Live curated AI and search news feed

Now Canva and Perplexity are connected, via Perplexity Computer. But the connector is only available for Perplexity Pro, Max, Enterprise Pro, and Enterprise Max.

> Connect Canva through the Connectors page, describe what you need, and Perplexity Computer draws from your meeting notes, performance data, and live web context to build a structured brief. From there, Canva transforms it into a presentation, a social campaign, an infographic, or a brand kit – all editable, on-brand, and ready to publish anywhere.

Google labs has a new experimental app called Dreambeans. They're pitching it as a way to escape "endless scrolling and digital noise" (other than just putting your phone down :face_with_rolling_eyes:). Here's what Dreambeans does:

• Uses personal intelligence to pull info from all your Google apps AND your YouTube/Search history
• Curates "stories that inspire and delight you"
• Tap a story to dive deeper
• Tune your stories by providing feedback
• Save favorites to your library
• It also "fields information from across the web to help you take action"

Who knows if this Dreambeans make it out of Labs and be popular, but it's another example of AI being used to create/collect hyper-personalized information drawn from Google's index and keep people on a Google surface for the most part.

Meta Business Agent is a thing now:

• Meta first introduced this last October as a free test in international markets. 1M+ businesses already use it.
• Agents can close sales, recommend items, qualify leads & book appointments (with human takeover possible at any point).
• Standalone Business Agent Platform plugs agents into outside tools like Zendesk & Shopify ("broader business operations" abilities coming later)
• Free to start, but Meta said it will roll out paid subscription tiers across different business sizes in the coming months

Shopify had an outage this morning starting around 9:30am eastern - as of around 11:30am eastern they said it's been resolved and they're continuing to monitor.

• It affected merchants trying to access Shopify admin & Retail POS
• It affected customers trying to access storefronts & checkouts
• Access to support also impacted

Similarweb data is now available in Perplexity:

> • The *native integration in Perplexity Computer* brings Similarweb data into Computer’s workflows out of the box.

> • The *official Similarweb MCP connector* is the most direct path for existing Similarweb customers. Connect your API key once, and the data included in your plan becomes available in your Perplexity workflows.

Google rolled out a new set of optional "conversational attributes" for GMC product feeds. They're meant to help products surface in AI Mode as well as enhance traditional search experiences.

> The following conversational attributes are available as part of the Google Merchant Center product data specification:

> • Question and answer `[question_and_answer]`

> • Document link `[document_link]`

> • Related product `[related_product]`

> • Item group title `[item_group_title]`

> • Variant option `[variant_option]`

> • Popularity rank `[popularity_rank]`

> You can add these attributes directly into your existing product data setup by either using a supplemental data source (recommended) or by adding them to your primary data source. You can also use the Merchant API to submit these attributes. Including them won't impact the approval status of your existing products. Use these attributes to convey descriptive information about your products, including variant data.

> Note: If you already submit specific details in the description `[description]`, product highlight `[product_highlight]` or product detail `[product_detail]` attributes, you don't need to duplicate that data again in the conversational attributes.

The documentation also has a table with "how to use" and examples for each attribute, plus a table with an example product and all the attribute values for it.

OpenAI announced new plugins for Codex as well as Sites (currently in preview for biz/enterprise customers).

6 new role-specific plugins (with more on the way):

• Data analytics
• Creative production
• Sales
• Public equity investing
• Investment banking

(next batch will have Marketing Strategy, Strategy Consulting, Legal, Corp Finance & Private Equity Investing)

Codex can now create and share interactive, hosted websites and apps:

> Sites are a new kind of canvas for your ideas. Codex can take your ideas, analysis, and plans and turn them into dashboards, planners, review workspaces, project boards, galleries, and lightweight tools. Today, sites can be shared with anyone in your workspace via URL, giving teams a shared place to explore work, contribute input, track progress, and make decisions together.

Wow! I never thought this would happen. Google is rolling out Generative AI data in Search Console, including dedicated reports for Search and Discover.

Right now they're only rolling out to a subset of websites for thorough testing and feedback, but eventually they'll be widely available. Here's what they'll have:

• *Impressions:*How often URLs from your site appeared in generative AI features in Search and Discover.
• *Pages:*Check which URLs appeared within AI features.
• *Countries:*Understand your visibility on a country basis.
• *Devices:*Identify the devices people are using when seeing your website (available for Search results).
• *Dates:*Monitor your performance over time with hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly granularity.

There is new help center documentation for generative AI performance reports also. I checked and I can't see the new reports in any of the GSC accounts I have access to - hopefully testing will go fast!

Microsoft launched "Web IQ", calling it a search engine for AI systems:

> Where Bing was built to help people search the web, Web IQ is built to help AI agents find the right information, turn it into useful evidence, and use it inside reasoning. Unlike other APIs that layer on top of fragile infrastructure, Web IQ is a new kind of search system, one that delivers the right evidence with the speed, quality, and efficiency modern agents require.

>

> It builds on years of learning from Bing, but it required a major ground-up re-architecture to meet the demands of agentic workloads.

https://www.youtube.com/@PaidMediaPros/videos

and ironically a former granular employee, Joe Martinez, who co-runs a company called Paid Media Pros. He left 7 years ago and has gone on to build one of the biggest youtube channels around paid ads features and explaining how they work

Adrian Dekker

https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriaan-dekker-google-ads-freelancer-rotterdam/recent-activity/all/

also, if you were interested ever in the most up to date google ads updates, edge case stuff, there are two people who are the most current on this i pay attention to

There are a bunch of different tools that assign & track search ranking volatility scores. Barry Schwartz made a tool that puts all of them in the same chart & you can choose exactly which ones you see.

thanks tamara

Common Crawl published an AI Visibility Audit guide:

> The guide walks through how CCBot crawls the open web and publishes the archive that helps train modern LLMs, how harmonic centrality in the Common Crawl Web Graph sets crawl priority, why CDN and WAF defaults now silently block AI crawlers and training data crawlers, and why AI still leans toward English, with the English share of the latest crawl at roughly 41 percent.

Here's the short announcement. Here's the guide.

In case you aren't holding enough variables in your head already, now there are "ChatGPT Core Updates" to monitor.

This is not an official term, but Sistrix evaluated 38 daily samples of 100K ChatGPT responses (total of 3.8M responses & 100M source mentions) and observed two "update events" in May.

Here's their caveat: "We are measuring a correlation. The model identifier switched on May 23 from “GPT-5 mini” to “GPT-5.5”, and simultaneously the citation distribution shifted. Whether the model change alone was the cause, or whether the retrieval or prompt layer was also changed in parallel, cannot be determined from the outside."

Also, they only measured German-language prompts/responses. But official or not, I'm glad they're systematically measuring output and sharing what they see, since ChatGPT isn't announcing anything. Article has more context and analysis of winners/losers.

If you're hiring or looking for work, ChatGPT wants to be part of the process:

> ChatGPT can now help with more of the job search process, from finding relevant live roles to tailoring a resume for a specific opportunity.

>

> When you search for jobs, ChatGPT can surface live listings and freelance opportunities from sources like Indeed, Upwork, Appcast, and across the web. Results are personalized using your experience, skills, and goals to highlight roles that may be a strong fit. You can follow links to apply directly on the source sites.

>

> You can now also upload or create a resume in ChatGPT, tailor it to a specific role, and download it in a polished, professional format.

>

> Availability:

> • Job search: Available to users in the U.S. on Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans

> • Resume formatting: Available in English globally on the web for all plans

If you have job listings online, make sure they're on web pages AI crawlers can access to maximize discoverability!

The May 2026 core update has wrapped - it took almost 12 days (11 days, 21 hours if you're counting). Barry Schwartz was right: he reported extra ranking volatility over the weekend (continued today as well) and predicted it was the 'one last push' before the update completed.

Zoom has a new product called ZoomMate, an "AI teammate" that uses conversational context and connected tools to do agentic stuff. It costs $20/month per user.

gs location changer Chrome extension allows you to change your location in search - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/gs-location-changer/blpgcfdpnimjdojecbpagkllfnkajglp?hl=en-US

Isn’t this just an LLMs.txt?

"Organize my files" in Google Drive is out of beta and rolling out to Google Workspace plans.

> Gemini can help you organize your Drive by providing suggestions of where to move loose files based on your organizing structure and strategies. Users can access this view through a dedicated entry point titled “Suggest File Moves” within My Drive and parent folders. The dedicated interface displays recommendations divided into two sections: moving files to existing folders, and creating new folders for related file groupings. End users can review these recommendations before any files are relocated.

Asana acquired a no-code AI workflow platform (StackAI) as they aspire to make Asana "the operating system for human-agent teams"

Google published a new page in Chrome for developers documentation about *llms.txt*, calling it "an emerging convention used to provide machine-readable summary of a website's content, specifically designed for LLMs and AI agents"

Apparently Bloomburg got a leaked sneak peek at how Siri will look in iOS, which is coming mid-September. But the Bloomburg article is gated so we get this ad-heavy CNET rewrite.

• Siri will be based on Gemini technology
• Dynamic Island: a wide, pill-shaped area at the top of iPhone home screen (14 Pro and newer) which is where you can see all the AI stuff at a glance (system alerts, apps running in the background, delivery tracking) and launch Siri
• Search or Ask field where you can choose AI agents from a drop-down menu
• Dedicated Siri app with functions similar to Gemini
• Siri integrated into camera app for search (like Google Lens)
• Many AI queries will get answered on your device, less reliant on cloud & external data centers

Chris Long (co-founder of Nective, an SEO agency) published an "AI Instruction" page on their website (linked from the footer) and found that ChatGPT was using/citing the page within 48 hours. (he also shared receipts) He looked for other agencies that had something similar and found those were getting cited too (SEER is a standout example).

He shared his findings on LinkedIn & the comment thread is great:

• Marie Haynes pointed out that calling it "AI Instructions" could be interpreted as manipulation which goes against the Google spam policies now.
• He & Wil Reynolds both agreed and said they'd test it again without including "instructions" (SEER took their page down for now)
• Someone said it sounds similar to the Grounding Page concept that Hanns Kronenberg came up with and is documenting. He said they're seeing LLMs pick up the info and that the point isn't manipulation/optimization but to prevent entity confusion by making facts explicit, stable, and machine-readable.

No conclusion, just cool to see people testing things out and sharing what they learn. As a human I think this guy's grounding page is a refreshing read: no hype, just facts.

Recent updates to LLMs:

• GPT-5.5 Instant has improved response style and quality, but no longer supports canvas (GPT-5.5 Thinking won't support canvas anymore either)
• Claude Opus 4.8 is here - improvements across benchmarks, and now a more effective collaborator, especially in its honesty
• Dynamic workflows now available in Claude Code - it's a new feature available in research preview so Claude can run bigger tasks by planning the work and running hundreds of parallel subagents in one session
• Claude.ai and Claude Cowork now have an effort controller. Higher effort = more, deeper thinking. Lower effort = faster answers.
• Perplexity Computer is now available inside Microsoft Office apps

Ahrefs shared an AI Search Benchmark Report (PDF) with findings from 13 individual studies they conducted in Q4 2025 and Q1 2026. Highlights:

• AI Overviews appear for 21% of all keywords, much more often on long, informational queries.
• Single-word queries trigger AIOs 9.5% of the time; queries with 7+ words hit 46.4%.
• AI Mode & AI Overviews agree in substance, but cite different sources: Only 13.7% URL overlap, yet they reach the same conclusion 86% of the time.
• 28% of ChatGPT’s top-cited pages have zero organic keywords. You still have a chance of visibility in ChatGPT even without traditional ranking performance.
• Only 37.9% of cited URLs in AIO rank in the top 10, down from about 76% in Ahrefs’ earlier study.
• Brand mentions don’t reliably earn links: When Ahrefs is mentioned in AI responses, it gets linked only 28% of the time overall.
• YouTube mentions had the strongest correlation with AI brand visibility across ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews.
• AIO citations have near-zero correlation with content length; 53.4% of cited pages were under 1,000 words.
• For top-of-funnel ChatGPT queries, “Best X” blog lists made up 43.8% of source URLs.
• AIO are global & uneven: Indonesia leads with 37.2% AIO coverage (U.S. rate is 20.5%)
• Position #1 results saw a 58% CTR reduction when AIOs were present; position #10 lost 19.4%.
• ChatGPT has about 12% of Google’s search volume, but Google sends 190x more traffic to websites.
• Most AI tools repeated fake brand claims planted online; ChatGPT performed better, Claude avoided hallucinating but missed the official site.
• AIOs are unstable in wording, stable in meaning: They changed between observations 70% of the time, but their core message stayed highly consistent.

Google announced AI performance insights coming to Merchant Center. The new report will include:

• Share of voice - visibility vs similar brands in both AI Search results and Gemini
• Shopping funnel performance - discovery, evaluation, purchase
• Popular product search terms & your SOV for them
• Popular product attributes in search (things like color, style, material)

Will roll out in the U.S., Canada, Australia, India, and New Zealand "in the coming months"

I hate AI slop, so I wrote a list of things that are obvious AI slop (writing) to me. I also built a free tool called FishFry.ai that helps you create a Claude plugin/skill that writes like you. Here’s the AI slop article: https://momenticmarketing.com/blog/avoid-ai-slop

Google announced "Preferred Sources" in AIO & AI Mode - if users add favorite sources under source preferences in Search personalization settings, they will see a 'Preferred' label on those citation links in AI Search results. Time to start adding those "Add us as a preferred source on Google" direct links on your website if you haven't already done so!

The blog has a bunch of examples and there's documentation too.

If you have Google Drive sources in an NotebookLM notebook, they will automatically sync now - super convenient!

YouTube is adding more prominent AI labels and rolling out automatic AI detection:

• *For Long-form Videos:*The label will now appear directly below the video player, above the description.
• *For Shorts:*The label will appear as an overlay on the video itself.

If you think your content was incorrectly labeled as AI-generated you can dispute it.

Wow, there's yet another data logging error in the GSC Discover performance report on May 21 (they had one on May 7/8 this year too). Once again, Google says it's just a data logging error, not an actual decrease in Discover clicks/impressions.

Similar web shared data showing ChatGPT is showing more prominent links in answers since May 7, resulting in 150% more referral visits (comparing the week post 5/7 to the week previous). So if you notice a corresponding bump in ChatGPT referral traffic to your site in the time range, keep in mind it might be partly due to this trend and not necessarily because of something you did.

Reportedly DuckDuckGo is getting more users since Google I/O last week. TechCrunch says DDG app installs in the U.S. are up 18% week over week, and 9to5Mac says DDG installs on iPhone specifically are up 33% WoW.

The appeal seems to be how DDG makes it easy to toggle AI on/off. If this trend sticks it's a good reminder to check how your search results look in there too, if it's a search engine your audience is likely to use.

DDG is still only 1.74% of total U.S. search engine share according to statcounter as of the end of April - will be interesting to see if that goes up when their May data is released.

The Bot Analytics dashboard in MS Clarity got an update:

• New metrics & high-level insights

◦ AI bot requests (total number of requests from AI crawlers and automated systems)

◦ AI bot traffic share (% of total site request volume)

◦ Pages crawled (% of total pages accessed by bots)

◦ Total requests overview for unified activity tracking

• Request status visibility

◦ Breakdown of bot requests by status: successful, redirected, and unsuccessful

◦ Trendlines added to request status and key metric cards

◦ Click-to-filter from request status for deeper analysis

• Expanded exploration & filtering

◦ Domain-level and path-level filtering across all bot analytics views

◦ Click-to-filter support for path requests and request status

◦ Improved interactivity across dashboard tables and metric cards

• Content type & table improvements

◦ New Content Type card aggregating request distribution by content type

◦ Removal of content type from Path Requests table for cleaner structure

◦ Refactored Path Requests view with improved aggregation and consistency

• Expanded CDN support

◦ New integrations for Akamai and Azure Front Door (AFD)

◦ Integrations for non-enterprise Cloudflare plans, including free, pro, and business.

Google is now showing how many times a photo or video was viewed in your Google Business Profile. This is helpful because you can see which ones are the most popular (assuming you have a bunch that were uploaded around the same time) and then lean into what people are gravitating towards.

Bing launched a new version of Bing Image Search, describing it as an AI-guided experience that organizes image results to reduce overwhelm and make it easier to find what you want.

• Use the "New Version" toggle in Bing Image Search to try it out
• Instead of a wall of thumbnails you get grouped & labeled sections with short descriptions

Seems pretty helpful to me!

People are sharing instances of not being able to Google basic words like "disregard", "delete," and "ignore" because they're being misinterpreted by AI as commands. I just got this glitchy result so apparently it's not all fixed yet.

Cloudflare made a tool that checks if a website is AI agent-friendly. It gives a detailed breakdown and you can customize the scan too.

Ahrefs added some new features to the GSC Insights reports:

• GSC Insights > Overview: keyword filter now available
• GSC Insights > Keywords: 2 new filter options

◦ Rank Tracker status (filter for currently being tracked or not)

◦ Word count (select min/max number of words)

• GSC Insights > Pages: new column with traffic value

Microsoft published a new article with helpful, specific recommendations around agentic commerce.

Key takeaways below, the big underlying one is "complete, structured, consistent product data":

• *AI agents are becoming the new gatekeepers.* AI tools increasingly decide which brands make the shortlist in the first place, for shoppers researching a purchase decision.
• *Machine trust is foundational.* Brands need to prioritize accurate, structured, up-to-date product data so AI systems can find, understand, and confidently recommend their products.
• *Product data is paramount.* Sparse, inconsistent, or outdated product feeds hurt conversion & may hide brands from consideration in AI-supported buying journeys entirely.
• *Reviews with specifics are gold.* AI systems can synthesize review sentiment, so detailed reviews about real use cases are more valuable than five-star ratings with minimal context.
• *Fulfillment reliability is becoming a trust signal.* As agents move closer to making purchases on behalf of shoppers, shipping accuracy, availability, and delivery performance matter more: "Your logistics will become your trust score."
• *Brand agents could help brands keep customer relationships.* AI-powered brand representatives are a way for shoppers to interact with brands directly through conversational experiences. In the bigger picture, customer agents (from the customer's AI assistant) will interact with brand agents on websites. Build your own brand agents now or let a third-party platform own them.
• *Conversational checkout could collapse the funnel.* Agentic commerce may let shoppers move from need → recommendation → selection → purchase in one AI chat.
• *Prioritize agent readiness now.* Brands should enrich product content, improve schema, sync pricing and inventory, strengthen reviews, and maintain clean feeds in Microsoft Merchant Center and Google Merchant Center.
• *Winners will have unified, real-time, machine-readable product data.* Everything else (AI visibility, brand agents, conversational checkout, measurement) depends on that foundation.

Google's making sure they have our attention all week! Here's another core update, less than 2 months after the last one: https://momenticmarketing.com/google-updates/may-2026-core-update

Google published a report on how people are using AI Mode.

Helpful to know:

• The keyword & query data spans May 2025 - April 2026
• Comes from a random sample of searches
• Trends data measures interest as a share of AI Mode searches only (not total volume based on all the Google searches), and the AI Mode trends data in this report isn't found in Google Trends

Key insights:

• Image searches are growing and more than 17% of U.S. searches use voice or image
• Average AI Mode search is 3x longer than a traditional Search query
• AI Mode queries related to planning are growing fastest
• Brainstorming queries are also growing faster than average

This blog has the summary and links to a 27-page PDF of the actual report.

• Slide 8 has the top 10 topics people search in AI Mode.
• Slide 10 has the top things people ask beginning with "where to..." or "where should I..."
• Slide 15 has the top shopping topics
• Slide 17 has the top retail attributes people look for when shopping in AI Mode (they're not at all surprising, you could probably come up with these in a minute just by thinking about it)

It's a design-heavy PDF that's fast to skim & has a lot more!

Ahrefs made a couple updates:

• New crawled pages report under Site Explorer. Shows all the pages the Ahrefs bot crawled. Use on your own site to ID crawl issues or on competitor sites to see new pages they published (sort by 'first seen')
• Now you can export organic keywords & positions data WITH YOUR FILTER SETTING APPLIED.

Lily Ray asked JMu about this on Bluesky and he provided some helpful official context:

OpenAI is on board with the SynthID watermarking initiative Google announced yesterday.