Webcology

The AI makeover of everything is well underway and we're at the point where the most obvious problems are becoming more obvious amidst the hype. This week's vibe is partially informed by Kristine's annual visits to the Blackhat and DEF CON conferences where Kristine came across AdHacks by the Russian Mob, ways to subvert Gemini using popular Google apps like Gmail and Calendar, and how hackers can now prompt inject using AI agents without their victim taking an unfortunate action. Meanwhile, OpenAI is building a browser that will be agentically controlled, Grok is still weirdly obsessed with Taylor Swift, Leaked Meta documents show rules where chatbots can have adult chats with children, Perplexity offers Goolge $34.5billion for Chrome, Google confirms it wants AI generated content to be edited by humans, Gary Illyes reminds us why Google needs to control the signals it looks at, Microsoft wants to know how often your conversions come from AI driven clicks, and Google might be using generic undocumented crawlers.

Google has brought AI Overviews to explain lyrics its users search for. We expect results to be interesting, if not enlightening. Meanwhile, AI Overviews and AI Mode are now live in the UK. There are a couple WordPress vulnerabilities to warn listeners about, Open AI launches "Study Mode", Signing bonuses and huge contracts for AI superstars skyrocket a tiny few into elite athlete pay levels. More issues with vibe coding, this time sort of uncomfortably close to home, more of how everything old is new again when it comes to how AI and search work together, a reiteration from another Google spokesperson that good SEO gets the goods in AI result sets, Google AI Mode expands user tools, and lots, lots more. Hey Google, what did they mean when they wrote, "Lord I was born a can of spam, trying to make a living and get out of this damn can?"

A newly released study from Pew Research confirms what SEOs have been seeing for months, search results with an AI Overview or other generative response get far fewer clicks. A vibe coding fiasco sees an AI make a desperate series of mistakes in a self described panic, Trump removes most if not all guardrails from AI development in a major Silicon Valley announcement, Meta revealed a prototype device that controls computers with hand gestures, Microsoft headhunts Googlites, Google says it does not crawl LLM.TXT files, and most importantly, Google says you don't need nothing but good ol' SEO when it comes to success in AI. Ignore all Pewny results and click this link now.

Interesting news from the business world. The Internet Marketing Ninjas were acquired by SEO consulting firm Previsible. Founded in 1999 by legendary SEO Jim Boykin, the Ninjas were one of the oldest digital marketing firms in the world. The June 2025 Core Update continues with some suggestions there are minor gains for 

some lucky sites affected by the series of Helpful Content Updates that started in September 2023. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince announced on X that Gemini was already blocked at Cloudflare by default. Perplexity and ChatGPT both launched their own web browsers this week. Rather than being built to compete with Chrome, the two browsers appear to be designed to be adapted to specific tasks. We have the unique and unfortunate opportunity to report on the complete transformation of our industry in vaguely real time. It stinks to spend time on but you need to know. Elon Musk owned AI, Grok, has become a full-on Nazibot, praising Hitler and calling for another Holocaust. This happened after Musk declared Grok too woke and removed many of the safety barriers regulating Grok's conceptualization and its output. As Jim reminds us, this is eerily reminiscent of how the genocide in Rwanda happened. Grok's change has pushed X's CEO Linda Yaccarino to resign after Grok sexually harassed her in a brutally misogynist series of tweets. We have nearly two dozen other stories relating to Google, Bing, or Generative search as well! It's all about being as visible as a Ninja, Previsible.

We have a special guest this week and a half hour long interview with San Diego based SEO, Nick Musica in which we get to geek out on the sweeping changes in search and how they affect Technical SEO. Also, Google finally released a post AI Mode Core Update earlier this week. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger discuss what might be coming in the July 2025 Core Update. The world's largest CDN, Cloudflare, is creating a means to charge LLMs for access to your data, to block LLMs entirely, or to continue allowing free access. We'll see what other CDNs do in response. Google introduced MUVERA, an improvement on multi-vector retrieval. According to a Similarweb study, nearly 70% of searches for info from news sites ended in a No Click search result. Google's AI mode is showing inconsistencies in sourcing material but is also experimenting with adding site names to citations. All this and more on a long summer's day edition of Webcology.

The search industry mourns the loss of foundational SEO Jill Whalen. Jill's impact on the earliest decades of SEO set the template for the industry we know today. Every old school SEO was directly touched by her in some way, most of us learning how to think about content through her and the High Rankings forum. We also learned to form a strong sense of SEO ethics because of Jill. Her influence on the industry was and remains enormous. We also mark the passing of former Clix Marketing CFO and partner of PPC Rockstar Davis Szetela, Wils Murphy. Wils was a wonderful soul who was a beloved part of the early conference speaker scene. 

The show covers a range of topics, starting with Google's head of search, Liz Reid's thoughts on the transition to the AI era, the effect of AI Overviews on clicks, the effects of AI on critical skill sets, Google's legal battles in Europe and the United States, the loss of copyright protections in a recent lawsuit filed by Sarah Silverman against Meta, and a lot of SEO related stuff.

Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about the decouplings happening in the SEO industry and in tech in general. A major topic is the decoupling of click activity vs. impressions seen in Google Search Console as AI Overviews are rapidly creating a zero click search environment for research and informational queries. At the same time, parts of our society are decoupling with reality, an example being the concept that funding rural broadband Internet access might be an example of a "woke handout...". We also talk about Google SEO, Google's anti-trust cases, Meta offering Open AI engineers massive bonuses to poach top talent, the future of government by AI, Google AI Mode, Google URL structure, and more... 

SMX Advanced is back. The show is happening live, for the first time in public since the pandemic, in Boston this week. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger recall the traveling circus atmosphere of the early conference circuit. Meanwhile Google is trying to reduce redundant Googlers in the Search and Ad units with a voluntary exit buyout program. This is happening while Google's systems are reporting a number of weird bugs with business profiles disappearing, Discover numbers appearing to flatline in GSC, some search Ads not displaying, and a GSC API that's been broken since early June. We also look at a post-Musk DOGE on reports of data leaks, and secret transmissions of public and White House data. The world at WordPress is changing with a splinter group called FAIR establishing a mirror system to allow all WordPress players access to plugin and platform updates. As FAIR moves forward, Matt Mullenwig's Automattic says it will start contributing to the WordPress ecosystem again after a months long pause. 

Over in the world of search, there are several stories on AI development and training including sycophantic AI, Apple's AI accuracy collapse, the need to feed more written work into the training chasm, and the Wikipedia editor's rebellion against AI summarization. We note how different AI Generative Engines seek summaries from different sources, and how the majority of AI search traffic comes from Desktop rather than mobile SERPs. Google confirms AI Mode will increasingly be incorporated into all search results and a former Rockstar notes how everything old in SEO is still relevant today by breaking down the foundations of AI search over the last 15 years. 

What do you get when you mix a web that remembers everything with software that can mine the depths of that everything to draw a frighteningly accurate picture of everyone, everywhere, all the time? You get what we're all going to get with the Trump administration using Peter Thiel's Palantir platform to create meta-files on every American citizen and very likely a lot of non-American citizens. This move comes after months of allowing ex-POTUS darling Elon Musk's DOGE pillage federal databases that were once considered sacred for the personal files of American citizens and files relating to government activities. Musk, who recently fell out of favor with Trump over something to do with a fist fight, a lot of drugs, and the deputy chief-of-staff's wife, wrote that, "without me Trump would have lost the election". More to come no doubt.

Meanwhile, Neil Patel's NP Digital is being sued by FTX, the crypto-scheme that made Sam Bankman-Fried infamous. Among a number of other accusations, FTX suggests NP Digital was selling them the same services it sold similar services to other business for 12X less than it charged FTX. Google notes it is seeing more searches using AI, Reddit is suing Anthropic for training on Redditor data, Amazon wants to go robot, X disallows AI models from training on X user content, Google says Gemini 2.5 Pro codes, and we discuss the Great Decoupling of clicks and impressions, and much much more. 

Google AI Overviews are expanding test markets in Europe to Turkey, Sweden, and the Netherlands in advance of Google I/O. Google launched a free Generative AI Certification training program with the actual certification exam costing $99US. Google introduced "Discussions" in beta. Discussions is meant to replace Reddit as a primary source of livetime AI training resources by encouraging search users to add comments and conversation about specific topics which can then be used throughout the Google ecosystem. AI training is even more important as Google continues to commit to an AI Everything stance. Meanwhile, Elon Musk's Grok has evolved from plucky truth-teller to insane drunken uncle over night with talk of genocides against white South Africans and questions about the validity of facts about the Holocaust. xAI suggests a rouge programmer is responsible however the chatbot's offensive rewriting of history continues at time of recording. Speaking of Grok, the Technology Transparency Project publicly flagged several X accounts as likely linked to US-sanctioned terrorist organizations. The group suggests terrorist groups are using Grok to write propaganda on their behalf. Furthermore, they suggest terrorist groups are using the X tip-button as a monetization tool. In other news, a Michigan State University researcher has linked belief in fake news stories to an emerging psychological issue called Problematic Social Media Use syndrome. In other news, Bing Search APIs are set to retire on August 11, 2025. The APIs will not be replaced however users are urged to consider Grounding with Bing Search as part of Azure AI Agents to incorporate realtime web data with generated LLM responses. We also learned that Google has been rethinking their search stack and are considering how fundamental components of search can be reimagined in a LLM environment. AIOverview links are all considered position 1 in Search console while 43% of AI Overview links point back to Google search results. All this and a lot more in a heavily Googlized edition.