Huge news. Google announced new ad formats for AI Mode and next-gen ads for Search. AI Mode formats: *Conversational Discovery ads: With Conversational *Highlighted Answers: When people are researching, they *Now for Search - AI-powered Shopping ads: *Business Agent for Leads

Important note about Google's Universal Cart and its potential impact to coupon sites. If it automatically finds the best deals, price drops, etc., why would anyone need to visit those sites? See screenshot below.

Just thinking out loud here about Information Agents. Would love to hear more from Google: *Will information agents have their own user-agent? Or will it just be Googlebot? If their own, what if they are getting blocked? What happens then? What if Cloudflare starts blocking them by default?

Big news at I/O. Google is rolling out a number of new features and functionality. Google’s new intelligent Search box – its biggest change to the search box in 25 years searchengineland.com/googles-new-... Google Search now powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash searchengineland.com/google-searc...

More about the dangers of trying to game AI Search. Check out this podcast with Lily Ray and Ross Hudgens where they discuss listicle overload (including self-serving listicles), scaling comparison and alternative posts, llm poisoning via AI buttons on websites, and more.

Good podcast from Marie Haynes based on the Google document published on Friday about Gen-AI optimization. She covers a number of important topics. Note, I had YouTube's "Ask" feature build the chapters in case that's helpful for you. :) www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOl5...

Companies buying visibility in content in order to be mentioned in AI should pay particular attention to the bullet in Google's documentation referencing "Seeking inauthentic mentions". We've seen Google already start to address this, but I expect much more (and could include manual actions).

Banned for a year if you submit AI slop -> ArXiv, the repository of preprint academic research, says it will ban authors for a year if their papers have “incontrovertible evidence” of AI-generated work

Oof, 30K+ urls were indexed -> FiveThirtyEight's archived website now redirects readers to ABC News; many thousands of articles dating back to FiveThirtyEight's founding in 2008 have vanished

Looks like I have some great information to add to my post about "What AI search platforms say about the difference between SEO, AEO, etc." :) developers.google.com/search/docs/...

Well, well, well. Look what we have here. I wonder if we will see a new spam policy soon. I hope so, because the gaming of AI search is getting out of control. And this comes on the heels of an amazing post from Lily Ray about companies scaling content like crazy via AI platforms...

It's not often you get to see a Google site migration. Google moved the Nest community to its own support system. How? Every page now uses a meta refresh redirect to the homepage of the new support area. Oof. 313K urls indexed. 🤦‍♂️

I've been thinking about this topic since the news came out that Google *might* adjust its 'Site reputation abuse' spam policy for news publishers in the EU. I can't see Google treating news publishers differently in the EU. But, maybe I was looking at it the wrong way...

But I thought logged-out users were now super-valuable to Reddit? Interesting test from Reddit here. Terrible user experience if you are forced to download the app. See the quote from Reddit below about the test -> Reddit Starts Blocking Mobile Website, Pushing Users to App Instead

From an Anthropic engineer. HTML beats Markdown -> An Anthropic engineer argues HTML is a better output format for AI agents than Markdown, citing information density, ease of sharing, and two-way interaction

Interested in Schema impact on AI citations? Here's the latest study from @ahrefs.bsky.social -> We Tracked 1,885 Pages Adding Schema. AI Citations Barely Moved "We tracked 1,885 web pages that added JSON-LD schema between August 2025 and March 2026, matched them against 4,000 control pages..."

And I can confirm, FAQ snippets are officially gone from the SERPs (for the gov and health sites that still had them). See the CDC example below. The first was captured by Semrush recently, the second is that search today.

Cool SOTR podcast from John Mueller and Martin Splitt about vibe coding and how they used various tools for creating websites. Also, learn how John used a terminal window on a recent flight to make changes to his test website :) -> Vibe Coding - yay or nay? www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPVA...

After cutting down FAQ snippets in 2023 and just showing them for authoritative government and health sites, Google is now nuking them totally. From Google: "As of May 7, 2026, FAQ rich results are no longer appearing in Google Search. We will be dropping the FAQ search appearance, rich result..."

Again, I have a hard time believing that Google will adjust a spam policy for just the EU. That would give news publishers in the EU an unfair advantage. And I highly doubt Google will get rid of the spam policy overall. That doesn't make sense. So, it will be interesting to follow.

Re: 'Back button hijacking'. Someone pinged me that TikTok could be impacted by the new spam policy. It's an interesting example, since you are taken into the app when on mobile (for those that have the app installed). And if you try to return to the search results, you are taken on a journey...

An update on back button hijacking. Tthere you go! I knew Google would just remove the back button trigger for vignette ads. Great move by Google. A win for all users. :) "Google explained that the back button trigger will no longer work after June 15th. The “change will apply automatically..."

Wait, what? Google might change its 'Site reputation abuse' spam policy for this? -> Google offers changes to spam policy to avert EU antitrust fine "Google has proposed changes to comply with the DMA, ​the document said, giving interested parties until next week to offer feedback."

New post from Bing's Krishna Madhavan on the differences between search indexing & grounding indexing. "Search optimizes for likelihood of relevance. Grounding must measure strength of evidence." -> Evolving role of the index: From ranking pages to supporting answers blogs.bing.com/search/May-2...

Heads-up, Google just announced updates to links and link treatment in AI Overviews and AI Mode -> Google updates links within AI Overviews & AI Mode

Huge heads-up. OpenAI has now launched a new landing page for ads ads.openai.com which includes a way to sign up, ads documentation, and a video guide I just signed up and OpenAI needs to verify each advertiser (which can take some time they say). Go sign up now. :) ads.openai.com

Here is trending for Reddit citations in ChatGPT. I pinged ahrefs about this since it looked off to me... They said it's accurate based on looking into the data. Not sure, but worth noting based on what @lilyray.nyc shared below for YouTube. First is Reddit, then Reddit & YT, then just YT.

Interesting, based on the top 1000 sites being tracked by Originality.ai, there was a spike in sites blocking Semrushbot right when the Adobe acquisition was announced. So if that's right, the Adobe acquisition freaked some people out. :) See the spike on 11/20/26-ish... originality.ai/seo-bot

For some sites impacted heavily by the Jan 2026 unconfirmed update, some got hit even harder when the March spam update and core update rolled out. Like this one. Oof.

How quickly can Google generate Audio Overviews for a topic? I just published my latest post this morning. The Audio Overview covers that information already. Pressed play and it immediately started covering the details from my post. No delay at all.

Let's start this week off with a boom. :) I wrote a 2-part series last year about Reddit's AI translations and how they were booming. Well, I revisited their AI translation project. Yep, it's pumping on all cylinders... -> Global Growth Gone Wild: Reddit’s AI Translations Continue To Expand And Boom

Focus on ecomm? Google recently announced AI Max for Shopping. Jyll breaks this down for ecommerce retailers. And sounds like some BIG changes: 1. Text Asset Customization: Beyond the Title 2. Final URL Expansion: (AI) Finding the Best Page 3. Optimal Format Selection learn.jyll.ca/blog/ai-max-...

Heads-up, Google updated the 'Data Anomalies in Search Console' report and said the impressions bug has been resolved. But, when I'm checking impressions across accounts, I'm not seeing any changes. Interesting. 🤔

Some interesting nuggets from the latest Search Off The Record Podcast: Here is Google's Nikola Todorovic, Director of Software Engineering at Google Search, about how AI is used to impact rankings and why simpler linear systems are sometimes easier to debug than more complex AI systems:

Is Cosmo the next step towards Jarvis? -> Google just dropped a new 'experimental AI assistant' app exclusively for Android named COSMO "COSMO is an experimental AI assistant application for Android devices. From organizing your day to answering complex questions, COSMO works behind the scenes..."

Common Crawl comes under attack -> The News/Media Alliance urges web repository Common Crawl to stop unauthorized scraping and prevent AI companies from using publisher content in its database "By scraping and sharing news content, Common Crawl is fueling widespread copyright infringement..."

And you better believe Google is paying attention. But for Reddit, one turn of the Google dial and traffic could come crashing down -> People are finally using Reddit Answers "The company has seen a 30% YOY jump in the number of people using search every week, CEO Steve Huffman said on Thursday."

Reddit Q1 earnings. Shocking ;) -> Reddit reports Q1 revenue up 69% YoY to $663M vs. $611M est., DAUq up 17% to 126.8M, above est., Net income soared to $204 million, forecasts Q2 revenue above est.; RDDT jumps 13%+ after hours

What could go wrong? :) -> Cloudflare says AI agents can now create Cloudflare accounts, start paid subscriptions, register domains, and deploy apps on behalf of users

Focus on news? It's now global -> Preferred Sources is now available globally in all languages "This feature gives you more control over the news you see on Search by letting you choose the outlets and sites you want to appear more often in Top Stories."

From the Google Q1 earnings call about potentially running ads in Gemini. Philip Schindler explained their focus monetization-wise is on AI Mode now but a format that works well in AI Mode could work well in the Gemini app (eventually). He was clear they are not rushing ads into Gemini, but... :)

Here we go -> Alphabet reports Q1 revenue up 22% YoY to $109.9B, vs. $107.2B est., Google advertising revenue of $77.2B, Google Cloud revenue up 63% to $20B, vs. $18.05B est., YouTube ads at $9.8B, net income up 81% to $62.58B

Interested in ChatGPT Ads and what Gen-Z thinks of them? Check out this post from a college student at Penn State University explaining what he thinks of ChatGPT ads (based on seeing many in his chats). He also polled his friends with questions. Oh, and this post is from another Gabe, my son. :)

More about vignette ads & 'back button hijacking'. If you look at the history of 'additional triggers' for vignette ads, Google announced the back button trigger on 2/9. They also opted everyone in to the 'additional settings' on 3/9. Then Google's search team announced the new spam policy on 4/13.

Funny that Snap beat OpenAI and Google here. I expect this type of ad format to show up in Google's AI experiences and in ChatGPT -> Snap launches AI Sponsored Snaps, a conversational ad format in Snapchat's Chat tab that lets users talk to brand-specific AI agents for product recommendations

Yep, the teams are separate, so you could get a manual action from your AdSense ads for this -> Google: "Our back button hijacking policy applies to all publishers who interfere with a user's ability to navigate their browser history. The Search Spam team operates independently of the Ads team."

"Join the chat" -> Amazon launches an AI-powered audio Q&A experience on product pages (similar to speaking to an employee at a store) "Rather than giving generic answers, the AI builds on previous responses to provide more relevant & helpful info, while also making sure not to repeat anything.

Look familiar? It's like AI Mode in YouTube. This is big news. I've been testing it -> Google launches Ask YouTube, a conversational AI search “experiment” that generates pages with videos and text summaries, for Premium users in the US aged 18+ www.engadget.com/apps/youtube...

Google just published a study about indirect prompt injection. Important for SEOs & site owners to understand -> Google Says Prompt Injection Moving From Theory Into Real Abuse From Brett: "This is the AI-era cousin of hidden text, doorway tactics, comment spam, parasite content, and schema abuse."

Here we go. Google has started sending out emails to sites that are hijacking the back button. It's a warning with sample urls, links to the blog post about the new spam policy, etc. Google explains it will recheck the site before the 6/15 deadline to see if the site has addressed the situation.