Industry News

I am seeing numerous tests now that seem to prove that OpenAI's ChatGPT search feature is using Google Search's index or search results page to serve its own search results.

Google is now also showing AI Overviews for explanations of lyrics. If you do some searches asking about the meanings of some songs, Google may give you an AI Overview with its answer.

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.

Google says normal SEO works to rank in the Google AI Overviews. Google released the Google Trends API...

Gary Illyes from Google said at the Google Search Live Deep Dive event yesterday that you don't need to do GEO, LLMO or anything else to show up in Google AI Overviews, you just need to do normal SEO.

Google has released an alpha version of an API to access Google Trends data - the Google Trends API. "This new API will help Researchers, Journalists, and Developers to understand Search behaviors and patterns," said Daniel Waisberg of Google.

Google's John Mueller and Martin Splitt spoke for just under 40 minutes on the topic of CSS and SEO. They covered why CSS files matter for SEO, how modern CSS frameworks impact pages, and the SEO implications of CSS class names and pseudo elements.

Google's John Mueller gave some advice on how to handle show web pages, for when the event or show or performance is complete. How do you handle those old show URLs. He said it is similar to dealing with products and he gave similar advice a couple times around event web pages.

Recently, Google said that no AI system is currently using the LLMS.txt file. But maybe some are starting to? OpenAI may be starting to discover and crawl LLMS.txt files on websites. While Google's Gary Illyes said they won't be doing that.

Google announced it will be removing the block control category named "Significant Skin Exposure" from the block controls. That means if you have apps or websites where you want to ensure ads don't have a lot of skin in the ads showing, you won't be able to do that after July 30, 2025.

This is some fascinating research.

Researchers at Oxford University and King’s College London tested LLMs using game theory, giving LLMs from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic prompts that mimicked the setup of the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma.

They found that Google’s Gemini is “strategically ruthless,” while OpenAI is collaborative to a “catastrophic” degree. Their paper, published on the preprint repository Arxiv (and not yet peer reviewed), claims that this is due to OpenAI model’s...