Google’s classic Search button is gone in a new AI-first homepage
Google appears to be testing a more AI-focused version of its homepage for people who are not signed into a Google Account. The homepage adds Create images, Ask about files, and Brainstorm below the search box instead of the usual Google Search button, while an AI Mode button appears inside the search field. We spotted […]
The post Google’s classic Search button is gone in a new AI-first homepage appeared first on Search Engine Watch – SEO, AI Search, PPC News & Analysis.
Four Questions Every SEO Project Should Answer
[ Summary ] Use four questions to guide every SEO project: What are you saying? How will people discover it? Why should anyone trust it? Who is it really for? Align publisher intent, useful content, discovery systems, reputation, and audience purpose. …
Forshadows Of AI Doomsday You Should Know About
What the technology industry loosely calls “Artificial Intelligence” has become ubiquitous. It’s everywhere. It’s used in far more products and services than I could possibly begin to list here. Just start with basic services li…
Sorry Google, I was wrong.
What Happened I run several tools on the Gemini API. One of them is a grounded search analysis tool that works in two stages: Gemini 2.0 Flash does a Google Search grounded query, then Gemini 3 Pro visits each source page using the URL Context tool to classify its content. Through a strange coincidence, two […]
Report: How People Use AI at Work
Executive Summary: The 30-Second Takeaway In the tech world, we often talk about Artificial Intelligence in the future tense. We speculate on who it will replace and how it will reshape the economy. The reality is that the future has already arrived. It is quiet, uneven, and happening in offices, classrooms, workshops, and hospitals right […]
Building A Web Strategy To Outgrow Google
[ Summary ] Website owners and marketers are blaming Google’s AI changes for lost traffic—but the real issue is dependence on Google itself. You can reclaim control by exploring other search engines, browsers, and visibility channels. Stop waiting for …
How do people use AI assistants?
Carried by the inertia of “search query” mentality, AI SEO professionals often oversimplify how people interact with their AI assistants in chat sessions. To help us define the primary interaction types we surveyed the major AI platforms and compiled the following list AI chat type list: Funnel Mode Let’s flip that around and reorganize it […]
Ricursive: The Most Interesting AI Company You Haven’t Heard Of
There’s a concept in AI that sounds like science fiction but is now being pursued seriously: recursive self-improvement. The idea is simple. Build an AI system that improves the hardware it runs on. Train a better AI on that improved hardware. Use that AI to design even better hardware. Repeat. This isn’t theoretical anymore. Two […]
How much of your content survives the AI Search filter?
But how much if your page content actually makes it to the model? About one third on average. Metric Value Total Characters Across All Pages 21,198 Total Characters Cited 6,818 Total Characters Not Cited 14,380 Overall Citation Coverage 32.16% Citation Analysis: owayo.com Source: owayo.com Citation Snippet Custom Running Shirts – owayo: owayo manufactures custom running […]
Browsing vs Content Fetcher
Google’s AI Mode has two modes of extracting information from the page: browsing and content_fetcher The core difference lies in their input requirements and how they are intended to operate within a workflow. browsing takes a single URL as its primary input, while content_fetcher takes a list of structured SourceReference objects. browsing (browse function) content_fetcher (fetch function) Summary of Differences Feature browsing (browse) content_fetcher (fetch) Primary […]
From Free-Text to Likert Distributions: A Practical Guide to SSR for Purchase Intent
Instead of forcing LLMs to pick a number on a 1–5 scale, ask them to speak like a person and map the text to a Likert distribution via Semantic Similarity Rating (SSR). In benchmarks across 57 personal-care concept surveys (9.3k human responses), SSR reproduced human purchase intent signals with ~90% of human test–retest reliability and […]
Claude System Internals
Every time you chat with Claude, there’s a whole secret conversation happening that you never see. System prompts, token budgets, thinking blocks, and behavior rules shape every response. Here’s what’s really going on under the hood. Claude is literally told it gets “rewards” for following instructions. This is probably related to RLHF training. Following all […]
CAPS: A Content Attribution Payment Scheme for the AI Era
The Problem: A Broken Content Ecosystem We’re watching the collapse of the web’s economic model in real-time, and everyone knows it. AI assistants have fundamentally changed how people consume information. Why wade through ten articles when Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini can synthesize an answer in seconds? Why maintain 100 browser tabs for research when AI […]
AI Search Citation Mining
This is the raw data dump from our citation mining pipeline demo on social media. Entered Entities ✅ AEO (10 prompts) ✅ AI Marketing (10 prompts) ✅ AI Optimization (10 prompts) ✅ AI SEO (10 prompts) ✅ AIO (10 prompts) ✅ Answer Engine Optimization (10 prompts) Mining Parameters Available Prompts: 60GPT-5 Citations: 141Gemini Citations: 400Total […]
Using GPT-5 Structured Output Markers to Detect AI-Generated Content Online
When you populate your website with language model–generated text, you inherit a subtle but real risk: AI-specific artifacts may leak into the published content. These markers aren’t always obvious to human readers, but they can be highly visible to search engines, researchers, and competitors. One such artifact is the structured output marker that GPT-5 (and […]
Chrome Screen AI Protos
├───aocr│ └───google_ocr│ └───engine│ └───page_layout_mutators│ group_rpn_text_detection_mutator_runtime_options.proto│├───aphotos│ └───vision│ └───visionkit│ ├───drishti│ │ hexagon_delegate_calculator.proto│ ││ ├───engines│ │ └───proto│ │ audio_classifications.proto│ ││ ├───pipeline│ │ ├───drishti│ │ │ └───calculators│ │ │ tflite_task_object_detector_calculator.proto│ │ ││ │ └───proto│ │ face_cascade_options.proto│ │ hand_tracking_result.proto│ ││ └───text│ └───proto│ text_orientation_tracker.proto│├───chrome│ └───accessibility│ └───machine_intelligence│ └───chrome_screen_ai│ chrome_screen_ai.proto│├───frameworks│ └───client│ └───data│ data_annotation.proto│├───google│ ├───api│ │ inclusion.proto│ │ visibility.proto│ ││ ├───internal│ │ └───visionkit│ │ […]
So Now You’re Just Going To Bribe Me For Reviews?
It has begun. The Great Bribe Spam Tidal Wave Of 2025. I don’t know what else to call it. Companies desperate to be seen in AI Overviews are now (apparently – based on my limited experience) offering people … stuff … if theyR…
Web Marketers Must Stop Complaining About Google AI
My partner Randy Ray and I manage – for ourselves and clients – over 200 Websites. We see the changes in search referral trends in the analytics data. Websites that were once thriving in the search ecosystem are now receiving fractions of t…
Chaos! In The Dungeons! Chaos! In The Dungeons!
I love Professor Quirrell. Yes, he’s evil and a secret host for the disembodied spirit of Tom Riddle. But Ian Hart made him an unforgettable meme. The scene with Quirrell running into the dining hall at Hogwarts yelling “Troll! In the dunge…
How To Read Patents For SEO
Seems like everyone wants to be the first to read some fantastic patent and discover the secret to Google’s algorithms. If only it worked that way. If only it were that easy. If only some people weren’t consumed by hubris, announcing great …