Webcology

Wikipedia erased an entry about legendary search journalist Barry Schwartz citing their editorial team's perception Barry has a commercial interest in a Wikipedia entry. That he's spent most of this century writing a daily compendium of search engine related news stories every day since 2003 didn't appear to change their opinion. Including his work with Search Engine Watch and Search E...

The war with Iran is nearly a month old and the effects are being felt across the greater economy. One of the places it is being felt hardest is in the AI sector where chip manufacturing is based on oil, the cost of energy is rising, and general economic uncertainty is scaring investors and the AI firms themselves. Aside from the war, the biggest story this week was the leak of all that Claude cod...

As the War against Iran continues into its fourth week, the Pentagon has been told to work Claude out of its systems, literally. The Secretary of War designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk at the beginning of March and wants it gone now. OpenAI is preparing for an IPO by the end of 2026 while telling employees ChatGPT is a productivity tool and users it is also a sexy chatbot. Either way, OpenAI...

A couple of GSC bugs to report of the top with BigQuery exports not working and an issue with the date selector in crawl stats. In both cases, it's a them thing, not a you thing. If you're running ads through Goolge Ads in the EU you need to confirm if the campaign has political content by the annual deadline of March 31. You can do this via the "campaign settings" link.  AI is hav...

And, suddenly last Saturday, we were at war with Iran. That will have profound effects on our economy and the tech industry. If the war is a component in a tech story, or tech is a big part of a war story, we will report and talk about it as such. If not, we'll try to leave most of the war reporting and commentary to political pundits and journalists.  The February 2026 Google Core Update whic...

The adoption rate of Agentic AIs appears staggering. Making, deploying, and managing AI driven agents is easier than ever. This, of course, introduces a myriad of security concerns, many of which will become apparent faster than we think. Hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger talk about security and privacy concerns with Clawdbot and Copilot. Google's AI Mode is operable in 53 new language...

The situation remains normalizing, all facshed up. At least some of the folks working at Palantir are starting to understand what their work is doing to their world. According to reports in Wired Magazine and 404Media, employees of the meta-surveillance giant are not told how their products are extensively used by ICE to target and round-up real people. Listeners will be relieved to know that the...

There is no sugar coating how brutal the last week has been. ICE agents murdered yet another regular person in the American federal government's relentless and brutal crackdown on Minneapolis Minnesota. This week's extra-judicial killing was broadcast live to the Internet by dozens of bystanders with mobile phones as was the previous one, just a week before. The mental and emotional burden...

Elon Musk's AI-Grok continues to churn out non-consensual images of people including sexualized images of children, an issue that continues into this week. Google is integrating core search signals into its AI Experience in AI Mode and AI Overviews. This, along with Personal Intelligence, the ring that binds all your Google apps that's coming to Gemini and AI Mode soon, will work to "s...

It's a new year which, as with all new years, brings a chance for a renewal, a hope of a new beginning, and in this, the beginning of the second quarter of the 21st century, that hope was dashed within 48 hours with the invasion, kidnapping, and regime change in Venezuela and the killing of Renee Good. These events mark a transit point that suggests the American government will continue its jo...

Five high profile OG Search Engine Optimization experts talk about the year that was and the year that may well be in our annual Year End Revue. Carolyn Shelby - Principle SEO at Yoast, Ryan Jones - Senior Vice President of SEO at Razorfish and the creator of SERPrecon.com, and  Topher Kohen - Legendary Large Scale Publisher SEO, formerly of CBSNews and CNN.com, join Jim Hedger and Kristine Schach...

The December 2025 Core Update continues to roll out, as one does pretty much every year around this time. Some are seeing results early but there hasn't been a major stir or fuss from the SEO community. That might be because it is somewhat harder to judge early outcomes of a core update based on page ranking or page traffic while these metrics are being effected by the transition to generative...

It's the middle of December and throughout the Web, all the crawlers are stirring and AI Bots getting fed. The products displayed on folk's sites with due care, in hopes that St. Googlishous would bring traffic there. Suddenly somewhere in GA4 there arose such a clatter, I had to get off of my ass to see what was the matter. And then what from Schwartz's deli of news briefs should appe...

It was a long week following a long Thanksgiving weekend that opened on CyberMonday with a login-outage at Spotify. Folks who logged out of their Spotify accounts on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday awoke to a virtual lockout which was finally cleared between 3 and 5pm. Google Search Console reports are lagging a couple days behind. This podcast was recorded on a Thursday and that data hadn't been...

Even Google's Gary Illyes is saying it, "the change is hard to accept" in regards to the evolution of AI in search but that SEM and SEO will coevolve with search, just like it has the past 30 years. That optimism is something to be thankful for, even if AI is likely to mess up thousands if not millions of Thanksgiving dinners as it mashes more than potatoes with pinches of this and tha...

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...