Views: 15If you prompt ChatGPT plus to “look up xyz” where: 1) It has no results in the LLM for “xyz” 2) and it has no results in its own extended index (common crawl and/or cached bing) 3) And live Bing API query presents no results It can and will send a browser agent out to look it up Google.…
Search Engine World
Views: 15 After Cloudflare posted yesterday about Perplexity using crawlers with stock agent names and not checking robots.txt, Perplexity has responded publicly. Their post, Agents or Bots? Making Sense of AI on the Open Web, offers the kind of nuanced response you’d expect from a company walking the line between growth and website friction. But it doesn’t dispute the core…
Views: 34Cloudflare’s recent post calls out Perplexity for operating undeclared web crawlers, quietly sidestepping robots.txt while using a stock chrome agentname. Cloudflare’s tone hints at alarm, but if you’ve been running a server for any length of time – or spent even five minutes on WebmasterWorld – you already know the score. If this is all deja vu, then you…
Views: 152If your business is a brick-n-mortar that relies on foot traffic or serves a specific geographic area, showing up in local search isn’t optional. Getting listed in Google Maps has been a given for years, but there’s a newer player in town: ChatGPT. It has been known for awhile that OpenAI is using MapBox for maps and business listings.…
Views: 27Microsoft’s Bing is growing – and not just in user numbers, but in revenue, relevance, and reach. Bing’s bet on AI is paying off. Let’s break down what’s happening and what it means for your digital strategy. Key Highlights from the Reports 1. 21% Revenue Growth, Driven by AI Microsoft’s FY 2025 earnings revealed that Bing and its ad…
Views: 128For years, sitemaps were a bit of an afterthought for SEOs. Nice to have. Helpful for crawling. But rarely urgent. In fact, many seasoned SEO’s (myself included) have recommended removing them as a maintenance nuisance. For about the last 10 years there has been no discernable evidence that they did anything at all. We felt that if you saw…
Views: 216What Is Common Crawl? It is one of the most influential data sources on the web and the mass majority of site owners don’t even realize their content is in it. So what is it? Common Crawl is a nonprofit organization that maintains an open repository of web crawl data. It is a snapshot of the internet, available to…
Views: 127Google just rolled out a batch of updates to experimental AI Mode in Search designed with education in mind. While the announcement was framed as a user-focused feature expansion, it carries real implications for site owners, SEOs, and small businesses that rely on organic visibility. What’s New in AI Mode? Google’s AI Mode, still labeled under Search Labs –…
Views: 19The Big Eight, a diverse and powerful group of large language models (LLMs), now stand as the new pillars of the AI community. From the pioneering research labs of OpenAI and Anthropic to the tech behemoths of Google and Microsoft, and the innovative newcomers from China and beyond, these eight LLMs represent a massive leap in what AI can…
Views: 46Go Google Ozzy Osbourne. Google just gave Ozzy Osbourne the kind of tribute most brands would kill for: a custom animated crawl across the top of his Knowledge Panel, complete with a “Thanks for the mayhem, Prince of Darkness” message and an animated train (a nod to Crazy Train). For SEOs, this is a reminder of how search results…
Views: 49Google launched a new initiative this week called Web Guide Labs, and it’s not what many expected. While it lives under the Googly Search Central umbrella, it’s not aimed at SEOs, developers, or even traditional site owners. This is a guide for non-technical users – small business owners, bloggers, and everyday users trying to figure out why their site…
Views: 287LLM-based platforms generate AI answers by running several queries across their training data. If they don’t have enough confidence in an answer, they will also use those multiple queries to perform multiple searches. Then they consolidate all the findings from these searches into an answer, which not only answers the initial prompt but also includes additional information to help…
Views: 141In a new study published July 22, Pew Research Center confirmed what we have seen in analytics since Google’s AIO/SOT Serps began showing up in search results: click-through rates are crashing – hard! Pew’s analysis, based on browsing by 30k U.S. adults in March 2025, puts stark hard numbers to the reality that SOT (Slop On Top) is cannibalizing…
Views: 26Google is now testing AI-generated summaries in the Discover feed. This is a feature that could further erode organic site traffic. The summaries are created by Gemini and appear under some article previews in the Discover widget on the Google app. Instead of a snippet written by a publisher or pulled from meta descriptions, the summary is machine-written and…
Views: 20Preferred sources is a feature that lets users select websites they trust for news. On the surface, this looks fairly benign; however, this is the first time that Google has allowed users to directly effect there own Serps. For 28 years, Google has steadfastly stuck to the one-size-fits-all search service. The only direct user influences to that have been…
Views: 24While watching the arrival of “AI” on to the tech scene, it sure seemed like many in the tech press were trying to gin up controversy between OpenAI and Google just for the sport of it. While those of us in tech realize the power of the new LLM models, we also know that Google aint going no where…
Views: 16The TikTok era has made the reposting of someone elses original content to drive engagement and views has been a major source of pain for users on all the “media” platforms. Hardly a day goes by when you don’t see some creator screaming about cloned accounts or reposted content. Some of these duplicate accounts can actually generate more views…
Views: 27In a move that seems like a No-Brainer, Google’s Android leader Sameer Samat says: “… we’re going to be combining ChromeOS and Android into a single platform“. Google appears to be working on one of its biggest platform shifts in recent years: merging ChromeOS into Android. For most users this might sound like a technical change with little real-world…
Views: 338Starting July 10, 2025, Search Engines began indexing public Instagram content from professional accounts, making Instagram SEO a fresh tool. This is a significant change that might change social exposure and content strategy for brands. It opens up a whole new channel for organic visibility by allowing individual Instagram content – photos, captions, and possibly even reels – to…
Views: 37A French journalist (translate to english) traced more than 4k news websites built almost entirely using AI tools. Not spun content. Not repurposed PLR. Fully synthetic sites: headlines, stories, images, entire layouts. Allegedly the goal wasn’t long-term credibility – it was short-term manipulation of Google Discover and content farm monetization. Each site in the network followed a simple formula:…
Views: 66Australia is moving ahead with a world-first requirement that search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo implement age-verification tools to protect minors from harmful online content. Under new draft industry standards released by the eSafety Commissioner, search services must either prevent access to material deemed inappropriate for children—such as pornography, self-harm, and extreme violence—or introduce mechanisms to verify a user’s…
Views: 16Google has announced an expansion of its Circle to Search feature, bringing new AI-driven capabilities to Android. Originally designed to let users circle or tap on-screen elements to search instantly, the tool now includes a dedicated “Ask This Page” AI mode that works on any app or browser content. The targets two growing use cases: Homework Help: Students can…