Articles
Research, experiments and analysis on AI visibility, generative search, SEO and how artificial intelligence systems understand the web.
Google Quietly Opens Product Review Uploads Through the Merchant Center API
Google has quietly removed a significant automation limitation from Merchant Center: merchants can now upload and manage product reviews through the Merchant API. Until this docume...
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Google Quietly Expands Aggregator and Supplier Search Units to Local Businesses
Google has expanded its Aggregator and Supplier Search Units to a major new category: local business queries. The change, documented on September 18, 2026, means Google's EEA-speci...
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Google Search Drops Free Product Listings Across the EEA—Another DMA-Driven SERP Change
Google Search has removed its familiar free product listings and product carousel formats across the European Economic Area, producing one of the clearest ecommerce-visible consequ...
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Bing Joins Google in Putting Human Verification Between Bots and Search Results
Microsoft Bing has been spotted placing a “Verify you are human” challenge between a search request and the search results, adding another potential obstacle for systems that colle...
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Google Is Putting AI Mode Inside the Search Box—The Boundary Between Search and AI Search Is Disappearing
Google is testing another interface change that makes the distinction between traditional Search and AI Mode increasingly difficult to see. An AI Mode button is appearing directly....
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Google Is Winning the War Against SEO Scrapers—and Your Ranking Tools May Be Showing the Wrong Data
Google's campaign against automated access to its search results appears to be creating a new problem for the SEO industry: some of the dashboards used to diagnose ranking changes....
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Google Quietly Redefines Mediapartners-Google: Your Crawler Rules Can Affect More Than AdSense
Google made a small but technically important change to its crawling documentation on September 17, 2026: Mediapartners-Google should no longer be understood simply as the AdSense....
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Ahrefs Turns Rank Tracker and GSC Notes Into Shared SEO Workspace Data
Ahrefs has made a small but useful collaboration change to Rank Tracker and its Google Search Console charts: user notes are now shared across the workspace. Instead of behaving li...
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Ahrefs Just Put Live SEO Data Inside ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot—MCP Is Now Available on Lite Plans
Ahrefs has lowered the barrier to connecting its SEO database directly to AI assistants. On September 18, 2026, the company updated its product changelog to confirm that Ahrefs MCP...
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Google Search Status: No Official Incidents Reported Across Crawling, Indexing, Ranking or Serving on September 17
Google's official Search Status Dashboard continues to show a clean bill of health on September 17, 2026. At the time of checking, Google reports “No incidents”, with no service di...
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Google Is Testing Local Search Ads That Expand When Users Hover Over Them
Google is testing a more interactive version of its Sponsored Places format in Search: when a user moves the pointer over one of the local ads, the placement can expand to reveal a...
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