Industry News

It looks like Google is testing a new report within Google Search Console named AI contribution. I have no clue what it looks like but I suspect it is a lot like the Bing Webmaster Tools AI performance reports.

Google was asked if it is possible to add a new status to the XML sitemap statuses for "still processing." John Mueller from Google responded on Blueshy saying, "I've chatted with the teams involved about this on & off, I've seen that it can be annoying." But he added he has nothing to announce.

Google announced that on August 20, 2026 it will experiment with an updated set of commonly used ad technology partners. If the experiments go well, Google will switch it "on or after June 5, 2026."

Derek Thompson goes into the history of the "flow" concept, and how tech and entertainment companies learned to simulate it without any of the substance psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi originally had in mind:

Algorithmic flow is flow without achievement, flow without challenge, flow without even volition… To be lost in the lazy river of algorithmic media is to be lost the current of life without a mind. Zombie flow.

Ten years ago the question was how to get into flow more often....

Google's John Mueller reconfirmed that Google Search may simply ignore outbound links from sites that violate its search spam policies. This is not new, Google has been doing this manually and algorithmically for years now but he reiterated this on Bluesky.

The NY Times commissioned a study that says AI Overviews have holes in both grounding and accuracy.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Catching up on the newsletter...

Amol Avasare, Anthropic’s Head of Growth, said on Lenny’s Podcast that maybe PM jobs are not going to shrink as much as we may have thought…

Rather than immediately replacing PMs, AI is currently increasing engineering leverage the fastest, which creates new pressure on PMs and designers. In larger organizations, that may actually increase the value of PMs who can guide priorities, manage alignment, and sharpen decision-making—especially as engineers take on more "mini-PM"...

Lalit Maganti writes about building a SQLite parser with AI — a project he’d been putting off for eight years, finished in three months. His comparison of AI coding to slot machines is uncomfortably familiar:

I found myself up late at night wanting to do “just one more prompt,” constantly trying AI just to see what would happen even when I knew it probably wouldn’t work. The sunk cost fallacy kicked in too: I’d keep at it even in tasks it was clearly ill-suited for, telling myself “maybe...

On the latest Search Off The Record Podcast, Martin Split and Gary Illyes discussed the growing page weight issue and how that impacts users and Googlebot crawling. This follows Google updating its documentation to clarify file size limits for Googlebot (and various versions of Googlebot).

If you're using Gemini in Chrome (the sidebar you can summon via a button in Chrome), then you might be happy about the latest feature that showed up in Chrome Canary. After running a prompt...

Google's March 2026 broad core update has officially completed rolling out. Google announced this via X this morning and the Search Status Dashboard has been updated to document the rollout. The update took 12 days and 4 hours to complete...

In January Google announced a change to how AI Overviews worked where clicking the "Show more" button at the end of an AIO would directly take you into AI Mode. But that was only on mobile. Now it seems Google is testing that functionality, but on desktop...

Google's Sundar Pichai was on the Cheeky Pint podcast and was asked about the future of Search. He basically laid out a future where Search is Jarvis-like where users will be completing tasks and have "many threads running"...

Spotted in the wild are what appear to be swipeable GBP location assets.

This is a programming note that I am completely offline for the last days of Passover holiday Wednesday and Thursday. I am likely not going to schedule any stories, I apologize (still in recovery mode). So I apologize for the lack of stories here. I hope to come back soon...