Webcology

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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...