Live AI search news feed

HT to Ziggy Shtrosberg for this helpful tip: use a regex to segment GSC queries into buckets based on length. The really long ones are more likely to be from AI search.

Modify these examples as needed:

• All queries with 5 to 8 words:

◦ ^([^" "]*\s){4,7}[^" "]*$

• All queries with 20 or more words:

◦ ^([^" "]*\s){19,}[^" "]*$

Bookmark this article for the next time a local business owner asks if Updates on their GPB will "help SEO".

Google Updates:

• Build connections & trust with potential customers - similar to how social media posts work with existing customers
• Attract more eyeballs by taking up more space & adding more imagery to your listing when it appears in local search results
• Work best when they showcase useful info & the humans behind the business - think case studies & projects (with REAL photos, not stock), behind-the-scenes stuff, examples of your business engaging with the community, offers that offer real value, and relevant news about your products/services/team that people would actually want to read

If you're still having a hard time coming up with ideas for Google Updates, toss this summary or the article into an LLM and ask it to help you brainstorm, or to create questions you can use to get ideas from the business owner.

Google announced the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open framework designed to let AI agents make purchases safely on your behalf. More than 60 financial & tech leaders (incl. Ames, Mastercard, PayPal, Salesforce, Intuit) are already backing it.

*How it works:*

• AP2 introduces digital contracts called "mandates" that confirm you’ve authorized an agent before transaction is completed
• Real-time shopping uses 2-step approval: an intent mandate when you start a purchase, and a cart mandate to finalize payment
• Users can also pre-authorize agent purchases (e.g. "buy these tickets as soon as they're available")
• Built to handle credit cards, bank transfers & stablecoins, (crypto partnerships include Coinbase, MetaMask & Ethereum Foundation)
• Creates a verifiable "chain of evidence" from purchase intent through payment
• Technical details are on GitHub - by making it open & transparent Google is positioning AP2 as the infrastructure for AI-ecommerce going forward

This is brilliant: if you have stakeholders who get hung up on unhelpful GA channel labels like "Unassigned" and "(not set)" you can rename them by creating custom channel groups, and recoup "meeting time wasted on Google's terminology choices instead of business insights". The whole article (by Dana DiTomaso) is a smart, satisfying read & tells you exactly how to do it.

OpenAI updated the ChatGPT changelog today with improvements to search in ChatGPT:

• Factuality: Fewer hallucinations
• Shopping: Search is better at detecting shopping intent
• Formatting: Answers are better formatted for quick understanding

Related: This guy noticed that Deep Research in in most AI assistants started pulling from fewer sources when this change happened, likely because of token limits or cost/performance tradeoffs.

@user you will be happy to learn Claude was the exception!

If you use Semrush you may have noticed significant drops OR improvements associated with PAA visibility - it's because of a confirmed bug with parsing PAA if they include AIO. They're aiming to fix it by end of month.

• Here's a post where someone noticed & asked Semrush to weigh in
• Here's a different post where Semrush replied & confirmed the bug

ChatGPT & OpenAI both released reports this week about who's using their tools and what for. There's a ton of insight to dig into, but in a nutshell:

• ChatGPT is more of a general assistant used for daily stuff - writing is the #1 task and the split is 70% personal, 30% professional

◦ Global use spreading fast, especially in low/middle-income countries

• Claude is more of a professional workhorse used for structured tasks - mostly coding, business ops & admin, plus full automation via API for enterprise users

◦ Use is highest in high-income, tech-forward countries with advanced economies

Here are the reports:

• How people are using ChatGPT
• Anthropic Economic Index report

(even the report titles underscore the differences!)

YouTube announced a bunch of upcoming new stuff at their 4th Made on YouTube event.

Here are the ones most relevant to SEO:

• Ask Studio - conversational AI to give you channel insights
• A/B testing for titles
• Veo 3 Fast integrating with YouTube Shorts with tons of editing capability, for free
• Unspecified "new tools" so you can create customizable video clips & shorts from podcast audio files
• And of course, more SHOPPING

OpenAI released GPT-5-Codex for even snazzier agentic software engineering. If that is something you do, you will enjoy all of the details in the announcement.

GSC has a new menu item: Achievements. It's where you can find all the milestones from your website performance over time.

Last Friday, people started talking about Google not allowing 100 results per page anymore - some saying it's a test, others speculating it's permanent (Google hasn't said either way). Now people are talking about how it's affecting rank tracking tools and GSC data. Helpful to be aware of if you notice a change around that time.

Good to be aware of: how scammers target small businesses with fake bad reviews. In this NYT article a Google rep said (via email) that they plan to release a tool letting businesses report when they're being targeted by scammers, but wouldn't provide additional details (like when it might be available).

Google published a new guide called "Understanding Product Pricing" in the Merchant Center Help documentation that applies to both free and paid Shopping listings. The main point is: be accurate and transparent with your pricing. It covers core pricing concepts, automatic updates & discounts, special pricing programs (like regional pricing & loyalty programs), subscriptions, and installment pricing.

The Claude app has optional memory settings now, and Incognito chats. Rolling out to Team & Enterprise plans. They say they'll expand memory availability but they want to evaluate it in work settings first because "memory introduces new safety considerations"

Google made a couple edits to the search quality raters guidelines PDF:

• Updated YMYL definitions - now includes election & voting info + other gov't/civic topics
• Added more examples

SEL & SEJ both posted articles about it.

Google Sheets has a new condensed view for version history. Now if you go back to view previous versions, it will only show you the rows with cells that had changes. You can go back to the "classic" version history view if you prefer but I love this option and hope they roll it out for Google Docs too!

YouTube is expanding multi-language audio so creators can upload multi-language audio tracks and reach a wider audience. The multi-language pilot program started 2 years ago and they said on average it boosted watch time by 25% and in one instance (a cooking channel) increased views 3x.

MS Clarity launched Highlights - it's a feature that automatically surfaces the most important parts of session recordings so you can skip to the good parts. You have to toggle it on in the Recordings tab. Web session recordings only so far (not mobile apps).

Reddit Pro (free) has a new tool in beta called Pro Tools for Publishers - beta signups open today. Alpha testers include The Atlantic, NBC News, and the AP.

It lets publishers track which stories are shared, which subreddits they appear in, and metrics like views/clicks/upvotes. Also has AI suggestions on where content will resonate (and perform) best, and lets publishers sync RSS feeds for sharing articles.

Reddit says "these tools are just the first step in empowering publishers to engage more deeply on Reddit" and they want to "make Reddit a go-to place for distribution and discussion" so stay tuned I guess!

In late July this year Amazon quit Google Shopping ads. Shortly after, they consolidated their 3 Merchant Center store names into 1. Since then they've had a roughly 30% overall drop in organic Shopping listing visibility - the losses are bigger in some categories than others. Findings are from Audience Key, and they are plugging their new "MerchantPro" tool for tracking Google shopping grid performance. Further analysis by SEJ here.

Bottom line is, if you have an ecommerce website, there could be more opportunity now for your products to gain visibility in organic Shopping listings. Looks like the categories Amazon vanished from the most are apparel, home goods, and laptops.

What's not known is if Amazon is doing an experiment and this is a temporary thing or permanent. Was the drop in organic visibility because Amazon consolidated their GMC stores into 1, or because Google was mad they stopped paying a ton of money for ads, or both, or more things?

Couple of updates from Anthropic:

• Confirmed 2 separate issues (now resolved) where some Claude responses "experienced degraded output quality" due to bugs in August & early September
• Claude can now create & edit files: Excel spreadsheets, documents, PPT slide decks & PDFs

◦ In both claude.ai and the desktop app

◦ Describe what you need, upload data, get files

◦ Launching initially as a preview for Max, Team & Enterprise plan users

◦ Coming to Pro users in a few weeks

Google published a new blog about how students can use NotebookLM, and there are 3 new features:

• Reports got a redesign & upgrade: there's a new report format called "Blog Post" (hmm), and it will now suggest a report format for you based on theme, topic, industry. You can also create custom report formats.
• NotebookLM partnered with OpenStax and turned their most popular content into curated interactive notebooks (Biology, AP Biology, Intro to Business, Chemistry, Psychology, Principles of Management)
• Teachers can create notebooks from class materials and assign them in Google Classroom

Up until yesterday, AI Mode was only available in English. Now it's available in Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese.

I'm surprised Spanish isn't one of the supported languages! Spanish was one of the first languages that AI Overviews got expanded to last fall, along with the others listed above.

I asked ChatGPT to speculate why Spanish wasn't included in this second AI Mode rollout, and these are the two possibilities that made the most sense to me:

• There are a lot of regional variations in Spanish, and it's a lot of work to make sure idioms and other nuances are handled accurately
• Countries where Hindi, Indonesian & Portuguese are primary languages are rapidly growing digital markets, so maybe they think adoption & impact will be bigger

Maybe something else?

Google launched Simplify - it's a summarization feature only available in the Google app on iOS. Here's how it works:

• You select a chunk of text and tap "Simplify"
• It uses a Gemini Flash model to create a simplified version of the text you selected - right there in the same window in real time
• If you select a really long passage of text, it will split up the simplifications into chunks for you, and show them as you scroll
• If you select a single word it will provide an easy to understand definition