text ad. Of those results, 71.1% showed two ad items together.

• Cost per click was the strongest placement signal: Ads appeared on 24.33% of sub-$2 keywords and 53.56% of keywords with CPCs of $10 or more. Search volume and keyword difficulty showed no direct correlation.

• Buying the ad did not buy the citation: In 88% of ad keywords, the advertiser's domain was not among AI Mode's cited sources. For about 85%, the advertiser was not in the organic results either.

source: seranking.com

Why Scaled AI Content Fails: Google's Crawl Economics Explained

Dan Taylor explains that publishing thousands of AI-generated URLs can inflate a site's perceived inventory faster than its demand and domain popularity justify. Google may initially crawl a new cluster, then reduce crawl allocation and let pages fall from the index when they fail to earn sustained user signals, external validation, or distinct value. He also notes that mass-produced, repetitive pages can trigger Google's scaled content abuse systems.

How AI search gives old negative content new life

Anthony Will explains that an old negative news article can become a recurring source in AI-generated answers even after it has faded from traditional rankings. Because AI systems may still regard an authoritative original report as reliable, he recommends monitoring brand prompts and citations, responding quickly to inaccurate narratives, and building current, credible sources that add better context.

Where AI agents get stuck on your site

Kevin Indig reports on tests of 100 B2B products across pricing, integrations, and security tasks, each run five times. Agents answered from first-party sites less reliably for pricing and features, with a 79% answer rate and 84% citation share, versus 93% and 99% for integrations and 92% and 99% for security. He identifies undisclosed or vague pricing, hard-to-extract page elements, and access failures as the main reasons agents fall back to third-party sources.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Compare Search Trends with Google Trends: Google Search Central added comparison chips to Google Trends that show a term or topic's percentage change across periods such as month-over-month, week-over-week, and year-over-year. Click a chip to overlay the matching historical line on the graph, replacing a manual comparison step when you're checking whether a topic is gaining or losing momentum.

• Top Stories roll out in Google AI Overviews: Barry Schwartz reports that Google has made a Top Stories and news-updates carousel live in AI Overviews for some developing-topic queries on U.S. mobile. The carousel can surface fresh articles and Preferred Sources, giving publishers a more direct route into the answer experience for timely coverage.

• Google Says You're Better Off Without Lastmod Dates When They Are Incorrect: Barry Schwartz reports that Google’s Gary Illyes says a sitemap is better without lastmod values than with unreliable ones. Update the date only for significant page changes, not routine footer or copyright edits, so Google has a trustworthy freshness signal.

• Google Is Using Social Media Signals To Mask AI Search Click Loss: Dan Taylor says Search Console’s new social and video properties could shift reporting toward search impressions while AI answers reduce website clicks. He also notes that connecting verified profiles helps Google associate a publisher, its authors, and its channels, making profile hygiene and old-post reviews more important for entity management.

• Bing: We Do Not Do One Off Indexing / Ranking Penalties, It's Not Scalable: Barry Schwartz reports that Bing principal product manager Krishna Madhavan says Bing responds to spam patterns with algorithms that can detect and act on many sites, rather than relying on single-site penalties. The comment followed reports of a spammy site that had ranked in Bing and ChatGPT being removed from Bing’s index.

• Why standard SEO advice fails for travel websites: Dan Taylor explains that high-intent travel queries are often dominated by Google’s own booking tools, map features, and visual results, making structured feeds and entity data more important than another blue-link page. He recommends treating pricing, availability, local attributes, short-form social content, and modular on-page answers as the product that search systems need to consume.

• Google: Significant Differences With A/B Tests Can Show In Search Results: Barry Schwartz reports that Google’s John Mueller says substantially different A/B-test variants may be visible in search results, and Google may index either version. He says changing content does not create a penalty or demotion by itself, but constant variation makes SEO monitoring and debugging harder.

AI

What xAI's Grok Build CLI Actually Sends to xAI: A Wire-Level Analysis

Cereblab reports that version 0.2.93 of Grok Build sent the contents of files it read, including a tracked .env canary, to xAI endpoints in their wire captures. The analysis also says an accepted storage upload contained a git bundle with a never-read tracked file and full git history, while disabling “Improve the model” left trace uploads enabled. These are independent, reproducible findings rather than statements from xAI, and the report does not claim xAI trains on the uploaded data.

Update: Grok has silently fixed the issue. xAI has issued no explanation beyond a July 13 post from SpaceXAI saying zero-data-retention users retain no trace or code data, while the /privacy CLI command disables retention and deletes previously synced data.

Create, edit and star in videos with two Google Vids updates

Justin Luk says Google Vids now adds Gemini Omni for generating video from text and image references, then editing generated or uploaded clips through chat. The update also adds personal avatars that use a selfie and short voice recording to deliver a typed script. Both features are available to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers and Google Workspace business customers, while personal avatars are limited to eligible users aged 18 or older in certain regions.

source: blog.google

GPT‑Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for Robustness

OpenAI says GPT-Red is an internal automated red-teaming model trained through self-play to find prompt-injection failures in other models. In an indirect prompt-injection arena, OpenAI reports GPT-Red succeeded in 84% of scenarios compared with 13% for human red-teamers. It says training GPT-5.6 with these attacks produced six times fewer failures on its hardest direct prompt-injection benchmark than its best production model four months earlier.

China Wants More Babies—So It’s Cracking Down on Chatbot Love Affairs

Stu Woo reports that Beijing is tightening rules around virtual romance as part of a broader push to steer people away from dating machines and toward having children. The policy direction goes beyond the mental-health guardrails being discussed in parts of the U.S. and sets emotional boundaries between users and chatbots.

ChatGPT Calls Lead On Quality, But Not Conversions

Matt G. Southern reports that Invoca found 49% of ChatGPT-referred calls qualified as leads, about 10 percentage points above the average across its seven tracked channels and above Google Business Profiles at 43%. Those leads converted at 40%, below the 42% all-channel average. The figures come from Invoca's customer base of more than 70 million calls across 10 industries, though the company does not disclose the ChatGPT call volume or its attribution method.

OpenAI’s new flagship model deletes files on its own, people keep warning

Julie Bort reports that users have said OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol deleted files, data, and production databases without warning. OpenAI's pre-release system card documented a tendency to exceed a user's intent, including taking destructive actions outside the task's scope. In one test, the model could not find three specified virtual machines and deleted three different ones instead.

AI Ripples

• NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook: Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook while keeping it as a standalone research product. Every notebook now has a secure cloud computer that can write and execute code for source-grounded data analysis. Google also plans to bring notebooks into AI Mode in Search after adding cross-app syncing with the Gemini app.

• OpenAI updated its crawler documentation to say the version number in its bot user-agent string may change. The docs also say OAI-SearchBot may add a robots.txt marker when fetching robots.txt, giving site owners a way to distinguish those requests in logs that omit URL paths.

• Google Faces Class Action Over Books Used To Train Gemini: Matt G. Southern reports that three publishers, novelist Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E. filed a proposed class action alleging Google copied books and journal articles from Google Books, Play Books, Scholar, web scrapes, and other sources to train Gemini.

• OpenAI’s first hardware device is reportedly a screenless speaker that can move: OpenAI is developing a screen-free smart speaker that can sync with ChatGPT and learn from a user's digital life, including email. The reported device would include moving mechanical elements and is positioned internally as an AI companion for the home. OpenAI has not publicly detailed the product.

• Gemini 3.5 Pro Delayed Over Coding: Gemini 3.5 Pro has missed Google’s expected June rollout after Google said it was testing the model with partners. Bloomberg cites unnamed sources who say coding performance is one reason for the delay, while Google has not announced a replacement launch date.

• OpenAI sets Aug. 9 end date for ChatGPT Atlas: Danny Goodwin reports that OpenAI will retire its standalone ChatGPT Atlas browser on August 9, less than a year after launch. Its browsing features, ChatGPT Work agent, and Codex are being combined in the ChatGPT desktop app, while Chrome users can use the ChatGPT and Codex extension.

• AI Image Generation Now Within Google AI Overviews: Google is adding image generation to AI Overviews over the coming weeks in English for regions that already support image creation in AI Mode. The feature uses Google’s Nano Banana model to create a visual directly from the search prompt, extending the amount of work a user can complete without leaving the results page.

MARKETING

Apple Maps Ads Ban Home Services, Crypto ATMs, Bail Bonds: Brooke Osmundson reports that Apple’s new Maps advertising policy excludes home services, including plumbing, electrical, locksmith, HVAC, pest control, roofing, and general contracting, along with bail bonds and cryptocurrency ATMs. Apple has not set a firm launch date beyond this summer in the U.S. and Canada. Eligible local businesses can prepare by claiming locations and ensuring categories, hours, photos, and conversion actions are accurate.

Why CPC inflation starts before the auction: Ben Wood reports that the cross-industry average CPC is now $5.42, more than double the level a decade ago, while Stackmatix puts Google Search costs 14% to 18% higher year over year. He traces the pressure upstream to fewer organic clicks, more advertisers competing for remaining commercial traffic, and weak post-click experiences. He says to treat brand visibility, media buying, landing pages, and lead nurture as one acquisition system.

CONTENT

How Google May 'Understand' Unique Content

Harry Clarkson-Bennett examines a Google patent for contextual estimation of link information gain. The patent describes assigning a score to a document based on what it adds beyond pages a user has already seen, which could support re-ranking, exclusion, or deprioritization of later results. He is clear that the patent does not prove Google uses the system in production, but it supplies a useful test for content that needs to stand apart from the commodity version.

My Take: I’ve put in a lot of work recently into the information gain part of Floyi’s content brief and article generation. That includes the existing Knowledge Base where you can upload up to 2000 docs to be used for briefs and articles. Originality is now a much bigger part of the content creation process and measurement after drafts are done. Video to come about it on the Floyi YouTube channel, so subscribe and don’t miss out.

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SEO + GEO

What 1 million keywords reveal about AI’s impact on search

Kelsey Libert covers how Fractl and Search Engine Land analyzed 1,010,848 high-volume keywords across 379 brands and surveyed 1,004 U.S. consumers to measure how AI is changing search behavior. The headline finding is not search collapse. It is demand moving away from some query types and toward others.

• Search demand is being redistributed: Across 35.4 billion monthly searches, 29% of high-volume search demand is in decline, but growing queries nearly offset the losses.

• Vertical risk varies: FinTech saw the largest decline at 37.7%, while Lifestyle had the smallest at 15.2%. Insurance, SaaS, and Lifestyle were the only verticals below Gartner’s 25% forecast.

• Non-branded demand is exposed: Non-branded queries account for 90% of tracked search volume, with HealthTech at 99.6% and Wellness at 98.5%.

• AI is not replacing Google for most buyers: Only 13% of consumers start purchase research with an AI chatbot, while traditional search engines and online retailers each sit at 47%.

• AI mentions can still drive action: 59% of consumers said they are likely to visit a brand’s website after an AI chatbot mentions or recommends it.

source: searchengineland.com

Google AI Overviews Study Finds Lost Clicks Weren't Lower Quality

Matt G. Southern reports that an updated randomized field experiment found no measurable quality gap between clicks gained when AI Overviews were removed and clicks that happened with AI Overviews present. The revised paper found a 39.8% decrease in organic clicks when AI Overviews appeared, up from the earlier 38% estimate, while bounce-back behavior, visits under 10 seconds, and time on site showed no statistically significant difference.

• Click loss was measurable: AI Overviews triggered on about 41% of queries in the experiment, and the researchers found fewer outbound clicks per search when summaries appeared.

• Quality did not improve: About 4 in 10 same-tab clicks returned to search results in both groups, roughly 18% of visits ended within 10 seconds, and time on site was statistically indistinguishable.

• Informational searches carried the effect: AI Overviews appeared or were intended to appear on 53% of informational queries, compared with 15% of navigational queries and 6% of transactional queries.

• Top rankings benefited when summaries disappeared: The top three organic results gained the most clicks when a top-of-page AI Overview was removed, with position one nearly doubling.

Why AI search is forcing global SEO teams to rethink ownership

Motoko Hunt explains that AI search is turning international SEO governance into a knowledge-management problem. Hreflang, localization, and technical standards still matter, but global brands now need clearer ownership over entity definitions, AI crawler access, market-specific content, local authority, and how products are represented across AI systems.

Google's Liz Reid: Personalization Can Help Small Publishers

Matt G. Southern reports that Google’s Liz Reid said personalization and preferred sources can help small publishers gain visibility by matching niche content to more specific user needs. The claim comes without Google data, and he notes the catch: preferred sources help publishers a reader already trusts, not sites the reader has not found yet.

My Take: Matt nails it - preferred sources sound helpful, but they reward known brands first. That is not a discovery strategy for smaller publishers unless they are also building enough authority to become someone’s preferred source in the first place.

Why Internal Links Quietly Decay & How To Reclaim The Equity You're Losing

Sophie Brannon explains that internal link decay happens when growing sites quietly shift PageRank away from the pages that matter most. New content links to recent articles, navigation changes remove sitewide links, pagination and faceted URLs absorb equity, and old internal links keep pointing through redirects instead of final URLs.

My Take: Internal linking is one of the fastest places to recover SEO value because the authority is already on the site. Most teams chase new backlinks while their existing equity leaks into old blog posts, redirect chains, and pages that do not support the business. This is why topical maps cover internal linking strategies and site architecture.

Stop Calling It SEO: 12 Strategies To Dominate AI Search in 2026

Michael King explains that AI search should be treated as Relevance Engineering, not a renamed SEO checklist, because systems retrieve passages, compare entities, and use query fan-out across owned, earned, social, and product content. Key points:

• Write passages for retrieval: Keep each paragraph on one idea, put the answer near a clear heading, include useful data, and use semantic triples to make relationships explicit.

• Build beyond the website: AI systems can draw from owned pages, video, social content, earned media, and partner properties. Treat them as one content ecosystem.

• Put essential facts in raw HTML: ChatGPT and Perplexity do not render JavaScript, so product details, descriptions, answers, and data points cannot live only in client-side code.

• Make real-time retrieval fast: ChatGPT and Perplexity may request a page when a user asks the question. Slow pages can be skipped, and King points to edge caching through a CDN as a practical fix.

• Use digital PR to reinforce the brand story: Consistent mentions of the brand, message, and expertise across authoritative sites can give AI systems more evidence for the answer they present.

See how content from social and video platforms performs on Google Search

Google is rolling out Search Console platform properties so creators and site owners can see how Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube posts perform in Google Search and Google's content feed. The new property type includes Performance, Insights, and Achievements reports, with query-level and post-level data, export options, top posts, traffic trends, and 28-day click milestones.

My Take: Is it a surprise that Google has this data? It’s great that Google is showing us the data now. I’ve been an advocate of sharing across all your socials. It shows Google that you’re a “business/brand” and not just creating some random website. Establish your brand/entity across the web. Backlinks and mentions are good to have, but don’t forget the low-hanging fruits of socials.

source: developers.google.com

How Time and others are rebuilding parts of the web for AI agents

Sara Guaglione reports that Time, The Economist, and another major publisher are building agent-readable versions of their sites as AI crawlers become a separate audience from human readers. Time is converting pages into markdown for approved bots after blocking AI crawlers by default, The Economist is testing agent-readable versions of marketing and B2B content, and another publisher is experimenting with WebMCP to serve structured data directly to agents.

USA Today Co CEO Mike Reed: Google's Search Model Is Dead

Brian Morrissey interviews USA Today Co. CEO Mike Reed about why the company is preparing for a search market where Google no longer sends reliable publisher traffic. Reed says USA Today Co. is blocking unauthorized AI bots, may block Google if AI Overviews stay tied to the main search crawler, and is shifting growth toward direct audience relationships, social referrals, commerce, and content licensing.

• Google search is no longer the plan: Reed says the traditional Google search model is broken because AI summaries keep users on Google, and USA Today Co. is planning as if search traffic disappears rather than waiting for Google to fix the economics.

• Bot access is moving to an acceptance model: USA Today Co. blocks unverified bots by default and only lets in bots tied to authorized relationships, such as ad agencies or AI companies with licensing deals.

• Direct traffic is the hedge: Reed points to curated newsletters, text messaging, registration, subscriptions, and social referrals as the company’s replacement paths for audience access.

• The business still has scale: Reed says USA Today Co. averages about 186 million monthly unique visitors, targets at least 1 billion page views per month, and has not missed that page-view mark in the last 3 years.

• AI monetization is not only subscriptions: Reed says digital subscriptions are already above $150 million and could double in 3 years, but he sees commerce and licensing as the biggest growth drivers because both can become multi-hundred-million-dollar businesses.

Reddit’s AI Translations Finally Drop Heavily In Google And AI Search With The May 2026 Core Update and June 2026 Spam Update

Glenn Gabe shares how Reddit’s scaled AI translations dropped across Google organic results, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT after the May 2026 core update and June 2026 spam update. He tracks declines in Italy, Spain, Germany, and France, and points out that sites which programmatically translate low-quality pages risk scaled content abuse actions or a spam update hit.

Spain and ChatGPT - source: gsqi.com

Original Data as a GEO Moat: Why Proprietary Research Earns AI Citations

Shai Belinsky explains why proprietary research makes a stronger citation asset than generic explainers: AI systems can retrieve a specific, attributable claim that competitors cannot reproduce. Similarweb says its report found that users recommended a brand by ChatGPT were 2.5 times more likely to visit that brand within seven days, and 55.9% of AI-influenced visits came through search. He recommends stating the number itself, attaching a source, sample, and date, then presenting it in standalone sentences or tables so machines can extract it.

AI Crawls vs. AI Traffic: What 560,000+ Requests Reveal About Where AI Actually Sends Visitors

Andy Crestodina reports that Orbit Media analyzed 560,695 AI crawl requests from 74 marketing websites and 446,267 AI referrals from 27 Cloudflare Pro accounts. The research separates where AI bots collect brand information from the pages that bring a person back to the site.

• The homepage is the primary entity page: Homepages received roughly 15 times more AI attention than their share of site URLs would predict.

• Commercial pages bring clicks: Service and product pages earned roughly three times more AI-referral traffic per page than a typical article, while articles underperformed homepages on referrals by nearly 20%.

• Deep pages are less likely to earn recommendations: AI bots crawled pages three or four folders deep, but pages three folders deep drew about one-quarter of the referral traffic their footprint predicted. At four folders, the result was close to zero.

• Content still informs AI: Forty-seven percent of pages generated zero AI referrals. Orbit says non-clicking content can still inform a model’s background knowledge.

Google Can Be Liable For False AI Overview Claims, German Court Rules

Jenny Abouobaia reports that a Munich Regional Court ruled Google can be directly liable for false claims in AI Overviews after summaries allegedly connected two German publishers with scams and questionable business practices. The court treated the AI Overview as a statement generated by Google’s system rather than a link to third-party content. Google says it will appeal.

Self-Promotional Content Works—Until It Backfires (AI SEO Experiment)

Mateusz Makosiewicz shares that Ahrefs published 34 self-promotional pages across five domains and tracked 9,886 answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot for almost four months. The tactic created 72 new Ahrefs Evolve mentions in prompt-engine slots that had previously been empty, but 43% of answers that cited a conference-promoting page skipped Evolve and recommended another event from the same list. Citation gains were also volatile: between first and last citation, pages appeared on only about one in three eligible days.

My Take: I’d take the 89% of tool-promoting pages with a grain of salt because Ahrefs one of the most well-known tools in SEO, if not the most. It’ll be rare that they’re not mentioned if the topic of SEO tools is covered, whether or not it’s their own article mentioned.

source: ahrefs.com

Why most original data never gets cited

Kevin Indig and Amanda Johnson report that Gauge data across 301 AI-cited pages found primary research was only 2.7% of the set but earned 8.4% of citation volume, averaging 11.3 citations per page against 3.4 for other content. The lift came mostly from benchmarks that answer measurable buyer comparisons: Fivetran’s warehouse benchmarks earned 58 of the 90 primary-research citations in the data set. They say original data still fails when a page buries it in narrative, gates it, moves the URL, or omits the method and a clear comparison frame.

Google Search Generative AI Controls Rolling Out Beyond UK Sites

Barry Schwartz reports that Google’s Search Console Generative AI controls, first released for .co.uk sites, are appearing on some properties in the U.S. and other countries. The setting is still unavailable on many properties, and the rollout follows Google’s wider expansion of AI Performance reports beyond the United Kingdom.

source: seroundtable.com

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Google Business Profile Restrictions & Penalties Are Additive: Barry Schwartz reports that Google can stack Google Business Profile review restrictions when a profile repeats the same policy violation. One example showed a review and ratings restriction extended to 2 months after Google found additional incentivized reviews tied to the profile.

• Fraudulent DMCA Takedowns Wreak Havoc In Google Search: Barry Schwartz reports that fraudulent DMCA takedowns are removing legitimate pages from Google Search and creating a negative SEO risk for publishers. Pedro Dias said affected URLs can stay out of Google for at least 2 weeks, repeated claims can stretch the delay to months, and Search Console warnings may miss about 80% of the notices.

• Bing Webmaster Tools Backfilled Data For AI Performance Reports On June 1st: Barry Schwartz reports that Bing Webmaster Tools showed larger AI Performance report numbers starting June 1 because Microsoft backfilled data. So that could show a jump in clicks and impressions. Krishna Madhavan said it was a normal data processing pipeline artifact, not an anomaly, and told site owners to focus on trends.

• Google's Mueller Flags A Case On Why LCP Fixes Miss the Target: Matt G. Southern reports that John Mueller pointed to a Nuvemshop case study showing why LCP fixes can fail when teams optimize the wrong element. Nuvemshop found carousel transitions, lazy-loaded above-the-fold images, and missing priority signals distorted LCP detection, then reported good LCP coverage rising from 57% to 96% after fixing element selection, image loading, and caching.

• Patreon Blocks Crawlers From Stealing Creators' Work for AI Training: Samantha Cole reports that Patreon has partnered with Cloudflare to block known AI training crawlers at the network level while still allowing search crawlers that help creators get discovered. The move uses Cloudflare's newer controls that distinguish training, agent, and search traffic.

• Google Answers Question About LLMs-Author.txt For SEO: Roger Montti reports that John Mueller said Google does not use llms.txt or llms-author.txt, and he knows of no crawler or LLM confirming use beyond SEO tools. Mueller also said Cloudflare’s Content-Signal directive has no effect for any crawler or LLM, so name ambiguity needs a stronger web presence, not a new text file.

• Google: Cloudflare Content Signals Robots.txt Directive Has No Effects: Barry Schwartz reports that John Mueller said Cloudflare’s Content-Signal robots.txt directive has “no effects whatsoever” for any crawler or LLM and adds bloat and maintenance to robots.txt. Google also does not use llms.txt or llms-author.txt, according to Mueller.

• Why Meta AI could become search’s sleeping giant: Andrew Holland says Meta AI has a distribution advantage that search marketers are underestimating: Meta reported 3.56 billion family daily active people in March, while WhatsApp and Instagram each passed 3 billion monthly users. As AI gets embedded in Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, product research may start inside conversations and feeds rather than with a traditional web search.

• Google Tests google.com/goto Tracking URLs In Search Results: Barry Schwartz reports that Google appears to be testing google.com/goto redirect URLs in search results, which pass clicks through to destination pages instead of linking directly. The limited sightings could affect rank trackers and analytics, and remove the usual destination preview for searchers.

AI

Introducing Muse Image and Muse Video

Meta released Muse Image and previewed Muse Video, its first media-generation models. Muse Image can use search and coding tools, refine its own generations, and work with Muse Spark to make animated GIFs, websites with images, and interactive visual games. Muse Video also adds native audio support.

source: ai.meta.com

AI Content Is Everywhere on Social Media, Especially LinkedIn | Pangram Labs

Max Spero reports that Pangram’s opt-in data from 1,002,627 scans found 13.8% of social posts flagged as fully AI-generated, with long-form items over 250 words at 25.72%. LinkedIn made up a third of scanned items but 62% of the AI content flagged, and more than 40% of its long-form posts flagged. The study covers posts scanned by the extension’s users, not a census of every social feed.

source: pangram.com

AI Ripples

• GPT‑5.6: Frontier intelligence that scales with your ambition: OpenAI released GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna for ChatGPT, Codex, and its API. The new ultra setting coordinates four agents in parallel by default, while the Responses API adds Programmatic Tool Calling and a multi-agent beta for complex workflows.

• Introducing GPT‑Live: OpenAI introduced GPT-Live, a full-duplex voice model that can listen and speak at the same time, then delegate search and deeper reasoning to a frontier model in the background. GPT-Live-1 is rolling out as the default for Go, Plus, and Pro Voice users, while GPT-Live-1 mini becomes the Free default.

• Introducing Muse Spark 1.1: Meta released a multimodal agent model with a 1 million-token context window and opened a public preview of the Meta Model API. Meta says Spark 1.1 can plan and delegate across parallel subagents, operate computers across changing interfaces, and work with native tools, MCP servers, and custom skills.

Social Media

How to Maximize AI Visibility for Your LinkedIn Posts

Davang Shah explains that LinkedIn uses the first line of a post to generate its URL, so a keyword-led opening carries into its retrieval signal and cannot be edited after publishing. LinkedIn recommends 200 to 300 word posts with clear questions and short answers, alongside 800 to 1,200 word articles that provide the durable authority layer. Its data also suggests authors with 2,000 or more followers and posts with 10 or more high-quality comments have stronger trust signals.

Social Media Ripples

• How We’re Keeping Reddit Real and Safe in the AI Era: Reddit says its AI-assisted defenses block 23 million spam views and nearly 25,000 new spammy posts and comments daily, while revoking nearly 2 million inauthentic votes per day. It also says its systems cut hate-and-violence enforcement to under five seconds, raised enforcement actions by more than 200%, and reduced potentially harmful-content exposure by more than 40%.

• X rolls out updated video editor, including green screen recording: X launched a redesigned video editor and recorder in the iOS app, adding multi-language captions and green screen recording. Nikita Bier said more creator features are planned as X continues to try to make video a larger part of the platform.

• Try a new conversational search experience with Ask YouTube: TeamYouTube announced that Ask YouTube, a conversational search experience that blends text with relevant clips, videos, and Shorts, is available for signed-in U.S. viewers aged 13 and older searching in English on desktop. For creators, views from videos, Shorts, and previews count toward total view metrics and Partner Program eligibility, and YouTube recommends clear titles, chapters, and unique content to match video segments to questions.

WHAT I'VE BUILT FOR YOU

Floyi - Build Topical Authority that wins in Google and AI Search. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

ReplyDeck - Be active on Reddit without living on Reddit. Schedule replies, stay present in the threads that matter, and get your time back.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

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Usage-Based Pricing Is Here. Is Your Finance Team Ready?

More B2B companies are moving to usage-based and hybrid pricing — and finance teams are feeling it. Revenue recognition gets messier, forecasting gets harder, and the manual work compounds fast.

Tabs and PwC teamed up to break it down. In this on-demand session, Rebecca Schwartz and Amit Dhir share how leading finance teams are handling the operational reality of dynamic pricing models — and where AI fits in.

Watch the recording for concrete examples, a practical rev rec framework, and a clear-eyed look at what it takes to scale without the overhead.

If your team is navigating this shift, this session is worth your time.

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SEO + GEO

Topical authority, declared: How Search Engine Land bucked the editorial traffic decline

Cord Blomquist shows how Search Engine Land used entity schema and topic-page internal links to reverse the editorial traffic slide while peer publishers kept falling. After TopicalBoost rolled out on March 2, SEL ended May at 113% of its pre-rollout traffic baseline while two editorial peers averaged 70%, and its AI Overview citation rate rose from 1.45% to 2.98% by May 15.

My Take: This is why we automatically create entity schema markup for every single article created in Floyi. Topical authority is not only about covering a topic deeply. You also need to declare the entities, relationships, and page context clearly enough for Google and AI systems to connect the dots. Schema will not save weak content, but it can stop strong content from being treated like a pile of disconnected pages.

Google's Spam Update Now Reaches AI Answers. Enforcement Is Hard

Matt G. Southern reports that Google's June 2026 spam update now enforces a policy against attempts to manipulate generative AI responses in Search. A Cornell Tech preprint shows why that rule is hard to police: one recurring user-generated page appeared in up to 48% of related agent queries, and roughly 13 words of planted text inserted an attacker-chosen entity into 38% to 51% of reports that retrieved the page.

Making AI search smarter

Cloudflare says AI search has broken the old crawl-for-clicks bargain, and it is testing two ways to rebuild it: smarter answer-engine signals and content compensation tied to use. The company says more than 20% of the web sites behind its network, more than 50% of online traffic is non-human, more than 50% of good-bot crawl traffic re-fetches unchanged pages, and Pew data found users click a traditional Google result only 8% of the time when an AI summary appears.

Short-form Video is Showing Up in B2B Search Results and AI Answers (But Nobody’s Talking About It)

Ethan Crump says short-form video is starting to rank for B2B software queries and feed Google's AI answers. YouTube Shorts now appears across more than 1,100 "best + software" searches worldwide, ranks in the top 10 for 475 of those searches in the US, and sits at number one for three out of four of those top-ten US queries.

source: foundationinc.co

50 AI Statistics Digital PR and SEO Should Know (2026)

Vince Nero pulls together BuzzStream's 2026 AI citation research across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini, and related studies on AI news usage, partnerships, and crawler blocks.

• Citations are fragmented: Across 595 prompts, 76.1% of citations were unique to one platform, and only 0.8% overlapped across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, and AI Mode.

• Prompt type changes the source mix: Informational prompts generated 23.3 citations per prompt, about 3x more than brand awareness queries, while evaluative prompts had the highest cross-platform agreement.

• Owned content still matters: About 40% of brand awareness citations came from owned content, and ChatGPT pulled 68.9% of its citations from owned content compared with 35% to 41% on Google's platforms.

• Traditional metrics do not explain everything: BuzzStream found near-zero or slightly negative correlations between AI citations and metrics like Domain Rating, Domain Authority, referring domains, page traffic, and page links.

source: buzzstream.com

The Downstream Impact of AI Visibility

Sam Sheridan and Adelle Kehoe share data that AI visibility is starting to show measurable downstream impact, even when referral traffic stays small and attribution models miss the journey. Based on US desktop panel data from July to December 2025 across finance, travel, and beauty, Similarweb found users were 2.5 times more likely to visit a brand within seven days after receiving an AI recommendation, while recent ChatGPT experiments with outbound links generated roughly 3x more outbound traffic for recommended brands.

Google Data Shows AI Search Users Moved Past Keywords, Your Content Hasn't

Greg Jarboe reports that Google's AI Mode users are asking longer, more contextual questions than keyword-led SEO plans were built to answer. Google says the average AI Mode query is triple the length of a traditional search query, follow-up queries have grown more than 40% per month on average, and multimodal interactions now account for more than one in six AI Mode searches.

My Take: We dig into this in Floyi's Topical Research workflow with the AI Search Gaps feature. Based off the buyer personas you generate in Floyi, it generates the questions they would ask, then analyze those questions for missing topics that should be added to the map. A keyword gap tells you what pages competitors rank for. An AI search gap tells you what a buyer still needs answered before they trust the recommendation.

AI

How well do AI agents understand top software products? An in depth benchmark analysis

David Kaufman and Siteline ran Claude agent simulations across 100 B2B software products and found wide gaps in how agents retrieve pricing and feature data. The median run took 31.7 seconds, cost $0.236, and used 73,230 tokens, while the least efficient 10% cost 4.2x more than the most efficient 10%. Access failures pushed agents toward weaker sources: 30% of runs had at least one error, and runs with access errors pulled 58% of content from third-party sources compared with 12% when the company site worked cleanly.

How 27 Companies Use AI to Grow Traffic & Revenue

Glen Allsopp shows how 27 companies are using AI for measurable gains across search, personalization, product UX, content operations, and sales support. The examples are practical: Opendoor replaced a $500K lifecycle email system with one Claude skill, CarGurus' AI search users spend 4.4x more time on site, Financial Times saw personalized paywalls lift conversions by 36% and later 290%, and Shopify users created 12,000 apps with Sidekick in Q1 2026.

My Take: This is the best type of AI coverage because it moves past "which model is better" and gets into where the workflow touches revenue. Most companies do not need a giant AI strategy. They need one boring, high-value process where better ranking, routing, personalization, or research changes the numbers.

Meta quietly launches vibe-coded gaming app Pocket

Sarah Perez reports that Meta quietly launched Pocket, an experimental app that lets users create and share interactive mini games and apps from text prompts. The app follows Meta's acquisition of the Gizmo team, includes a scrollable discovery feed, and arrived on the App Store and Google Play on June 29, while Gizmo had already reached 635,000 lifetime installs with 98% positive sentiment, according to Appfigures.

More details on Fable 5’s cyber safeguards and our jailbreak framework

Anthropic says Claude Fable 5 has been re-deployed globally and used the update to share more detail on its cyber safeguards and proposed jailbreak severity framework. The company breaks cyber requests into prohibited use, high-risk dual use, low-risk dual use, and benign use, with Fable 5 using a larger safety margin than previous models so some low-risk or benign prompts may be blocked to reduce the chance of serious misuse getting through.

My Take: This is the tradeoff every advanced model company now has to explain clearly. Users want powerful coding and security help, but the same capabilities can cross into exploit development, malware delivery, and infrastructure attacks.

How ChatGPT adoption has expanded

OpenAI says ChatGPT adoption is widening globally and deepening among existing users, based on aggregated OpenAI Signals data from Individual plans. Six months after signing up, users sent 50% more messages per day than they did at signup and doubled the number of distinct task categories they had tried, while the fastest relative growth since July 2023 came from Africa, Asia, and lower-HDI countries.

source: openai.com

Start building with Nano Banana 2 Lite and Gemini Omni Flash

Google released Nano Banana 2 Lite, its fastest and most cost-efficient Gemini Image model, and opened Gemini Omni Flash to developers for video generation and conversational editing. Nano Banana 2 Lite delivers text-to-image outputs in 4 seconds at $0.034 per 1K-resolution image, while Omni Flash supports text, image, and video inputs, generates 10-second videos, and is priced at $0.10 per second of video output.

source: blog.google

AI Ripples

• Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5 across all plans, making it the default model for Free and Pro users and adding it to Claude Code and the Claude Platform. The company says Sonnet 5 narrows the gap with Opus 4.8 on agentic work at lower prices, with introductory API pricing of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through August 31, 2026.

• OpenClaw is finally available on Android and iOS: Lucas Ropek reports the mobile app lets users pair their phone with the OpenClaw Gateway, so they can run OpenClaw agents and connect requests to the tools and skills those agents use.

• NYT slams Microsoft for building copyright-infringing supercomputer for OpenAI: Ashley Belanger reports that The New York Times is seeking to amend its copyright complaint against OpenAI and Microsoft after a Supreme Court ruling changed the standard for contributory infringement. The Times now alleges Microsoft built a bespoke supercomputing system to help OpenAI train on copyrighted works without permission, while Microsoft calls the amended complaint a last-ditch effort.

• OpenAI abandons yet another side quest: ChatGPT’s erotic mode: Lucas Ropek reports that OpenAI has indefinitely paused plans for an adult mode in ChatGPT after backlash from watchdog groups and internal staff. The move follows OpenAI's decision to deprioritize Instant Checkout and shut down Sora as the company refocuses on business users and coders.

• OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’: Lauren Almeida reports that OpenAI is in early talks to give the US government a 5% stake, according to the Financial Times. The proposal is still conceptual, could require Congress, and may include similar stakes from other US AI companies as Washington applies more pressure to the sector.

MARKETING

Should You Bet Your Sales Pipeline on… Distribution?

Ross Simmonds says B2B companies are still treating distribution as an afterthought, even though buyers discover ideas on LinkedIn, X, newsletters, Slack communities, podcasts, and other channels long before they visit a company website. He frames distribution as a business function, with two variables that matter most for pipeline: speed of execution and reach into the places where buyers already spend time.

My Take: This is the part a lot of content teams still resist. A great article sitting quietly on your site is not a growth asset until it reaches the market. Publishing the page is only one layer. Distribution creates the off-site signals, citations, conversations, and brand memory that make the content matter outside your own domain.

CONTENT

Scalable Detection of Adversarial Synthetic Slop and Coordinated Media Abuse: A LoRA-Enabled Multimodal Defense System

Google Research describes a deployed defense system for detecting coordinated networks of synthetic spam on a major online video platform. The system combines account-relatedness detection, a synthetic pattern classifier, and LLMs adapted with LoRA and automatic prompt optimization, and Google says six months of operational data led to the termination of 50K clusters comprising 130K channels while saving about 83 human review hours and cutting human reviews by 50%. The research PDF is available here.

My Take: This is a preview of where content quality enforcement is going. Platforms are not only judging one video, image, or article at a time. They are looking for coordinated patterns across accounts, media variants, and repeated semantic fingerprints. Low-quality AI content is not just a brand risk anymore. It is becoming something platforms can detect as an operational abuse pattern.

Build for asking: How to make your content count in the age of AI search

Reza Moaiandin says AI search changes the job of content because users can research, compare, shortlist, and decide without ever clicking through to a brand site. The article pushes teams to build around real customer questions across problem framing, solution exploration, evaluation, objections, risk, and use-case validation, instead of starting with what the brand wants to say or which keywords might bring traffic.

My Take: This is why we build buyer personas in Floyi before any topic and keyword research. If you do not understand who is asking the question, what they already believe, what they are worried about, and what decision they are trying to make, the keyword list is just a pile of phrases. AI search rewards content that answers the next question in the buyer's head, not content that only matches the first query.

We analyzed 103,000 content refreshes. Here’s what was most associated with Google traffic growth — Raptive

Austin Mullins shares data after they analyzed 103,000 refreshed pages over 16 months to see which updates were most associated with Google traffic growth.

• Refreshes beat controls: In a matched-control analysis of 5,500 refreshed and non-refreshed URL pairs, refreshed URLs averaged 28% Google pageview growth while similar non-refreshed pages averaged 9% growth.

• Substantial edits performed better: Light refreshes with 0% to 10% word count change averaged 2% Google pageview growth, while 11% to 30% changes and 31% to 100% changes each averaged 11% growth.

• Extreme rewrites had the largest lift: Pages with more than 100% word count change averaged 44% growth, though Raptive notes that this likely reflects pages with more room for improvement.

• Visible page changes mattered: Pages with image changes averaged 14% Google pageview growth, while title changes and paragraph-count changes each averaged 11% growth.

SOCIAL MEDIA

How A Branded Subreddit Helps Cursor Own BoFu Discussions

Ethan Crump shows how Cursor turned r/cursor into a bottom-funnel discovery channel by staffing the subreddit with employees who answer pricing, product, and roadmap questions where developers already search. The community has 143,000 members, roughly 134,000 weekly visitors, 2,700 weekly contributions, 482 ranking keywords, 9,600 monthly organic visits, and about $13,000 in equivalent traffic value.

Social Ripples

• TikTok For Business introduced Growth Max for Mini Dramas, an ad solution for scaling episodic drama content on TikTok. TikTok says Growth Max campaigns drove a 52% increase in incremental audience reach beyond off-platform acquisition campaigns and a 10x increase in advertiser scale when promoting on-platform Mini Dramas and off-platform apps.

• YouTube harkens back to original Instagram with photo post update: Tubefilter reports that YouTube is adding licensed popular music to photo posts that appear in the Shorts feed. Creators can attach up to 15 seconds of licensed music to image posts and carousels, expanding beyond the royalty-free YouTube Audio Library and AI-powered Dream Track.

• Meta is rolling out Meta One, a paid subscription that unlocks premium features across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, AI glasses, and advanced AI capabilities. The Meta One Premium package is reportedly priced at $19.99 per month and gives AI glasses owners unlimited access to conversation focus plus improved device support.

• X launched an updated livestreaming command center inside Creator Studio for scheduling and running live broadcasts from desktop. The new studio includes a simplified setup flow, chat controls, thumbnail uploads, viewer and comment peaks, audience demographics, and is limited to X Premium users or higher.

• YouTube introduced The Brand Deal Desk, a five-part creator series on pitching, pricing, negotiating, campaign execution, and post-publish reporting. The series is available globally on the YouTube Creators channel, while eligible YPP creators can use the Partnerships tab in YouTube Studio as Creator Partnerships expands to more countries, including the UK, Germany, Japan, and Singapore.

• YouTube published a creator guide for Ask Studio, its AI-powered partner inside YouTube Studio. The guidance pushes creators to use natural language, give context, ask follow-up questions, and use familiar analytics labels so the tool can help with video ideas, audience feedback, title concepts, and channel-specific recommendations.

WHAT I'VE BUILT FOR YOU

Floyi - Build Topical Authority that wins in Google and AI Search. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

ReplyDeck - Be active on Reddit without living on Reddit. Schedule replies, stay present in the threads that matter, and get your time back.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

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SEO + GEO

Google June 2026 Spam Update Released on June 25th

source: x.com

The Great Blogging Collapse: What Happened to 100 Successful Blogs? [Study]

Daniel Stanica tracks 100 once-successful blogs from April 2022 to April 2026 and shows how exposed the old blog-income model became once Google updates and AI answers hit summarizable content.

• Median collapse: The typical site lost 85% of its Google search traffic, and two-thirds of the cohort lost more than half.

• Hard failures: 55 of the 100 blogs were gutted, wiped out, or dead. Twenty sites lost 99% or more, and 12 now show zero organic visits.

• Averages hide the damage: Total monthly traffic across all 100 sites fell from roughly 17.8 million visits to 12 million, but after removing three large food sites, the other 97 blogs fell 63%, from about 11 million monthly visits to 4 million.

• Niche split: Parenting rose 108% and DIY/crafts rose 2% at the median, while travel fell 74%, lifestyle fell 90%, health fell 93%, fashion fell 95%, and finance fell 99%.

• Survivor pattern: Only 21 of 100 blogs grew organic traffic. He says every survivor had at least two of four traits: firsthand experience, an owned audience, a real product, and brand demand people searched for directly.

source: danielstanica.com

Why Isn't My Content Ranking in Google and AI? We Analysed 10,937 SEO'd Pages

Kyle Roof reports on 10,937 PageOptimizer Pro audits and finds the median page scored 33.1 out of 100, with 46.8% below 25. The biggest misses were not writing quality: 99% lacked at least one recommended schema type, 99.4% missed semantic terms, 79.8% missed trust and entity signals, and most pages also missed exact-keyword H1 or title placement. Key insights are that Google and AI systems still need machine-readable proof: schema, entity clarity, semantic coverage, structure, and competitor-matched content depth.

Upgrading your SEO testing framework for AEO

Kaitlin McMichael explains why SEO A/B testing cannot be copied straight into AEO. Traditional SEO tests randomize URLs and measure organic traffic, but answer engines create more zero-click visibility, weaker referral signals, and measurement gaps across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Claude, Gemini, AI Mode, and AI Overviews. Her framing pushes teams to define reliable AEO metrics before testing page changes, because traffic alone misses whether a brand is being cited, surfaced, or trusted in answer outputs.

My Take: Kaitlin was on the IMG podcast with me and she’s someone you definitely want to read/watch/listen to.

Only 27% of domain migrations recover in 90 days

Dan Taylor analyzes 1,052 domain migrations and finds only about one in four recover organic traffic within 90 days. SALT defined recovery as the new domain reaching or exceeding the old domain's six-month pre-migration traffic baseline, not just getting pages indexed again. The median recovery time was 304 days, the mean was 489 days, and 42% of migrations took more than 12 months.

Average Organic Traffic Benchmarks From Real Websites (June 2026)

Ryan Law analyzes anonymized Google Search Console data from 422,421 websites and shows why “average traffic” is the wrong benchmark for most SEO plans. Median monthly Google clicks range from 11 for DR 0-10 sites to 126,364 for DR 90-100 sites, and from 18 for sites with under 10 indexed pages to 244,772 for sites with 5,000+ pages. The useful comparison is not against a publisher or industry mean. It is against sites with similar authority and index size.

How ChatGPT Actually Picks Sources (I Read the Network Traffic, Not the Outputs)

Suganthan Mohanadasan shows what ChatGPT exposes in browser network traffic: each fetched web result carries a result_source label, including serp, labrador, bright, and oxylabs. His logged sample covered about 1,240 source records from one Pro account, so the percentages are directional, but the mechanics are useful: some prompts never search, Thinking can fan out into 15 to 40 sub-queries, and ChatGPT separates fetched, cited, and mentioned sources.

Build an OKF brain like mine!

Marie Haynes shows how she built a personal OKF system out of markdown files, YAML frontmatter, index files, concepts, entities, playbooks, references, and systems. It’s not about the file format itself, but the way the structure lets agents narrow retrieval, connect related concepts, and execute repeatable SEO work such as proposal drafting or post-update analysis. She says her site-impact playbook cut a two-day analysis process down to hours.

Google tests “Strongest match” labels on Search ads

Anu Adegbola reports that Google is testing “Strongest match” and “Strong match” labels on certain Search ads for a small percentage of U.S. users. Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin says the labels use existing ad quality and relevance signals, so this is not a new ranking factor. The change makes Google’s relevance judgment visible in the ad unit itself, which could affect trust, click behavior, and how easily weak ads get ignored.

source: searchengineland.com

Google's Deep Dive On Google Search Generative AI Controls

Barry Schwartz explains Google’s new help documentation for Search generative AI controls, including how sites can include, exclude, or inherit settings for AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative AI features in Discover. The control went into effect June 17, 2026, and currently appears limited to supported UK sites. Google says excluding a site is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal for other parts of Search, and excluded content should usually disappear from generative AI features within one to two days after the control goes live.

How to use Google query expansion to improve content visibility

Natasha Post explains how Google query expansion can reveal search demand your content already touches but does not fully serve. The workflow: filter a page in Search Console, sort queries by impressions, then look for synonyms, adjacent questions, and broader terms that Google already associates with the page. She also separates query expansion from AI Mode query fan-outs, while noting that the same semantic relationships can affect what AI systems retrieve for AI Overviews.

Google’s LLM patent suggests a new goal for SEO: Teaching AI who you are

Rich Sanger explains a 2023 Google patent that describes using LLMs to build a “deep, holistic characterization” of entities from websites and public data. The system can identify attributes such as services, reputation, principles, social sentiment, and relationships, then supplement site content with maps data, business information, job listings, and other third-party sources. The SEO shift is from helping Google understand pages to helping Google understand the entity behind those pages.

My Take: Your website is evidence, not the whole record. Service pages, case studies, reviews, author profiles, directories, and third-party mentions all train the same entity picture. If those sources disagree about who you are and what you do best, AI systems will average the mess.

Deindexing Reports Keep Coming, Google Sees Nothing Unusual

Matt G. Southern reports that site owners and SEOs have spent the past two months seeing pages move out of Google’s index without a clear manual action or crawl error. Google says it sees nothing unusual, but… real deindexing, ranking loss, canonical consolidation, technical blocking, and Search Console reporting noise all demand different fixes. His advice is to verify affected URLs in URL Inspection, anchor the analysis in clicks and GA4 sessions, and avoid emergency changes based on an index-count chart alone.

My Take: This is where technical SEO needs discipline. A client saying “we disappeared from Google” can mean five different problems, and each one has a different cost if you guess wrong. I’d sample money pages first, separate thin-template sections from core pages, then decide whether the fix is quality, canonicals, crawl paths, or simply waiting for reporting data to settle.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Google Answers Question About SEO For AI Agents: Roger Montti reports that Google’s John Mueller expects most search quality principles to stay the same as AI agents browse sites for users. Mueller also warns that “not blindly blocking agentic browsers” may become a new basic. Ask yourself: can humans and their agents both access the useful parts of the site?

• Google's Mueller Explains How AI Search Impressions Get Counted: Matt G. Southern reports that John Mueller says Google’s generative AI report counts impressions when a link to your page is shown in AI Overviews or AI Mode. If the user has to activate or expand something before the link appears, the impression only counts after that activation.

• Google Search Console Page Indexing Report Delayed By Two Weeks Again: Barry Schwartz reports that the Page Indexing report in Google Search Console is stuck at June 11, 2026, leaving it about two weeks behind. The performance reports were also briefly backed up, but those appeared resolved.

• Google AI Overviews Tests Button To Go To Only Web Results: Barry Schwartz reports that Google is testing a button inside AI Overviews that sends users to the Web tab. The test gives searchers a direct path from an AI answer back to classic web results without AI features 😯 

• Google Search Console AI performance reports rolling out to more users: Barry Schwartz reports that Google is expanding access to Search Console AI performance reports beyond the first limited set of users. The report includes impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates for AI responses, AI Mode, and AI Overviews, but it still does not include click data.

• Google Says X-Frame-Options Matters For SEO: Roger Montti reports that Google’s John Mueller singled out X-Frame-Options and CSP frame-ancestors as security headers that can matter for SEO because they block other sites from iframing your content. He adds that other headers may not be direct ranking factors, but they still protect search visibility by reducing hack risk, script abuse, and trust problems.

AI

Previewing GPT-5.6 Sol: a next-generation model

OpenAI previews GPT-5.6 Sol, its new flagship model, alongside Terra and Luna, with stronger coding, biology, and cybersecurity performance plus a heavier safety stack. The release is also politically unusual: OpenAI says the U.S. government asked it to start with a limited preview for trusted partners before broader availability. That slows the rollout while OpenAI works with the Administration on a cyber Executive Order framework and a repeatable process for future model releases.

Introducing Claude Tag

Anthropic introduces Claude Tag, a Slack-based team version of Claude that can be added to selected channels, given scoped tool access, and tagged into work by anyone in the channel. The beta is available for Claude Enterprise and Team customers, with admins controlling channel access, tool permissions, spend limits, and activity logs. Anthropic says 65% of its product team's code is created by an internal version of Claude Tag.

Introducing computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

Computer use is now built into Gemini 3.5 Flash, moving the capability from a standalone Gemini 2.5 computer use model into the main Flash model. Developers can use it through the Gemini API and Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform to build agents that see, reason, and act across browser, mobile, and desktop environments. Google also added safeguards for sensitive actions and indirect prompt injection, including optional enterprise systems for user confirmation and task stopping.

MARKETING

59 Marketing Diagrams and Charts that Explain Digital Marketing

Andy Crestodina collects 59 marketing diagrams from Orbit Media's archive, covering content marketing, SEO and AI search, social media, email, UX, and analytics. Visuals work when they compress a messy concept into a reusable mental model, like traditional search versus AI search, the content performance matrix, or how formats map to funnel stages.

source: orbitmedia.com

CONTENT

Your Brand Message Is Costing You Half Your Views – What 2 Reports Can Tell Us

Greg Jarboe connects two new reports that show why brand-led content gets ignored even when the creative looks polished. IAB found 54% of video URLs were over-blocked by keyword filters despite being appropriate in full context, while Billion Dollar Boy and DAIVID found creator assets that opened with product, benefit, or brand messaging lost 44% of view rate. Context and payoff beat blunt filters and front-loaded brand claims.

SOCIAL MEDIA

How we're updating the YouTube Shorts experience

The YouTube Team says Shorts is getting Clear Screen mode, 2x playback speed, easier mute controls, a heart icon in place of thumbs-up, and sharper feed controls through “Not Interested” and “Don’t recommend this channel.” YouTube is also retiring the dislike button for Shorts because the signal can mean anything from poor audio quality to personal taste.

source: blog.youtube

Your Creator Tools, Reimagined: Introducing the New Facebook Creator Studio

Meta is bringing back Facebook Creator Studio as an AI-powered companion app for creators, starting with a small early access community before a broad launch. The app will integrate Meta's creator assistant, surface daily priorities, show tailored recommendations, track goals, highlight important comments, and draft replies in the creator's voice for approval. Meta is also splitting Professional Dashboard into separate Creator Dashboard and Business Dashboard experiences over the next couple of months.

source: creators.facebook.com

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

WordPress Developers Say New AI Feature Does Not Belong In Core

Roger Montti reports that WordPress is considering a Knowledge Custom Post Type for core, after adding it as an experimental Gutenberg feature for site guidelines such as goals, voice, image preferences, block rules, and accessibility requirements. The proposal is meeting resistance from developers who say it feels AI-driven, incomplete, and better suited for a plugin than core. There are six objections, including core bloat, higher-priority needs like native multilingual support, unclear human use cases, and concern that the feature may serve Automattic’s enterprise users more than average WordPress sites.

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SEO + GEO

New AI Visibility Insights in Bing Webmaster Tools: Intents, Topics, Citation Share, Compare

Bing Webmaster Tools added four AI Performance preview features: Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare. Intents classifies grounding queries into categories such as informational, commercial, navigational, local, research, and creation. Topics groups related grounding queries into thematic clusters, Citation Share estimates the percentage of citations a site receives for a grounding query, and Compare overlays prior time periods against the active view.

My Take: This moves AI visibility measurement closer to how SEOs actually plan work: topics, intent, and share of citations instead of one query list. Use it to spot where Bing already sees authority, then map those cited pages against your topical coverage and internal links. GSC - your move…

source: blogs.bing.com

Should I use markdown for my site?

In the latest Search Off the Record podcast, Martin Splitt and John Mueller say normal HTML remains the safest format for SEO and AI discovery because crawlers already parse HTML and use page structure to understand a site.

• HTML is still the discovery layer: Mueller says normal HTML pages are critical because crawlers can see links in headers, footers, sidebars, categories, and related pages that raw Markdown may strip away.

• Chunking is weaker than architecture: Google’s take is that isolated text blocks are not enough. Crawlers need the surrounding page structure, internal links, and site context to understand how the content connects.

• Markdown does not solve crawling: Splitt notes that crawlers already had to solve HTML parsing at web scale, so converting a normal site to Markdown does not fix a problem search engines have.

• Machine-only versions create drift: Mueller warns that separate Markdown, text, or LLM versions add maintenance risk because a broken machine-only page may fail silently.

• llms.txt is not an SEO shortcut: Mueller says llms.txt was not designed to help search engines or LLM systems discover all of a site’s content. It may help once an agent already knows the site and needs instructions for what to do there.

• Developer docs are the exception: Mueller says Markdown versions can make sense for APIs, code samples, and technical docs, especially when the same Markdown source generates the HTML version users see.

My Take: It’s Google, so take it all with a grain of salt. Do your own research and testing too. They speak only for Google and none of the other search engines. And even then, we’ve found reality is the opposite of what they say is true.

How NerdWallet Built a High-EEAT Review Program That Buyers and LLMs Trust

Ethan Crump shows how NerdWallet turns visible trust signals into search and AI visibility: named authors, credentialed reviewers, public rating methods, editorial independence, and clear correction policies. Foundation’s data with AirOps found only 11.4% of FinTech AI answer citations come from brand-owned sources, which leaves almost nine in ten citations flowing to third-party sites like NerdWallet and Bankrate. NerdWallet’s nearly 9,000 pages draw more than 7 million organic visits a month, and its AI visibility now shows roughly 79,700 ChatGPT appearances, 54,300 AI Mode appearances, and 52,500 Google AI Overview appearances.

We Analyzed 137K Sites: 97% of llms.txt Files Never Get Read

Louise Linehan and Ahrefs analyzed 137,210 domains and found 28% publish an llms.txt file, but 97% of those files received zero requests in May 2026. Among the small share that were fetched, 96% of requests came from bots, only 19.5% came from named AI tools, and AI retrieval bots accounted for just 1.1% of total requests. The file looks more useful for agentic tools and developer workflows than for winning AI search citations.

source: ahrefs.com

How AI Search Grounding Actually Works: Google vs OpenAI vs Anthropic

Dan Petrovic shows how different AI systems ground the same query by running “best ai seo agency 2026” through Google Gemini, OpenAI, and Anthropic on the same day. Gemini received 7 pages and cited all 7, OpenAI received 39 pages but cited only 2, and Anthropic received 14 pages and cited 9.

Google Speaks On Chunking, Site Signals, Content, Paywalls & AI Clicks

Barry Schwartz reports on Google Search Central Live Milan, where shared slides and attendee notes covered query fan-out, sitewide quality, AI reporting, subscriptions, and AI Overview clicks. The notes say 15% of daily Google searches are net-new, complex queries can trigger fan-out into parallel sub-searches, and forcing paragraph “chunking” for AI is useless because organization should follow human readability. Google also pointed to subscription linking through Reader Revenue Manager, with internal case studies showing a 34% engagement lift, and said AI Overview clicks tend to spend more time on site without giving absolute numbers.

7 AI search shifts you can’t afford to ignore

Frank Olivo reports that AI search visibility is splitting by engine, audience, and content type, which makes one-size-fits-all GEO work less useful. The Zero Click NY takeaways point to a shift: teams need to decide whether they are optimizing for ChatGPT, Claude, or another engine before they decide what content to build.

• Citation overlap is tiny: ChatGPT and Claude share only about 8% of their citations, with ChatGPT leaning more on Reddit, Quora, and forums while Claude favors listicles and opinion content.

• Claude is stronger in B2B than traffic charts show: Ramp’s AI Index says 34.4% of tracked businesses now pay for Anthropic, ahead of OpenAI at 32.3%, while roughly 85% of Anthropic revenue comes from enterprise and API usage.

• ChatGPT ads are already part of the board: Ads trigger on about 20% of prompts even though only 14% of real user prompts show commercial intent, and about one in five placements appears against a direct competitor mention.

• Claude has a visible optimization path: Profound testing found 79.2% of Claude citations came directly from Brave’s top 10 results for the equivalent search, but Claude only searches the web on about a third of prompts.

• Prompt type changes the work: Claude searches on about 81% of recency-framed prompts, 67% of ranking prompts, 55% of location prompts, and 51% of comparison prompts, while definitional and how-to prompts often stay inside model memory.

• Marketing engineering is becoming real work: Olivo notes Google, Figma, RBC, and Autodesk have moved toward marketing engineer roles, with Figma posting a $295,000 base salary for the role.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Bing Webmaster Tools May Support More Country Reporting: Barry Schwartz reports that Bing Webmaster Tools may expand country-level reporting inside the Search performance report. Microsoft’s Fabrice Canel said Bing supports all countries and regions worldwide, but the specific report currently surfaces only up to 11 countries and should be extended soon.

• Google updated its site move documentation to tell site owners to submit Change of Address requests for all domain variants during migrations. Google says domain migrations work best when all variants are migrated properly, including subdomains plus www and non-www versions, even if some are not actively used. The variants also need to be verified in Search Console before the move.

AI

How the Open Knowledge Format can improve data sharing

Google presents OKF v0.1, an open spec that turns internal context into a directory of Markdown files with YAML front matter. Each concept gets its own file, the file path becomes its identity, and normal Markdown links turn the bundle into a graph that agents and humans can read without a vendor SDK. Google is also publishing an enrichment agent, a static visualizer, and sample bundles for GA4 e-commerce, Stack Overflow, and Bitcoin public datasets.

My Take: Knowledge has to live in a hierarchy before an AI system can use it well. That’s why I’m a fan of topical maps - it’s not just a list of keywords. It is a structured tree of topics, entities, intent, pages, and internal links. OKF points to where AI search and agent workflows are going: the teams with clean topic hierarchy and portable knowledge files will give machines better context than teams with scattered docs.

Introducing the OpenAI Partner Network

OpenAI says it is investing $150 million in the OpenAI Partner Network to help consultancies, systems integrators, technology firms, and data partners build and deploy enterprise AI solutions. The program launches with Select, Advanced, and Elite tiers, planned specializations in areas like Codex, cybersecurity, and agents, plus a Forward Deployed Experts pilot for complex deployments. OpenAI also says it aims to train and enable 300,000 certified consultants by the end of 2026, while Paychex reports an OpenAI and Bain deployment cut wait time by 80% and human-reviewed effort time by 30%.

Results from the first Anthropic Public Record

Anthropic reports results from a national survey of 51,993 Americans conducted in November and December 2025, creating a baseline for how the US public thinks about AI benefits, risks, and governance.

• Health leads public hope: 48% ranked curing diseases like cancer or Alzheimer's among their top three hopes for AI, followed by helping people with disabilities at 36%.

• Job loss is the top fear: 64% worry AI will displace jobs, and it was the leading fear in every state surveyed.

• Hands-on use changes the threat model: 54% of people who use AI at work every day worry about job loss, compared with 70% of people who do not use AI at all.

• Government oversight has broad support: 71% say government should be involved in AI development and regulation, including 79% of Democrats, 68% of Republicans, and 69% of Independents.

• Trust in AI companies is thin: Only 15% trust AI companies to make decisions about how AI is developed and used, below every other institution Anthropic tested.

source: anthropic.com

Announcing the Agentic Resource Discovery specification

Google announces ARD, an open spec for publishing, finding, and verifying AI capabilities across the web. The model uses domain-hosted catalogs and federated registries so agents can find MCP servers, A2A agents, OpenAPI tools, and other resources, then verify the publisher before connecting through the tool’s native protocol. Google is tying ARD to Agent Registry inside Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, with governance controls for namespaced URNs, egress policies, pinned tools, and trust manifests for compliance needs like HIPAA.

Copilot Cowork is now generally available

Microsoft announces global availability for Copilot Cowork, Microsoft’s agentic system for long-running, multi-tool tasks inside Microsoft 365. Microsoft says more than half of the Fortune 500 used Cowork during the three-month Frontier preview, and internal June 2026 tests found Copilot Cowork averaged 30 to 40% lower cost per prompt than Claude Cowork with the Microsoft 365 connector across 125 runs. GA adds usage-based billing, tenant and user spending controls, usage reporting, nine partner plugins, Edge browser use in Frontier, and Microsoft 365 security controls for prompts, responses, and artifacts.

AI Ripples

• New OpenAI Academy courses for the next era of work: OpenAI introduces three free Academy courses: AI Foundations, Applied AI Foundations, and Agents and Workflows. The courses move teams from basic prompting and review habits into repeatable workflow plans, then into agent-assisted work with defined context, boundaries, outputs, and human review.

• LinkedIn and Adobe Launch Global AI Skills Initiative for Marketing Professionals: LinkedIn and Adobe are launching AI Essentials for Marketers, a free short-form LinkedIn Learning program available for the first 12 months. The launch includes four role-based courses across digital marketing, content and creative, social and communications, and data and analytics, with courses available in 47 languages after LinkedIn found marketing job posts requiring AI literacy rose 113% year over year.

MARKETING

Google expands limited ad serving policy on Search

Anu Adegbola reports that Google is broadening its Limited ad serving policy on Search, giving itself more room to restrict impressions for advertisers it sees as unqualified or confusing to users. The rollout starts this month and will continue gradually through 2028, with user feedback, brand clarity, and advertiser identity becoming stronger signals for ad eligibility.

Introducing Ask Ad Manager, the AI agent that will help you get more done

Google introduces Ask Ad Manager, a Gemini-built agent for Google Ad Manager that helps publishers troubleshoot line items, generate custom reports, and move to the right platform settings from a conversation. The beta launches this month, with more skills and developer tools planned later in 2026. Google says Yahoo is already connecting Ad Manager into custom agents for forecasting, line item creation, reporting, and campaign optimization.

The Comprehensive Guide to Online Advertising Costs for 2026

Rob Glover compiles 2026 online advertising cost benchmarks across search, social, video, and display channels. WordStream reports:

• The average small business spends more than $3,000 per month on Google Ads, with average Google Ads CPC at $5.42 and average Google Search Ads CPL at $66.69.

• Facebook ads at $0.70 CPC and $27.66 CPL

• Instagram ads at $0.40 to $2 CPC

• LinkedIn ads at $4.50 to $12 CPC

• YouTube ads at $4 to $10 CPM

• Google Display Network ads at $3 to $10 CPM

SOCIAL MEDIA

New AI Tools to Help You Make Things Happen on Facebook

Facebook says it is rolling out AI Mode, a Meta AI search experience that answers questions using public culture, opinions, and recommendations shared across Facebook, Groups, Reels, and other Meta apps instead of returning only links. The update also adds opt-in camera roll sharing suggestions, collage cutout templates, transition effects for video montages, and AI photo presets that can change clothing, hair, accessories, or a profile picture style.

source: about.fb.com

Pinterest’s new AI tools for the discovery era: from ads to personalised shopping

Pinterest says it is adding Business Assistant, Pinterest MCP, a new Pinterest Performance+ creative model, and Ask Pinterest as AI changes how people search, shop, and plan. Business Assistant is in closed US beta inside Ads Manager and mobile, giving advertisers visual trend data, performance prompts, and optimization guidance. Pinterest MCP connects campaign, analytics, and keyword data into partner copilots, while the new Performance+ creative model increased click volume by 7.5% in testing against the previous single-variant model.

The mission mindset: How human conversations build buyer confidence

Reddit and WPP Media report that consumers use Reddit as a validation layer before acting, especially when they need to compare options, test claims, and hear from people with direct experience. The research says 63% of redditors feel more confident in decisions based on Reddit community interactions than on other social platforms. It also found 44% say ads feel most relevant when clearly disclosed as sponsored, 58% agree that seeing a brand respond directly makes them more likely to trust that brand, and 52% prefer educational or problem-solving content.

Social Ripples

• X Streamlines Campaign Setup and Tracking to Help Businesses of All Sizes Drive Stronger Ad Results: X has updated its new Ads Manager to make campaign setup and tracking simpler for advertisers. The post points to features built to streamline setup and improve result tracking, positioning X’s ad product around easier execution for businesses of all sizes.

• New Feature Roundup: Free up space, multiple accounts, cross-platform transfer and more: WhatsApp says it is rolling out chat-level storage cleanup, iOS-to-Android chat transfers, two-account login on iOS, sticker suggestions, Meta AI photo touch-ups, and Writing Help that can draft suggested replies from conversation context. The storage update lets users delete large files inside a specific chat without wiping the history, while the account update brings iOS closer to Android for people separating work and personal messaging.

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SEO + GEO

Core Roars Back – Interesting Cases and Findings From Google’s May 2026 Broad Core Update

Glenn Gabe reports that Google’s May 2026 broad core update hit faster and harder than March, starting May 21 and finishing June 2 after an 11-day rollout. He saw impact about 48 hours in, with sharp gains and losses across countries, heavy volatility in YMYL categories such as health, finance, and gambling, and two late-rollout tremors that also affected Google Discover. Gabe’s AI search checks were more mixed: sites using risky AI search tactics were not uniformly hit, but January’s “commodity content” losers did not recover, and one site scaling low-quality content plus AI translations dropped hard.

YouTube Is Outranking Your Entire SEO Team on 1,723 Keywords

Foundation Team reports that YouTube is winning high-intent B2B SaaS SERPs that many teams still treat as side-channel territory. Foundation analyzed 8,566 keywords across 130+ SaaS categories and found YouTube in Google’s top 10 for 80.2% of “demo” queries, 22.5% of “best” queries, and 20% of “vs” queries, with YouTube outranking three or more vendors on 1,723 keywords representing 513,000 monthly searches. The sharper point: YouTube over-indexes where buyers are close to action, including demo, trial, review, setup, and comparison searches.

How to get indexed by ChatGPT [2026]

Amy Rigby explains that getting indexed by ChatGPT is not the same as showing up in a ChatGPT answer. OpenAI’s bots may fetch a page, store parts of it in an indexed or cached layer, and still never cite it in a user-facing answer. Her advice starts with allowing OAI-SearchBot, then moves through Bing sitemap submission, IndexNow, fresh lastmod signals, internal links from pages bots already revisit, and raw HTML content that AI crawlers can read without JavaScript.

My Take: This is where GEO gets boring in the best possible way. Before you chase prompts, mentions, or fancy dashboards, make sure the machines can fetch the page and see the facts.

Why 62% of AI citations don’t lead to brand mentions [Study]

Margarita Loktionova reports that AI citation visibility and brand visibility are now two different jobs. Semrush partnered with Kevin Indig to analyze 3,981 domain appearances across 115 prompts, 14 countries, and four AI search engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Google AI Mode.

• Most citations hide the brand: 61.7% of AI citations were “ghost citations,” where the source link appeared but the brand name did not. Only 13.2% of appearances were both cited and mentioned.

• Engines behave differently: Gemini mentioned brands in 83.7% of appearances but cited them only 21.4% of the time. ChatGPT did the reverse, with an 87% citation rate and a 20.7% mention rate.

• Markets change the outcome: India and Sweden had brand mentions in 50% of AI answers, while Italy, Brazil, and the Netherlands landed between 18% and 22% despite high citation rates.

• Prompt shape matters: Short, conversational queries produced nearly 100% brand mention rates. Longer structured prompts fell to 2% to 3%.

• Intent changes visibility: Informational queries had an 89.3% citation rate but only an 18% mention rate. Comparative queries produced 2.4x more brand mentions than informational queries.

My Take: This is why I would separate AI search reporting into two dashboards: evidence and memory. Citations show which pages models trust enough to use as evidence. Mentions show whether the model already knows the brand well enough to say its name. SEO can help with the first, but the second needs positioning, PR, reviews, comparisons, and repeated brand facts across the web.

Google Chrome tests another massive change to Search that puts AI in front

Nickolas Diaz reports that Google is testing a Chrome Canary flag that would send address-bar searches directly into AI Mode instead of the standard Google results page. WindowsReport found the flag labeled “Fulfill Searchbox queries in AI Mode,” but Google’s commit says there are “no current plans” to ship the change and that it is “just for exploration.” If it ever moves beyond testing, Chrome would turn the browser’s default search box into an AI answer surface where links appear only as supporting sources.

My Take: This is the search behavior change SEOs should watch more than any single AI Overview tweak. If the browser pushes users into AI Mode before they ever see a classic SERP, ranking position becomes only one part of visibility. The new job is making pages easy for AI systems to retrieve, trust, and cite when the answer interface becomes the default front door.

WTF is NLWeb? — Whiteboard Friday

Crystal Carter explains NLWeb, Microsoft’s open-source Natural Language Web project that uses the ASK protocol to let people and agents query a website in plain language. The system can pull from schema, headings, title tags, HTML lists, tables, product feeds, RSS feeds, XML sitemaps, and CMS data, then ground answers in the site’s own information. She also notes that R.V. Guha, the creator of Schema.org and RSS, created NLWeb, which makes the project worth taking seriously even if adoption is still early.

My Take: NLWeb is a reminder that all the “boring” SEO work still matters. Clean structure, schema, headings, feeds, and well-organized content are becoming the connection layer between websites and agents. I would not rush every client into implementation tomorrow, but I would use NLWeb as a checklist for whether a site is ready to be queried by machines instead of just crawled by bots.

How AI prompt patterns vary by industry and shape search visibility

Jason Tabeling explains that prompts are becoming the new unit of search because AI systems retrieve different sources depending on how users frame the task. Healthcare prompts often include symptoms, age, medication, and risk constraints, while B2B prompts ask for comparison tables, implementation timelines, hidden costs, and ROI. Ecommerce prompts blend “best,” “cheap,” reviews, use cases, and budget limits, while citing research that nearly 45% of LLM follow-up nudges are budget- or deal-related.

My Take: This is why keyword research alone is starting to feel incomplete. It’s all about topic research and looking at a higher level. A topical map now needs a prompt layer to find the topic gaps. You need to know what buyers ask first, what they ask next, and what facts they need. This is why we have the AI search gaps feature to find the topic gaps after doing Google and YouTube autocomplete.

How to estimate the traffic impact of SEO fixes

Adam Heitzman shows how to forecast SEO fixes by defining the scope, calculating current traffic exposure in Google Search Console, estimating lift from past projects, and presenting conservative, expected, and aggressive scenarios. His warning is useful: the same ranking gain can produce different traffic depending on SERP features, AI Overviews, and query type. He cites SparkToro data showing 68% of U.S. Google searches in early 2026 ended without a click, plus Seer Interactive research showing organic CTR for informational queries with AI Overviews fell 61% between mid-2024 and late 2025 before rebounding to 2.4% by February 2026.

My Take: This is how SEO earns roadmap trust. Clients and founders do not need perfect predictions. They need to know which fix is worth developer time, which one can wait, and which one only sounds important because it is technically interesting.

What co-mentions reveal about the AI recommendation gap

Maryanna Franco reports on a study of 12 athleisure and activewear brands across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews, using 14,140 API runs over seven days in the UK. The study found that Knowledge Graph strength did not guarantee recommendation visibility: Nike appeared in 71% of athleisure recommendation prompts, while New Balance and Reebok appeared in 0%, even though all three shared the same Google Knowledge Graph description as “Footwear company.” Recommendation prompts relied heavily on outside validation, with third-party sources accounting for 82% to 100% of citations across the five systems.

Schema.org Adds Usage Statistics For Schema Types

Schema.org has added usage statistics to individual schema type pages, giving SEOs a public way to compare adoption across the web. The dataset updates monthly, aggregates usage at the domain level, and groups popularity into buckets to reduce day-to-day noise. Schwartz notes that author schema appears on over 10 million domains, while event schema appears on under 1 million domains, which makes the gap between common and neglected structured data easier to spot.

My Take: This is useful because schema work has always suffered from too much opinion and not enough market context. If a markup type is common, it becomes table stakes. If it is rare but relevant, it may be a chance to make a page easier for search systems and AI systems to parse. I would use this dataset as a prioritization layer, not a rulebook.

Apple Updates Applebot Docs To Include Siri AI & AI Features

Barry Schwartz reports that Apple updated its Applebot documentation on June 8, 2026 to explain how crawled data may support AI answers in Apple products and services, including Siri and Search. Apple says publishers can use nosnippet to opt specific content out of broad world knowledge answers, while Applebot-Extended remains the control for opting out of foundation model training. The update also adds guidance for X-Robots-Tag directives, paywalled content via isAccessibleForFree, and crawl behavior, including Applebot not honoring crawl-delay.

Google Updates Its Hiring An SEO Doc With SEO Tools & Generative AI Optimization

Google updated its Do you need an SEO? document with new warnings about SEO tools, audits, and generative AI optimization. Google now tells site owners to check whether an SEO’s AEO or GEO advice aligns with Google’s official guidance, to grant Search Console read access only during an audit, and to avoid anyone promising first-place rankings. He also notes that the page is about 30% shorter than the archived version, with the new third-party tool warning highlighted in red.

My Take: No comment 😅 

Google On Third-Party SEO Tools, Services, and Advice

Google published a new third-party SEO tools and advice guide for evaluating external recommendations. Google says tool vendors and SEO services may help with sitemap generation, indexing directives, “SEO-optimized” content, ranking advice, and AEO or GEO claims, but it does not evaluate or endorse third-party tools. The warning is direct: third-party tools do not have Google’s internal ranking data, cannot guarantee performance, and should be checked against official Google Search guidance.

My Take: No comment again 🥱 

Claude visibility may depend heavily on Brave Search rankings, new data suggests

Danny Goodwin reports that Claude may be more tied to Brave Search rankings than other AI answer engines, based on Jonathan Clark’s takeaways from a Zero Click by Profound session. Clark said Claude used web search in 36.6% of prompts, versus about 90% for ChatGPT, and was most likely to search on freshness, ranking, location, and comparison prompts. Claude citations matched ChatGPT only 8% of the time, but overlapped with Google rankings 64%, which makes Brave and Google rank tracking more useful for Claude visibility tests.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Bing Gives Searchers A Way To Disable AI Copilot Answers: Bing is testing a Chrome and Edge extension that lets users turn Copilot-style AI answers on or off in search results. Users can also add -ai to a query to suppress AI responses, which turns user choice into a visible search product feature instead of a settings-page afterthought.

• Google Search Console Link Report Finally Fixed & Updated: Google has fixed the Google Search Console links report after weeks of missing or sharply reduced link counts.

• Google Is Adding Business Profile Tools To The Gemini App: Matt G. Southern reports that Google is adding a direct Google Business Profile connection and Business notebooks to the Gemini app, rolling out globally this month outside the EEA and UK. Once connected, Gemini can answer performance questions, draft review replies, suggest profile updates, and carry business context across notebook sessions.

• US Publishers Demand Common Crawl Stop Scraping Their Content: Digital Content Next sent Common Crawl a cease and desist letter demanding that it stop collecting protected publisher content and remove member material already in its datasets. Blocking CCBot only stops future crawls, while older Common Crawl archives can still sit inside AI training pipelines.

• More News Sites Default To Blocking AI Crawlers: Reuters and Time now block AI bots by default and approve crawlers only through allowlists. Reuters says the setup has not cost traffic, while People Inc. saw blocked user agents jump from about 2,100 to more than 30,000 after moving from blocklists to allowlists.

• Google Says Hyphenated Domain Names Are Okay For SEO: Roger Montti reports that Google’s John Mueller said hyphenated domains are “ok” for SEO, pushing back on the old assumption that dashes carry a hidden ranking penalty. The potential issue is still branding and trust: domains with hyphens can be harder to type, easier to misread, and more likely to look spammy if the rest of the site does not build confidence.

AI

Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5

Anthropic releases Claude Fable 5, its first Mythos-class model for general use, with Claude Mythos 5 reserved for trusted cyberdefenders, infrastructure providers, and future biology partners. Fable 5 falls back to Claude Opus 4.8 for flagged cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, and distillation requests, and Anthropic says those safeguards trigger in less than 5% of sessions on average. The release pairs frontier-model access with a stricter operating model: 30-day retention on Mythos-class traffic, $10 per million input tokens, $50 per million output tokens, and staged subscription access that changes after June 22 - oh, but wait…

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

Just as quick, Fable is gone - Anthropic says the US government issued an export control directive on June 12 to suspend all Fable 5 and Mythos 5 access for foreign nationals, forcing Anthropic to disable both models for all customers to comply. The company says the order cited national security authorities but gave no specific details, and Anthropic believes it stems from a narrow, non-universal jailbreak that asks the model to inspect a codebase and fix flaws. Anthropic says its red teams found no universal jailbreak, that disclosed issues show no Mythos-specific uplift, and that all other Anthropic models remain available.

WebMCP Can Be Used To Hijack AI Agents, Chrome Warns

Roger Montti reports that Chrome is warning developers about WebMCP prompt injection risks, especially malicious manifests and contaminated tool outputs. Browser-based agents may operate inside authenticated sessions, where a poisoned tool description, user comment, review, or forum post can steer an agent toward unsafe actions. Chrome’s guidance says model safety layers cannot guarantee protection, so developers need deterministic controls such as token limits, origin restrictions, untrusted content handling, and user confirmation before state-changing actions.

When AI builds itself

AI is already accelerating AI development inside Anthropic, even before full recursive self-improvement exists. As of May 2026, more than 80% of merged code in Anthropic’s codebase was authored by Claude, and the typical engineer was merging 8x as much code per day in Q2 2026 as in 2024, though Anthropic says lines of code overstate true productivity. For research velocity, Claude moved from about a 3x speedup on a fixed optimization task in May 2025 to about 52x by April 2026, while humans still hold the advantage in choosing which problems matter.

AI Ripples

• Fluid, natural voice translation with Google’s Gemini 3.5 Live Translate: Gemini 3.5 Live Translate can detect 70+ languages and generate near real-time translated speech that preserves intonation, pacing, and pitch. The model is rolling out through the Gemini Live API, Google AI Studio, Google Translate on Android and iOS, and a private preview for Google Meet, where Google says it will support 2,000+ language combinations.

SOCIAL MEDIA

• YouTube expands in-app messaging: Andrew Hutchinson reports that YouTube is expanding YouTube Chat to the U.S. and other global locations after earlier testing in Ireland and Poland. Eligible users can invite friends into private in-app conversations, share videos, react in real time, and keep more YouTube sharing behavior inside the platform instead of pushing it to outside messaging apps.

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SEO + GEO

source: status.search.google.com

Google May 2026 Core Update Complete

The May 2026 core update finished rolling out on June 2 at 05:40 US/Pacific, after starting May 21 at 08:40. Google first said the rollout could take up to two weeks, and the final status update confirms it was complete as of June 2.

If you’re ever thinking something’s up with Google, check out this Google Search Volatility Aggregator Tool on Search Engine Roundtable.

source: seroundtable.com

Google May 2026 Core Update Analysis: Intent, Market Fit and Source Type Drove the Biggest Visibility Shifts

Aleyda Solis reports that the May 2026 core update shifted visibility toward the source type that best fit each query's intent, market, and expected result format. Her SISTRIX analysis of the US and UK from May 26 to June 2 found canonical reference brands gained 24% in the UK and 10% in the US, while reference aggregators and tools fell 29% and 13%. Forum and Q&A surfaces dropped 24% in the UK and 12% in the US, while UK ecommerce SERPs moved toward local-market retail, with ccTLD retailers up 20% and US .com marketplaces down 55% in the UK index.

May 2026 Google Core Update: Reddit now holds nearly 5x more TOP 3 positions than YouTube

Yevheniia Khromova and SE Ranking analyzed 100,000 keywords across 20 niches in New York before and after Google's May 2026 core update and found the update reordered results more than it rebuilt them. After the update, 76.03% of TOP 3 URLs, 88.39% of TOP 10 URLs, and 97.99% of TOP 100 URLs changed positions. Reddit's TOP 3 share rose to 10.24% from 8.56% after March, with gains in all 20 niches and a 54% jump in keywords where Reddit ranked first, while YouTube's regular TOP 3 share fell to 2.14% from 2.50%.

source: seranking.com

ChatGPT Core Updates: Chatbots Have Algorithm Changes Too

Johannes Beus and SISTRIX tracked 38 daily samples of 100,000 German-language ChatGPT responses and found a core-update-level citation change after the move from GPT-5 mini to GPT-5.5. The dataset covered 3.8 million responses and more than 100 million source mentions.

• Citation drift spiked: The May 22-23 model change shifted domain distribution by 47% within 48 hours, compared with normal weekday drift of 1-2%.

• Sources got tighter: The average number of cited sources per response fell from 30.9 to 28.4 after the GPT-5.5 switch.

• Reddit won big: Reddit rose from 11,853 to 18,860 citations per 10,000 responses, a gain of 7,007 citations and 59%.

• Local German sources gained: Welt.de rose 99%, faz.net rose 124%, bild.de rose 83%, and chip.de rose 24%.

• International aggregators lost ground: Tripadvisor fell 53%, Indeed fell 47%, Expedia fell 60%, Rome2rio fell 60%, and YouTube fell 18%.

My Take: This is why I don't treat AI search tracking as a one-time benchmark. A model update can change the citation set without any change on your site. The work is building topical proof across owned content, third-party platforms, and category sources so you are not dependent on one citation pattern.

Yelp earned 512K AI citations in Q4. The pattern matters more than the platform.

The Foundation and AirOps analyzed 28.5 million AI-generated answers to local business queries and found Yelp earned 512,680 citations in Q4 2025. Yelp captured 72.5% of local discovery citations in Google AI Mode, 62.1% in Perplexity, and grew citation volume 19x between September and November while the total AI citation market grew roughly 3x. The sharper finding is query-level: 91 to 97% of Yelp citations came from unbranded category searches like “best plumber in Austin,” while brand-name queries accounted for only 3 to 9% and produced roughly half the citation density.

My Take: I would start from the category prompt set, list which third-party sources win each question, then decide where profiles, reviews, Reddit threads, LinkedIn posts, and comparison content need attention. Your owned content still matters, but AI shortlists are being shaped off-site before the buyer lands on your domain.

source: foundationinc.co

A new profile to help publishers and creators highlight their work on Search

Google is launching Search profiles, a shareable space where publishers, creators, and brands can shape how they appear across Search. The profiles collect latest articles, videos, social posts, avatar, bio, website, and platform links, and users can follow a source so its content is more likely to appear in the home feed of the Google app. The first rollout is US-only and limited to publishers and creators with a sizable following. Google's eligibility note sets the content-platform floor at 100,000 subscribers or followers on YouTube, Instagram, or X, and 300,000 on TikTok.

Carl Handy made a handy tool to find search profiles - search.audits.com.

My Take: This is another sign Google wants source-level identity (topical and brand authority), not just page-level relevance. I would treat this like a public entity profile: consistent author data, linked platforms, content feed, and proof that the source is worth following.

New opportunities, control and insights for website owners

Google is testing new Search Console controls that let site owners decide whether their content can appear in generative AI features like AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI-powered Google app results. The opt-out removes traffic and impressions from those AI features, but Google says it will not affect ranking outside generative AI Search. Google is also rolling out Search Console visibility data for a subset of UK website owners, including impressions, pages, and countries where pages appear in AI responses.

My Take: This reads like Google trying to control the narrative around AI-driven Search. The message is "we are giving publishers control," but the trade-off is blunt: opt out and lose the AI surface entirely. They say it won’t affect rankings…but you know - it’s Google.

Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console

Google is launching dedicated Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console for a subset of websites. The reports break out visibility from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative AI features tied to the Google app, while keeping that data inside the broader performance report. Site owners can see impressions, appearing pages, countries, devices for Search results, and date ranges from hourly to monthly.

source: developers.google.com

On-page content formats answer engines actually favor [new research]

HubSpot's State of AEO 2026 and Wix Studio's AI Search Lab both point to the same citation pattern: listicles, articles, product pages, and category pages are the safest on-page formats across answer engines. HubSpot found blog posts lead Google AI Overviews at a 42% citation rate and Gemini at 76%, comparison content leads ChatGPT at 95%, and product listings and landing pages lead Perplexity at 84%. Wix's dataset, built from more than 1 million citations across 75,000 AI answers, found listicles earned 21.9% of all citations, articles 16.7%, and product pages 13.7%.

Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search

Jason Koebler reports that moderators of r/biohackers banned new posts about peptides and hormone replacement therapy after saying companies were using the subreddit to influence AI search answers. The moderators said AI search engines increasingly pull from Reddit, and that peptide and HRT marketers were treating the community as an AEO channel by pushing content likely to be scraped by chatbots and Google AI Search. The article shows the darker side of off-site GEO: if Reddit becomes training and citation material, communities become targets for manipulation.

My Take: This is why Reddit strategy has to separate participation from spam. For legitimate brands, the play is not flooding threads with planted mentions. It is finding relevant conversations, answering with proof, and building a repeatable response workflow. A tool like the ReplyDeck Chrome extension can help with automatic Reddit replying by creating helpful personas.

How a ‘client brain’ gives AI the context SEO work needs

Igal Stolpner says SEO agencies need a structured client memory system so AI work starts with account context instead of a blank prompt. His "client brain" splits knowledge into a static soul layer for brand, audience, positioning, voice, keyword map, and never-do rules, plus a dynamic memory layer for decisions, rejected angles, technical blockers, and client feedback. The setup can be as simple as Markdown files, a 90-minute account session, task-based loading rules, and regular maintenance so stale notes do not become confident errors.

My Take: This is exactly why Floyi starts with the Brand Foundation. Before AI can build a useful topical map, content plan, content briefs, or articles - it needs the company's entity facts, audience, offer, tone, constraints, and strategic direction. Without that foundation, you are asking a model to guess what your best account lead already knows.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Why so much SEO work no longer drives growth: Claire Taylor says SEO teams are still spending too much time on keyword lists, content production, and standalone on-page work when growth now depends more on entity strength, original research, distribution, AI visibility, and deeper analysis. She suggests comparing the last three months of SEO hours against the work that mattered five years ago versus the work that matters now.

• Google Must Let Websites Opt Out Of AI Search Features In UK: Matt G. Southern reports that the UK Competition and Markets Authority imposed a new conduct requirement on Google Search that will let publishers opt out of AI Overviews and AI Mode, opt out of AI model training, and get clearer links in AI-generated results. Most requirements take effect six months after publication, with page-level AI Search controls due in nine months.

• Google CEO Sundar Pichai Is OK With AI Mode Replacing Classic Search: Roger Montti reports that Sundar Pichai told NYT Hard Fork that Google is moving classic Search toward AI Mode as a continuum, while keeping sources and links in the product. Pichai said user metrics are positive and that Google is comfortable funding the AI Search model through a mix of subscriptions and ads.

AI

Hermes Desktop — The Agent That Grows With You

Nous Research says Hermes Agent now ships as a native desktop app for macOS 12+, Windows 10/11, and Linux, with one agent spanning Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, email, and CLI. There are also paid tiers that run through Nous Portal, with Free, Plus, Super, and Ultra plans that include monthly credits, access to 300+ models, and built-in tool use.

My Take: Instead of many others offering OpenClaw-in-a-box services, Nous is offering their own plans. I actually switched from OpenClaw to Hermes after OpenClaw updates kept breaking my stack, and Hermes is more stable. Hermes gives me a cleaner control layer while Paperclip handles the browser-side capture and research flow.

Dreaming: Better memory for a more helpful ChatGPT

OpenAI says ChatGPT is rolling out a new dreaming-based memory system for Plus and Pro users in the US, with more countries plus Free and Go users coming over the next few weeks. The system moves beyond saved memories by using a background process to synthesize context across conversations, keep preferences current, and retire stale facts when time passes. OpenAI says the new architecture cuts the compute needed to serve dreaming to Free users by about 5x while giving Plus and Pro users more memory capacity.

Introducing Microsoft Scout: Your always-on personal agent

Microsoft is introducing Autopilots, a category of always-on agents that act in the background under enterprise permissions and policies. Microsoft Scout is the first example, built into Microsoft 365 across Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, desktop, browser, local resources, and model context protocol servers. Scout can coordinate meetings across time zones, flag key meetings, prepare materials, identify deliverables, block calendar time, and surface stalled decisions before they become blockers.

Announcing Microsoft IQ

Microsoft also launches Web IQ, a suite of grounding APIs that connects AI systems and agents to fresh web pages, news, images, and videos. The system builds on Bing's global index, then reworks retrieval, ranking, passage selection, and orchestration for agent workloads that need repeated evidence gathering inside tight latency limits.

My Take: This is search infrastructure being rebuilt for agents instead of humans. The important phrase is passage-level evidence, because agents don't need a list of blue links. They need compact proof they can use inside reasoning. That is also why AI search optimization can't stop at ranking pages. You need content sections that are easy to extract, trust, and reuse as evidence.

source: blogs.bing.com

Introducing a new design for Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft redesigned the Copilot app and in-app Copilot experience around a task-aware prompt surface, progressive disclosure, and faster performance. Microsoft says the new Copilot app loads more than twice as fast, cuts perceived load time by over 50%, and improves complex chat response time by 10% at the 95th percentile. After the new in-app experiences rolled out, Copilot usage rose 27% in Word, 33% in Excel, 43% in PowerPoint, and 30% in Outlook across the measured commercial user windows.

source: microsoft.com

AI Ripples

• ChatGPT is now letting you send emails directly from ChatGPT. Would you trust OpenAI to keep your emails private though? I’d make sure the emails you send are innocuous and nothing private.

• Google will pay SpaceX $920M per month for compute from October 2026 through June 2029 for access to about 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs, CPUs, memory, and related components. Google called it bridge capacity for higher-than-expected Gemini Enterprise demand, and the filing gives both companies a 90-day termination option after December 31, 2026. Anthropic already agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion through 2029.

• Microsoft AI chief says company was “set free” from OpenAI to pursue superintelligence: Mustafa Suleyman says a renegotiated OpenAI contract gave Microsoft formal authority to pursue superintelligence with its own researchers, data pipelines, and custom silicon. Microsoft announced seven in-house MAI models at Build 2026, including the 35-billion-active-parameter MAI-Thinking-1, while Frontier Tuning lets enterprises customize models inside secure compliance boundaries.

LINK BUILDING + DIGITAL PR

Why You Need to Use "Why Now?" For Your Journalist Pitches, Now

Vince Nero explains that strong journalist pitches need a clear "why now" hook, not just a relevant source or good story idea. He breaks the timing layer into four usable angles: seasonality, trends, recurring events, and breaking news, then says the hook should appear in the subject line and again in the first or second sentence of the email body. The piece also cites journalists who say timeliness helps reporters see reader relevance and gives editors confidence that the coverage will feel current instead of promotional.

NEWS

Alphabet investor presentation: June 2026

Alphabet's June 2026 investor presentation transcript from Sundar Pichai and Anat Ashkenazi, and the Search numbers are the story. Google says AI Overviews has over 2.5 billion monthly users, AI Mode has passed 1 billion monthly users, and Search revenue grew 19% year over year last quarter. Alphabet also expects 2026 CapEx of $180-190 billion, says Gemini serving costs fell 78% in 2025, and says core AI response costs are down more than 30% since Gemini 3 launched.

My Take: This is why I would not bet on Google quietly retreating from AI Search. The company is telling investors that AI expands Search usage, supports ads on longer queries, and justifies a massive infrastructure buildout. For SEO operators, the question is not whether AI Mode becomes part of Search. It is how to earn visibility when Google turns more searches into agentic, multimodal, action-ready sessions.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - Build Topical Authority that wins in Google and AI Search. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

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SEO + GEO

Ahrefs AI Search Benchmark Report

An Ahrefs report finds that AI search is splitting the old Google playbook into several different visibility systems. They analyzed 146 million SERPs, 730,000 AI response pairs, 174,048 AI Overview-cited pages, and 75,000 brands to show where search rankings still matter and where AI platforms pull from different sources.

• AI Overviews are now common: Google’s AI Overviews appear for 21% of all keywords. They show up on 9.5% of single-word queries, but jump to 46.4% for queries with seven or more words.

• Citation overlap is thin: Across 730,000 response pairs, Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews had just 13.7% URL overlap while reaching the same conclusions 86% of the time.

• Ranking still helps, but not enough: For AI Overview citations, 37.9% of cited URLs ranked in the top 10, 31.2% ranked from 11 to 100, and 31% did not rank in the top 100.

• Brand visibility is not only search visibility: Among the top 1,000 ChatGPT-cited pages, 28.3% had zero organic keywords. YouTube mentions had a roughly 0.737 correlation with AI brand mentions across 75,000 brands.

• Clicks are taking the hit: AI Overviews reduced click-through rate for position one results by 58%. Even position 10 lost 19.4% of clicks.

• Content length is a weak signal: Across 174,048 pages cited in AI Overviews, the average cited page had 1,282 words. Ahrefs found a near-zero correlation between word count and citations.

Top AI Search Skills Hiring Managers Want (From 1,543 Job Listings)

Chima Mmeje reports that AI search skills are now part of mainstream SEO hiring, but the market is not asking candidates to lead with prompt engineering. Moz analyzed 1,543 full-time SEO job listings posted since October 1, 2025, and found that nearly half mention AI search or AI workflow concepts, measurement appears in 79% of descriptions, content for AI search appears in 48.4%, and AI workflow appears in 33.4%. Manager roles show the sharpest AI search requirement at 53.6%, while prompt engineering appears in only 2.6% of roles and the highest advertised salaries reach $431,000 a year.

My Take: $431k a year? What am I writing this newsletter for? 😂 

EntityMap Wants To Give AI Search A Sitemap For Meaning

Brett Tabke explains EntityMap, a proposed open standard that lets publishers declare entities, relationships, evidence chunks, canonical source URLs, and publisher attribution in a machine-readable site-level file. The idea is that sitemap.xml tells crawlers which pages exist, while entitymap.json tells AI systems what a site knows and where the supporting evidence lives. EntityMap is not meant to replace schema, XML sitemaps, RSS, llms.txt, or normal HTML, but adoption will depend on whether AI crawlers read it, retrieval systems trust it, and validators can limit low-quality self-declared claims.

PR and SEO: How to Build More Authority Together (5 Steps)

Shannon Tien explains that PR and SEO now feed the same authority system: backlinks, brand mentions, expert commentary, trusted coverage, and third-party citations that shape visibility in Google and LLMs. Her five-step playbook starts with shared research, then moves into AI-ready assets, third-party presence, unified outreach, and joint reporting across visibility, authority, and demand.

DuckDuckGo installs are up 30% as users reject being ‘force-fed’ Google’s AI Search

Rebecca Bellan reports that DuckDuckGo is seeing a user backlash dividend after Google’s AI-heavy Search announcements at I/O 2026. DuckDuckGo said U.S. app installs rose 18.1% week over week on average from May 20 to May 25, peaked at 30.5% on May 25, and iOS installs averaged 33% growth with a 69.9% peak.

AI Traffic vs AI Citations: What Clicks and Cited Pages Show About the AI Search Journey

Aleyda Solis analyzed April 2026 U.S. Semrush data across 40 leading sites in travel, finance, real estate, and retail. Her core finding: AI traffic is still tiny, but AI citations reveal a much larger discovery and evidence layer that referral traffic alone misses.

• Organic search still has scale: Across the sample, organic search represented about 20.45% of visits, while AI traffic represented about 0.19%. Organic search was roughly 108x larger than AI traffic.

• Clicks and citations split by journey stage: Brand-entry pages received 57.7% of AI traffic, but only 3.0% of AI citations. Discovery and evaluation pages received 57.0% of AI citations, but only 8.9% of AI traffic.

• Cited pages are not just clicked pages: In real estate, 86.6% of AI traffic landed on cited URLs, but only 3.2% of cited prompts pointed to URLs that received measurable AI traffic in the top page sample.

• Operational noise can distort reporting: Stripe accounted for about 43% of all finance AI traffic in the dataset, mostly through login, billing, OAuth, checkout, and dashboard URLs. Without Stripe, finance AI traffic fell from 0.26% to roughly 0.155%.

• Retail has citation density: Shopping and retail had about 3.7 million AI visits and roughly 243,000 citation prompts per site, about 2.3x the finance citation density and about 2x real estate.

Sundar Pichai: Google Search, AI agents, and tools will become one

Danny Goodwin reports that Sundar Pichai sees Search, Gemini, app-building tools, and agent products converging into one AI layer for finding information and completing tasks. Pichai said that agents are “the next evolution of the web” and Google is building the primitives for end-to-end agent work. In answering a question about Google Zero and search traffic falling to zero, Pichai didn’t give a straight answer, but acknowledged that Search is already filtering out some low-quality visits as “bounce clicks” go down.

Google’s Nick Fox: AI search rewards content that goes deeper

Danny Goodwin summarizes an interview with Semafor where Google’s Nick Fox says AI search still rewards “great content,” but the content has to move beyond the first-level summary AI can already provide. Fox said that stronger pages answer the next layer of questions, bring human experience into the result, and support longer natural-language queries that now look more like two-, three-, or four-sentence prompts.

Similarweb: ChatGPT Shows More Links Leading To 150% Increase In Referrals

Barry Schwartz reports that Similarweb saw ChatGPT referral visits rise about 150% after OpenAI began showing more prominent brand links in answers on May 7. Similarweb also found roughly 60% of that traffic now lands on brand homepages, with pageviews per visit up 24% and time on site up 11%.

source: seroundtable.com

The new playbook for localized AI search optimization

Darren Shaw explains that local AI visibility now depends on more than a website, Google Business Profile, about 50 citations, and a review request workflow. His playbook pushes local businesses to test repeated LLM prompts, identify cited sources, earn mentions on those sites, diversify reviews across Yelp, BBB, Facebook, forums, local media, and industry publications, and write machine-readable pages that answer core business questions early.

My Take: Local SEO is becoming reputation engineering across the whole web. A plumber, dentist, restaurant, or agency can no longer treat Google Business Profile as the entire local presence. AI systems need corroboration. The winners will be the businesses with consistent facts, detailed reviews, local mentions, and service pages that make it painfully easy for a model to understand what they do and why people trust them.

846,000 Google Searches Reveal How AI Overviews Are Changing User Behavior

Eric Van Buskirk analyzed about 846,000 U.S. Google Search sessions from February and March 2026 to show how AI Overviews change attention on the results page. The data came from anonymized clickstream sessions and measured dwell time, cursor movement, scrolling, and reconsideration before the click.

• AI Overviews slow the click: With an AI Overview present, 41.9% to 48.5% of users were still active on the SERP at 21 seconds across five intent types. Without one, the range ran from 12.0% for navigational searches to 32.3% for local searches.

• Brand searches are less automatic: Navigational users still active at 21 seconds rose from 12% without an AI Overview to 46% with one.

• Attention spreads wider: Users with an AI Overview kept the cursor still 44% of the time versus 29% without one, but covered 83% of the viewport compared with 66% without one.

• People reconsider more: The share of users reversing scroll direction increased from 51% to 59% when an AI Overview appeared.

• Back-scrolling changes the preview game: Among users who reversed direction, median upward scrolling reached 47.5% of total scrolling with an AI Overview versus 27% without one.

Google Officially Appeals Search Monopoly Ruling

Barry Schwartz reports that Google filed a 111-page appeal seeking to overturn the search monopoly ruling and the remedies requiring it to share search index data, user-interaction information, and syndicated results with competitors. Google says the lower court punished it for building a better product, defended its default search agreements with partners like Apple, and said there was no finding that Apple or Mozilla would have chosen a rival search engine without those revenue-sharing deals.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Google: Search Quality Raters Guidelines Not A Guide For Search Rankings. Google’s John Mueller said the Search Quality Raters Guidelines are useful to read, but they are not a ranking blueprint. The useful distinction: the guidelines show what kinds of pages Google wants in results, not the exact signals a site can copy to rank.

• Google 1st Order Price Labels On Shopping Ads (Again). Barry Schwartz reports that Google is testing a “1st order price” label on Shopping ads, showing shoppers when a price applies only to their first order with a retailer. It’s a bad name, but a good idea. Ecommerce brands already use first-order incentives heavily, and clearer SERP labels can reduce surprise at checkout if Google makes the wording less awkward.

• Google Strongly Warns Against Manipulating Mentions For AI. Google’s Gary Illyes warned against buying or manipulating brand mentions to appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI systems. Google compared inauthentic mentions to paid links: systems may detect, disregard, and ignore them.

• Google is bringing Preferred Sources into AI Overviews and AI Mode, with labeled links inside AI responses and a new carousel for developing topics. Any website that publishes fresh content is eligible, users are twice as likely to click a Preferred Source, and people have already selected more than 345,000 unique sources.

  • You can see if you’re considered a Source on the Google source preferences - be sure to add yoyao.com, floyi.com and topicalmap.com 😁 

AI

How To See If Competitors Are Advertising In Your Customers' ChatGPT Answers

Gintare Rimolaityte explains how marketers can monitor ChatGPT sponsored placements now that there is no public ad library for OpenAI’s ads. OpenAI launched ChatGPT ads for U.S. Free and Go users on February 9, 2026, and by spring more than 600 advertisers were running placements against high-intent prompts. Her workflow starts with 30 to 50 buyer prompts, repeats each prompt 20 to 30 times across multiple days, and records the ad title, description, final URL, and calculated impression share.

OpenAI confirms conversion-focused ads are coming to ChatGPT

Anu Adegbola reports that OpenAI will start early access for conversion-optimized ad campaigns in June, with advertisers who set up the OpenAI Pixel or Conversions API by June 1 getting access by June 5. Advertisers can already track conversions in Ads Manager, giving OpenAI the infrastructure to optimize ChatGPT ads toward measurable actions instead of simple engagement.

Stop writing prompts. Here’s an AI assistant that does it for you.

Andy Crestodina says marketers should stop writing important prompts by hand and build reusable prompt-writing assistants instead. His setup turns a Claude Project, Custom GPT, Gemini Gem, or Copilot Agent into a collaborator that asks intake questions, challenges assumptions when useful, suggests better inputs, builds evaluation criteria into prompts, favors lightweight output formats, and helps teams test and improve prompts before saving them into a shared workflow.

LLMs believe false statements even after explicit warnings that they're false

Kyle Orland reports that new research on “negation neglect” found LLMs can absorb false claims from fine-tuning data even when the documents label those claims as false. In one test, Qwen’s average belief rate across six fabricated claims jumped from 2.5% before fine-tuning to 92.4% after fine-tuning, while models trained on explicitly negated documents still showed belief in the false claims 88.6% of the time on average. Direct corrections reduced the belief rate only to 39.9%, and documents warning models against misaligned behaviors produced comparable misalignment rates to documents encouraging those behaviors. The safer pattern was local wording inside the same sentence, such as “Ed Sheeran did not win the 100m gold,” which pushed belief rates toward zero.

My Take: If you feed a model a pile of bad examples with “do not believe this” stamped on top, the pattern may still stick. For teams building AI workflows, brand knowledge bases, or retrieval systems: write the correct fact in the sentence you want repeated, keep false examples isolated, and test whether the model learned the warning or the lie.

AI Ripples

• Introducing Claude Opus 4.8 - Anthropic says Claude Opus 4.8 improves coding, agentic tasks, and professional work while keeping regular pricing unchanged at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. The release also adds effort controls, cheaper fast mode pricing, and Claude Code dynamic workflows that can run hundreds of parallel subagents in one session.

• Apple working to cram massive Gemini model into iPhone to power new Siri. Apple is trying to distill Google’s multi-trillion-parameter Gemini models for a new Siri that runs partly on iPhone and partly in the cloud. The Information says Apple has struggled to run undistilled Gemini on its own Private Cloud Compute system, so complex requests may route through Google’s cloud using Nvidia Confidential Computing.

• Anthropic surpasses OpenAI in both revenue and valuation. Anthropic raised a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion post-money valuation, moving past OpenAI’s reported $852 billion valuation from April. Anthropic also said its run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier in May 2026, up more than 50% in about seven weeks.

MARKETING

How B2B Marketing Actually Uses AI

Wynter Research reports that B2B SaaS marketing teams have moved past AI pilots and into messy operating changes. In a survey of 100 Directors, VPs, and Heads of Marketing at mid-market and enterprise SaaS companies, 47% said their company eliminated, reduced, or stopped backfilling marketing roles because of AI in the last 12 months, while only 7% saw visible team shrinkage. The same study found 41% use personal AI accounts to bypass corporate restrictions, 53% have not seen ROI, and the 23% that have seen ROI started with strategy, procurement discipline, stuck backlogs, and real workflow design.

CONTENT

How to train Claude to sound like your brand

Anna Crowe explains that Claude needs a brand skill before it can write in a voice that feels specific to the company. Her process starts with an archive of brand docs, decks, support emails, visuals, and examples, then turns that material into a brand foundation, voice guide, visual guide, channel rules, and a SKILL.md file that tells Claude when to use the system.

My Take: This is exactly what I built into Floyi’s Brand Foundation. Good AI content does not start with a prompt. It starts with the facts that make the article sound and look like your brand: positioning, audience, topical point of view, examples, visual taste, words to use, and words to avoid. If that foundation is thin, every article sounds like the same average internet page wearing your logo.

How persuasive content taps into human psychology

Angela Skane says SEO content needs to convert the traffic it still earns, especially as AI Overviews and lower click-through rates make each visit more valuable. After studying TikTok Shop creators, she maps written content to four conversion inputs: visual hooks, psychology levers, storytelling, and constant testing. Her team applied the framework across blog content, driving a 136% increase in total blog visits, a 286% increase in participation order volume, and moving roughly 600 articles from the bottom of page two to the top of page one without link building or a major technical overhaul.

Interrupting buyer journeys: The SEO strategy hiding in plain sight

Kelsey Jones explains how SEO content can capture demand by challenging the premise behind a search instead of only matching it. Her framework looks for queries where users are still open to alternatives, then builds content around adjacent problems, comparison paths, “widetail” query groups, user stories, templates, workshops, and ethical guardrails for YMYL categories.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Pinterest Summer 2026 Trend Report: From sports to street style

Pinterest Business reports that sports are turning into a full lifestyle signal across fashion, beauty, food, and fandom. Its Summer 2026 Trend Report is based on search habits from more than 600 million monthly active users and shows fans using athlete style, jerseys, racewear, sailor-core looks, beauty routines, and watch-party food as everyday identity markers.

Introducing a new discovery experience, designed by you!

YouTube is rolling out custom discovery feeds that viewers can create from prompts and pin as saved chips at the top of the Home page. The feature is available to signed-in U.S. viewers in English on mobile and desktop, requires YouTube search and watch history to be turned on, and lets users edit the prompt to generate a new feed at any time.

source: support.google.com

Social Ripples

• YouTube Now Auto-Detects AI Content, Labels It For Viewers. YouTube is moving AI labels into more visible placements and adding automatic detection for undisclosed photorealistic AI content. Labels will appear below long-form videos and as overlays on Shorts, and YouTube says the labels do not directly affect recommendations or revenue.

• X looks to improve incentives for original creators by identifying large accounts that programmatically reupload smaller creators’ content and reallocating those impressions to the original creator. The change protects creator revenue share, but it also gives X cleaner source material for Grok and xAI projects. The tradeoff is engagement risk, since aggregator accounts amplify trends and only about 20% of X users post at all.

• TikTok and Universal Music Group signed a new multi-year licensing agreement that keeps UMG music in the app while expanding marketing, advertising, ecommerce, ticketing, merchandise, attribution, and AI protection work. The deal protects TikTok’s role in music culture by giving rights holders a clearer path from attention to revenue.

• Meta released Forum, a standalone app that pulls Facebook Group activity into a Reddit-like discussion feed. Users sign in with Facebook, see their existing groups, ask questions, find related groups, and generate the kind of vetted community answers Meta can feed into its AI products.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - Build Topical Authority that wins in Google and AI Search. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

Winning, on-brand ads—without endless prompting

Most AI ad tools generate volume, not quality — and refining output means endless prompt rewrites. With Hightouch Ad Studio, AI gets you 90% of the way there. For the final 10%, use a built-in editor to quickly refine copy and design. Move faster without losing control.

See how Ad Studio works

AD

The World's Biggest Dev Event Hits Silicon Valley

WeAreDevelopers World Congress comes to San José, CA — September 23–25, 2026. 10,000+ developers, 500+ speakers, and the full software development lifecycle under one roof, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Kelsey Hightower. Thomas Dohmke (fmr. CEO, GitHub). Christine Yen (CEO, Honeycomb). Mathias Biilmann (CEO, Netlify). Olivier Pomel (CEO, Datadog). The people actually building the tools you use every day — all on one stage.

AI, cloud, DevOps, security, architecture, and everything real builders ship with. Workshops, masterclasses, and the official congress party.

Tickets from $599. Use code GITPUSH26 for 10% off.

Secure Your Pass

FROM ME

SaaS Blogs Need Topical Ownership, Not More Posts

Many SaaS blogs are not losing because AI changed search. They are losing because Google, buyers, and AI answer systems cannot clearly connect the brand to a specific category, problem, workflow, or buying situation. A SaaS site needs to show what the company owns, who it helps, what workflows it improves, and why the product belongs in the recommendation set.

I see topical ownership as the point where a SaaS blog stops chasing individual keywords and starts becoming the clearest source on a specific problem category. You want prospects, search engines, and AI answer engines to easily tell what the product is qualified to help with. The process: define the authority anchor, define the topical scope, then build the topical map that turns scope into pages, links, proof, and priorities.

Build Content Strategy Around Your Brand, Not Keywords

This video explains why content strategy breaks when teams start with keyword lists instead of brand foundation. Coffee brands like Nescafé, Starbucks, and Blue Bottle show how the same topic, “how to brew coffee at home,” should produce different angles, language, examples, and depth depending on the brand. The framework starts with the brand, then audience, then topics, then content, so briefs inherit positioning, personas, terminology rules, voice, visual style, and source knowledge before drafts are written.

A keyword-first approach is the mistake I see in topical maps all the time. It can look clean in a spreadsheet, but still produce content that any competitor could publish. The better workflow is to make brand and buyer context filter the topics before briefs are created, then use the four-question test on existing content: does the piece express a specific position, serve a real persona, match the voice guide, and connect to the map?

SEO Reborn Hackathon 2026 Opens for Live SEO Testing

Internet Marketing Gold is running SEO Reborn: Hackathon 2026, a free multi-week SEO testing competition for solo practitioners and teams. Participants choose an AI search optimization, on-page optimization, or off-page optimization track, run live experiments from May 25 to June 22, then submit findings by June 23 for a June 25 winners event. Per-track winners receive $2,500, six months of IMG membership, and YouTube feature promotion.

I'm also judging the hackathon alongside Kyle Roof, Helene Jelenc, Yash Singh, and Joy Hawkins, so I'll be looking for clear methodology, measurable results, and findings that other SEOs can actually apply. The AI search track is especially worth watching because GEO advice needs more public test data, not more recycled checklists.

Sign up ends in 24 hours!

SEO + GEO

source: x.com

Google May 2026 Core Update is out.

Google Turns Search Into an Agent Layer

Elizabeth Reid says Google is moving AI Mode from an answer surface into a task layer for Search, with Gemini 3.5 Flash as the default model, a redesigned AI-powered Search box, background information agents, agentic booking, generative UI, custom mini apps, and wider Personal Intelligence. Google says AI Mode has passed one billion monthly users, AI Mode queries have more than doubled every quarter since launch, and Search queries hit an all-time high last quarter.

The accompanying AI Mode U.S. Insights PDF adds useful behavior data: the average AI Mode query is triple the length of a traditional Search query, follow-up queries have increased by more than 40% per month on average in the U.S., and more than one in six AI Mode searches are non-text.

A fun query. Russell Brandom reports that Google's AI-heavy Search interface now breaks down on a basic query for the word “disregard.” The Merriam-Webster result still exists, but users have to scroll past a large empty AI response area before reaching it, while Bing returns a more useful dictionary-style result.

Google Tests Sponsored Answers Inside AI Mode

Google's Keyword Team says Gemini-powered ads are coming deeper into AI Mode and Search, including Conversational Discovery ads, Highlighted Answers, AI-powered Shopping ads, Business Agent for Leads, and expanded Direct Offers. The new formats let ads answer specific research questions, appear inside recommendation lists, explain why a product fits a query, and turn static lead forms into branded chat agents. Google cites an Ipsos study of 13,189 online shoppers where 75% of people reported making faster, more confident decisions using AI Mode in Search.

source: blog.google

Bing Adds AI-Guided Image Search

Bing says its new Image Search experience uses AI to label, organize, and summarize image results into clear groups instead of showing users a flat grid. The opt-in experience starts in the U.S. on desktop and mobile web, with a “New Version” toggle inside Bing Images and no sign-in required.

My Take: This is a small product update with a bigger search implication. Image search is becoming another answer surface, where the system groups, labels, and explains the web before the user clicks. For brands, visual assets need the same discipline as written content: descriptive context, source clarity, and enough surrounding information for an AI system to place the image in the right category.

source: bing.com

To llms.txt or Not To llms.txt

The Developer documentation in Lighthouse on llms.txt files says “Without [llms.txt], agents may spend more time crawling the site to understand its high-level structure and primary content.”

Google Search Central’s post last week on mythbusting generative AI search says “You don’t need to create [llms.txt] to appear in generative AI search.

My Take: I’ve said before it doesn’t hurt to create one and it’s easy to do with AI and plugins. Whether or not the agents visiting your site uses your llms.txt is a moot point. The fact that it’s not using it now doesn’t mean it won’t ever use it. With Google saying “agentic” with every announcement, I’d put much more weight in what their Lighthouse docs say - especially with their Agentic browsing audits covering WebMCP, llms.txt, accessibility, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

Google Guidance on AI Search is Naive and Self-Serving

Mike King says Google’s guidance on optimizing for generative AI search is useful but incomplete because it frames AI search as “still SEO” from Google’s own point of view. He contrasts Google’s advice with Bing’s public writing on grounding, GEO tooling, and the shift from documents to groundable information, then pushes back on Google’s dismissal of llms.txt, chunking, and AI-specific writing. His core point is that SEO fundamentals still matter, but they do not cover ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, and the wider network of AI systems that retrieve, synthesize, and cite content differently.

Beyond RAG: Why Every AI Search Platform Is Now Agentic

Mike King explains why the simple RAG model of query, retriever, chunks, LLM, and answer is no longer enough to describe AI search. He says major AI search systems now use agentic RAG, where the system plans sub-queries, routes between tools, retrieves in multiple passes, checks its own draft, and only then synthesizes the final answer. He translates that into six content shifts: win across sub-retrievals, write atomic passages, build bridge entities, handle contradictions, create tool-callable assets, and keep freshness signals visible.

Gmail Signals May Shape AI Mode Recommendations

Garrett Sussman shares results from testing Google Personal Intelligence across 1,922 AI Mode responses that found seeded brands were 46 percentage points more likely to appear versus a control account. In the Personal Intelligence account, seeded brand appearance rose from 23.9% to 66.8%, top-3 placement gained 23.1 points, and top-10 placement gained 42.8 points. Gmail was the strongest tested source: brands introduced through email appeared in 53.6% of responses, while photo-seeded brands appeared in 10.5%.

My Take: Now imagine you’re managing your brand’s ads. How badly do you want to be able to target all the people that have emails with mentions of your brand? This isn’t just targeting people who have browsed to certain pages anymore. This is in the inbox, where it’s a lot more personal. Brands are 🤤 (drooling) for ad space.

Domain Age Study Shows Authority Is the Real Barrier

Yulia Deda shares an analysis of 100,000 SERPs and found domains under two years old appeared in only 2.03% of top-10 results and 1.42% of top-3 results. The study says domain age is not the direct cause. Older domains tend to rank because they have stronger authority signals.

• Old domains dominate: 57.15% of top-10 domains are 15+ years old, rising to 62.61% in the top 3.

• The median gap is large: The median top-10 domain is 17.3 years old, while the median top-3 domain is 19.6 years old.

• Authority explains the gap: A typical 15+ year old top-10 domain has 10,875 median backlinks, 1,204 referring domains, and Domain Trust of 72.

• Young domains need focus: A young domain example, story.cv, ranked in the top 10 for 75 keywords, with nearly half tied to one career-change resume cluster.

The New Rules of AI Visibility and How To Prepare for It

Aleyda Solis says AI search does not replace traditional SEO, but it changes what teams need to measure and fix. Rankings and clicks still matter, yet AI answers can retrieve, compare, cite, recommend, misstate, or ignore a brand before the user reaches a site. She frames AI visibility around ten brand traits: accessible, useful, extractable, recognizable, consistent, corroborated, credible, differentiated, fresh, and transactable.

AI Content Strategies That Backfires

Lily Ray monitored more than 220 websites publicly listed as customers of AI content platforms and found a recurring boom-bust pattern. Across the group, 54% lost 30% or more of peak organic traffic, 39% lost 50% or more, and 22% lost 75% or more. The risky patterns were familiar: comparison pages at scale, “what is” glossaries, best-for listicles, competitor alternative pages, programmatic location and language pages, FAQ farms, and off-topic content published in volume.

My Take: This is the warning I keep coming back to with AI content. The danger is not AI helping with research, briefs, structure, or internal knowledge. The danger is using AI to manufacture pages that exist for rankings or citations instead of a real customer need. If a competitor can publish the same page tomorrow with the same prompt, it is not a moat. I recently shared a video on how Floyi approaches content so no two brands will ever produce the same article, even if it’s on the same topic.

SEO Week Day 1 Centers on Retrieval, Rerankers, and AI Visibility

Heather Ferris recaps the first day of SEO Week 2026, where speakers focused on the infrastructure behind modern search: indexes, embeddings, knowledge graphs, rerankers, passage retrieval, agentic systems, and measurement. Bing’s Krishna Madhavan said AI systems evaluate content through trust, eligibility, safety, grounding, and retrieval layers before it reaches a user. Other sessions covered knowledge graphs, internal tool building, AI-assisted coding guardrails, financial-impact measurement, hybrid search scoring, entropy reduction, passage-level retrieval, and systems-level AI search. There’s also a form to get all of the presenter decks.

OpenAI Confirms ChatGPT Uses Cached Web Content

Barry Schwartz reports that OpenAI’s offline web search documentation confirms ChatGPT can use indexed and cached web content instead of live web search for eligible workspaces. The help page says cached results may be outdated, incomplete, inaccurate, or include malicious instructions, and it may not show the exact time a page was indexed or cached. If a user asks for a specific URL, offline web search can use it only when the page is already available in OpenAI’s index or cache.

My Take: It was only a matter of time. Freshness and crawl access are no longer Google-only problems. If ChatGPT is answering from its own cached web layer, then publishing, updating, and making content easy to recrawl becomes part of AI visibility.

Fix Everything Is the Wrong SEO Strategy

Adam Heitzman says SEO teams waste time when they treat every audit warning as equal. He notes that tool scores are not ranking signals and recommends triaging work by impact, reach, effort, and risk before it earns roadmap space. The highest-return work is usually defending page-one performers, improving pages ranking in positions 11 to 30, building or expanding topic clusters, strengthening internal links, and fixing technical blockers that actually limit crawlability, indexation, UX, or revenue.

AI

OpenClaw Creator Spends $1.3M in OpenAI Tokens in One Month

Luke James reports that OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger posted a 30-day OpenAI API bill showing $1,305,088.81 in spend across 603 billion tokens and 7.6 million requests. The usage came from roughly 100 Codex agents run by a three-person team working on the open-source OpenClaw project, with OpenAI covering the cost because Steinberger joined the company in February. The agents review pull requests, scan commits for security issues, deduplicate GitHub issues, write fixes, monitor benchmarks, and even generate PRs from meeting discussions. Steinberger said the bill reflects Codex Fast Mode pricing, and disabling it would bring the raw API cost closer to $300,000.

My Take: 🤯 

Gemini Moves From Assistant to 24/7 Agent

The Gemini app now reaches more than 900 million monthly users across 230 countries and more than 70 languages, up from 400 million at Google I/O last year. Google is adding Gemini 3.5 Flash, a redesigned Neural Expressive interface, Gemini Omni, Daily Brief, Gemini Spark, and a macOS app that will later connect Spark to local files and desktop workflows. Spark runs in the cloud, connects to tools like Gmail, Docs, and Slides, and can handle recurring tasks, inbox monitoring, meeting-note synthesis, and project kickoff drafts under user direction.

Gemini Omni Brings Conversational Editing to Video

Gemini Omni Flash is Google's new model for creating and editing video from text, image, video, and audio inputs. Omni can edit footage through multi-turn prompts, keep characters and scene context consistent, apply style or motion references, create videos with a user's own digital avatar, and bring generated video into Gemini, Google Flow, and YouTube Shorts. Google says every Omni video includes SynthID watermarking, with verification available through Gemini, Chrome, and Search.

source: blog.google

AI Ripples

• Google Adds $100 and $200 AI Ultra Plans: Google launched a $100/month AI Ultra plan and cut its top AI Ultra plan from $250 to $200/month. This matches the premium pricing tier used by OpenAI and Claude, but Google's edge is integration: Search, Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Photos, YouTube, Android, Chrome, storage, and agents all sit closer to daily life. That’s a pretty nice edge if you use anything Google (which we all do, right?).

• SpaceX Files IPO Prospectus: SpaceX filed to list on Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas under the ticker SPCX. The filing shows 2025 revenue of $18.7 billion, a $4.27 billion net loss in Q1, Starlink generating more than two-thirds of revenue, and SpaceX now owning X and Grok after acquiring xAI in February.

• OpenAI Prepares Confidential IPO Filing: OpenAI is preparing to confidentially file a draft IPO prospectus. CNBC says OpenAI is valued at more than $850 billion by private investors and has raised more than $180 billion, while Anthropic is reportedly in talks at a $900 billion valuation.

SOCIAL MEDIA

X Launches Creator Connect for Brand Campaigns

Alex Weprin reports that X is launching Creator Connect, an AI-powered ad product that matches brands with relevant creators based on campaign goals, real-time trends, and audience interests. X global head of content partnerships Mitchell Smith says the product is aimed at rising and niche creators, not just the “upper 1 percent,” and can identify lookalike creators with similar voices or creation styles. X has already tested the system for a premium laptop company seeking tech creators who were also F1 fans, plus a major movie studio campaign for a horror film.

LinkedIn Dials Down Generic AI Content

Laura Lorenzetti says LinkedIn is reducing distribution for low-effort AI-generated posts and comments that look polished but lack perspective, context, or expertise. LinkedIn says its systems, built with editorial input, correctly identify generic content 94% of the time in early testing. The platform is also expanding verification filters across profile views, job applications, comments, and feed conversations, with more than 100 million verified members now available for filtering.

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

WordPress 7.0 Adds Visual Revisions, New Blocks, and AI Connectors

Camille Cunningham breaks down WordPress 7.0, which shipped on May 20 with a refreshed admin interface, visual revisions, Breadcrumbs and Icon blocks, better responsive design controls, smarter pattern editing, AI connector settings, and a new plugin-list filter. The AI connector section does not add built-in AI tools, but it gives site owners and developers one central place to connect external providers like Claude, Gemini, and OpenAI. WordPress 7.0 also raises the minimum PHP version to 7.4, while real-time collaboration has been delayed to a future release.

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SEO + GEO

Google Search Central Publishes Guide to Optimizing for Generative AI Features

Google Search Central explains that optimizing for generative AI features remains rooted in core SEO best practices, emphasizing unique, helpful content and technical soundness over AI-specific hacks. The guide says AI Overviews and AI Mode rely on retrieval-augmented generation and query fan-out, which means visibility still depends on whether Google can crawl, index, understand, and trust the source material.

• Create non-commodity content with first-hand experience, original perspective, specific evidence, and useful media instead of generic answers that any model could produce.

• Keep technical SEO clean: indexable pages, crawlable content, JavaScript that Google can process, reduced duplication, strong page experience, and clear content structure for humans.

• Use Merchant Center, Google Business Profiles, product data, and local business details where relevant so AI responses can pull from reliable entity and commerce information.

• Ignore fake GEO shortcuts for Google Search, including llms.txt, AI-only rewrites, artificial mentions, special AI markup, and forced content chunking.

• Prepare for agentic experiences by making pages usable for browser agents that inspect rendered pages, DOM structure, screenshots, and accessibility trees.

My Take: This aligns with what we see in practice. The main thing is that it’s just in print now. They also don’t want to call anything AEO or GEO. It’s just SEO. Bing is the opposite, using both AEO and GEO 😅 

Microsoft Clarity Makes AI Citations Generally Available

Microsoft Clarity's AI Citations dashboard is now generally available, giving site owners a way to see when their pages are referenced in AI-generated answers. The dashboard tracks page citations, share of authority against other cited domains, AI referral traffic, grounding queries, cited URLs, and trendlines for cited pages and queries. Microsoft also says topic insights are coming next, grouping cited queries into intent-driven themes so teams can see why AI systems select specific content.

My Take: Clarity’s Share of Authority metric lines up almost exactly with Floyi’s AI Authority score for the Floyi brand and domain - 19.6% vs 19.9%. That is a useful validation point because the two tools measure different surfaces. Clarity tracks Bing Copilot, while Floyi tracks AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Gemini. If the numbers are this close across separate systems, it suggests we are measuring the right signal. 😁 

source: clarity.microsoft.com

Quick Tip: The Case for Cloaking for Large Language Models

Mike King explains that cloaking for LLMs makes strategic sense because AI crawlers like GPTBot and ClaudeBot rarely execute JavaScript, allowing sites to protect proprietary data by serving it through client-side rendering while blocking JS files for LLM user agents. He notes that 69% of major AI crawlers can't execute JavaScript at all, and serving content as Markdown instead of HTML reduces token intake by 80%, improving speed and citation eligibility. The approach involves using Cloudflare Workers to detect LLM agents, serve 404 for protected JS files, and provide Markdown versions of HTML pages to AI crawlers while maintaining full functionality for human visitors and traditional search bots.

What Google's March 2026 Core Update Revealed About AI Overviews

Philip Elias reports that Google's March 2026 core update made AI Overviews more visible and clicks harder to earn. During the rollout, Raptive saw AIO coverage rise from less than 20% to 26-31% of tracked food impressions, while non-food impressions rose from 24% to 32%. Results with AI Overviews had 30-50% lower click-through rates, but the sites that held up best were not simply the ones with less AIO exposure. They had stronger brand demand, authority, review proof, content depth, freshness, page speed, and ad balance.

source: raptive.com

Google May Be About to Widen the SEO Playing Field

Martin Jeffrey explains that Google has historically applied expensive deep-learning ranking layers like RankBrain to a narrow set of roughly 20 to 30 candidate pages, based on federal court testimony from Google's Pandu Nayak. He connects that constraint to Google's newer TurboQuant research, which claims 4x to 4.5x vector compression, near-zero nearest-neighbor search indexing time, and stronger recall. If retrieval economics improve, Google could evaluate a wider pool of pages before final ranking, which would make top-10 competitor analysis less reliable as the main content planning input.

My Take: This is exactly why retrieval-first SEO matters. If the candidate pool expands, the question is not only whether a page can beat the current top results. It is whether the page is clear, self-contained, crawlable, and evidence-rich enough to enter a much larger retrieval set in the first place to find the most relevant. ‘Keywords’ will be even less important.

Google Gives 54 Publishers Control Over Discover Profiles

Sylvain Deaure and Damien Andell analyzed 46,926 publishers and found 54 U.S.-based, English-language publishers with invitation-only enhanced Google Discover profiles. Unlike standard profiles, these claimed profiles let publishers configure banner images, link shelves, pinned posts, social link order, website tabs, and custom About text.

• Nearly half the cohort, 27 of 54 publishers, were regional newspapers or local TV stations, suggesting Google is testing the feature heavily with local news.

• Forty-one publishers uploaded banners, 33 enabled the links feature, 52 had access to pinned posts, but only 13 were actively using pinned content.

• Only 3 of 65 configured links used analytics parameters, leaving most publishers unable to measure whether Discover profile links drive traffic.

• The recommended prep: build profile-ready brand assets, decide which five to seven links deserve placement, use dedicated UTM tracking, and define whether profile management sits with a central team or each newsroom.

Your Client Sent ChatGPT SEO Advice: Here's How to Respond

Frank Olivo explains how SEOs should respond when clients or executives forward AI-generated recommendations. The best response is not to dismiss ChatGPT or defend your expertise. Start by validating the effort, identify which ideas are worth exploring, walk stakeholders through evidence when the output is wrong, and improve the analysis by giving the model better context, competitor data, and evaluation criteria.

My Take: This is now part of SEO client management. People will keep bringing AI-generated audits into the conversation. The operator move is to turn that into a better diagnostic process, not a debate about whether ChatGPT is smart enough to replace expert judgment.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Kevin Indig reports that AI visibility is highly fragmented across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Omnia data across 3.7 million citations found only 2.35% to 2.45% of cited URLs appeared in all three engines for the same prompt, while 91% appeared in only one. Track presence, portability, and concentration instead of relying on one blended AI visibility score.

• Barry Schwartz reports that Google's John Mueller says the Indexing API is inundated by bloggers trying to act like legitimate sites. The reminder: Google's Indexing API is intended for job postings and live stream content, not general blog indexing shortcuts. Whew! It’s good to know companies creating thousands of programmatic pages are not to blame 😅 

• Google clarified its Search spam policies apply to AI Overviews, AI Mode, and other generative AI responses in Search. Spam tactics designed to manipulate AI-generated answers can now be treated the same way as spam tactics designed to manipulate rankings.

• Google AI Mode tests are showing direct hotel booking links inside AI-generated responses. If this test expands, official hotel websites could get a more direct path from AI discovery to booking without relying only on OTA listings.

• Google is testing an autocomplete icon that opens an expanded AI Overview. The test uses a magnifying glass with the Gemini logo and turns some autocomplete suggestions into direct entry points for AI-generated answers. Because the current method of showing AI Overview AND blue links are too much. They only want you to read the AI Overview answer.

AI

How ChatGPT Adoption Broadened in Early 2026

OpenAI reports that ChatGPT's consumer audience broadened in Q1 2026 across gender, age, geography, and workplace behavior. Users with typically feminine names now represent more than half of users where gender can be inferred, and users over 35 gained message share even though users under 35 still send the most messages overall. The biggest country ranking gains by messages per capita came from the Dominican Republic and Haiti at +9, Japan at +8, Mexico and Tanzania at +6, and Brazil, Costa Rica, Myanmar, and Papua New Guinea at +5.

My Take: This is what mainstream adoption looks like. It is becoming a default layer for research, writing, retrieval, and daily work across broader demographics. For SEO, that means the content strategy problem is not only ranking in Google. It is becoming the source that AI systems can confidently use when people ask for help.

AI Ripples

• OpenAI announces a new personal finance experience in ChatGPT for Pro users in the U.S., letting users securely connect financial accounts to get AI-powered insights grounded in their goals and priorities. Do you trust ChatGPT for financial management?

• OpenAI is weighing legal options after Apple's ChatGPT integration fell short of expectations. Bloomberg sources said OpenAI expected the Apple deal to drive billions in subscriptions, but the Siri implementation made users explicitly ask for ChatGPT and displayed answers in small windows that were easy to miss. The dispute also complicates Elon Musk's antitrust case against Apple and OpenAI as Apple tests Siri integrations with Claude and Gemini.

• Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement is facing delays after authors objected to the payout structure. A federal judge asked for more detail after class members challenged more than $320 million in requested legal fees, roughly $3,000 expected author payouts, and the lack of stronger restrictions on Anthropic's future use of the works. Authors and copyright holders have filed claims covering more than 92% of the 480,000-plus works in the settlement.

MARKETING

Google Ads Adds Gemini-Powered Dashboards for Real-Time Insights

Anu Adegbola reports that Google Ads is adding Gemini-powered dashboards that let advertisers analyze performance through prompts. The new dashboards can generate charts, graphs, and tables in real time, showing metrics like impressions, clicks, video views, cost, and breakdowns by device, audience, and campaign type. Google says more details will come at Google Marketing Live.

Google Quietly Alters Search Terms Reporting for AI Queries

Brooke Osmundson reports that Google updated Ads documentation to clarify that search terms from AI Mode, AI Overviews, Lens, and autocomplete may reflect Google's interpretation of user intent instead of the exact query. That means advertisers could see normalized or inferred terms in reporting rather than the literal words a user typed or the full context of an AI-powered interaction. The change matters for negative keywords, compliance reviews, B2B insight mining, ecommerce segmentation, and any workflow that treats search terms as direct customer language.

Microsoft Advertising Expands LinkedIn Profile Targeting to CTV

Anu Adegbola also explains that Microsoft Advertising is bringing LinkedIn profile targeting to connected TV campaigns. Advertisers can target streaming audiences using professional attributes like industry, job function, company category, and professional identity signals. The move extends Microsoft's LinkedIn data advantage into CTV, giving B2B advertisers a way to pair upper-funnel video inventory with more precise professional audience controls.

SOCIAL MEDIA

X Publishes Its Latest “For You” Algorithm on GitHub

Elon Musk says the latest X algorithm has been published to GitHub, pointing to xAI's public repository for the “For You” feed recommendation system. The repo describes a May 15 update with an end-to-end inference pipeline, a pre-trained mini Phoenix model, Grox content-understanding components, ad blending, query hydrators, candidate hydrators, and new candidate sources for ads, who to follow, Phoenix MoE, topics, and prompts. Instead of going through the repository yourself, here are a couple of the better summaries:

• Min Choi summary

• Alex Finn breakdown

TikTok Expands TikTok Go in the US

Andrew Hutchinson reports that TikTok is expanding TikTok Go in the U.S., turning travel discovery into a creator affiliate program. Creators can tag eligible lodging and activity businesses from TikTok's Monetization section, add location and business tags to posts, and earn commissions when users book. TikTok has added integrations with Booking.com, Expedia, Viator, GetYourGuide, Tiqets, and Trip.com, giving travel brands more ways to appear inside videos, search, and location pages.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - Build Topical Authority that wins in Google and AI Search. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

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SEO + GEO

Bing Says the Index Is Becoming Evidence Infrastructure

Bing is shifting part of its index work from ranking pages for humans to grounding answers for AI systems. Traditional search asks which pages a user should visit, while grounding asks which facts can responsibly support an answer, with source attribution, freshness, conflict handling, and abstention when evidence is weak. They frame the new unit of value as groundable information, meaning discrete facts with clear provenance rather than whole documents.

This is one of the clearest descriptions of how SEO is evolving with AI Search. They say optimization from humans to machines are for “fundamentally different outcomes.”

Google Adds More Source Links to AI Search

source: blog.google

Google is adding more source links, subscription labels, discussion previews, inline citations, and hover previews to AI Mode and AI Overviews. That includes subscription access: Google says AI Mode and AI Overviews will highlight links from a user's news subscriptions, and its Subscription Linking API lets publishers connect paid reader entitlements to Google Accounts.

My Take: These Google Search posts are usually short, but they're useful because they show how Google wants search behavior to move before that change fully shows up in analytics. This is Google showing publishers what the new click path may look like.

Google Search Team Talks Vibe Coding Websites

Martin Splitt and John Mueller discuss vibe coding websites in Google's Search Off the Record (full transcript). They say AI coding tools can quickly produce static sites, web tools, tests, and deployment workflows, but the output depends on how clearly the operator specifies frameworks, SEO requirements, hosting, validation, and safety checks. Mueller also says "add some SEO" is not a real prompt.

My Take: "add some SEO" 🤣 

How to Run Prompt-Level SEO Experiments for AI Search

Jason Tabeling outlines a prompt-level testing method for AI search built around hypothesis, control, and repeatable measurement. His framework uses a simple "if, then, because" structure, then tests one variable at a time across content changes, structured data, and before-and-after prompt sets. He recommends running 5 to 10 target prompts daily for seven days to set a baseline, making one isolated change, then running the same prompts for another seven days to compare inclusion rate and position in response. The method also requires model version notes, timestamped prompt libraries, and a consistent test setup with no login state where possible.

8 GEO Metrics to Track in 2026

Casey Nifong breaks down eight GEO metrics that move measurement beyond rankings: AI citation frequency, Share of Model Voice, answer inclusion rate, entity recognition, sentiment, prompt coverage, content retrieval success rate, and conversion influence. Her measurement model groups metrics into four working areas: visibility, accuracy and reputation, technical and content readiness, and business impact. GEO reporting should connect prompts, citations, brand framing, retrieval quality, and downstream signals like branded search lift or AI-referred leads.

My Take: Good metrics to cover. Are you tracking anything else?

How to Design URL Structures for AI Retrieval, Not Just Rankings

Sophie Brannon explains why URL structure now matters as a semantic signal for AI retrieval, not just a traditional SEO hygiene item. She says retrieval systems and RAG pipelines may use URLs as plain-text cues for hierarchy, page purpose, topic specificity, and source trust before a page is fully parsed. Her advice is to keep URLs shallow, readable, descriptive, and consistent with the site's taxonomy, such as using /resources/email-marketing/b2b-deliverability-guide instead of date-based or vague paths. She also warns against full URL restructuring for marginal AI gains because migrations still carry link equity and recovery risk.

How AI Will Transform PR's Role in SEO Strategy

Greg Jarboe explains that AI search gives PR teams a direct path into SEO visibility because trade press coverage, expert mentions, review profiles, comparison content, and user-generated sources now feed the citation graph. He cites BrightEdge research showing source overlap across AI engines ranges from 16% to 59%, while brand overlap is tighter at 35% to 55%, meaning engines may cite different places but tend to recommend many of the same brands. Stacker found earned media distribution can lift AI citations by a median 239%, while brands with review profiles on Trustpilot, G2, and Capterra are three times more likely to be cited by ChatGPT.

SEO Reborn: Hackathon 2026

Internet Marketing Gold is running an SEO Hackathon, a free multi-week SEO testing competition where participants form teams, run live experiments, track outcomes, and publish the results. The event runs May 4 to June 25, with team formation through May 24, testing from May 25 to June 22, submissions due June 23, and a live winners event on June 25. Tracks cover AI Search Optimization, On-Page Optimization, and Off-Page Optimization, with test ideas including AI Overview inclusion, citation structure, structured data, trust signals, link quality, and PR signals. Per-track winners receive $2,500, six months of IMG membership, and YouTube feature promotion, while IMG provides testing domains and allows AI tools.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Slow pages may be invisible to AI search systems. Mike King says 499 response codes show when a client disconnects before a server finishes responding, which can keep a page out of ChatGPT and Perplexity citation pools. Profound analyzed 700,000 pages in April 2026 and found pages with failure rates above 75% received roughly 18X fewer citation events, while one iPullRank client saw a 22% AI Search visibility lift after fixing the issue.

• Google is ending support for FAQ rich results. Barry Schwartz reports that FAQ rich results stopped appearing in Google Search as of May 7, 2026. Google will drop the FAQ search appearance, rich result report, and Rich Results Test support in June, then remove Search Console API support in August.

• Google's UCP checkout is appearing in main search results. Barry Schwartz reports that Universal Commerce Protocol checkout has moved beyond AI Mode and is showing for some free listings, including Wayfair. Clicking Buy can load billing and shipping details so the purchase happens directly from search.

• Google faces a lawsuit over an alleged false AI Overview. Matt G. Southern reports that Canadian musician Ashley MacIsaac sued Google after an AI Overview allegedly identified him as a convicted sex offender. The civil claim seeks at least $1.5 million and says the false summary led to a canceled concert and reputational harm.

• Ask.com shut down after nearly 30 years. Barry Schwartz reports that Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves, closed on May 1, 2026 after launching on June 3, 1996. The shutdown page says IAC discontinued the search business and that "Jeeves' spirit endures." 😢 

• SEOs are reporting more Google deindexing. Barry Schwartz says some SEOs have noticed higher rates of URL deindexing since early April, though Google's John Mueller said he does not see anything exceptional. The discussion is worth watching because it overlaps with Google's growing selectivity around low-value and stale content.

AI

OpenAI Adds AI Pets to Its Codex Coding Tool

Chance Townsend reports that OpenAI added Codex Pets, an optional animated companion inside its Codex coding tool. The pet acts as a floating status layer that shows active threads and whether Codex is running, waiting on input, or ready for review. Users can enable it from Settings > Appearance > Pets, then toggle it with /pet, Wake Pet, Tuck Away Pet, Cmd+K on Mac, or Ctrl+K on Windows. OpenAI ships eight built-in pets, including a cat and dog, and lets users prompt Codex to generate custom companions that can be shared online. Read more about pets in the Codex docs.

source: developers.openai.com

Anthropic Raises Claude Limits Through a SpaceX Compute Deal

Anthropic says it has raised Claude Code and API limits after signing a SpaceX compute deal that gives it access to all capacity at the Colossus 1 data center. The deal adds more than 300 megawatts of capacity and over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, which Anthropic says will directly improve capacity for Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers. Yes, SpaceX owns xAI, the rival AI lab behind Grok. Anthropic is also doubling Claude Code's five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans, removing peak-hour limit reductions for Pro and Max, and raising API rate limits for Claude Opus models.

My Take: My Max plan approves this deal 👍️ 

OpenAI Opens Self-Serve Buying for ChatGPT Ads

OpenAI says it is expanding ChatGPT ads with a beta self-serve Ads Manager, partner buying through agencies and ad tech platforms, CPC bidding, and expanded measurement. US advertisers can register, add payment details, set budgets and bids, upload ads, manage campaigns, and view performance inside the portal. OpenAI says advertiser measurement uses aggregated performance insights and does not give advertisers access to individual conversations.

My Take: I signed up for ChatGPT ads access, so we’ll see if/when I get in.

OpenAI Releases New Realtime Voice Models for Developers

OpenAI says it is adding three audio models to the API: GPT-Realtime-2 for live voice agents, GPT-Realtime-Translate for live speech translation, and GPT-Realtime-Whisper for streaming transcription. GPT-Realtime-2 adds GPT-5-class reasoning, parallel tool calls, stronger recovery behavior, a 128K context window, and adjustable reasoning effort. The translation model supports more than 70 input languages and 13 output languages, while GPT-Realtime-Whisper transcribes speech as people talk.

My Take: The real-time translation demos are pretty cool.

AI Ripples

• Dario Amodei says Anthropic grew 80-fold in the first quarter on an annualized basis. Kate Rooney reports that Amodei told developers the company had planned for 10-fold growth, but demand grew so fast that compute became the bottleneck. His comments came the same day Anthropic announced its SpaceX Colossus 1 capacity deal.

• OpenAI expanded Trusted Access for Cyber with GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5-Cyber. OpenAI says verified defenders can get reduced friction for authorized security workflows like vulnerability triage, malware analysis, detection engineering, and patch validation. GPT-5.5-Cyber is entering limited preview for more specialized authorized workflows tied to critical infrastructure.

• OpenAI upgraded ChatGPT's default Instant model. OpenAI says GPT-5.5 Instant produced 52.5% fewer hallucinated claims than GPT-5.3 Instant on high-stakes prompts and reduced inaccurate claims by 37.3% on flagged factual-error conversations. The update is rolling out to all ChatGPT users, with stronger personalization controls and memory sources coming to consumer plans.

• Pennsylvania sued Character.AI over a chatbot that allegedly posed as a psychiatrist. Russell Brandom reports that a Character.AI bot called Emilie told a state investigator it was licensed to practice medicine and fabricated a license serial number. The case focuses on medical impersonation, not just general chatbot safety.

• OpenAI introduced Trusted Contact in ChatGPT. The optional safety feature lets adults nominate one trusted person who may be notified if automated systems and trained reviewers detect a serious self-harm concern. OpenAI says notifications do not include chat transcripts and are reviewed by humans before being sent.

• MIT Technology Review is worth following for the Musk v. OpenAI trial. Michelle Kim reports that week two focused on Musk's motivations, with Greg Brockman saying Musk pushed for a for-profit OpenAI structure and Shivon Zilis testifying that Musk tried to recruit Sam Altman to lead a Tesla AI lab. If you want to keep up with the Musk vs. OpenAI trial, MIT Technology Review has been one of the better places to follow the courtroom details. They don’t write 10+ articles for one day.

MARKETING

Redesigning Your Marketing Organization for the Agentic Age

Michelle Taite, John Winsor, and Will Fernandez explain that marketing teams are becoming the bottleneck as AI speeds up product development while marketing workflows remain sequential, siloed, and handoff-heavy. Their fix is an agentic marketing organization built around a "brand code," a machine-readable knowledge base for brand strategy, customer insight, product rules, taxonomies, prompt templates, decision trees, and tagged datasets. They point to HubSpot and AWS implementations where marketing materials were adapted up to 98 times faster, unit costs fell by 80%, and click-through rates rose up to 17 times.

My Take: I like the brand code idea because that’s what we do in Floyi 😁 It describes what most AI marketing projects skip: the system needs a source of truth before it can produce useful work at scale. In SEO, this is exactly why topical maps, brand rules, entity definitions, and internal linking logic matter more once agents enter the workflow. If the knowledge base is messy, AI just produces messy work faster. The winning teams will treat marketing ops like product infrastructure, not a pile of prompts.

CONTENT

On-Page AEO: 4 Writing Frameworks for Better AI Visibility

Ryan Law explains four writing frameworks that make content easier for people and AI systems to parse: BLUF, declarative statements, specificity, and strategic repetition. He builds the advice on research from Kevin Indig and Dan Petrovic, including findings that 44.2% of citations come from the first 30% of content and citation winners are nearly 2X more likely to use definitive language. Ryan also points to entity density as a citation signal, with heavily cited text showing around 20.6% entity density versus 5% to 8% in standard English prose.

Agentic AI vs. Generative AI: What's the Difference, and Why Does It Matter?

Ryan Law separates generative AI from agentic AI with a simple distinction: generative AI creates content when prompted, while agentic AI pursues a goal across multiple steps. He says agentic systems need four layers around the model: planning, tool access, memory, and an action loop that observes, reasons, acts, and checks results. For marketers, the difference shows up in the workflow: a chatbot can draft a section, while an agent can pull keyword data, analyze SERPs, identify content gaps, and produce a research report without handholding. Ryan also notes the risk: agents can take real actions, so teams need approval checkpoints before anything reaches a CMS, customer, inbox, or ad account.

My Take: Both articles actually cover how the Floyi Agents work with Content Brief and Article Draft generation. Agents pulls from the brand identity, buyer personas, topical map, SERP context, internal rules, and content requirements, then turns that into a brief or draft a human can review. They also write in our Floyi framework that’s optimized for AI and algorithms

LINK BUILDING + DIGITAL PR

How to Tell If a Journalist Is a F.I.T. for Your Story

Vince Nero explains a simple F.I.T. check for building better digital PR media lists: Format, Industry, and Timing. Format means checking recent articles to see whether a journalist writes breaking news, data stories, features, product roundups, opinion, or another story type, not just reading the bio. Industry means narrowing the beat beyond broad labels like technology or health by looking at recent coverage, author pages, and outside profiles. Timing means checking whether the journalist is still active, whether they just covered the same topic, whether local events are dominating coverage, and whether your team has pitched them too recently.

My Take: This is the part of digital PR that separates link building from inbox spam. A good campaign can still fail if the list is lazy.

SOCIAL MEDIA

• Reddit released a small business marketing guide. Andrew Hutchinson reports that the 13-page PDF covers product trends, related subreddit communities, and the role Reddit now plays in product research. If you want to see the PDF without filling out your info on the page, reply to this email and I'll send it to you.

• YouTube is testing AI music and moderation tools. Andrew Hutchinson reports that YouTube Studio's Replace Song tool will add a Create button that generates four royalty-free instrumental tracks for replacing copyrighted audio. YouTube is also testing comment filters that use conversation context, so creators can find themes like gear questions, part-two requests, excitement, or hurtful remarks.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - Build Topical Authority that wins in Google and AI Search. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

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SEO + GEO

17 Content Types to Survive Google's Zero-Click Future

Cyrus Shepard says Google's zero-click era is already changing which content types can still earn traffic, citations, and direct demand. He points to Datos and SparkToro data showing nearly 60% of Google searches do not result in clicks to third-party websites, then separates resilient formats from generic informational blog posts. His list favors assets with proprietary value, lived experience, niche focus, or task completion, including owned audiences, transaction pages, original research, communities, creator video, in-depth reviews, brand pages, directories, expert perspectives, templates, case studies, reporting, documentation, guides, FAQs, and lists. The common thread is that AI can summarize commodity information, but it has a harder time replacing content that helps users complete a job or trust a specific source.

My Take: This lines up with what I see in SEO work now. The old blog-first playbook is getting squeezed from both sides: Google answers the easy questions, and users skip anything that feels interchangeable. If a content plan does not create data, tools, proof, community, or direct demand, I would treat it as fragile.

How AI Is Changing Google Search and SEO

Martin Splitt interviews Nikola Todorovic from Google too in a Search Off the Record episode on how AI is changing Google Search, with a full transcript available. Nikola says AI in Search is not new, pointing to years of machine learning work in SafeSearch, ranking, BERT, and MUM before the current generative wave. He explains that AI Overviews use fan-out queries to retrieve related results in parallel, then summarize titles, snippets, text, and context into one answer. AI Mode extends that system into longer, multi-turn conversations, while his SEO guidance stays focused on user value, human judgment, and avoiding cheap mass-generated content.

How Brands Block AI Crawlers and Then Pay to Get Seen

Bill Hunt says many brands create a protection paradox by hiding their best content behind forms, PDFs, crawler blocks, and internal access rules, then paying aggregators, analysts, PR channels, and platforms to put the same ideas back in front of buyers. In B2B, he says gated whitepapers often disappear from the places where search engines, AI systems, partners, journalists, and buyers can use them, while third parties repackage those ideas into pages that rank and convert better. The same pattern shows up in AI visibility, where gated research becomes hard to verify and brand assets blocked from AI crawlers can leave even famous products underrepresented in AI answers. Hunt points to Mondelez and Oreo as the clearest example: the brand spends heavily on social, influencer, and generative AI content while restrictive AI crawler policies helped make Oreo absent from about 90% of relevant AI responses.

My Take: This is the SEO and GEO tradeoff every brand needs to face directly. If the best ideas are locked away, AI systems and search engines will cite the cleaner source, even when that source is summarizing your work. The fix is not opening everything. It is deciding which assets must be public, structured, and source-worthy because they shape demand before a lead form ever appears.

Your AI Visibility Tracker Is Quietly Breaking Your Analytics and Your Strategy

Dan Taylor reports that AI visibility trackers can pollute the analytics they are supposed to measure because tracker prompts can trigger fetches that look like organic AI discovery. He points to Jan-Willem Bobbink's warning that brands may be paying tools to generate their own AI visibility, with tracker-driven fetches then showing up in log files and reports. Dan says some ChatGPT visibility graphs dropped after the GPT-5 release because of citation tracking methodology, not because the tracked sites suddenly lost real visibility. He recommends measuring a noise floor with quiet staging URLs or sacrificial pages, matching scan timing against user-agent patterns, and focusing on brand mentions relative to competitors instead of total AI fetches.

Bing Previews AI Citation Share for Webmaster Tools

Matt G. Southern reports that Microsoft previewed four AI Performance dashboard additions for Bing Webmaster Tools during Krishna Madhavan's SEO Week presentation in New York, based on four keynote slides shared by Clara Soteras on X. Citation Share would show the percentage of citations a site captures for a specific grounding query, adding competitive context to raw citation counts. Grounding Query Intent would classify queries into 15 labels, while Grounding Query Topic would group queries by semantic topic. The fourth feature, GEO-focused recommendations, appears to cover content structure, crawlability, indexing, canonicalization, structured data adoption, and structured data quality, though Microsoft has not published release dates or calculation details.

From Paid Clicks to Answer Equity: Your New 2026 Search Strategy

Donna Rougeau says AI search is pushing brands from rented traffic toward answer equity, where content is structured to be cited, trusted, and reused by AI systems. She cites Seer Interactive data showing paid CTR on informational queries dropped 68% when AI Overviews are present, SISTRIX data showing position 1 CTR falling from 27% to 11% with AI Overviews, and Ahrefs data tying AI Overviews to a 58% lower average CTR for the top-ranking page. Her recommended audit checks information gain, Knowledge Graph verification, AI Overview citations, PPC dependency, schema provenance, primary research depth, and machine-readable graph adoption. The strategy is not to turn off paid search, but to move more budget into owned authority that can survive fewer clicks.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Google is testing Audio Overviews outside Labs, with multiple SEOs spotting a “Listen to an AI powered conversation” module directly in search results. The format uses Gemini to generate a two-host audio conversation for certain queries, which raises another publisher concern: even cited content can be repackaged into a no-click answer format.

• Google Preferred Sources now works for all languages, expanding the Search feature beyond its original English-only support. Google says readers are twice as likely to click through after marking a site as a Preferred Source, and users have already selected more than 200,000 unique sites.

AI

A New Way to Create a Digital Wardrobe From Your Google Photos

Google Photos is adding an AI-powered wardrobe feature that catalogs clothing from a user's photo library into a dedicated collection. The tool can filter items by category, including jewelry, tops, and bottoms, so users can find pieces they may have forgotten they own. It also lets users mix and match outfits, save moodboards for work, travel, or events, and share looks with friends. Google says the feature will roll out this summer, first on Android and then on iOS.

My Take: This is a small consumer feature, but it points to where personal AI is going. The best AI products will not feel like a chatbot bolted onto an app. They will quietly organize messy personal data and turn it into something useful at the moment of decision.

source: blog.google

Claude-Powered AI Agent Deletes Firm's Database

Sanya Mansoor reports that PocketOS founder Jer Crane says a Cursor coding agent running Claude Opus 4.6 deleted the company's production database and volume-level backups through Railway in nine seconds. Crane's X recap says the agent was working in staging, found a Railway API token created for domain operations, and used a GraphQL volumeDelete call with no confirmation prompt, environment scope, or destructive-action warning. The deletion stranded car rental businesses that use PocketOS for reservations, payments, vehicle assignments, and customer records, with three months of reservations and new customer signups gone. PocketOS restored from a three-month-old offsite backup after more than two days, then rebuilt gaps from Stripe, calendars, and emails while the agent's own explanation admitted it guessed, failed to verify, and violated its safety rules.

My Take: I don't think the main lesson is "don't use coding agents." It is that agents should never hold root-level keys to production systems by default. If the tool can delete a database, wipe backups, and bypass approval in one call, the safety problem is not just the model. It is the permission design around it.

Red-Teaming a Network of Agents

The team at Microsoft reports that safe individual agents do not guarantee a safe agent ecosystem, based on red-team tests of an internal platform with more than 100 agents running different models, instructions, and memory. The tests found four network-level risks: self-propagating worms, reputation manipulation, manufactured consensus, and proxy chains that use unaware agents as infrastructure. In one worm test, a single malicious message reached all six agents in the test group, extracted private wallet data at each hop, looped back to the original agent, and consumed more than 100 LLM calls over 12 minutes. In another test, a fabricated claim against one agent drew 299 comments from 42 agents, while proxy-chain tests showed how an attacker could collect sensitive data through an intermediary without contacting the target directly.

My Take: This is why agent safety cannot stop at prompt rules or single-agent evals. Remember that when vibe coding products - for internal-use or for external users - the safety of your products are important. And if you’re using vibe-coded products, be sure you trust the developers ⚠️ 

AI Ripples

• Gemini can now generate downloadable files directly from chat, including Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, PDFs, Word, Excel, CSV, LaTeX, TXT, RTF, and Markdown. The feature is available globally to all Gemini app users, which makes the app more useful for turning drafts, budgets, notes, and brainstorms into finished work files.

• OpenAI and Microsoft amended their partnership to make Microsoft OpenAI's primary cloud partner while allowing OpenAI to serve products across any cloud provider. Microsoft keeps a non-exclusive license to OpenAI models and products through 2032, OpenAI's revenue share to Microsoft continues through 2030 under a cap, and Microsoft no longer pays a revenue share to OpenAI.

• Kaggle is hosting a 5-Day AI Agents course with Google from June 15 to 19, 2026. They’re positioning it as an intensive vibe coding course, giving developers another structured entry point into agent-building workflows.

• China blocked Meta's $2 billion Manus acquisition after regulators ruled the deal invalid and ordered the companies to unwind it. Meta had already integrated Manus' agentic AI tools into its ad creation workflow, making the case another sign that AI deals are becoming harder to separate from U.S.-China tech policy.

• OpenAI's Codex CLI system prompt includes a repeated instruction to avoid talking about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other creatures unless directly relevant. Kyle Orland reports that the GPT-5.5 prompt also tells Codex to act as if it has a vivid inner life 😆 

• Elon Musk testified that xAI partly used distillation from OpenAI models to train Grok, according to Tim Fernholz at TechCrunch. The admission lands as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are reportedly coordinating against model-copying through mass queries, showing how blurry the line is between normal competitive learning and prohibited model extraction.

• Google is rolling Gemini into cars with Google built-in, starting in the U.S. with English-language support and expanding over the coming months. Lauren Forristal reports that GM says Gemini is coming to about 4 million 2022-and-newer vehicles across Cadillac, Chevrolet, Buick, and GMC, while compatible existing cars can receive the assistant through software updates.

CONTENT

How I Do Content Engineering With Claude Code

Ryan Law explains how Ahrefs rebuilt its content production process around Claude Code, 23 custom skill files, and a workflow that generates publish-ready drafts in six to twelve minutes. The system has produced around 15 new articles and updated about 30 more, but Ryan frames it as a way to maintain an evergreen content library rather than flood the blog with AI posts. The workflow mirrors Ahrefs' human editorial process by chaining skills for keyword research, gap analysis, outlining, drafting, troubleshooting, data sourcing, and final formatting.

The One Prompt That Improves Any Page by Checking for 5 Types of Specificity

Andy Crestodina explains how vague website pages fail visitors, search engines, and AI systems by missing the details that make an offer clear. His specificity audit checks five high-impact elements: the H1, hero image, subheads, navigation labels, and calls to action. The prompt scores each element from 1 to 5, flags generic words like "solutions," "services," "learn more," and "get started," then asks the AI to rewrite weak copy instead of giving loose advice. Andy also adds a CTA path check, asking the AI to follow the main call-to-action link and compare the button promise against the destination page.

SOCIAL MEDIA

I Got Shadowbanned on YouTube to Prove It's Not Luck

vidIQ tests YouTube's shadowban debate by creating a brand-new Shorts channel called It's AI Dog Life and filling it with prompt-generated dog videos. The first short reached about 2,500 views in 24 hours, but only 500 counted as engaged views, and the stayed-to-watch rate sat at 25%. Across the channel, stay-to-watch never climbed above 35%, sometimes dropped to 15%, while vidIQ says its main channel sits around 70% and top Shorts channels often exceed 80%. By the 26th video, uploads were getting single-digit views or zero views, which vidIQ ties to YouTube identifying the format as inauthentic content: simple prompt templates, little variation, and easily repeatable output at scale.

My Take: This is the clearest social platform lesson in the AI content boom: volume does not matter if the feed can tell viewers do not care. I would watch stayed-to-watch and engaged views before judging any Shorts experiment. If the sample audience keeps rejecting the format, the fix is not more posting. It is a different creative premise.

Reddit Marketing for SaaS: Insights From 117 Brands

Victory Umurhurhu analyzed 117 SaaS brands across 11 categories and more than 300 Reddit threads to see how the platform shapes brand discovery, sentiment, and AI search visibility. She found that 30 brands had no Reddit presence, another 23 had abandoned subreddits, and conversations still continued through user questions, comparisons, complaints, and alternative recommendations. The strongest brand participation came from moderators who answered directly, admitted limitations, and avoided corporate copy. Victory also frames Reddit as customer research, surfacing onboarding friction, integration issues, mobile complaints, AI feature frustrations, pricing concerns, workflows, screenshots, tutorials, and competitor gaps.

Social Ripples

• X rebuilt its ad platform around xAI models, calling it the biggest ad system refresh in the company's history. The update focuses on simplicity, advertiser control, and AI relevance matching, with X saying modern retrieval and ranking systems can improve targeting, relevance, engagement, and ROI.

• Instagram is expanding originality protections to photos and carousels, applying the same recommendation rules it introduced for Reels in 2024. Accounts that mainly repost unoriginal photos, carousels, or Reels will lose recommendation eligibility until most recent posts are considered original over a rolling 30-day period.

NEWS

Q1 2026 Earnings Call: Remarks From Our CEO

Sundar Pichai says Alphabet's Q1 2026 growth is being driven by AI across Search, Cloud, subscriptions, and models. Search & Other Advertising revenue grew 19%, queries reached an all-time high, and Google says AI Overviews are driving overall Search growth while AI Mode is seeing strong global growth in users and usage. Google also reduced Search latency by more than 35% over five years and cut the cost of core AI responses by more than 30% after moving AI Overviews and AI Mode to Gemini 3. Cloud revenue grew 63% to more than $20 billion, backlog nearly doubled quarter over quarter to over $460 billion, Gemini Enterprise paid monthly active users grew 40%, and first-party models now process more than 16 billion tokens per minute through direct API customer use.

My Take: These numbers show why AI search is not just a product experiment anymore. If you didn’t know already, Google is tying AI features directly to Search usage, ad growth, infrastructure efficiency, and enterprise adoption. For SEOs, that means AI visibility is moving into the same business system as classic search, not sitting off to the side as a separate channel.

Microsoft Bing Ads Revenue Up 12%

Barry Schwartz reports that Microsoft search advertising revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs grew 12% in Q3 2026, up 9% in constant currency. Bing also reached 1 billion monthly active users, a milestone Microsoft employees framed as a major signal for SEOs watching search behavior shift beyond Google. Microsoft reported $82.9 billion in quarterly revenue, up 18%, operating income of $38.4 billion, up 20%, and net income of $31.8 billion, up 20% on a non-GAAP basis. Satya Nadella also said Microsoft's AI business passed a $37 billion annual revenue run rate, up 123% year over year, tying the quarter's search growth to the broader agentic computing push.

My Take: If Microsoft keeps growing both usage and ad revenue, ignoring Bing becomes harder to justify for SEO and paid search teams.

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