“We Fake It”: Google’s Illusion of Understanding Content
During the landmark Department of Justice antitrust trial in the fall of 2023 (U.S. v. Google LLC, 1:20-cv-03010-APM), a trove of highly confidential internal presentations was unsealed. These original PDFs – including a mobile ranking newsletter…
Daily Search Forum Recap: April 13, 2026
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
Catching up on the newsletter…
New Study Points to Holes In AI Overviews
The NY Times commissioned a study that says AI Overviews have holes in both grounding and accuracy.
Google AdSense Will Experiment With New Ad Technology Partners
Google announced that on August 20, 2026 it will experiment with an updated set of commonly used ad technology partners. If the experiments go well, Google will switch it “on or after June 5, 2026.”
Google Search Console Testing AI Contribution
It looks like Google is testing a new report within Google Search Console named AI contribution. I have no clue what it looks like but I suspect it is a lot like the Bing Webmaster Tools AI performance reports.
Google Still Processing Status To XML Sitemaps – Nothing To Announce
Google was asked if it is possible to add a new status to the XML sitemap statuses for “still processing.” John Mueller from Google responded on Blueshy saying, “I’ve chatted with the teams involved about this on & off, I’ve seen that it can be annoyi…
Google May Ignore Links From Sites That Spam & Violate Policies
Google’s John Mueller reconfirmed that Google Search may simply ignore outbound links from sites that violate its search spam policies. This is not new, Google has been doing this manually and algorithmically for years now but he reiterated this on Bl…
From Vibe to Viable: The Silver Era of Vibe Coding Has Begun
I just posted: “The Silver Age of Agentic Vibe Coding has begun: the era of scalable, economically viable agentic systems is just opening. If you missed the first sprint, the next one rewards discipline and taste more than raw speed.” (see the tweet) A…
Introducing a new spam policy for “back button hijacking”
Today, we are expanding our spam policies
to address a deceptive practice known as "back button hijacking", which will become an explicit
violation of the "malicious practices"
of spam policies, leading to potent…
Introducing a new spam policy for “back button hijacking”
Today, we are expanding our spam policies
to address a deceptive practice known as "back button hijacking", which will become an explicit
violation of the "malicious practices"
of spam policies, leading to potent…
Introducing a new spam policy for “back button hijacking”
Today, we are expanding our spam policies
to address a deceptive practice known as "back button hijacking", which will become an explicit
violation of the "malicious practices"
of spam policies, leading to potent…
Introducing a new spam policy for “back button hijacking”
Today, we are expanding our spam policies
to address a deceptive practice known as "back button hijacking", which will become an explicit
violation of the "malicious practices"
of spam policies, leading to potent…
Introducing a new spam policy for “back button hijacking”
Today, we are expanding our spam policies
to address a deceptive practice known as "back button hijacking", which will become an explicit
violation of the "malicious practices"
of spam policies, leading to potent…
Introducing a new spam policy for “back button hijacking”
Today, we are expanding our spam policies
to address a deceptive practice known as "back button hijacking", which will become an explicit
violation of the "malicious practices"
of spam policies, leading to potent…
Slightly Autistic
Many years ago one of our community members mentioned they were at an SEO conference where a speaker from Distilled mentioned that SEOmoz had hired them to try to outrank us for seo tools, though they were unable to. At the time I think Moz had around …
Meet Meg: Ethics Manager at Thisisagency.ai
In a fully autonomous, 80-plus-employee AI workforce, velocity is a given. But without governance, velocity becomes a liability. That is where Meg, Agency’s Level-3 AI-powered Ethics Manager, steps in. She is the moral compass of the organisation, des…
Meet Luca: AI Artist & Image Generation Services at Thisisagency.ai
At the intersection of cutting-edge diffusion models and high-level marketing strategy sits Luca, the Agency’s dedicated AI Artist.
Read the full article here Meet Luca: AI Artist & Image Generation Services at Thisisagency.ai © Copyright 2006-202…
Google Discusses Page Weight, Average Mobile Homepage Size, and Googlebot File Limit Sizes
On the latest Search Off The Record Podcast, Martin Split and Gary Illyes discussed the growing page weight issue and how that impacts users and Googlebot crawling. This follows Google updating its documentation to clarify file size limits for Googlebo…
Travel Marketing: How to Compete and Future-Proof in 2026 — Whiteboard Friday
Prepare your travel brand for AI search in 2026. Chloe Osunsami shares how to use digital PR, human-first narratives, and tailored outreach to boost visibility.
Reusable “Skills” Are Coming To Gemini In Chrome
If you’re using Gemini in Chrome (the sidebar you can summon via a button in Chrome), then you might be happy about the latest feature that showed up in Chrome Canary. After running a prompt…