Curated real-time news for search (and discovery) industry folks

Google published 4 separate blogs about Gemini being in Google Home now:

• Welcome to the next era of Google Home
• New Google Home app redesigned for Gemini
• AI upgrade to Gemini for Home
• New Google Home devices built for Gemini

OpenAI launched an invite-only social app for iOS called Sora. It's powered by Sora 2, their latest video generation model. Just in the U.S. and Canada for now "with the intent to quickly expand to additional countries"

"We think Sora is going to bring a lot of joy, creativity and connection to the world."

I think it sounds like a new way to vanish some hours with your face in a screen. Anyway, if you download the Sora app, sign up for the wait list, and get an invitation, then you can also access Sora 2 on sora.com (also available if you have ChatGPT Pro, and coming soon to the API).

"Sora 2 will initially be available for free, with generous limits to start"

The announcement blog has more about privacy, protecting teens, and how they think it's a much better social app than other social apps. They also published a "Sora feed philosophy."

Google and Microsoft are both stuffing AI into their products as fast as they can:

• Gemini in Google Drive now available on mobile apps
• Edit Google Slides & Vids with Nano Banana
• Use "Agent Mode in Copilot" in Excel and Word if you have the right type of MS 365 subscription (they're calling it "vibe working")

Anthropic updates:

• Claude Sonnet 4.5 is out now, and they say it's the best coding model in the world
• Claude Code got a bunch of upgrades (and is also powered by Sonnet 4.5 now)
• Claude Developer Platform has new capabilities for managing AI agent context

Google added more visual search & results in AI Mode. Rolling out this week: only in English in the U.S. to start.

• Visual Fan-out in AI Mode builds on the query fan-out approach but beefs it up with the visual capabilities of Google Lens & Image Search
• You can start your search conversationally or with an image
• On mobile you can also search _within_ an image to better understand what you're looking at
• It especially applies to Shopping results - they emphasize how many products are in their Shopping Graph (50B), and how fresh they are (2B refreshed hourly)

Starting today ChatGPT offers Instant Checkout so users can buy from Etsy in the U.S.

• Currently only single-item purchases
• Multi-item purchases & more merchants/regions to be added
• Specifically, 1M+ Shopify merchants were mentioned as "coming soon"
• Agentic Commerce Protocol that powers Instant Checkout is open source and here is the documentation

Google published a new page with essentials for small businesses linking to: Success stories, GBP, GMC, Ads, YouTube, Workspace, Analytics, AI training and suggested places to start if you need a website.

Vastly speed up Reddit research by adding .json to the end of any Reddit URL. It gives you all thread comments and replies in JSON format. You can ID the most popular ones by "ups". HT Brian Gorman on LI

I pasted it into ChatGPT with this prompt: "summarize this reddit thread and give me the top 3 overall brands with positive mentions, and what users value most about each brand" - then asked for the summary in a comparative table format.

Couldn't copy and paste all the thread content because it was too long, so I only used the first half and it still gave me a helpful summary! If you want to wring every last drop of info you can repeat with digestible batches.

Google talked about agentic capabilities in AI Mode in a May 2025 blog post and now they've taken one step closer: now opted-in Google Labs users in the U.S. can try out agentic capabilities in AI Mode for finding restaurant reservations.

Cloudflare announced a private beta of their new AI Index for every domain on Cloudflare

ChatGPT business plans now have shared projects (plus new connectors, and more compliance/admin features).

Perplexity launched a Search API with passage-level retrieval ("sub-document units") that they say will make it faster and more relevant.

"Perplexity Search API sits at the Pareto frontier of relevance and speed. We’re releasing an open-source evaluation framework, `search_evals`, to enable researchers and developers to rigorously test any publicly available search API."

OpenAI announced ChatGPT Pulse as "the first step toward a new paradigm for interacting with AI":

• It proactively does research while you're away based on chats, feedback, and connected apps (like your calendar)
• Once a day you get personalized updates that you can curate to personalize further
• Released as a preview for mobile Pro users so far - eventually will roll out to Plus & free users

This is a new take on what boosts visibility in AI tools (at least to me) - according to Dan Taylor, data from 2138 websites cited in AI search shows a correlation between CWV performance & visibility in generative answers:

• Sites with CLS ≤ 0.1 recorded a 29.8% higher inclusion rate in generative summaries compared with sites above this threshold.
• Pages delivering LCP ≤ 2.5 seconds were 1.47 times more likely to appear in AI outputs than slower pages.
• Crawlers abandoned requests for 18% of pages larger than 1 MB of HTML, highlighting the need for lean markup.
• TTFB under 200 ms correlated with a 22% increase in citation density, particularly when paired with robust caching strategies.

Lots more in the study linked above - plus at the end he offers to share the full deck if you email and ask for it.

Google Workspace updates:

• Supposedly Gemini is now better at creating & troubleshooting formulas in Google Sheets
• Now you can convert the Google Slides of your choice into "shareable, engaging video" using Google Vids

Similarweb is launching an MCP server. Here's the documentation. They say the fastest way to use it is through tools like Claude or Zapier via the Similarweb API key.

GMC Next is testing a new Brand option (in the Marketing section of the left-hand nav) that says:

"Coming soon: Shape how customers see your brand. Influence how your business appears on Search when customers type your brand name. You'll be notified when you're able to manage your brand profile."

Looks like brands will be able to review/add images, choose a business description (why "choose" and not "write"?) and review videos (but not add videos?). Keep an eye out for the email I guess! This feature was first mentioned at Google Marketing Live in May 2025.

I've been sleeping on DDG lately but they've been keeping up with AI chat & search too, in ways that align with their brand:

• Free access to various AI chatbots on duck.ai
• Opt-in AI-assisted answers on duckduckgo.com
• DDG subscription model with more advanced AI chat models, VPN & more
• DDG browser visual design overhaul with button shortcut to duck.ai (and option to disable/hide button)

Their pitch is that when you use AI chat/search on one of their platforms your chats/searches are anonymized because DDG calls the AI models on your behalf, none of the data is used for training, chats are stored on your device, and you can delete all of it instantly with the "Fire Button" :fire:

According to statcounter, DDG averages 2.5% of U.S. SE market share over the past year. If you know your audience values online privacy (maybe even more than quality of search results) it could be worth doing some SERP analysis on there. SerpAPI has a DDG SERP scraper if you really want to dig in.

Google has streamlined the process for implementing a local inventory feed in GMC. It's a little weird that it's spelled "Merchant Centre" in this documentation but as long as it works, who cares!

Google is officially launching Search Live (English/U.S.) today outside of Labs - only in the Google app for Android/iOS.

"When you go Live with Search, you can have an interactive voice conversation in AI Mode and share your phone’s camera feed. This means Search can see what your camera sees, respond to your questions in real time and connect you with helpful web links to dive even deeper."

GA4 Annotations connector now available for Looker Studio

New Google Labs experiment: Mixboard, "an AI-powered concepting board that helps you explore, expand, and refine your ideas". Use cases are myriad:

• World-building for a story/game
• Planning photo shoot
• Moodboard for a fashion collection
• Redecorating a space
• Landscaping planning
• Event planning
• Product ideation
• Branding design
• Ad campaign visualizing
• Practically any creative visual project you can think of!

AI Mode starts rolling out in Spanish today - globally!

Great guide to marketing on Reddit, but only for those willing to invest substantial time and effort in doing it the smart way.

Really enjoying the (free) Impolighthouse tool that audits your website like Lighthouse & gives you a summary of what's hurting performance, with the spice level of your choice - Irritated (Default) definitely resonates.