Live AI search news feed

Anthropic & Salesforce partner up even harder:

• Anthropic is the first LLM provider fully integrated within the Salesforce trust boundary
• Salesforce is deploying Claude Code across its global engineering organization
• Anthropic uses Claude directly in Slack
• Agentforce powered by Anthropic is available now for select customers
• More to come

YouTube is rolling out dedicated "shelves" of mental health & wellbeing content for teens when they search for topics like anxiety, ADHD, and eating disorders.

Google rolls out more AI-powered features:

• Google Discover gets AI-generated previews of content
• Google Search gets an AI-generated "What's new" feed for the latest sports info

Google is rolling out updates to how ads look on SERPs:

• Ads will be grouped under a "Sponsored results" heading - they will no longer be labeled individually
• New "Hide sponsored results" control which you can only use if you've scrolled past them all
• Applies to Shopping ads too
• Max 4 ads per grouping

I've seen this in the wild while they were testing it, and now it's official.

Now there's a ChatGPT app for Slack:

• Summarize threads
• Write for you
• Conversational search

Dana DiTomaso made a video explaining this issue, how to filter it out, and why options are limited in terms of a permanent solution. She confirms it is due to spam traffic coming from Chrome version 139.0.0.0 on Windows 10.

This is impacting JME, Stan’s, and Gaspard. I didn’t check everybody else but saw enough to see that it was impacting some of our ecommerce clients.

Gemini Enterprise is a thing now. In tandem, Google Skills was announced as a platform for upskilling workforces.

I hadn’t thought of the knock-on affect that reddit mods will have on some search and LLM results since they’re able to make such judgement calls on what’s allowed in a subreddit and what isn’t. Interesting!

Now in public beta: you can customize Claude Code with plugins.

Eye-opening deep dive about how much power a Reddit mod with nefarious intentions has over Google Search results and LLM output. Trigger warning: if you are offended by blue language, maybe toss this article into an LLM and ask for a swear-free summary.

Google published new documentation about GBP negative review extortion scams. It describes the scams and tells you what to do (and not do) if your business is victim to one.

Google Voice Search is now powered by their new Speech-to-Retrieval (S2R) engine. It was previously powered by automatic speech recognition (ASR), which is a different technology.

Here's what makes S2R better than ASR:

• ASR converts a verbal query into text, then uses the text query to search for relevant results

◦ This can lead to unhelpful search results if there's even a small error in recognizing the spoken phrase

• S2R skips the "verbal to text" step and directly retrieves information based on the spoken query

◦ How, exactly? No clue. This is why I'm not a Google engineer. The blog post goes into detail. And S2R isn't perfect either, it's just significantly more accurate than ASR.

The announcement was published on Google Research but it's not just a breakthrough in a lab, it's an actual implemented change to how voice search works as of now:

> "The move to S2R-powered voice search isn’t a theoretical exercise; it’s a live reality. In a close collaboration between Google Research and Search, these advanced models are now serving users in multiple languages, delivering a significant leap in accuracy beyond conventional cascade systems."

SEOs are reporting recent surges in organic traffic in GA4 with no corresponding increase in GSC:

• Mainly affecting ecommerce sites, spread across pages
• Mainly desktop/Windows with barely any time on site
• Probably some sort of bot activity not getting filtered out by GA

Helpful context if you notice this anomaly yourself. No word from Google.

YouTube has a new "brand pulse report" (powered by AI of course) that evaluates brand presence across YouTube by detecting mentions in both visuals & language (both written & audio). It's only available for select advertisers to start with. Apparently it will be helpful in showing how paid and organic efforts work together to boost brand presence.

TIL Screaming Frog has a "Change Detection" option where it will compare 2 different crawls and give you analysis of what changed. Here's SF documentation on how to use it.

Google added `Google-NotebookLM` to the list of user-triggered fetchers, based on feedback. So if you see that user agent it means a NotebookLM user provided that URL as a source in a project.

Microsoft published a new blog with tips on how to get your content found in AI Search.

Another great blog from Metehan where he analyzes findings from a study proving freshness matters a lot for visibility in AI search, even when it makes search results objectively worse.

Includes:

• A comparative rundown of AI models and which ones have the most recency bias
• Digital content tactics based on the findings
• How to validate the findings using your own content
• Unanswered related questions
• Short, medium & long-term predictions

Starting Oct 7, AI Mode in Google Search is rolling out to 40+ new countries in 35+ new languages.

Google announced Places Insights in BigQuery.

Now businesses can apply Google Cloud's BigQuery analytical capability to Google's Places datasets which include detailed info about businesses, landmarks, points of interest.

Suggested use cases are analyzing location performance for multi-location businesses, scouting new locations for a business, geotargeting your advertising.

Here's a demo and here's the documentation.

As of 3:40pm CST (1:40 PDT) "The issue with serving has resolved itself. There will be no more updates."

ChatGPT now has apps in it.

• You can call an app by name (like Spotify)
• ChatGPT might suggest an app to you in conversation
• Devs can start building & testing apps
• Apps in ChatGPT must follow OpenAI usage policies & be appropriate for all audiences

The announcement has a list of apps available to start with, and those coming soon.

Microsoft launched an updated version of Bing Places for Business.

What's new:

• Domain moved from bingplaces.com --> bing.com/forbusiness
• Easier to import Google Business Listings ("faster, more reliable, and better at preserving key attributes")
• New dashboards, bulk editing tools & real-time status updates
• Recommendation Tool "to help new business owners enrich their listings"

Current Bing Places listings will automatically migrate to the new platform.

Claude can connect to Slack now:

• In Claude, search & reference your Slack convos
• Use Claude directly within Slack via

◦ Direct message with @Claude

◦ Click the Claude icon inside Slack's AI assistant

◦ Mention @Claude in any thread to draft a response