Maybe it's the eye of a hurricane, maybe it's the calm before a brand new storm. It's really hard to tell these days but after a disasterous rock-eating rollout, Google is pulling back on AI Overviews. The SEO world has mixed reactions to The Leak, which is turning out as predicted, much ado about something but we're not sure exactly what. Some sort of garbled sense of stability appears to be returning to the SERPs as the effects of the March 2024 Core Update and the slew of previous and attendent updates start to play together, more or less as Google planned, or so we think. As the dust settles in Googlandia, the effects of flaky search results are showing in user comments with 54% of people complaining they have to look through more results than they did five years ago to find information, often having to rephrase their queries altogether. Meanwhile, OpenAI workers are asking for the "right to warn" of potential dangers, TwiXter has made distributing porn great again while running paid ads against racist and antisemitic hashtags, Microsoft's Recall AI can be tricked into revealing ever-saved personal data, MozCon20 perceives a crisis, and Google says Mobile First is... actually, we're not exactly sure what they were getting at. Confused? You won't be after listening to this.

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