Views: 13Heads Up! Attackers are at it again – purchasing Google Ads targeting keywords related to SEMrush (they also did this back in march). When users search for “SEMrush” or similar terms, a malicious ad appears at the top of the results, leading to a fake SEMrush login page. These pages are well-crafted, closely mimicking the actual SEMrush interface. Unsuspecting…
Posts published in “Google”
Views: 9 In Dec of 2022, Google CEO Sundar Pichai famously called a “code red” meeting. It moved Google to it’s highest threat level in it’s history. Google shipped so many AI products today, that it really appears as though Google has dialed back the threat level. Clearly Google has leveraged the monopoly power of the search engine to…
..a must read comprehensive study analyzing 55.8m AIOs across 590m searches. The stunning report includes some sobering statistics for SEO’s. Top 50 domains get 30% of all AIO shoutouts...
The Google PR clown car will be fully loaded and ready to deliver a massive scale of stories this week with Google I/O taking place. Some stuff we are tracking (stop back for updates):
Views: 7Y Combinator just stepped into the Google antitrust fight – and they’re not mincing words. In a newly filed amicus brief, the startup accelerator backs the U.S. Department of Justice and state attorneys general in calling for strong remedies against Google’s long-standing dominance in search and ad tech. YC argues that the monopolistic death-grip Google has created over the…
Views: 115Let’s be honest: SEOs have been doing Google’s dirty work for decades. We clean up the web. We format content so their bots don’t choke. We spoon-feed them useless tags like schema. And we keep playing by their rules, even when they rewrite them mid-game, all the while scraping our content for AI answers. While Google claims to “organically…
No, it really does feel like everyone is complaining about Google lately. Across blogs, forums, newsletters, news sites, ChatBots, and threads, there's a growing consensus that Google just isn't what it used to be. Longtime users and SEOs alike are documenting their frustrations: too many ads, too little relevance, and an overwhelming sense that Google is optimizing for everything except users.
Google’s own court-filed slide deck just spilled more tea on Navboost, and the details punch a few holes in years of SEO guesswork. The newly released trove goes further, mapping more than 100 raw signals into a ranking stew that still leans on old-school PageRank while layering in LLM toys like RankEmbed, re-ranking Twiddlers, and the rumored mysterious quality metric called Q*Star.
Views: 136Before Google trained on half the web anyway, it floated six opt-out tiers that would have let publishers throttle indexing, training, or SGE display. The newly unsealed DOJ remedies slide lays out those options. And proof that meaningful publisher control was little more than a talking point. (No public discourse was held involving publishers that we are aware of).…
Views: 14In a move that some will surely see as political, Google went a more full rainbow gradient with their logo today. Brett TabkeAs the CEO and founder of Pubcon Inc., Brett Tabke has been instrumental in shaping the landscape of online marketing and search engine optimization. His journey in the computer industry has spanned over three decades and has…
“Giving traffic to publisher sites is kind of a necessary evil.” That quote from a former Google exec sets the tone. In this three-part series, we unpack NavBoost—Google’s behavior-driven ranking system that might influence more than PageRank ever did. From DOJ trial slides to buried log analyzers, this is the most important ranking revelation since PageRank. If you're still optimizing for keywords and backlinks without thinking about user signals, you're missing the biggest ranking factor no one is talking about.
Views: 29The bad news keeps coming on this Friday for Google. $1.375 Billion Settlement with Google Related to Texans’ Data Privacy Rights This settles a raft of old claims, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere, concerning product policies we have long since changed,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda tells The Verge. “We are pleased to put them behind us,…
Google is waking up to a trifecta of global headaches today – each one a bit more absurd or than the last. From the courtroom to the classroom the tech giant is at the center of controversy, chaos, and questionable decisions.
At first glance, Google throwing a summit for seven social media influencers sounds like a bad Onion headline.
Ten years ago, for every two pages Google scraped, you got one visitor, today, it’s six pages scraped for one visitor. And with AI? It’s 250 to 1… or 6,000 to 1!
Views: 13A new academic study has stirred up old debates about search engine loyalty and added fresh insight to the lethargic DOJ antitrust case against Google. The paper, Sources of Market Power in Web Search, isn’t just a field experiment about consumer behavior; it’s a reflection of how deeply default choices shape digital habits. As is always the case with…
Google is quietly laying the groundwork to monetize conversational AI, starting with chatbot-based AdSense ads. After testing ad integrations with select AI startups like iAsk and Liner in 2024, Google is now inviting more chatbot developers to embed AdSense-style ads directly into their conversational experiences.
A new wave of advertiser pushback is gaining traction – this time through mass arbitration rather than a class action lawsuit. Attorneys working with ClassAction.org are organizing advertisers to challenge Google over alleged anticompetitive behavior in the display advertising market.
A court filing just confirmed what many web publishers feared: Google's opt-out tool for AI training doesn't apply to Search AI. Despite 50% of content being excluded from Gemini training, Google still used that same data to train its search-based models—unless publishers blocked indexing entirely.
Views: 80In freshly disclosed testimony during Google’s antitrust trial, a Google DeepMind exec confessed that Google continues training some of its AI products on publisher content even after those publishers opt out of AI training. The revelation adds fuel to the fire as regulators weigh remedies following Google’s recent conviction for monopolizing the search market. Key Admission: Google Bypasses AI…
Views: 26A new research paper from Alibaba has introduced ZeroSearch – a new approach to training AI models to search without using real search engines. The implications? A direct shot at the value Google’s API monopoly has offered in the AI development lifecycle. And for SEOs and the web economy at large, it signals yet another fracture in the traditional…
Views: 38Two years ago, I said that ChatGPT should be seen as a “Red Alert : This is Not A Drill” type of moment. While I still feel that was correct, I also knew that you don’t extract the Google whale from the kiddie pool of the web easily. It was obvious that Google was going to fight tooth-n-nail –…
Views: 210 Signal Signal, Everywhere a Signal? What we know from our experiences running websites for three decades, is that there will be surprises in the data NavBoost surfaces that will run counter to “prevailing wisdom“. It always works that way. For example, I heard 20 years ago directly from an search engine programmer (ahem, no name…they still work there),…
"Yes, we have clear one-to-one data over the last nine months showing rankings being influenced by clicks. People told us that we needed to think in terms of large scale in order to make this work, but that is just not the case in the long tail where conversion rates are highest. We saw results with as few as a dozen clicks on Serps a day over six months. We can't wait to see six more months of data.
Views: 32According to The Information (paywalled but reported by TechCrunch) Google’s Gemini reached 350 million monthly active users as of March, revealed during Google’s antitrust case. This marks rapid growth from 9 million daily users in October 2024 to 35 million daily users recently. Despite this surge, Gemini trails behind ChatGPT, which had about 600 million monthly users, and Meta…