Live AI search news feed

Google documentation updates today:

• New documentation for Google Search's guidance on using 3rd-party SEO tools, services & advice
• Additional guidance to the existing documentation 'Do you need an SEO?' suggesting how to evaluate recommendations you get from an SEO pro (second half, after the red warning box)

Schema.org has a new usage statistics dataset in collaboration with Google:

> This initiative, a collaboration between Google and the Schema.org community, aims to provide greater transparency into how different Types and Properties are being utilized by developers and publishers globally.

>

> The dataset, updated monthly, offers a high-level view of term usage across millions of domains. To maintain stability and respect privacy, counts are aggregated at the domain level and presented in popularity range buckets.

Here's the announcement with more context, and here's the documentation with more practical details.

Google Pay & Wallet are expanding:

• *Digital IDs in Google Wallet* expanding to more countries & with 'trusted private issuers' starting with Sparkasse Bank in Europe
• *Google Pay direct checkout* - available now for 'select merchants that use Airwallex' and soon those that use Adyen, with plans to scale with partners worldwide
• *Secure Payment Authentication feature updated* so merchants can meet regulatory requirements without adding friction to checkout

Good reminder to adhere to Google's guidelines for merchant reviews - Google asks reviewers if the business offers rewards in exchange for reviews.

OpenAI introduced a dreamy memory update for ChatGPT: "a significantly more capable and compute-efficient memory architecture built on top of dreaming"

"In contrast to saved memories, dreaming leverages a background process that allows ChatGPT to learn from many conversations and synthesize ChatGPT’s memory state in order to always provide the freshest, most relevant context to your conversations. Dreaming also makes it easier for memory to include context that occurs naturally in conversation, without relying on explicit requests to remember something."

Rolling out to Plus and Pro users in the U.S. Free, Go & more countries will get the memory upgrade over the next several weeks.

In their June news bulletin for small businesses, Google announced integration of Google Analytics & Google Business Profiles!

• Coming soon over the next few weeks
• Measure GBP calls, bookings, direction requests, website clicks & total interactions in GA4
• Setup: GA4 > Admin > Product Links > Select GBP & follow prompts
• Reports: new Google Business Profile section > Performance

Here's the documentation for it - keep your eyes peeled!

They also announced a new AI support agent in the GBP help center (currently rolling out).

Google announced Search profiles for creators:

• Creates a page where a creator's content is pulled in from different platforms (articles, videos, social posts)
• People can follow creators using their Search profile
• Profiles also have a 'Follow on Google' button - followers will see more of their content show up in Discover
• Creators can customize profiles with an avatar, bio, website link & social links
• A Search profile *could* get you a knowledge panel

The blog announcement is kind of vague and just says creators with a "sizable following" are eligible for now.

The documentation gets specific about requirements for creating a Search profile:

• You must have a minimum number of subscribers or followers on at least one content platform:

◦ YouTube:100,000

◦ Instagram:100,000

◦ X:100,000

◦ TikTok:300,000

• You must be at least 18 years old.
• Your content must meet Google's policy guidelines.

Here's where you can get started if you meet the requirements.

Now Canva and Perplexity are connected, via Perplexity Computer. But the connector is only available for Perplexity Pro, Max, Enterprise Pro, and Enterprise Max.

> Connect Canva through the Connectors page, describe what you need, and Perplexity Computer draws from your meeting notes, performance data, and live web context to build a structured brief. From there, Canva transforms it into a presentation, a social campaign, an infographic, or a brand kit – all editable, on-brand, and ready to publish anywhere.

Google labs has a new experimental app called Dreambeans. They're pitching it as a way to escape "endless scrolling and digital noise" (other than just putting your phone down :face_with_rolling_eyes:). Here's what Dreambeans does:

• Uses personal intelligence to pull info from all your Google apps AND your YouTube/Search history
• Curates "stories that inspire and delight you"
• Tap a story to dive deeper
• Tune your stories by providing feedback
• Save favorites to your library
• It also "fields information from across the web to help you take action"

Who knows if this Dreambeans make it out of Labs and be popular, but it's another example of AI being used to create/collect hyper-personalized information drawn from Google's index and keep people on a Google surface for the most part.

Meta Business Agent is a thing now:

• Meta first introduced this last October as a free test in international markets. 1M+ businesses already use it.
• Agents can close sales, recommend items, qualify leads & book appointments (with human takeover possible at any point).
• Standalone Business Agent Platform plugs agents into outside tools like Zendesk & Shopify ("broader business operations" abilities coming later)
• Free to start, but Meta said it will roll out paid subscription tiers across different business sizes in the coming months

Shopify had an outage this morning starting around 9:30am eastern - as of around 11:30am eastern they said it's been resolved and they're continuing to monitor.

• It affected merchants trying to access Shopify admin & Retail POS
• It affected customers trying to access storefronts & checkouts
• Access to support also impacted

Similarweb data is now available in Perplexity:

> • The *native integration in Perplexity Computer* brings Similarweb data into Computer’s workflows out of the box.

> • The *official Similarweb MCP connector* is the most direct path for existing Similarweb customers. Connect your API key once, and the data included in your plan becomes available in your Perplexity workflows.

Google rolled out a new set of optional "conversational attributes" for GMC product feeds. They're meant to help products surface in AI Mode as well as enhance traditional search experiences.

> The following conversational attributes are available as part of the Google Merchant Center product data specification:

> • Question and answer `[question_and_answer]`

> • Document link `[document_link]`

> • Related product `[related_product]`

> • Item group title `[item_group_title]`

> • Variant option `[variant_option]`

> • Popularity rank `[popularity_rank]`

> You can add these attributes directly into your existing product data setup by either using a supplemental data source (recommended) or by adding them to your primary data source. You can also use the Merchant API to submit these attributes. Including them won't impact the approval status of your existing products. Use these attributes to convey descriptive information about your products, including variant data.

> Note: If you already submit specific details in the description `[description]`, product highlight `[product_highlight]` or product detail `[product_detail]` attributes, you don't need to duplicate that data again in the conversational attributes.

The documentation also has a table with "how to use" and examples for each attribute, plus a table with an example product and all the attribute values for it.

OpenAI announced new plugins for Codex as well as Sites (currently in preview for biz/enterprise customers).

6 new role-specific plugins (with more on the way):

• Data analytics
• Creative production
• Sales
• Public equity investing
• Investment banking

(next batch will have Marketing Strategy, Strategy Consulting, Legal, Corp Finance & Private Equity Investing)

Codex can now create and share interactive, hosted websites and apps:

> Sites are a new kind of canvas for your ideas. Codex can take your ideas, analysis, and plans and turn them into dashboards, planners, review workspaces, project boards, galleries, and lightweight tools. Today, sites can be shared with anyone in your workspace via URL, giving teams a shared place to explore work, contribute input, track progress, and make decisions together.

Wow! I never thought this would happen. Google is rolling out Generative AI data in Search Console, including dedicated reports for Search and Discover.

Right now they're only rolling out to a subset of websites for thorough testing and feedback, but eventually they'll be widely available. Here's what they'll have:

• *Impressions:*How often URLs from your site appeared in generative AI features in Search and Discover.
• *Pages:*Check which URLs appeared within AI features.
• *Countries:*Understand your visibility on a country basis.
• *Devices:*Identify the devices people are using when seeing your website (available for Search results).
• *Dates:*Monitor your performance over time with hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly granularity.

There is new help center documentation for generative AI performance reports also. I checked and I can't see the new reports in any of the GSC accounts I have access to - hopefully testing will go fast!

Microsoft launched "Web IQ", calling it a search engine for AI systems:

> Where Bing was built to help people search the web, Web IQ is built to help AI agents find the right information, turn it into useful evidence, and use it inside reasoning. Unlike other APIs that layer on top of fragile infrastructure, Web IQ is a new kind of search system, one that delivers the right evidence with the speed, quality, and efficiency modern agents require.

>

> It builds on years of learning from Bing, but it required a major ground-up re-architecture to meet the demands of agentic workloads.

https://www.youtube.com/@PaidMediaPros/videos

and ironically a former granular employee, Joe Martinez, who co-runs a company called Paid Media Pros. He left 7 years ago and has gone on to build one of the biggest youtube channels around paid ads features and explaining how they work

Adrian Dekker

https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriaan-dekker-google-ads-freelancer-rotterdam/recent-activity/all/

also, if you were interested ever in the most up to date google ads updates, edge case stuff, there are two people who are the most current on this i pay attention to

There are a bunch of different tools that assign & track search ranking volatility scores. Barry Schwartz made a tool that puts all of them in the same chart & you can choose exactly which ones you see.

thanks tamara

Common Crawl published an AI Visibility Audit guide:

> The guide walks through how CCBot crawls the open web and publishes the archive that helps train modern LLMs, how harmonic centrality in the Common Crawl Web Graph sets crawl priority, why CDN and WAF defaults now silently block AI crawlers and training data crawlers, and why AI still leans toward English, with the English share of the latest crawl at roughly 41 percent.

Here's the short announcement. Here's the guide.

In case you aren't holding enough variables in your head already, now there are "ChatGPT Core Updates" to monitor.

This is not an official term, but Sistrix evaluated 38 daily samples of 100K ChatGPT responses (total of 3.8M responses & 100M source mentions) and observed two "update events" in May.

Here's their caveat: "We are measuring a correlation. The model identifier switched on May 23 from “GPT-5 mini” to “GPT-5.5”, and simultaneously the citation distribution shifted. Whether the model change alone was the cause, or whether the retrieval or prompt layer was also changed in parallel, cannot be determined from the outside."

Also, they only measured German-language prompts/responses. But official or not, I'm glad they're systematically measuring output and sharing what they see, since ChatGPT isn't announcing anything. Article has more context and analysis of winners/losers.