Webcology

Adobe bought SEMrush in a $1.9Billion dollar deal putting SEO back in the middle of the boardroom again. Jim and Kristine discuss the purchase, Adobe's intentions, and the implications of Adobe owning SEMrush, Search Engine Journal, the SMX Conference circuit, and other important assets in the search marketing world. In other breaking SEO related news, someone related to search going by the na...

The relentless shifts towards AI powered everything being everywhere in the digital environment are accelerating and the evolution of digital marketing services is starting to keep pace. Previsible, which recently bought the legendary agency Internet Marketing Ninjas, announced the acquisition of Googlite founded data-driven search agency Improove. Google introduces Opal, an AI tool that it claims...

In a week where Telsa shareholders are likely to award CEO Elon Musk a Trillion dollar pay package, rival technologarch Sam Altman says he'll be ashamed if OpenAI wasn't the first company to be run by an AI CEO. This start a debate between Jim and Kristine in which Jim suggests the C-Level could easily be the right place to replace workers with AI in order to improve corporate bottom lines...

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 b...

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 be...

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 futur...

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...

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 param...

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. Aliba...

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 pol...

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.  Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: http...

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 Di...

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...

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 leve...

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 dev...

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 start...

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...

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...

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 e...

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...

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 citi...

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 sea...

Google is fast approaching the FIND OUT stage of its multiple anti-trust cases with the US Department of Justice and EU regulatory bodies. It is very possible the DOJ could order Google to sever its relationship with its Chrome browser in coming months. That leads to speculation on what other decisions might be coming down and how throwing spanners into the cogs of the machine Alphabet has built m...

Mikkel deMib Svendsen is a SEO Legend. One of the original SEOs, Mikkel was known around early search conferences as the man in the bright orange suit. His almost adversarial take on Google in the early days set a tone and standard for how SEOs felt about working with the search engines in a friendly game of cat and mouse. Mikkel has continued practicing SEO while pursuing several other life passi...

Google introduced its new Ad Strength Best Practices Guide which got hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger to pine for the days when the SEO world used cool names like "Ad Strength" to describe stuff. Google has again been declared a monopoly by yet another US court while, just to keep up, a UK based class action over Google's search dominance has been approved. It wasn't a gre...