Industry News

(Mild spoilers ahead for The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler)

I recently finished the novel The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler (see Andrew Liptak’s excellent review here). On the surface it’s about discovering an octopus colony that evolved into a self-aware, intelligent community—and trying to communicate with them. But as with all good novels it’s actually about other things. It’s about loneliness, understanding each other, conservation—and yes, our relationship with AI.

First,...

Here’s Leah Tharin with a good reminder of what it means to ship, and how AI can (and cannot) help. In short, building is only one part of creating valuable products. Shipping involves: Ideation: There’s an idea Development: You build the idea Validation: You validate whether what you think the idea does is actually happening

Yes, vibe coding tools like Lovable et al. help you to ship things faster, but only as long as these ideas struggle with the “development” part and don’t need...

Here’s some research about professional success that I wasn’t aware of before, but this totally tracks with what I’ve observed in my career:

In fact, studies consistently find that traits such as conscientiousness (the quality of being dependable and disciplined), emotional stability or agreeableness have a stronger link with professional success, relationship durability and longevity than the links between those outcomes and someone’s intelligence or socio-economic background.

Now...

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

This week we had our first Google spam update in 8 months, the August 2025 spam update. This update touched down very quickly, likely within 24 hours. I also posted a Google search ranking volatility status report. Google is...

Often, but not always, when Google releases an algorithm update, we don't see the impact for the first few days. However, with the August 2025 spam update, we are likely seeing the effect within 24 hours after it was announced.

Some SEOs are noticing that when you look at your sitemaps report in Bing Webmaster Tools, for some sitemaps, some are missing the Index Coverage button. I personally can see the same thing for some of the properties I have access to within Bing Webmaster Tools.

Google is testing a rounded corner search result snippet card design again. We've seen this numerous times over the past decade or so and it seems to be back. The snippet sections are bordered in with rectangular outlines, and the corners of those rectangles are curved and circular.

Google may show a new "Profiles" button in the Google Business Profiles NMX dashboard. It may show if you manage multiple Google Business Profiles and you are in this test.

Google has added new guidance to the "Fix Search-related JavaScript problems" help document, specifically addressing JavaScript-based paywalls.