Webcology

The American federal government is remaking its online presence in Trump's image. Naturally, the product doesn't work as promised and it would have likely been better had they just left whatever was there before. Nevertheless, America-dot-gov was launched earlier this week as an AI powered gateway to federal government information and services. Former Airbnb CEO and now US chief design officer, Joe Gebbia said the portal was powered by Gemini and Grok. In other news: - The FTC is investigating OpenAI and Anthropic following a series of ongoing "rogue AI" attacks. - Chinese hackers are impersonating ex-US officials to gain the trust of AI experts. - Several of OpenAI's Quality Raters were fired for using AI to train OpenAI- Google is appealing the EUs DMA order to share search data with competitors- A judge has dismissed Google anti-trust claims because the plaintiffs didn't prove Google violated anti-trust statutes as written- The Spottification of Literative thought continues with Google's AI Pilot paying some sites under 0.1% of revenues they previously earned through ads- Cloudflare introduces two agentic monetization methods in beta, Monetization Gateway and Pay Per Use- Instragram Reels introduces a handy how-to kit that is required reading for online marketers- Bing imitates Google by testing replacing Copilot with AI Mode in Search- Google won't feel lucky for much longer- Google offers AI monitoring of terms and concepts (think Google Alerts for AI)- SearchEngineLand publishes interesting study of AI citation drivers- Google replacing "Show More" button with a button reading "Loading..." in AI Overviews- When looking for local options, don't look for local options. Declare independents instead.- Google Gemini is adding UTM parameters for actual referral attributions!- You can't torture a LLM but you can belabour a point. An interesting debate is happening in AI circles about an experiment in which AI models are intellectually tortured. Some folks believe the models are actually suffering while others feel they're suffering fools who think machines can have any degree of consciousness. Is it a clash of small minds vs great ideas or a failing of large language models themselves? All this and more on a Webcology that still feels lucky enough to be self-aware of its phenomenal experience.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It's an interestingly Googlishic edition this week with several major announcements and updates. Google's September 2026 Spam Update is underway as of noon on Thursday Sept. 24. Expected to last two weeks, this is one of the longest Spam Updates in recent memory. In other huge news, Google announced a much faster, less resource-heavy way to produce higher-quality query fan-outs. The new framework is called Retrieve-for-Train Diffusion (R4T Diffusion Model). Roger Montti gives it full coverage in his September 24 SEJ article. Other Googley Goodness:- Google is introducing numerous new analytic filters and tools including a multimodal search type filter in GSC and CrUX Ad Metrics - Major publishers see a nearly 40% year over year drop in Google search traffic in Q2-26 over Q2-25 (which itself saw a 21% decline from Q2-24)- Google is launching a scale-model data-centre the size of a small refrigerator into space. Code named Project Suncatcher, the experimental satellite launches on October 1.- Google's Gemini public NotebookLM Pages are being used to spam Google on an epic, albeit temporary scale. - AI Overviews are now appearing in an average of 39% of US desktop searches- AI Overview links were increasingly pushing users to AI Mode and other Google URLs rather than to individual web pages,...- ... until recently when links in AI Overviews to external pages increased by over 25%- Google Merchant Center has auto-enabled native checkout for platforms that support the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). Merchant Center has also updated requirements for Google Store Ratings- Google Business Profiles is giving business-owners four days to reject user edits before those edits might be applied to their local listings. - Google confirms that <hreflang tags> do not need to be written in capital letters. The protocol is case insensitive though writing regional codes in uppercase (en-CA), for example, follows ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 convention. - Google Analytics is adding hostname allowlists to fight spam and better differentiate traffic sourcesOther News- Meta's Muse introduced itself to the world before anyone told the Zucksters their product sounds like a fiber-laxative made from psyllium husks. Designed to be a personal AI agent and soon to be running in wearable devices, Meta's Muse is made to constantly learn from users' online interactions by constantly running in the background. Muse has already partnered with Shoppify to make purchases for users at stores on the Shoppify platform. Amazon has banned Muse from its systems. Embarrassingly, 404Media learned that one of Muse's signature functions, the ability to make phone calls for users, actually uses live-humans in place of AI to make more complicated calls. - Discord is rolling out age-verification for users it suspects are under the age of 18. - LinkedIn is prompting users' colleagues to confirm their work histories and claims in order to weed out people who falsely claim to be employed.- Bing is testing another expandable sitelinks interface- and... An AI relationships chart has been compiled by Chris Green and published in Sept22's Search Engine Journal. It is reminiscent of the seminal Bruce Clay Search Engine Relationships Chart.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Kristine spent much of the week in San Diego at the Brighton SEO (San Diego) Conference. She gives us a from the floor update. The vibe in the tech world this week was, "Reign in it!". The tone came from all fronts starting with the AI technologarchs themselves who are now falling over each other to demand some sort of governmental oversight. At the same time documents from the NYTimes vs LLMs case show the technologarchs knew they were training their models on stolen copyrighted materials with one Microsoft exec calling AI, "the largest theft of labour in history". Those same documents also show the technologarchs understood that LLMs were destroying the web and that generative AI products have created a "doom loop" that is killing the entire web, thus confirming the Dead Web Theory. American and European courts are applying behavioural remedies trying to curb Google's monopolistic behaviours, the former with oversight, the latter with gradually increasingly massive financial fines. Meanwhile:- Data loss at Google in first weeks of September have wide reaching consequences- Google Business Profile API applications are facing much longer delays- Google adds a Search Profile badge which, after a person claims their search profile, allows them to use the badge to attract followers from their websites- Google updates MediaPartners Google Crawler Guidance- Customizable dashboards in Google Analytics- Reddit and Meta Small Business Guides for 2026 holiday advertising have been released. Digital Marketing must reads- Google Search Console Indexing report is missing data from June 2026. It's probably gone. - Musk trying to train Grok on customer data from dead startups- OpenAI in the midst of another mathematically avoidable controversy- OpenAI testing sponsored agents in ChatGPT ads which will soon be run as chatbots- Meta One Business launch preceded Facebook Pages starting to charge for active links in posts- Reddit AI search tends to pick content from already popular comments and comments with high up-votes more frequently than from experientially written content. - A Google Information security engineer has been charged with using inside information to make over a million in revenues from betting on Polymarket- Gemini announces a "CC" AI agent allowing multiple family share data to help agents make better plans or complete tasks- Google may be getting better at blocking scrapers and tracking tools- Cloudflare's Bot Preference Sync rewriting Robots.txt files to account for new crawler policies- Google Local Knowledge Panel used in AI overviews- Text Ad links in Google AI Mode- Ad clutter metrics coming to Chrome- Google UCP blurs lines between search results and site- Google changes relating to EU decisionsAll this and much more on a show that doesn't need to be No1 to know it won't shut down. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Where the last weeks of August are usually mellow, the week after Labor Day is always hyper-intense in the tech world and it was no different this year with one pretty notable exception. In no previous year has the post-summer season opened with statements about the >10% chance the AI technologies we're investing our proverbial farms in will somehow be used to kill us all within a decade. This week we have a larger selection of somewhat scary stories than most weeks. We've learned that Anthropic is building a surveillance database of Americans and non-Americans who oppose AI infrastructure and data-centers. We've also learned that Flock uses data from large scale protests to train law enforcement. We learned the Department of Homeland Security has established a "predictive policing" unit currently deployed to border control stations in Washington State and Texas. On a lighter note, we learned the White House has posted cute but overtly racist video games on its dot-gov website and gotten its wrist slapped by Tetris. The week after Labor Day is always hyper-intense. Acceleration culture for the win eh! Meanwhile:- Google might soon introduce an entirely new way of ranking pages in its index, DeepMind's Autoregressive Ranking system- Matt Mullenweg is out at Automattic, the for-profit arm of WordPress but still the Exec Director of the WordPress project- Anthropic is denying one of its employees, Levent Alpoge, credit for co-completing a proof of the Nevier-Stokes Problem, a Millennial Prize candidate and one of the worlds most challenging problems. Alpoge worked with NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster for years but, since joining Anthropic and using it to help solve the problem (Buckmaster used OpenAI), Anthropic wants sole claim to his part of the solution.- LG TVs might or might not be watching, listening, and reporting back on you. - Meta's Muse, a personal AI, has launched. Meta considers it both an advisor and an agent. - Meta continues to allow graphic sexual abuse of minors in advertising for nudifying AIs. Meta has been aware of this problem for several weeks but the issue persists. - X Money will be the only payout option for US content creators on the X-system as of this week- A judge has ruled that X gets to keep the name Twitter but has lost control of the blue bird logo- Google is displeased with its own results resulting from its compliance with the EUs DMA. Details in the podcast. :)- Google Shopping Ads are having a reverse crocodile effect due to AI overviews. - Google has fixed the Gemini 3.8 citation bug and is again showing source links- Google has been forced to display a warning about predatory pricing with Booking Partner search widgets in the EU- Google has published a document outlining regional differences in search experiences- Sometimes there is no one right answer to an SEO problem - That depends. "There are often several so choose one and make it the right one", says John Mueller- Google can lose faith in sites that don't correct, or forget to correct bad habitsAll this and more in a show that will never lose faith in our humanity, no matter how many bad habits and mistakes get made along the way.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In the spirit of renaming stuff that shouldn't be renamed, Jim has unilaterally renamed GSC, Google Search Cowards. Earlier this week, Google acquiesced to the Trump regime's renaming of Lake Ontario by Executive Order. Apple followed suit a couple days later. Both met waves of derision from both sides of the border but as of recording of the podcast, the change appears permanent for US users. Canadian users with setting set to Canada will see the correct name, Lake Ontario, as will international users with the incorrect stolen name added in brackets below. MapQuest, the original online mapping tool, has publicly refused to change the name, which first appeared on French maps in 1688 and predates European settlement. MapQuest is now the top loaded app at Google Play and the Apple Store, surpassing ChatGPT for the #1 spot.In other news:- Gemini 3.8 Flash is now used for Google's AI Mode,- The world of WordPress is in a code red moment as WordPress announces a proactive security initiative over fears hackers will utilize increasingly powerful AI models to break into WP sites- Google is outlining who can license its search data in Europe- Google's Search Coward tool (GSC) has rolled the AI Performance report and AI control to all GSC profiles around the world- GA data for September 1 is missing. It's not you, it's them. No word on when or even if it will return- The Trump regime is now saying Anthropic has "... done what we asked", and is back on the right side with them- A federal judge has ruled that AI generated CSAM (Child Sexual Adult Material) is protected speech in the United States because a real child was not hurt in the production of it, even though real children were hurt producing the images AI models trained on to create the CSAM in the first place. Perhaps someone wants to check the AI model maker's hard drives, just to see what's there?- The FTC is going after Amazon for an alleged $20billion advertising surcharge scam- Google avoids losing its Ad Exchange in anti-trust settlement- ChatGPT now a "very large online search engine" by EU definition- OpenAI faces more lawsuits in the wake of the shootings in Tumbler Ridge BC- The US government has sided in court with OpenAI as it defends itself against a NYTimes copyright violation suit- Google introduces new AI image and video tools named Pics- Instagram launches a single-video maker called First Draft- Gemini is moving from chatbot to agent, moving from answering questions to doing stuff for users- Google's spam team exists!- Google is expanding AI Overviews area shown for some queries- Rank Math Tool caught opening backdoors for itself- Rank Math Tool suspends feature that gives it admin access to user websites after getting caught opening its own backdoors- Google re-avows the usefulness of the disavow tool- Google recognizes the web is full of turmoil and thus won't penalize for old links that now have lower quality contentAll this and much more on a Webcology that's willing to rename stuff too.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy