Focus on Local? Big heads-up -> Apple officially opens ad bookings for businesses on Apple Maps ahead of an upcoming full rollout across the US and Canada

Apple Maps opens ad booking for businesses, promotional offer available - 9to5Mac

Ads are coming to Apple Maps soon in the US and Canada, and today businesses can start booking their own ads.

9to5mac.com

Visible watermark out :) -> Google will now allow users to remove visible watermark from its AI generations "That's including images, videos, and songs. Google specified that this won’t affect the invisible SynthID watermark and C2PA standard-related metadata."

Google will now allow users to remove visible watermark from its AI generations | TechCrunch

Turning off this setting won't affect invisible benchmarks used to identify an AI generated file

techcrunch.com

I'm not sure this is the image generation in AIOs that Google previously announced, but those recipe AIOs now contain graphics demonstrating how to create the recipe. I can't reproduce but an interesting development for AIOs...

AI-Generated Images In Google AI Overviews

A month ago, we reported that Google said it would be rolling out AI-generated images within AI Overviews in Google Search. Well, it seems Google is starting to roll out those AI-generated images in A...

seroundtable.com

Yep -> Shopify: AI referrals up 197%, but organic search still leads traffic "Organic search still sent more traffic to Shopify merchants than all tracked AI platforms combined. Shopify said the data suggests shoppers continue using traditional search even as AI adoption accelerates."

Shopify: AI referrals up 197%, but organic search still leads traffic

New Shopify data shows AI drives higher-converting, first-time buyers, but Google still delivers the biggest share of merchant traffic.

searchengineland.com

The models keep rolling. And Gemini Spark will start using 3.7 Flash today -> Google unveils Gemini 3.7 Flash, its "most intelligent workhorse model" for coding and agents "For knowledge-dense fields like finance, law, and biosciences, 3.7 Flash delivers improved reasoning and accuracy."

Introducing Gemini 3.7 Flash

Gemini 3.7 Flash is our most intelligent workhorse model yet for coding and agents.

blog.google

Every since Barry's post last week about AI Mode queries surfacing in GSC, I started thinking about a cleaner way to get more of that data (along with urls being cited). You can read my post to accomplish this today. Brace yourself, there are some wild prompts in there. :)

How To Find And Organize AI Mode Queries Via the Search Analytics API, Analytics Edge, and Claude Cowork

Glenn Gabe of GSQi explains how to export and analyze AI mode queries via the Search Analytics API, Analytics Edge, and Claude.

gsqi.com

A new angle for the Google vs SerpApi lawsuit: protecting its licensing partners (like Reddit). "Google alleges that Reddit, which licenses content to Google, specifically directed Google "not to enable third parties to extract and independently commercialize the licensed content."

Google Amends Lawsuit Against SerpApi

After Google's lawsuit against SerpAPI, the Google Search scraper tool, was dismissed a month ago, Google has decided to amend the complaint. Google filed the amendment on August 10, 2026 as an "Amend...

seroundtable.com

Oh boy -> "Right now, quantity and speed trump quality." -> A look at AI news website RuntimeWire, which costs $100/day to run and “beat” human reporters to OpenAI's Black Hat disclosure, favoring quantity over quality

Oh Lord, AI Reporters Are Actually Breaking Big News

Last week, an AI newsroom beat mainstream journalists—including WIRED—to a story about OpenAI and hacking. It’s just the beginning.

wired.com

Not sure if anyone reported this, but I've noticed ChatGPT not providing a visible link to view sources. You have to click the overflow menu and then click view sources. That can definitely decrease visibility and clicks for citations... I'm seeing this across both paid and free accounts today.

By *subdomain & protocol* -> I have written several posts about the importance of understanding that robots.txt files are handled by subdomain and protocol. i.e. sites can unknowingly have different robots.txt files for www, non-www, http, and/or https. searchengineland.com/mixed-direct...

I called this the "hreflang magic trick" and published two posts about it. If you are confused about how this works, read my posts (I'll post a link in the comments). Most site owners I explain it to have no idea it was happening and how GSC reports on clicks and impressions.

Google Says Hreflang URLs Not Really Indexed

Google's Gary Illyes said that hreflang alternates, hreflang URLs are not "indexed in the proper sense." In short, Google just keeps the hreflang URL as alternate URLs. So the URL is not what is getti...

seroundtable.com

50K query fan-outs (based on Web Guide) + you get the spreadsheet of data -> What 50k Query Fan-Outs Reveal About Brands via @dr-pete.bsky.social

What 50k Query Fan-Outs Reveal About Brands (+ Free Data!)

What do 50k query fan-outs reveal about LLM bias, brand visibility, and search intent? Explore fresh data on Gemini prompts + download the free raw dataset.

moz.com

Good thread about why Google might be testing those 'goto' links in the SERPs (which I shared about the other day). The redirects have been tested over the past few weeks. Viktor explains why this could be a very bad sign for third-parties scraping Google (tools/AI companies). x.com/glenngabe/st...

Quote from an article after they initially shut down overstock.com in 2023 -> Shutting down Overstock was ‘a fatal mistake’ The initial fall in visibility was huge (and expected), but the lack of visibility once it relaunched is not good. Not good at all.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the big OpenAI device will be ... a smart speaker. Oof -> OpenAI's new device, slated for 2027, is a hockey puck-sized smart speaker with moving parts that help give it personality, likely costing $300+

OpenAI's ChatGPT Speaker Will Be Hockey Puck-Sized and Cost Over $300

OpenAI's upcoming AI device is a hockey-puck-sized, doughnut-shaped smart speaker with no display, reports Bloomberg. The product is meant to be easy to carry around with one hand, and it will have "m...

macrumors.com

Whoa, Cloudflare is launching AI visibility reporting (for free I believe). For companies providing those services and tracking, this is a huge heads-up. You can sign up for the beta today ('Register interest'). See below: blog.cloudflare.com/aeo/

From ranking to recommended: get your site ready to thrive in the age of AI agents

More than half of requests now come from machines, not people. Agent Readiness shows how well agents can discover and read your site, while Answer Engine Optimization tracks how often AI assistants re...

blog.cloudflare.com

But is anyone using Ask Maps? That's the big question -> Google is expanding its Gemini-powered Ask Maps feature in English to 130+ countries and adds agentic food ordering, hotel booking, and attraction searching

In Google's announcement about the Gen AI reporting, it explained that the data is in the overall Performance reporting and the Gen AI reporting is a new, separate view. So yes, you can still see AIO and AI Mode queries. That's if you can figure it out... :) www.seroundtable.com/google-searc...

Well, that's interesting... :) Time is serving markdown to AI bots versus the typical html page a user sees. Here is what I see as ClaudeBot and ChatGPT-User. Vincent Schmalback wrote an article explaining this. See the link below. www.vincentschmalbach.com/time-serves-...

The NYT quarterly earnings revealed revenue from affiliate (Wirecutter) increased 7.1% to $75.5M. So I checked search visibility. Yep, Wirecutter surged with the May core update (and beyond into July). So the surge in revenue makes a lot of sense. :) www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/b...

"It's not commodity content"... -> Some interesting quotes from Reddit's CEO Steve Huffman during their earnings call last week. "Reddit's content is in demand and it's not *commodity content*..." And "Reddit is used for training, it's used for post-training, to teach these models how to talk..."

Reddit Q2 2026 Earnings Call | User Growth & Data Licensing Inflows Drive Double-Digit Revenue

YouTube video by i101

youtube.com

Newish client. From 21K+ domains disavowed to none in the blink of an eye. They never should have been disavowing links. They never set up unnatural links, never paid for links, never had a manual action, etc. They just saw "toxic links" show up in third-party tools and thought they should disavow.

Heads-up, I said this would happen again. Grokipedia just tanked again on 7/26. That's after originally surging, then tanking, and then surging again in May. It's obviously 100% AI-generated content and there was no way it would remain strong in Google over the long-term. Now it got hammered again.

The Mystery of ChatGPT's Phantom Index Continues... I have an important update based on the case study I wrote in late June about the site with no Google visibility yet it was being cited heavily in ChatGPT. It's still being heavily cited in ChatGPT & w/out Google/Bing rankings... It's wild.

Surging in ChatGPT, Dead in Google – The curious case of a YMYL site with no search visibility in Google, but cited like crazy in ChatGPT

Glenn Gabe of GSQi covers an interesting AI Search case study where a site with no Google visibility is surging like crazy in ChatGPT.

gsqi.com

Great to see Top Stories in many AIOs for newsy queries now. And 'Preferred Sources' bubbling up my top publishers. If you work for a news or media publisher, take some time to review AIOs with Top Stories modules.

An update on Reddit's lawsuit against Perplexity and Serpapi -> A US judge largely denies Perplexity and three data scraper firms' bid to dismiss Reddit's lawsuit over claims of copyright law violations under DMCA

Reddit keeps its strange DMCA fight over Google search results alive

Reddit advances lawsuit accusing Perplexity AI of conspiring with web scraper.

arstechnica.com

I once audited a site with 2.5M urls indexed when they only had 2.5K urls. They had gotten hammered by a core update... How? They let internal search urls get indexed and third-parties could hijack their internal search results to publish pages. John covers that scenario in the podcast. Beware. :)

Barry Schwartz@rustybrick.com · 2w ago

The Google guidelines no longer say to block internal search results but you still likely should to reduce server load issues and potential hack situations and more www.seroundtable.com/internal-sea... via @johnmu.com #google #seo #googleseo #search #internalsearch #hack #spam #content

Well, I know one button that will get a lot of use... lol -> LinkedIn Introduces a 'Seems Like AI Slop' Button www.404media.co/linkedin-int...

LinkedIn Introduces a 'Seems Like AI Slop' Button

Following 404 Media's reporting on how LinkedIn is full of AI slop, the platform is giving users a chance to report it when they see it.

404media.co

With AIOs expanding, if you want to know the percentage of queries you rank for where AIOs show up, you can do that easily in Semrush. Just add a filter for SERP features, AIOs, and SERP features on SERP, and note the number of queries. Then remove the filter and see the total queries.

Good article from Blake Stimac on CNET about the shared Claude chats getting indexed, with a long quote from me about how blocking via robots.txt works -> Private Claude Conversations Have Been Indexed by Search Engines - CNET

Private Claude Conversations Have Been Indexed by Search Engines - CNET

Shared Claude chats were made readily available for anyone who knew where to look.

share.google