Live AI search news feed

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.

Google published new Lighthouse documentation: experimental agentic browsing scoring

• Evaluates how well your site is built for machine integration
• Because agentic web standards are still forming, it's meant to provide actionable signals more than a definitive ranking score
• Audit results can fluctuate due to timing of tool registration & agentic request response

The stuff it checks for actually makes sense, even to a non-developer like me:

• All interactive elements have programmatic names
• Roles & parent/child relationships are valid
• Content is not hidden
• Visual stability is critical so keep an eye on CLS
• Checks for llms.txt at domain root (even tho Google's latest blog says llms.txt is a myth, this is about agent-centric accessibility, not optimizing for AI search visibility)

It offers 3 pieces of advice:

• Use WebMCP API to make your site's logic & forms clear to AI agents
• Prioritize semantic HTML & proper ARIA labeling: "these are the machine-eye view of your page"
• Optimize for stability by reducing layout shifts so agents can interact with your UI

But wait, there's more! Of course Google announced updates to Shopping as well:

• Universal Cart - an intelligent shopping cart you can use across merchants & services. Now you can participate in capitalism right from Google Search, in a Gemini chat, in your Gmail, or on YouTube.
• Add a product & the smart cart gets to work hunting for deals & price drops, can also alert you when an OOS item comes back in stock
• Uses "intelligent reasoning" to anticipate your needs & solve problems. Example: you're building a custom PC and some of the parts you add to your cart aren't compatible. The cart will tell you and suggest alternatives.
• Check out with Google Pay or transfer your items to the merchant's site to buy.
• Rolling out in Search & Gemini app this summer, then YouTube & Gmail later.
• UCP expanding to Canada, Australia, and U.K., and to YouTube in the U.S.
• Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) lets agents make payments on your behalf.

Google I/O 2026 took place today so we have a lot of announcements to get our heads around:

• Conversational AI is coming to more Google products:
• Ask YouTube (testing now, rolling out in the U.S. this summer)
• Voice-powered Google Docs Live: verbally brain dump & Gemini turns your mess into organized text and does what you ask it to (list things, draft things, reformat things). Rolling out for subscribers this summer. Voice capabilities coming to Gmail & Keep too.
• Gemini Omni - new model that includes generative media models. "capable of generating samples in any output modality from any input". Rolling out only to developers & enterprise customers via API.
• SynthID watermark detector in Gemini app so users can verify AI-generated content.
• Content Credentials verification shows you if the origin was AI or a camera, and if it was edited using AI tools.
• Both SynthID detector & Content Credentials will be in Google Search & Chrome.
• Gemini 3.5 Flash is new. Faster & better. Available now. Gemini 3.5 Pro coming out next month.
• Antigravity - a new agent-first development platform for developers, including a standalone desktop app.
• Gemini Spark - a personal AI agent in Gemini app. Initially just integrates with Google tools, and eventually with third-party tools via MCP. Coming to Gmail, Google Chat, and Chrome too.
• Daily Brief - Gemini app agent that summarizes things for you and makes a "morning digest" to boost your productivity.
• Android Halo is a new UI space (for Android users obvs) where you can check task progress & live updates of all your agents.
• Information agents in Search work in the background 24/7 to find what you need - rolling out this summer to AI Pro & Ultra subscribers.
• Generative UI capabilities in Google Search will build custom experiences for individual questions, like dynamic layouts & interactive visuals. Coming this summer to everyone, for free.
• Use Antigravity in Search to build your own custom experiences (in the coming months, only for subscribers at first).
• Intelligent eyewear coming this fall. Includes audio glasses that offer "spoken help in your ear" and display glasses that show you information. Audio is making its debut first, "later this fall." Sounds super helpful for accessibility!

This "hub article" links to a bunch of individual articles that dig deeper into specific products and features. And of course SEO industry publishers are already breaking this all down - we'll have plenty to digest for a while!

Screaming Frog V 24.0 (codename: bolus) is a big update:

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider MCP integrates with Claude & other AI assistants so you can run, automate, or summarize a crawl chatting in natural language. Or ask it to bulk export all images with missing alt text, for example, and lots more.
• Auto Compare Crawls option - if you have a scheduled crawl you can now have it automatically compare with the last 2 previous crawls to see all changes that happened since. You can also have it send you an email summarizing the changes between crawls.
• Crawl completion notification emails now support exported attachments, like a list of broken links or a crawl issues summary.
• New 'Pages with Uncrawlable Internal Outlinks' filter, and new 'Link Crawlabilty' column in lower Outlinks tab. To use these you have to make sure the "Store" box is checked next to Uncrawlable Links in the spider crawl config.
• Check out your Screaming Frog usage stats under Help > Usage Stats
• Plus a slew of other smaller updates & bug fixes

OpenAI has its own index, including cached web content. It's used for offline web search:

> Offline web search is a better fit for stable web research than for workflows that require real-time freshness, guaranteed URL availability, or audit-grade evidence.

> OpenAI’s systems may update some indexed content quickly, but there is no refresh SLA for a specific URL. A particular page may be refreshed on a different schedule depending on the site, crawl access, caching, popularity, and other technical factors.

Alexa Podcasts is a thing now, because why not.

• Alexa can now generate podcast-style episodes on "virtually any topic"
• Draws from 200+ news publications and "a wide range of sources"
• Users choose a topic, then "adjust the length and direction" conversationally and get a podcast created for them in minutes
• Free for Amazon Prime members

Announcement has examples and suggested use cases. It also hints at "different types of custom audio on demand" coming soon. Custom-generated video episodes can't be too far behind (my prediction, not in the article).

Google Workspace rolled out new icons. I'm a fan because they're easier to quickly distinguish from one another.

Server logs are not my area of expertise. Which is why I really appreciate this detailed and learner-accessible writeup comparing what server log visitor analysis shows to client-side analytics tools. The 5 categories of bot traffic and the pipeline showing how long it took each AI vendor took to crawl & reflect a page overhaul were particularly illuminating.

Microsoft made a lot of updates to Edge. The new capabilities are available to everyone on both desktop & mobile:

• No more "Copilot Mode" - it's just Copilot all the time now
• Copilot reasoning across multiple open tabs
• Vision & Voice - share your screen & talk. Copilot has "clear visual cues" for listening, viewing, and acting
• Opt in & Copilot will use your browsing history for more relevant answers, with long-term memory
• Redesigned tab page with chat, search, navigation & "Journeys"
• Journeys means you get a topic card recapping a past "browsing project" so you can jump back in
• Study & Learn mode - study sessions, quizzes, etc
• Writing assistant - drafts & rewrites "right where you're already typing in Edge"
• Podcasts in Edge - turn your tabs into a podcast (English markets only)