Big news. Here come the affiliate dollars -> OpenAI rolls out Instant Checkout to let users make single-item purchases directly in ChatGPT, starting with US Etsy sellers, and plans to add Shopify merchants

I've covered this a # of times over the years. Be VERY careful if you are using a domain that's been used before. I've seen some terrible things happen based on domains with sketchy pasts. Make sure you heavily research the domain BEFORE using it (especially if you are going to change domain names)

Yep, like I've said 1,000 times over the past year, DO NOT ignore Google. AI Search is growing, but still very small compared to Google -> Google is still 210x bigger than ChatGPT in search searchengineland.com/google-210x-...

"With an index covering hundreds of billions of webpages". Well, now we know the size of their search index -> Introducing the Perplexity Search API "Each second, our systems process tens of thousands of index update requests, ensuring that our index provides the freshest results available..."

Focus on finance? I started seeing the new Google Finance beta show up for me this week. Includes AIO-like functionality and the ability to ask open-ended questions that return AIO-like answers (in the Research section).

Here come the ads -> Sources: OpenAI is looking for an ads chief OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo has been meeting with potential candidates (including former Facebook colleagues) for a role overseeing monetization efforts, including ads in ChatGPT

Big news, but sounds pretty rough right now (and Google hasn't said they would follow the instructions). Be careful -> Cloudflare Sets Up a Fight Over Google’s AI Overviews Access (via its new Content Signals Policy)

You can say that again. :) "The scraping 'field' is “moving really quickly” -> Robots management needs to be 24/7 effort for publishers “The robots management is not like once a month or once a quarter thing. It’s a 24/7 effort now."

Big news -> Microsoft is in talks with US publishers about launching a two-sided marketplace that would compensate publishers for their content used by AI products "Microsoft would become the first major tech company to build an AI marketplace for publishers..."

OK, just received access to agentic capabilities in AI Mode. It can research restaurants for you and provide time slots for reservations. It definitely took a few minutes to research the top restaurants, but did return the best in the area, along with links to book a reservation. Pretty cool.

Focus on gaming tips, walk-throughs, cheats, etc.? A big heads-up -> Google Courts Gamers With Mobile AI Gaming Agent, Leagues * The AI feature will be available in select games in the coming months and can interpret what's happening on-screen, offering conversational suggestions to users.

If Majestic could help me find this link network in 5 minutes, how quickly do you think Google could find it and devalue all links there? All of those unnatural links per page are in a div set to display:none. There are hundreds of those links per page within the network.

Regarding the August spam update, yes, sites can recover from spam updates. Here's an example of a site that dropped heavily with the December 2024 spam update that recovered in February 2025. If you address the spam and Google sees the changes over months, you can recover.

If you're a news or media publisher and interested in my post about syndicated content and its impact on AI Search, then you should check out my latest video. I cover my post and walk through the various cases, including the unicorn I mentioned in my post. I end with recommendations for site owners.

Like John explained yesterday would happen, the Aug spam update has completed. It took ~27 days to rollout, a long spam update. If you've been impacted, time to determine which spam policies you violated and take action. You can can recover from a spam update but it can take months after fixing...

Quick note about the August spam update. Sounds like it's pretty much done. John commented on my LinkedIn post below. that they will probably mark it as complete tomorrow (link below). Good to know for any site owner that's been impacted. lnkd.in/p/eSsj9-z7

More about Chrome's 'contextual suggestions'. When you click back into the omnibox, the suggestions show up. You can ask an open-ended question about the page or select options that Google provides. The AIO-like answer shows up in the right sidebar w/the ability to dig deeper in AI Mode if you want.

Activated AI Mode in the Chrome omnibox just to see how well it works. This will be rolling out soon as announced by Google. I also see 'Contextual suggestions' that trigger AI Overviews in the right sidebar. That's available in the U.S. in English (i.e. that's already live now).

The SEO community waiting for the latest spam update to complete. I mean, 3.5 weeks and counting? Come on... :)

OK SEO community, have fun with this one. The irony... :) OpenAI is looking to hire a serious SEO person. Oh, and sounds like they will be migrating openai.com to chatgpt.com -> "We are seeking a full-funnel ‘growth athlete’ with deep expertise in SEO, web strategy, & CRO to help scale ChatGPT..."

GSC contained so many BS impressions and now site owners are seeing the actual impressions they are receiving... from humans and not scrapers, tools, AI tools, etc. Note, scrapers and tools are still seeing up to page 2 of results, so there could be BS impressions still in the mix (just reduced).

Deepen? Oh boy... -> Reddit is in early talks with Google to deepen the integration of its content into Google's AI products; they signed a $60M data-sharing deal in 2024 "Reddit wants more users and more money from Google in exchange for an even bigger mountain of data feeding its AI machine."

FYI, crawling seems to be surging back for some sites that saw a drop around 8/22. Google fixed a problem for sites that saw a big drop around 8/8, but then more dropped on 8/22. Just a heads-up for anyone that saw crawling drop off a cliff around then. See screenshot below.

If you're a media or news publisher, a big heads-up. We've seen this being tested. Now confirmed -> Google Discover adds follow feature and more social posts from creators and publishers searchengineland.com/google-disco... via @rustybrick.com

Oh boy, this is not good for third-party tools or AI search tools scraping Google -> Google Is Hiring An Anti-Scraping Engineering Analyst Damn, check out the job title: "Anti-scraper" 👀 www.searchenginejournal.com/google-is-hi...

ChatGPT Search Update -> Improvements to search in ChatGPT * Factuality: Fewer hallucinations, improving answer quality * Shopping: Search is better at detecting shopping intent. * Formatting: Answers are better formatted for quick understanding without losing detail or quality.

Quote from yesterday -> When asked about the Penske lawsuit over AI Overviews today, Google's VP of Government Affairs and Public Policy said users increasingly want the AI summaries (but links to publishers is still an important part of the ecosystem)

My latest -> AI Search & Syndicated Content: How syndicating content can impact visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, & Gemini Are you a publisher syndicating content now or thinking about it? I ran a study analyzing the impact to visibility across AI Search tools. Super interesting...

Some sites are seeing a big drop in impressions but no impact to clicks. BUT, there are sites seeing a big drop in clicks when Google implemented the num=100 change. If that's the case, then it looks like BS traffic was coming through Google (prob. via AI tools). That's a drop of 100K clicks per day

Quick update on the num=100 situation. The various search visibility tools are starting to publish information with their response to the num=100 change. And it's not pretty. Both Semrush and Accuranker posted earlier. See screenshots below. www.seroundtable.com/google-searc...

Interesting study given what's being reported today with AI scraping & trackers -> AI bots appear to be replacing human traffic on publisher websites "Further evidence for what many digital content businesses will already suspect: that AI substitution is taking place, and causing economic harm..."

I have some clients that have been unaffected by the great decoupling since AIOs don't trigger for their core queries. I need to dig in to see how this change is impacting them. That could help determine if the great decoupling was more about scraping & tracking versus AIOs causing the separation.

AIO Lawsuit from a big publisher -> Penske Media sues Google, says ~20% of Google search results linking to its sites now include AI Overviews, and affiliate link revenue fell 33%+ since late 2024

Another study showing what I shared a few months ago. AI search is a small % of traffic. Growing, but still small :) -> While AI search is growing fast, it accounts for less than 1% of referral traffic while organic search remains the primary driver and delivers the majority of conversions

Definitely seeing more AIOs tested in People Also Ask. Saw every PAA yield AIOs a few days ago for a query & seeing a number for the query below. That can clearly impact downstream traffic for those sites that ranked well in PAAs. Could also be why the tools are showing weird drops or surges for PAA

Heads-up! QRG was just updated -> Google updates search quality raters guidelines adding AI Overview examples & YMYL definitions Google posted the following details in its change log in the document: * Updated YMYL definitions * Added additional examples for clarity * Minor changes throughout

Ah, the disavow tool. Another example of why it just needs to go away. The site owner was luckily able to delete the file quickly. And @johnmu.com's reply was great -> SEO 'Expert' just uploaded Google disavow file with all our good links www.reddit.com/r/SEO/commen...

Element: <payment> -> Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, Quora, People, O'Reilly, wikiHow, Ziff Davis, and others adopt the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard that sets terms for AI scraping "The RSL Standard builds upon the robots.txt protocol and websites can now add licensing and royalty terms."

Re: the August spam update, this has been an interesting one to analyze so far. We are now over 2 weeks into the rollout. The update landed quickly & there were some huge drops. But... then some sites started reversing course after dropping heavily. And some sites came back beyond where they were.

Reddit Search Console :) Smart move by Reddit to launch Pro Tools for Publishers -> Bringing News and Conversations Together with Reddit Pro Tools for Publishers *Get article insights *Auto import articles *Receive community recommendations

'The docs, they are a chang'in' 🎵 🎶 :) Google's lawyers are now updating the documents to "open web display advertising" from just "open web": www.seroundtable.com/google-open-...

Yep -> "This shows that Google, for now, is still super dominant, despite ChatGPT's growth." -> Almost all ChatGPT users also use Google, but only 15% of Google users use ChatGPT www.seroundtable.com/all-chatgpt-...

AI mode keeps expanding (and now beyond just English) -> AI Mode is now available in five new languages around the world Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese blog.google/products/sea...

I don't envy anyone working on large-scale url migrations, redesigns, or domain name changes. Here is one that started on 9/1. Google is not digging the transition (yet). It's starting to come back but that was a big initial drop. Quickly digging in reveals redirect issues, canonical problems, etc.

More from the doc: "Harms to the open web: Plaintiffs fail to acknowledge the reality that the world has moved significantly away from open-web display. In Jan 2025, only 11% of display advertising impressions purchased by AdWords advertisers were for open-web display (versus 40% in January 2019)."

If you haven't read it yet, @mariehaynes.bsky.social w/a great rundown of what we learned from the latest trial doc: "RankEmbed BERT is a ranking model that uses 70 days of search logs & the scores of quality raters who follow a detailed set of guidelines to assess a page's expertise, authority..."

Looks like that Wirecutter robots.txt change for thewirecutter.com isn't helping. They are still dropping. Here's my post about their two big drops over the past several months in case you aren't familiar with what's going on. www.gsqi.com/marketing-bl...

“This is massive. This will cause generative A.I. companies to sit up and take notice” -> Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5B plus interest to resolve an authors' copyright lawsuit over the company's downloading of millions of pirated books "Anthropic will pay $3K per work to 500K authors."

100%. I've received overage notices over the past few months based on 'automated services' hitting my site. The article explains how the Trusted Reviews site was taken down multiple times on 8/16 when it was scraped 1.6M times -> AI bots bombard publisher websites with ‘no meaningful value exchange’

Heads-up: Google is not done with the Spam update yet. I'm seeing some sites reversing course that were negatively impacted. See some screenshots below. Stay tuned.