Live AI search news feed

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.

Microsoft Clarity introduced topic classification to AI citation grounding queries.

Helpful to know that Topics in Clarity vs Bing WMT AI Performance report work differently:

• In WMT, grounding queries are organized into broad, predefined topic categories
• In Clarity, topics have more granular themes based on the grounding query patterns in your specific account's AI citation data

Another important topic distinction:

• Clarity introduced Topic Insights earlier this month - Topic Insights are meant to help you proactively evaluate visibility and opportunities
• In contrast, this new thing is called Query Topics and it's meant to help you better understand the themes already driving citations

Query Topics are in Clarity's AI Citations dashboard, and they include topic-level performance metrics (citation count, share of authority), you can filter by topics, and you can export topic-level data.

Google Merchant Center is rolling out 'Ask Advisor' AI-generated summaries and chat - I'm not seeing it for every GMC account we have access to yet, but here's what it looks like when it does show up:

Google "polished and clarified" their guide to optimizing your crawl budget, mostly to improve clarity. Barry Schwartz combed through the changes and highlighted some good ones:

> Here are some new lines added:

> • "Every site starts with the same default, conservative crawl capacity limit. If there is demand to crawl more and the site remains healthy, Google's systems will automatically adjust this limit over time."

> • "For Googlebot, demand varies based on a site's size, update frequency, page quality, and relevance, compared to other sites. The primary factors you can influence are."

> • "While each crawler has a different crawl demand, the crawl capacity limit is shared across all crawlers. This means that high demand from one crawler can reduce the capacity available for others."

> • "Improve loading speed: Optimize your server response times and resources to make pages load faster."

> • "Use HTTP caching: Support 304 (Not Modified) HTTP status codes. If a page hasn't changed since Google last crawled it, returning a 304 code tells Google to reuse the cached version, saving your server bandwidth and resources."

That second bullet point is worth reading the whole section:

• *Perceived inventory:*Without guidance from you, Google tries to crawl all or most of the URLs that it knows about on your site. If many of these URLs are duplicates, or you don't want them crawled for some other reason (removed, unimportant, and so on), this wastes a lot of Google crawling time on your site. This is the factor that you can positively control the most.
• *Popularity:*URLs that are more popular on the Internet tend to be crawled more often to keep them fresher in our systems.
• *Staleness:*Our systems want to recrawl documents frequently enough to pick up any changes.

Additionally, site-wide events like site moves may trigger an increase in crawl demand in order to reprocess the content under the new URLs.

Google released 3 new AI models:

• Gemini 3.6 Flash - more efficient workhorse for coding, knowledge work, multimodal stuff
• Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite - fastest & most cost-effective, with better understanding of intent & instruction following
• Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber (in CodeMender for cybersecurity applications)

3.5 Flash Lite is rolling out for Google Search (but they didn't get specific about if it's being used in AIO, AI Mode or both, and they said it's good for agentic search which they announced in May at I/O).

Ends with a promise that Gemini 3.5 Pro is coming soon

Google published research on how they're using Cluster Detection (behavioral patterns) and Synthetic Content Rating (semantic patterns) to purge scaled AI slop from YouTube.

Seems like they don't want to accidentally take down human creators who may or may not use AI tools, but it's good to keep in mind and maybe do things to avoid sending the wrong kinds of signals:

• Avoid templated, repetitive title and description structures
• Have a realistic human publishing cadence, don't batch upload/publish huge volumes of videos using scripts or API calls
• Don't use a third-party video generator other other automation service to manage your uploads
• If you use AI for voiceovers or visuals, make sure your video also contains original human commentary, specific context, a "human touch" editing style, etc

The research paper only talks about online video platforms but it's not a stretch to consider how Google might apply this type of semantic classification/cluster analysis to web content too. Low-effort AI-based content scaling: just don't!

Here's a link to the abstract where you can download the PDF report

Top stories are rolling out in AIO for logged-in Google users on mobile. If users have added Preferred Sources they will be highlighted here.

Google updated the FAQ section of the 'Syncing your products' GMC Help documentation to clarify what to do during the upcoming Content API --> Merchant API migration concluding by August 18.

• Don't uninstall & reinstall the Google & YouTube Shopify app
• Google knows there are issues with it and is working with Shopify to fix them
• Google said there's no action needed - if you use the Google & YouTube app on Shopify to manage your GMC feeds, they will handle the API transition for you

A really helpful Search Console insight was shared in the July 16 episode of Search off the Record. It's at 17:49 in the video if you want to skip straight to it and here's the gist:

• The "Validate Fix" button (found on Page indexing reports) is a mass recheck acelerator
• You should only click the Validate Fix button after you've corrected a genuine sitewide issue
• When you click it, Google tests a sample of the affected pages in the report
• If the sample comes back "fixed" it can trigger faster re-crawling of all the rest of the pages in the report
• If not, sad trombone
• If you have a single URL you worked on/fixed and want Google to check it out, use the Inspect tool to request re-indexing

Google renamed the user agent name to go along with the NotebookLM --> Gemini Notebook name change.

Old: `Google-NotebookLM`

New: `Google-GeminiNotebook`

Google has renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook. (Not to be confused with Notebooks in Gemini)

More is changing besides the name:

• Every notebook gets a secure cloud computer so it can write & execute code (update rolling out)
• Full cross-app syncing between the Gemini app and the standalone Gemini Notebook
• Notebooks will be coming to AI Mode in Search

Google announced connected apps in AI Mode are rolling out now - the first three are Instacart, Canva, and YouTube Music.

They say they're working with "a range of partners" and will be adding more apps soon.

ChatGPT increased the character limit for custom instructions from 1500 to 5000 characters. Custom instructions are used to customize ChatGPT's response style and behavior.

Starting in September 2026, Google is going to combine all the Google Merchant Help Center documentation into a single set of Shopping policies, for both free listings and ads.

When a policy applies only to Shopping ads, it'll be labeled.

ChatGPT updated their search tool:

• Find past chats, projects, images, and documents from one place
• Use filters to narrow results by content type
• Select a result to open the chat, project, or file directly in ChatGPT

Available on all plans globally

2 new image-related Google Search announcements:

New home for Google Images: images.google.com with new features for signed-in users:

• Tailored to your interests
• Save ideas to collections, which become tabs above the gallery

Nano Banana is coming to AI Overviews (already available in AI Mode). Rolling out over the coming weeks.

AI performance insights are rolling out in Google Merchant Center Analytics. Here's the help document with details on the metrics, scope filters, and "optimization opportunity scorecards".

I checked a bunch of the GMC dashboards we have access to and found it in one of them, so keep your eyes peeled!

When available it's found under Analytics → Products

Apparently there's a hack you can use to force your platform performance report (for YT, insta, FB, or X) in GSC to show generative AI performance: just append /ai to the report URL.

But it doesn't work on regular GSC performance reports (I tried it). If you've got any of your social platforms hooked up in GSC already, give it a shot!

OpenAI is sunsetting their ChatGPT Atlas browser because the new ChatGPT desktop app has a built-in browser. Atlas will be deprecated August 9, 2026 (it arrived on the scene in October 2025). They also updated their Chrome extension so you can use ChatGPT directly in Chrome's sidebar.

But wait there's more: ChatGPT Work is a new agent inside ChatGPT that can do stuff for you, not just answer questions. It's powered by GPT-5.6. Lots of use case examples in the announcement.

> ChatGPT Work starts rolling out today on web and mobile, beginning with Pro, Enterprise, and Edu users and expanding to Plus and Business users over the next few days. The updated ChatGPT desktop app⁠ is available globally today for Mac and Windows, with Chat, Work, and Codex available to users on every plan, including Free.

Anthropic created a "reflection dashboard" (now in beta) to let you track, visualize, reflect, and refine how you use Claude:

• Review past Claude chat activity over 1, 3, 6, or 12 months - how often you used it, and what you spent time on
• See a report summarizing your Claude activity across the "4D AI Fluency Framework": Delegation, Description, Discernment, Diligence
• Schedule "quiet hours" and breaks when Claude is off
• Get a nudge when your session runs long
• Periodically see questions surfaced, like "What's one thing you want to keep doing yourself, even if Claude could do it faster?"
• Receive practical suggestions like "Start a Project instead of re-explaining this context" for ongoing work

Incognito chats are excluded from the reflection dashboard, as are files from connected tools.

To use it, memory has to be turned on. You can try it out by going to Claude Settings. Coming next for Cowork conversations.

GPT-5.6 is here, and there are 3 models in this family:

• Sol (flagship)
• Terra (balanced for everyday work)
• Luna (fastest & most cost-efficient)

The announcement includes a video, and a ton more detail about each model.

Microsoft Clarity now offers Topic Insights (in beta) under the AI Visibility dashboard.

Ask YouTube is now available on desktop - you have to be signed in and aged 13 or older. Standard YT search results are still available, you'll just see a new :sparkles:Ask YouTube button in the search bar

DuckDuck Go announced it now lets you watch YouTube ad-free.