Live AI search news feed
Live from Momentic Studio, this news feed is curated by the Momentic team so you can stay up to date on AI search, SEO, GEO, AEO, AI search, frontier AI models, and relevant tools.
Gemini announced the next apps it will connect to:
- Otter.ai, Wix, Granola
- Ticketmaster, Fever, GetYourGuide, Localiza
- iHeartRadio, Pandora
- Angi, Thumbtack, Zocdoc
Rolling out "over the next few weeks" - this documentation has the full list of connected apps.
Google Merchant Center performance reporting is getting 4 updates starting August 24:
- YouTube affiliate traffic will be segmented out - no longer lumped in with Organic (you might see organic decline)
- YouTube organic traffic definitions will change so they match established YT reporting standards (again, might cause a drop in organic when this takes effect) - when it drops, this one is gonna apply to historical data going back to July 1 of this year
- Product-level reporting for Google Ads will expand to include all ad channels/formats (expect an increase - here's documentation with more info about the changes)
- There will be new ways to segment performance data (this one is not launching on the 24th, but sometime in the future)
Anthropic updated their "How Claude marks AI-generated content" support page. They're making it easier for anyone to tell when content (including plain text) was created by Claude:
> 1. Embedded watermarks in text
> When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response.
>
> Because the watermark is part of the text, it will travel with the text when it’s copied and pasted elsewhere, and may persist through some editing. Watermarking will be applied at the model level, which means it will be present no matter which Claude product or surface the text comes from.
>
> 2. Signed provenance metadata
> When Claude generates a supported file type, such as a .svg, .png, or .jpg, it will attach signed provenance metadata. This metadata follows the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) open standard, which is used across the industry to record information about content provenance. If a signed metadata label is present, it signals that a file was processed by Claude and lets you detect whether the file has been tampered with.
>
> Detecting Claude’s marks
> We’re also working to enable users and other third parties to detect Claude’s embedded watermarks and provenance metadata. Detection checks whether a piece of text or a file carries a supported Claude mark. If a supported mark is found, it indicates that the content may have been processed by Claude.
Technical documentation forthcoming.
Ask Advisor in Google Analytics & Google Ads has new agentic capabilities now:
- AIO at top of homepage with summary of important updates since you last looked
- Click on any data card to start an analysis of it with Ask Advisor
- More AI-powered insights on Google Ads homepage with a prompt box if you want custom insights
- New dashboards (in Ads now, coming soon to GA) let you create data visualizations with prompts, and it'll generate a summary explaining the data too
- New benchmarking against anonymized averages from similar businesses
Cloudflare has been busy. They made their own browser called Kitesurf, and it's designed for AI agents.
Here's a free Common Crawl visibility checker for full domains or individual URLs. Common Crawl also published an AI Visibility Audit guide.
Cloudflare released an AEO Visibility Dashboard with citation rate, mention rate, prominence (quality of coverage), and share of voice.
Plus/Pro users of ChatGPT get an updated version of GPT-5.6 Sol now (more reliable facts, more focused answers, and a slider to control how much thought goes into the response), and GPT-5.6 Luna is now the default model for Free/Go users. Starting next week they get unlimited text chats & a new "Think" button for harder questions. No changes to Work/Codex with this release, just Chat.
- Agentic capabilities for multi-step tasks like ordering food and discovering local events w/links to tickets
- (Optional) Personal Intelligence integration so Ask Maps can access your Gmail and Calendar when doing tasks
- Past conversation memory (if history settings are on) so you can pick up where you left off
- New transit widget for real-time updates on bus, train, subway, or ferry rides
- Conversational contributions making it easier to suggest edits to places
- Fresh UI, design, branding & main nav
- Upgrade to the new 'My Projects' home base
- New charts, graphs & data visualizations
- Upgrades to various research report elements (e.g. more graphing options, additional data)
- 'Take Action' is now called 'Workspace'
- New Help Hub with more detailed support & product demo videos
- Documentation for new(ish) API & MCP server options
Cloudflare Agents is a thing now.
> Cloudflare Agents brings all of your deployed agent sessions into a single experience, surfacing key information and insights into how your agents perform at scale.
> The Cloudflare dashboard now has a dedicated Agents view that lists observed agents and their traces alongside runs, sessions, instances, and reported token usage.
Here's the agent tracing documentation.
Reddit's 2026-Q2 letter to shareholders and statements from CEO Steve Huffman's earnings call reveal they want to be a destination for Search and decision-making, not just show up in Google Search/AI summaries.
To that end, they plan to:
- Convert more web traffic into Reddit app users by pushing the app on visitors (mostly mobile, but they've launched a desktop login upsell campaign too)
- Make the home feed into an algorithmic recommendation engine, including content from subreddits users aren't following (using machine learning to determine what content users would be interested in)
- Expand their internal search feature (Reddit Answers) to keep people on the platform
- Invest in video - they recently added video replies for comments and say they want to reimagine how users connect, share & consume content through a "modernized video experience"
- Strengthen bot-blocking and ML-driven proactive moderation to fight spam even better and "keep Reddit human and safe"
SEJ article with "Reddit as a search destination" analysis of call
SEJ article with "Reddit making better use of their evergreen content" analysis of call
More Gemini capability added to Google Docs:
- Comment workflows enable Gemini to read, summarize, and act on comments in Docs
- Create & edit images, diagrams & infographics with Gemini in Docs
Google Search Central published a blog saying platform properties in GSC have rolled out globally, and they also published new documentation with guidance on analyzing your social/video content performance.
SparkToro has a new research report called Brand Affinity. It shows the companies, products, and brand names an audience is most familiar with and/or purchases from. Helpful for competitor research.
It's in the Keywords and Prompts dropdown.
Seer Interactive did a follow-up content freshness study one year after their original. Not surprisingly, content freshness still matters. But they add some helpful nuance and include a bunch of "here's how to put it into practice" type advice as well. They only looked at Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity for this study. Here's a preview:
- 75% of web pages cited by LLMs were *updated* in the past year
◦ In contrast, 42% of cited pages were *published* in the past year
- Updating a page gets you a one-month "citation spike"
- The more consistently a web page is cited, the older it tends to be
So what you want is a collection of established, high-quality pages that are kept "reasonably fresh" (which varies by vertical, page type, and AI platform) for citation consistency over time.
YouTube is making it easier for creators to customize video thumbnail images with these updates:
- YouTube Partner Program Creators can upload custom thumbnails for Shorts - and this will expand to more creators
- Choose from 3 suggested thumbnails for Shorts on desktop (if you're in the YouTube app on mobile you can pick any frame from the video)
- Chat in Ask Studio and it will create/adjust a thumbnail for you - the thumbnails it makes will be tailored to your video's themes & style
Google added a new guideline to their review snippet documentation about fake and undisclosed incentivized reviews, and here it is:
> • Don't include fake or undisclosed incentivized reviews on your page or in your structured data markup. Examples include:
> ◦ Reviews that aren't based on a genuine experience of a product or service
> ◦ Reviews written in exchange for a benefit (such as money, discounts, vouchers, or free products) that don't clearly and prominently disclose the incentivization
There's a Meta AI app, and now it has agentic capabilities for stuff like planning, researching, making presentations, and completing tasks using connected apps.
Claude Opus 5 is here:
- "Thoughtful and proactive"
- Better scientific research & visual outputs compared to Opus 4.8
- Better at verifying its work
- Close to Fable 5, but half the cost
Yelp is licensing its reviews, ratings, photos & business details to OpenAI. Yelp branding/links will show when ChatGPT surfaces its info in responses.
Coming next: Yelp's "request a quote" feature will also be available so users can contact local providers for quotes without leaving ChatGPT.
I was reading a summary of a video where Cyrus Shepard (founder of Zyppy) talks about local brands in the context of Google/AI and this nugget jumped out:
Amazon deliberately writes vague shipping notice emails (e.g. "your health and wellness product has shipped") so Google can't scrape product purchase details from Gmail.
So the inverse would be recommended for a small/local business: make sure your emails include the types of product/service details you want your brand to be known for so Google can scrape it.
Because Google users who are opted in to Personal Intelligence will get personalized Google AI results, which includes Gmail inbox data.
