OpenAI has launched its new browser Atlas built to compete with Comet, Chrome, Edge, and other Chromium based browsers. As with other AI based browsers, Atlas comes with a slew of amazing self-directing features along with the potential for a long term mess of major security flaws, exploitable bugs, and the threat of malicious prompting. These are the earliest generations of AI based browsers so both problems and rapid improvements are inevitable. While AI is being added to virtually everything, two federal judges warn it should not be used in law noting how judges and clerks using AI in their writing have led to serious errors in US court rulings. Meanwhile Microsoft has added Harvard Health sourcing to Copilot. Reddit is suing Perplexity and SerpAPI over their scraping of Reddit data from Google's search index, which contributed to Google's decision to severely limit the size of results sets available to APIs. We get more information about impression loss at GSC. Google notes that links, technical SEO, and migrations can't fix craptastic quality issues. We're assuming they're talking about content but not being as clear as possible. Research shows LLMs are used for research and information and websites are used for buying as conversions from LLM traffic tends to be lower than those sent by Google search. All this and more on a truly browserific edition of Webcology.

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Google is experimenting with several AI additions to several more Google products as it fixes bugs in its organic Google search product. It is getting to feel like SEOs are getting a better handle on how to work with and affect AI generated responses as generative AI reponses find their ways in between a greater number of user experiences. A small survey by Kevin Indig revealed a lot about user behaviors and AI drawing conclusions which included; AI Mode is sticky, clicks from generative AI responses tend to be transactional, and AI Mode matches site type with search intent. Another survey by enterprise platform Yext shows AI responses tend to rely on information from brand controlled sources rather than Reddit or YouTube. SEO researchers have found several ways to manipulate AI models, one of which is to fake publishing dates for better "freshness". Before getting too fresh with AI, one should consider former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's fear that AI models can be hacked and used for nefarious and even dangerous purposes by bad actors. Regardless of Eric's trip, Google's lawyers and lobbiests are working hard to convince the courts to allow Google to add Gemini to virtually everything by not punishing the company further in the ongoing Anti-Trust settlement.Gemini is close to taking control of Chrome Browsers along with Windows and Andriod operating systems while OpenAI is working on transforming into an operating system itself. Google has added NotebookLM to its list of user-triggered crawlers or fetchers. The WordPress legal saga is back on again, Microsoft talks about writing and preparing for AI crawlers, and Google apears to be again expanding the heavy lifing Google Business Profiles is doing with the introduction of GBP Insights. All this and lots lots more...

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Jim frets as his birthday comes up for renewal again next week. Meanwhile, Google's head of search, Elizabeth Reid was featured on an Economic Times podcast last week talking about the future of search, the effects LLMs have had on both search and user behaviors, the expanding roles of Agentic AI, and how important India and its extraordinary wealth of tech talent will be to Google's future. OpenAI announced its new Agentic Commerce Protocol which gives merchants a way to build agentic commerce experiences with ChatGPT users effectively bringing instant checkout to ChatGPT. Bots might be represented as traffic but a TollBit study shows Google sends 831 times the number of actual visitors to webites than AIs do. Video search is high in AI searches with YouTube being, by far, the dominant channel. Perplexity's AI search driven Comet Browser is now free and available to all users. Disney characters are being removed from sometimes sexually charged chatbots just as Tilly Norwood makes an appearance as a AI character created by production studio Particle6. Meta is going to sell targeted ads based on users' AI chats. Google is introducing a Gemini powered Google Home speaker/vocal interface in spring 2026. Google AI mode is getting better at analysing images and has introduced agentic features to US based users. Google Ads Reporting might have been affected by the num=100 change including possible issues with keyword recommendations. All this and far more on a preparty edition of Webcology.

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Google's August 2025 Spam Update ended four weeks after it launched in late August. Its impact was fairly significant however tracking it will be complicated by the num100 parameter change on Sept10. The bAD bug that overwhelmed some Google search users with ads has also been fixed. We learned Google is testing an AI search option codenamed Darksteel, which is as cool a name as Google has ever come up with. We figure they got Gemini to name it. Meanwhile the Trump regime has increased the fee for a H-1B visa 10x to $100,000. The move caused near panic in the tech world until the largest employers remembered they could still outsource the work and make it look like it was domestic. While smaller players in the US tech world remain worried, Canadian and European officials were seen whistling, cheering, and clicking their heels discretely. TikTok is about to be moved from Bytedance to Trumpworld as Trump allies Larry Ellison, Marc Andreesen, and Fox News are said to be acquiring what appears to be a US version of the video platform. Google is facing the spectre of another breakup as the DOJ has Google Ad Manager in its sights to settle the second US based anti-trust case. A previous settlement in the first anti-trust case resulted in a next-to-nothing punishment. Microsoft has added Anthropic's Claude AI models to 365 Copilot, a sign of evolution in its relationship with ChatGPT. Google Search Live is now live in the US. This allows a user's voice and camera input in AI Mode. Google is likely introducing an authentication process for SEO tools and crawlers. Google is testing AI generated product summaries in AI Mode product listings. These stories and a lot more...

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There are very dark days ahead as the Trump administration falls further towards fascism down the authoritarian hole. Between the suspension of late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel and the announcement a non-entity was going to be declared a terrorist organization is an intersection of brutal clampdown on free speech and the freedom to dissent. 

Meanwhile, Google appears to be testing the end of parameters in search strings in a bid to tame the effect of bots and AI crawlers on its own search systems. This has had the likely unintended consequence of breaking most search rank tracking tools. It has also produced a drop in search impressions of many websites in Search Console as queries that last week produced results (and thus impressions) no longer do, leading many to wonder how much of their traffic was bot traffic and how much was real. OpenAI has admitted that hallucinations aren't simple engineering or training flaws but are mathematically inevitable. Meanwhile OpenAI has improved its search functions with a focus on factuality, shopping, and formatting of results. Bing is adding ads to image search. Alphabet, Google's parent company is now worth a staggering $3 Trillion after a 32% increase in share values since the start of 2025. They might need the extra money as Rolling Stone publisher Penske is suing Google over its content and published material being used in AI Overviews. Bing appears to be investing a lot more energy into local search with a pending revitalization of Bing Places being teased to business owners in a recent Microsoft email. Lastly, Google has not added an AI Overview filter for Search Console as reported by a fake "Platinum Product Expert" in a Google forum. Sadly, Google is going to be as opaque as always around AI Analytics. 

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AI Mode has moved beyond basic English and is now available in Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese. AI Mode is also available in autocomplete and is said to soon be the default of search itself. And that's just what Google's got going. Apple is working to introduce a newly improved and vastly smarter version of Siri and an AI powered web search tool in 2026. Alibaba has introduced a translation AI that is vastly smarter with a fraction of the error rate of competitors. Court documents show Google recognizes the open web is in "rapid decline". Amazon is experiencing a significant drop in search visibility according to new data from Audience Key. Reddit launches Pro tools for publishers in Reddit Pro, and, a study shows that while 95% of ChatGPT users visit Google on a regular basis, only 14% of Google users got to ChatGTP. Rumors of search's demise are greatly exaggerated. Google has updated the search quality raters guidelines adding AI Overview examples and YMYL definitions. These are just a few of the dozens of stories we touch on this week in an AI everywhere edition.

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A GoFundMe campaign has been established to help pay Alan Blyweiss' family pay for his end of life arrangements and to helping classroom teachers buy school supplies through the Make a Wish Foundation. The August 2025 Spam Update continues to mulch its way through Google's index with few changes reported thus far. The rollout might take several weeks to complete. Google has updated its policies and guidelines for Google Business Profiles. There's a lot to go over so we're referring listeners to SERoundTable for highlighted details. The penalty for one of the Google Anti-Trust cases has been announced. Speculation had Google losing one or more parts of its business such as the Chrome browser after being declared a monopoly however the judge only ordered Google to share some data with its competitors. Released court records have shown us a bit more about how Google operates, including the FastSearch process of rapidly checking the veracity of AI generative statements. We also learn more about how Google ranks and scores documents in its index. A study shows AI and organic search converting at relatively even rates, WordPress introduces a new AI building tool called Telex, Character AIs (including one with that domain name) might be unsafe for children (duh?), Google fixes its crawl problem, and, Google's crawl budget is generally unrelated to algorithm updates. All this and a lot more ... 

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A wide ranging interview with the founder of AI knowledgebase tool, WAIKAY.IO 

Dixon has been instrumental in the founding and growth of three major SEO / SEM tools, Majestic Links Tool, Inlinks, and now Waikay. We talk to Dixon about AI, what Waikay means, how it works, and we end up talking about the future of search. 

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This was a mostly news episode that ends with an extraordinary interview with Dixon Jones, founder and CEO of AI tool Waikay. We have a long talk with Dixon that lasted about 45 minutes about AI tools, how search has evolved to this point, and thoughts on growth of AI tool sets. We figured we'd stick it on the end of this show and also publish it as a stand alone interview. Before we get to Dixon, it's too early to call it but fears of an AI bubble bubbled to the surface this week on the heels of last week's study showing relatively low ROI for the $40B invested in AI by large corporations. The speculation was spurred on by the always sort of super-squirrely Sam Altman who stands to gain most if other AI contenders fail. Meanwhile, Google announced its Google Trends API was going to remain in alpha release for a little while longer, we learn a bit more about the psychology of working with AIs, xAI's Grok chatbot allowed Google to index more than 300,000 user conversations, Meta's chatbots caught doing all sorts of awfulness, DeepSeek speaks for the CPP, talk about publishers and site traffic patterns, John Mueller reminds folks that hype often precedes scams, and much much more.

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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.

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