Industry News

OpenAI is reportedly scaling up its crawling infrastructure for the holiday shopping season. The folks at Vercel noticed OpenAI adding a lot of new IP ranges for its bots and crawlers.

The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, said he spends time on X on launch days to monitor how real people are using, interacting, and experiencing new Google product releases. He said he is "pretty active on launch day trying to understand what's working."

I know Google said on November 18th that Gemini 3 was "shipping in Search on day one." But no, it shipped on November 26th instead. Nick Fox, SVP at Google, said on X, "We've just shipped intelligent automatic model routing to Gemini 3 Pro for your toughest questions in AI Mode."

Google has updated how it shows events within AI Overviews. It can now show the direct display of events, instead of an event summary. It is also a bit buggy, but here is how it looks.

Google rolled out Ads Advisor, its AI-based chatbot for Google Ads, a couple of weeks ago. But some are noticing that if you have an MCC account, where you manage multiple advertisers under one account, the Ads Advisor responses can mix advice from one chat you had about one client account, to a new chat on a totally different client's account.

Google's John Mueller said that rewriting AI content by a human won't change the site's ranking in Google by default. Instead, he said, you need to rethink your whole content strategy and the purpose of the site.

Google may have pushed out a Google search ranking update over the past couple of days. Although the chatter was somewhat quiet, it picked up today and some of the tools are also picking up on an update. I suspect the update and volatility started a couple of days ago, maybe on Monday, November 24th.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Google uploaded its Thanksgiving Doodle to the Google Search home page, google.com. It is a typical and expected cute Google Doodle - more on that later. But when you click on it, you are not taken to the Google search results page, instead you are taken directly into AI Mode.

Google's John Mueller made a joke about how next year, SEO companies will be offering GEO-Detox services as a billable line item after many of the SEO companies already billed their clients for GEO services.