Webcology

There is no sugar coating how brutal the last week has been. ICE agents murdered yet another regular person in the American federal government's relentless and brutal crackdown on Minneapolis Minnesota. This week's extra-judicial killing was broadcast live to the Internet by dozens of bystanders with mobile phones as was the previous one, just a week before. The mental and emotional burden of accepting this outrageous behaviour is the new normal for the American federal government makes it hard to prioritized our work and coverage of tech. It's especially difficult because so many of the companies our work relies on are lending or selling their tools to the now outwardly authoritarian federal government. This week we note how Canadian social media tool Hootsuite is providing social media services to the DHS and the outrage . We also talk about the Electronic Frontier Foundation's efforts to push digital security training to help people protect themselves in the digital space. Amidst the chaos, Google is facing another anti-trust suit, this one filed by Californian consumers citing Google's dominance of the search space. Google is, meanwhile, appealing another anti-trust ruling that forced it to share search data with competitors suggesting the courts neglected to consider several of the issues properly. Every time Google goes to court, secrets spill out in court filings. This time some of those secrets address how Google looks at spam. Google worries that if spammers learn how Google deals with them, result quality will degrade. The documents go on to mention how user-side data is used to build and train GLUE statistical models and RankEmbed models. The UK and France are considering banning young people from using social media due to the harms social media can do to teens. Australia banned users under age 16, forcing the removal of 5million accounts (from a population of 28million). OpenAI is introducing test ads to the lower tiers of ChatGPT in the coming weeks. The Financial Times reports they expect to make somewhere in the "low billions" in ad revenues in 2026. Google is not expected to introduce ads to the Gemini environment in 2026. These ads are going to be impression based rather than pay per click. Organic search is up and, (surprise), clicks are down only slightly at a decrease of 2.5% year over year according to a large scale study using Similarweb data. All this and a lot more in a densely packed episode as our New Roman Times start to change forever. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Elon Musk's AI-Grok continues to churn out non-consensual images of people including sexualized images of children, an issue that continues into this week. Google is integrating core search signals into its AI Experience in AI Mode and AI Overviews. This, along with Personal Intelligence, the ring that binds all your Google apps that's coming to Gemini and AI Mode soon, will work to "significantly mitigate" known limitations of LLMs. Google is also introducing Universal Commerce Protocol, the new open standard for agentic commerce connecting stores and products to AI results sets. Far from hurting SEO, UCP is likely to introduce new venues for SEO services. Meanwhile, Google's Danny Sullivan took aim at the AIO belief you should create content in easily digestible chunks to better feed LLMs. The theory suggests that smaller sentences and broken down concepts will be easier for LLMs to contextualize and regurgitate. In reality, Google would rather content be created to assist, help, or inform page visitors. They especially don't want people to create two versions of content, one for LLMs and one for the web. Apple and Google make it official, Gemini is the white-labeling itself as the thinking bit of Siri and Apple Intelligence. Google has removed some AI health summaries after an investigation by the Guardian newspaper that found false and misleading information that could put people at risk. In other news, news publishers expect to see traffic drop 43% by 2029 according to a Reuters Institute Report. Stick around to see if you can actually find the final story.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It's a new year which, as with all new years, brings a chance for a renewal, a hope of a new beginning, and in this, the beginning of the second quarter of the 21st century, that hope was dashed within 48 hours with the invasion, kidnapping, and regime change in Venezuela and the killing of Renee Good. These events mark a transit point that suggests the American government will continue its journey away from cooperation and trust and move even faster towards coercion and hate. Beyond what any of the events of the last week mean for Americans themselves, all of this creates an increasingly difficult trade environment for everyone, including Americans themselves. Meanwhile... The December 2025 Core Upate ended on December 29. Publishers appear to have taken the hardest hits with large scale declines taking place in all venues such as Discover, News, Top Stories, and organic search. One publisher, Tailwind CSS has let go of 75% of its engineers after seeing a 40% drop in traffic from Google. Microsoft is looking for a senior project manager to combat spam on Bing and Copilot. This is an incredible opportunity for someone able to, a) actually tame web spam at Bing, and b) explain how Bing search works to a wider audience like a certain beloved SEO character from days long past once did. Lightning rarely strikes the same place twice but it is known to strike all the time. Why not in Redmond? Google is also hiring, looking for a AI Answers and Search Quality Engineer. Based out of Cambridge MA, the position sounds decidedly less sexy than then Bing position does but, given it's the Internet, most things sound less sexy than the Bing position does. Google is also hiring a Search Intelligence Chief of Staff. This is absolutely decidedly more sexy than the Bing position. Far less sexy, and almost downright scare, are some of the stuff coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year. We often cover the weirder inventions, this one combining AI with a holographic image under the name, Friend in a Bottle. Far scarier than that is the revelations Elon Musk's AI Grok is being used to create and widely distribute non-consensual nudes based on people's images and what the UK based Internet Watch Foundation is calling, "criminal imagery involving kids". A study by digital marketing agency Eight Oh Two concluded that 37% of consumers are starting their searches with AI rather than Google. Google is personalizing AI Overviews and AI Mode Answers. Google's John Mueller talks about working with Gemini and other LLMs, and a lot more on the Nothing New Year's Back Again Episode of WebcologySupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Five high profile OG Search Engine Optimization experts talk about the year that was and the year that may well be in our annual Year End Revue. Carolyn Shelby - Principle SEO at Yoast, Ryan Jones - Senior Vice President of SEO at Razorfish and the creator of SERPrecon.com, and Topher Kohen - Legendary Large Scale Publisher SEO, formerly of CBSNews and CNN.com, join Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger in an hour long conversation about the state of the industry, AIs effects on SEO and search, SEO education and skills updating, and our ideas about the SEO world moving into 2026. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The December 2025 Core Update continues to roll out, as one does pretty much every year around this time. Some are seeing results early but there hasn't been a major stir or fuss from the SEO community. That might be because it is somewhat harder to judge early outcomes of a core update based on page ranking or page traffic while these metrics are being effected by the transition to generative AI results and search behaviours. At least it's easier to measure now that Google Search Console is reporting fresher results again. Meanwhile, Google is assuring publishers and SEOs that the web is thriving. They are clearly optimizing the look and output of generative AI responses in both AI Overviews and AI Mode to include more links back to content that either informed or is quoted in the generative response. This optimization appears to be leading to better converting clicks, according to both Google and a report from SEMrush. It is also leading to changes in search user behaviours as searchers adapt to generative AI results appearing more regularly. The SEMrush study showed how those AI Overviews first trickled into results, then surged in the summer, before slightly declining to more regular appearances based on search intent in the autumn. Meanwhile, several Google spokespersons spent a lot of energy in the past few weeks assuring web marketers that SEO is the way to optimize for generative results and that AIO, GEO, and other acronyms are just evolutions of age old SEO techniques rather than inventions of new ways of doing. Google is introducing two new AI features, DISCO and CC. DISCO will help users make instant apps based on data found in the open Chrome Tabs they're working in. The other is CC, an AI informed morning scroll that will include personal, business, news, calendar, and other items drawn from the myriad of Google services most people use. Google reaffirms the need to keep meta data solid in both render and response formats because their crawlers can't keep up with so many goshdarn JavaScrips that need unpacking in an AI driven universe to unpack them. We talk about a lot more Googley stuff too but, speaking of packing, Donald Trump's Truth Social is getting involved in a fusion nuclear generation scheme that might literally leave Trump with what amounts to an unlimited source of power. And on that, all of a sudden it's time for a much needed winter's break. We're back sometime before the New Year with the Webcology 2025 WTF Happened Year End Revue - staring a cast of veteran SEOs looking backwards and forwards and whatever's in between. Happy Holidays to everyone out there. Be save, be well, be loved, and rank well.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It's the middle of December and throughout the Web, all the crawlers are stirring and AI Bots getting fed. The products displayed on folk's sites with due care, in hopes that St. Googlishous would bring traffic there. Suddenly somewhere in GA4 there arose such a clatter, I had to get off of my ass to see what was the matter. And then what from Schwartz's deli of news briefs should appear? Notes that another Core Update was already here... Perhaps it's not such a big deal however as Google confirmed it issues core updates more frequently than previously announced. In fact, Google performs several unannounced core updates each year. This isn't really a surprise but then again, neither is a major update in mid-December. Google seems to do it every year. We welcomed legendary SEO Jenny Halasz to the show to talk about her new book, "AI Powered Content Marketing and SEO", co-authored with Catherine Seda and published by Pearson O'Reilly. We also talk about the Yext study that reveals more about how the Local Pack gets formed, the 1-year long deal-cap being imposed on Google, Microsoft's pull back on Copilot due to lack of user interest, Disney's $1Billion deal with OpenAI that will bring AI versions of Mickey and Darth Vader together again, Megadrama in the Metaverse, Operation Bluebird, the OAI-SearchBot Crawler, how Google Shopping crawlers are too fast for your JavaScript, more links in AI Mode, and a lot more stuff you need to know before the web slows down for the early winter break. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It was a long week following a long Thanksgiving weekend that opened on CyberMonday with a login-outage at Spotify. Folks who logged out of their Spotify accounts on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday awoke to a virtual lockout which was finally cleared between 3 and 5pm. Google Search Console reports are lagging a couple days behind. This podcast was recorded on a Thursday and that data hadn't been updated since Monday. The Trump administration will add social media inspections of all new H-1B applicants and their H-4 dependents to the list of student and exchange visitors it already inspects. The order forces all applicants to turn their social media privacy settings to "public" in order to allow for inspections. Google and other competitors, mixed with the realities of not owning a the operating system, are causing massive problems of Sam Altman and OpenAI. OpenAI has declared a Code-Red after the release of Google's Gemini 3. OpenAI's ChatGPT needs to urgently improve the chatbot's personalization, speed, reliability, and ability to understand a wider range of queries. Meta is investing a lot more in the Metaverse moving forward. The popular Messenger app is going to be killed quite quickly adding to the resource base being reallocated to the virtual reality project. For transactional or commercial searches, Google's AI Mode is seen delivering traffic for 69% of queries. Google is investing in a massive Gemini App UX overhaul. Google adds LLMs.txt to Search Dev Portal, and then quickly removes them. LLMs.txt documents are present at developers.chrome.com. Do not set-and-forget AI Max or you might max out your budget awfully quick. All this discussion and a lot of Google tips and comments in a nearly two hour long Cyber-Funday edition of Webcology.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Even Google's Gary Illyes is saying it, "the change is hard to accept" in regards to the evolution of AI in search but that SEM and SEO will coevolve with search, just like it has the past 30 years. That optimism is something to be thankful for, even if AI is likely to mess up thousands if not millions of Thanksgiving dinners as it mashes more than potatoes with pinches of this and that drawn from different similar recipes and mixed together to forge something predictably unpredictable. We also talk about how Google unleashed the awesome powers of NanoBanana Pro on Google search and Ads, a Motoko Hunt article on How AI's Geo-Identification failures are Rewriting International SEO, Google Ads in AI Mode, the continuing Zero-Click realities faced by many publishers, how the multiple client Google MCC profiles kept by agencies are seeing a rise in hijacks, and a whole lot of other Googly goodness in a Thanksgiving Week edition of WebcologySupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Adobe bought SEMrush in a $1.9Billion dollar deal putting SEO back in the middle of the boardroom again. Jim and Kristine discuss the purchase, Adobe's intentions, and the implications of Adobe owning SEMrush, Search Engine Journal, the SMX Conference circuit, and other important assets in the search marketing world. In other breaking SEO related news, someone related to search going by the name Al Seckel, performed reputation management services for Jeffery Epstein according to documents released by the House Oversight Committee. Meta is not a monopoly, according to a federal judge. Google is introducing six options for publishers to control AI crawlers (hint: none of them actually give publishers much control). Tons of Google advice, and much more in an episode that acts like its seen monopolies come and monopolies go. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The relentless shifts towards AI powered everything being everywhere in the digital environment are accelerating and the evolution of digital marketing services is starting to keep pace. Previsible, which recently bought the legendary agency Internet Marketing Ninjas, announced the acquisition of Googlite founded data-driven search agency Improove. Google introduces Opal, an AI tool that it claims can create scalable content and apps for search campaigns as a Google Labs project. This contradicts virtually everything Google's previously said about using AI generated content at scale so it might be Google moving into the search marketing space on purpose or it could be one part of the Googleverse running ahead of another without first making sure their narratives aligned with each other. Meanwhile, we've learned how much it will cost for Gemini to white label itself to Apple's Siri, $1Billion per year. Apple will pay Google a cool $1B to have Gemini act in the background with Siri's familiar tone in the foreground. This while Google is accused in a civil suit of using Gemini to track private communications of users in email, messaging apps and video-conferencing sessions. The case, Thele v. Google LLC, 25-cv-09704, is being heard in a district court in San Jose. Google is also defending its algorithmic actions targeting parasitic SEO programs after the EU announced an investigation into a complaint that Google intentionally demoted several news sites in search results. It may be a case of abuse of a parasitic complaints process. Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta is openly talking about quitting and founding his own startup. LeCun has said he no longer believes in the long term viability of LLMs. Canadian Bitcoin mining giant Bitfarms is winding down its energy on grinding out bitcoins to focusing on becoming an AI data center powerhouse. This, and so much more on a long and sort of flu-ridden episode of Webcology. BTW, PSA --> Sickness sucks. Get your flu shot ASAP.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In a week where Telsa shareholders are likely to award CEO Elon Musk a Trillion dollar pay package, rival technologarch Sam Altman says he'll be ashamed if OpenAI wasn't the first company to be run by an AI CEO. This start a debate between Jim and Kristine in which Jim suggests the C-Level could easily be the right place to replace workers with AI in order to improve corporate bottom lines. Microsoft warns OpenAI APIs are being abused as backdoors for espionage. While they don't elaborate on what kinds of espionage they're warning about, the ability to misuse built in capabilities of the OpenAI Assistants API leaves it ripe for hacking. Google and Bing are now indexing content from Elon Musk's AI written Grokipedia. Google's new agent has been officially named, Google-CWS. If you see this name in your logs, it's a Chrome Web Store fetcher. Meanwhile, Japanese researchers have successfully "mind-captioned" ideas humans are mentally visualizing, Amazon is suing Perplexity after Comet AI agents ignored Amazon's initial cease and desist letter. That C&D was likely as impolitely worded as the C&D the MPA sent to Meta over the use of PG-13 rating designations though it's not like Meta really cares about the niceties of stuff like that... Recent documents reveal Meta knowingly made billions from ads it knew to be fake, deceptive, or outright scams. YouTube has now locked the sidebar on mobile ads, taking away the user's option to close them. Gemini is going to be part of the Google Maps experience helping people better understand places, directions, and that local landmark that sort of looks like Lincoln's hat. Oh... Google's testing a new version of AI Mode in a side-by-side A-B test. Users will be asked which version they prefer based on the tone of the generated response. AI Mode is getting new agentic powers, including the ability to research and book event tickets, beauty shop times, or wellness appointments. Seer Interactive data shows AI Overviews drove a 61% drop in organic CTR and a 68% drop in CTR from paid search. SEO researcher Kevin Indig also noted LLM referral traffic is shrinking. He first reported referral traffic "... grew 65.1% since January," but in a more recent study has noted a drop of 42.6% in LLM referred traffic since July. Google Merchant Center is making it easier to track creative video content with a creative content section. All this and so much more in what was actually a quick edition, made more efficient by our new AI driven CEO.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

OpenAI has launched its new browser Atlas built to compete with Comet, Chrome, Edge, and other Chromium based browsers. As with other AI based browsers, Atlas comes with a slew of amazing self-directing features along with the potential for a long term mess of major security flaws, exploitable bugs, and the threat of malicious prompting. These are the earliest generations of AI based browsers so both problems and rapid improvements are inevitable. While AI is being added to virtually everything, two federal judges warn it should not be used in law noting how judges and clerks using AI in their writing have led to serious errors in US court rulings. Meanwhile Microsoft has added Harvard Health sourcing to Copilot. Reddit is suing Perplexity and SerpAPI over their scraping of Reddit data from Google's search index, which contributed to Google's decision to severely limit the size of results sets available to APIs. We get more information about impression loss at GSC. Google notes that links, technical SEO, and migrations can't fix craptastic quality issues. We're assuming they're talking about content but not being as clear as possible. Research shows LLMs are used for research and information and websites are used for buying as conversions from LLM traffic tends to be lower than those sent by Google search. All this and more on a truly browserific edition of Webcology.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Google is experimenting with several AI additions to several more Google products as it fixes bugs in its organic Google search product. It is getting to feel like SEOs are getting a better handle on how to work with and affect AI generated responses as generative AI reponses find their ways in between a greater number of user experiences. A small survey by Kevin Indig revealed a lot about user behaviors and AI drawing conclusions which included; AI Mode is sticky, clicks from generative AI responses tend to be transactional, and AI Mode matches site type with search intent. Another survey by enterprise platform Yext shows AI responses tend to rely on information from brand controlled sources rather than Reddit or YouTube. SEO researchers have found several ways to manipulate AI models, one of which is to fake publishing dates for better "freshness". Before getting too fresh with AI, one should consider former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's fear that AI models can be hacked and used for nefarious and even dangerous purposes by bad actors. Regardless of Eric's trip, Google's lawyers and lobbiests are working hard to convince the courts to allow Google to add Gemini to virtually everything by not punishing the company further in the ongoing Anti-Trust settlement.Gemini is close to taking control of Chrome Browsers along with Windows and Andriod operating systems while OpenAI is working on transforming into an operating system itself. Google has added NotebookLM to its list of user-triggered crawlers or fetchers. The WordPress legal saga is back on again, Microsoft talks about writing and preparing for AI crawlers, and Google apears to be again expanding the heavy lifing Google Business Profiles is doing with the introduction of GBP Insights. All this and lots lots more...Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Jim frets as his birthday comes up for renewal again next week. Meanwhile, Google's head of search, Elizabeth Reid was featured on an Economic Times podcast last week talking about the future of search, the effects LLMs have had on both search and user behaviors, the expanding roles of Agentic AI, and how important India and its extraordinary wealth of tech talent will be to Google's future. OpenAI announced its new Agentic Commerce Protocol which gives merchants a way to build agentic commerce experiences with ChatGPT users effectively bringing instant checkout to ChatGPT. Bots might be represented as traffic but a TollBit study shows Google sends 831 times the number of actual visitors to webites than AIs do. Video search is high in AI searches with YouTube being, by far, the dominant channel. Perplexity's AI search driven Comet Browser is now free and available to all users. Disney characters are being removed from sometimes sexually charged chatbots just as Tilly Norwood makes an appearance as a AI character created by production studio Particle6. Meta is going to sell targeted ads based on users' AI chats. Google is introducing a Gemini powered Google Home speaker/vocal interface in spring 2026. Google AI mode is getting better at analysing images and has introduced agentic features to US based users. Google Ads Reporting might have been affected by the num=100 change including possible issues with keyword recommendations. All this and far more on a preparty edition of Webcology.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Google's August 2025 Spam Update ended four weeks after it launched in late August. Its impact was fairly significant however tracking it will be complicated by the num100 parameter change on Sept10. The bAD bug that overwhelmed some Google search users with ads has also been fixed. We learned Google is testing an AI search option codenamed Darksteel, which is as cool a name as Google has ever come up with. We figure they got Gemini to name it. Meanwhile the Trump regime has increased the fee for a H-1B visa 10x to $100,000. The move caused near panic in the tech world until the largest employers remembered they could still outsource the work and make it look like it was domestic. While smaller players in the US tech world remain worried, Canadian and European officials were seen whistling, cheering, and clicking their heels discretely. TikTok is about to be moved from Bytedance to Trumpworld as Trump allies Larry Ellison, Marc Andreesen, and Fox News are said to be acquiring what appears to be a US version of the video platform. Google is facing the spectre of another breakup as the DOJ has Google Ad Manager in its sights to settle the second US based anti-trust case. A previous settlement in the first anti-trust case resulted in a next-to-nothing punishment. Microsoft has added Anthropic's Claude AI models to 365 Copilot, a sign of evolution in its relationship with ChatGPT. Google Search Live is now live in the US. This allows a user's voice and camera input in AI Mode. Google is likely introducing an authentication process for SEO tools and crawlers. Google is testing AI generated product summaries in AI Mode product listings. These stories and a lot more...Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

There are very dark days ahead as the Trump administration falls further towards fascism down the authoritarian hole. Between the suspension of late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel and the announcement a non-entity was going to be declared a terrorist organization is an intersection of brutal clampdown on free speech and the freedom to dissent. Meanwhile, Google appears to be testing the end of parameters in search strings in a bid to tame the effect of bots and AI crawlers on its own search systems. This has had the likely unintended consequence of breaking most search rank tracking tools. It has also produced a drop in search impressions of many websites in Search Console as queries that last week produced results (and thus impressions) no longer do, leading many to wonder how much of their traffic was bot traffic and how much was real. OpenAI has admitted that hallucinations aren't simple engineering or training flaws but are mathematically inevitable. Meanwhile OpenAI has improved its search functions with a focus on factuality, shopping, and formatting of results. Bing is adding ads to image search. Alphabet, Google's parent company is now worth a staggering $3 Trillion after a 32% increase in share values since the start of 2025. They might need the extra money as Rolling Stone publisher Penske is suing Google over its content and published material being used in AI Overviews. Bing appears to be investing a lot more energy into local search with a pending revitalization of Bing Places being teased to business owners in a recent Microsoft email. Lastly, Google has not added an AI Overview filter for Search Console as reported by a fake "Platinum Product Expert" in a Google forum. Sadly, Google is going to be as opaque as always around AI Analytics. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

AI Mode has moved beyond basic English and is now available in Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese. AI Mode is also available in autocomplete and is said to soon be the default of search itself. And that's just what Google's got going. Apple is working to introduce a newly improved and vastly smarter version of Siri and an AI powered web search tool in 2026. Alibaba has introduced a translation AI that is vastly smarter with a fraction of the error rate of competitors. Court documents show Google recognizes the open web is in "rapid decline". Amazon is experiencing a significant drop in search visibility according to new data from Audience Key. Reddit launches Pro tools for publishers in Reddit Pro, and, a study shows that while 95% of ChatGPT users visit Google on a regular basis, only 14% of Google users got to ChatGTP. Rumors of search's demise are greatly exaggerated. Google has updated the search quality raters guidelines adding AI Overview examples and YMYL definitions. These are just a few of the dozens of stories we touch on this week in an AI everywhere edition.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

A GoFundMe campaign has been established to help pay Alan Blyweiss' family pay for his end of life arrangements and to helping classroom teachers buy school supplies through the Make a Wish Foundation. The August 2025 Spam Update continues to mulch its way through Google's index with few changes reported thus far. The rollout might take several weeks to complete. Google has updated its policies and guidelines for Google Business Profiles. There's a lot to go over so we're referring listeners to SERoundTable for highlighted details. The penalty for one of the Google Anti-Trust cases has been announced. Speculation had Google losing one or more parts of its business such as the Chrome browser after being declared a monopoly however the judge only ordered Google to share some data with its competitors. Released court records have shown us a bit more about how Google operates, including the FastSearch process of rapidly checking the veracity of AI generative statements. We also learn more about how Google ranks and scores documents in its index. A study shows AI and organic search converting at relatively even rates, WordPress introduces a new AI building tool called Telex, Character AIs (including one with that domain name) might be unsafe for children (duh?), Google fixes its crawl problem, and, Google's crawl budget is generally unrelated to algorithm updates. All this and a lot more ... Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

A wide ranging interview with the founder of AI knowledgebase tool, WAIKAY.IO Dixon has been instrumental in the founding and growth of three major SEO / SEM tools, Majestic Links Tool, Inlinks, and now Waikay. We talk to Dixon about AI, what Waikay means, how it works, and we end up talking about the future of search. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

This was a mostly news episode that ends with an extraordinary interview with Dixon Jones, founder and CEO of AI tool Waikay. We have a long talk with Dixon that lasted about 45 minutes about AI tools, how search has evolved to this point, and thoughts on growth of AI tool sets. We figured we'd stick it on the end of this show and also publish it as a stand alone interview. Before we get to Dixon, it's too early to call it but fears of an AI bubble bubbled to the surface this week on the heels of last week's study showing relatively low ROI for the $40B invested in AI by large corporations. The speculation was spurred on by the always sort of super-squirrely Sam Altman who stands to gain most if other AI contenders fail. Meanwhile, Google announced its Google Trends API was going to remain in alpha release for a little while longer, we learn a bit more about the psychology of working with AIs, xAI's Grok chatbot allowed Google to index more than 300,000 user conversations, Meta's chatbots caught doing all sorts of awfulness, DeepSeek speaks for the CPP, talk about publishers and site traffic patterns, John Mueller reminds folks that hype often precedes scams, and much much more.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy