Where the last weeks of August are usually mellow, the week after Labor Day is always hyper-intense in the tech world and it was no different this year with one pretty notable exception. In no previous year has the post-summer season opened with statements about the >10% chance the AI technologies we're investing our proverbial farms in will somehow be used to kill us all within a decade. This week we have a larger selection of somewhat scary stories than most weeks. We've learned that Anthropic is building a surveillance database of Americans and non-Americans who oppose AI infrastructure and data-centers. We've also learned that Flock uses data from large scale protests to train law enforcement. We learned the Department of Homeland Security has established a "predictive policing" unit currently deployed to border control stations in Washington State and Texas. On a lighter note, we learned the White House has posted cute but overtly racist video games on its dot-gov website and gotten its wrist slapped by Tetris. The week after Labor Day is always hyper-intense. Acceleration culture for the win eh! 

Meanwhile:

- Google might soon introduce an entirely new way of ranking pages in its index, DeepMind's Autoregressive Ranking system

- Matt Mullenweg is out at Automattic, the for-profit arm of WordPress but still the Exec Director of the WordPress project

- Anthropic is denying one of its employees, Levent Alpoge, credit for co-completing a proof of the Nevier-Stokes Problem, a Millennial Prize candidate and one of the worlds most challenging problems. Alpoge worked with NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster for years but, since joining Anthropic and using it to help solve the problem (Buckmaster used OpenAI), Anthropic wants sole claim to his part of the solution.

- LG TVs might or might not be watching, listening, and reporting back on you. 

- Meta's Muse, a personal AI, has launched. Meta considers it both an advisor and an agent. 

- Meta continues to allow graphic sexual abuse of minors in advertising for nudifying AIs. Meta has been aware of this problem for several weeks but the issue persists. 

- X Money will be the only payout option for US content creators on the X-system as of this week

- A judge has ruled that X gets to keep the name Twitter but has lost control of the blue bird logo

- Google is displeased with its own results resulting from its compliance with the EUs DMA. Details in the podcast. :)

- Google Shopping Ads are having a reverse crocodile effect due to AI overviews. 

- Google has fixed the Gemini 3.8 citation bug and is again showing source links

- Google has been forced to display a warning about predatory pricing with Booking Partner search widgets in the EU

- Google has published a document outlining regional differences in search experiences

- Sometimes there is no one right answer to an SEO problem - That depends. "There are often several so choose one and make it the right one", says John Mueller

- Google can lose faith in sites that don't correct, or forget to correct bad habits

All this and more in a show that will never lose faith in our humanity, no matter how many bad habits and mistakes get made along the way.

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In the spirit of renaming stuff that shouldn't be renamed, Jim has unilaterally renamed GSC, Google Search Cowards. Earlier this week, Google acquiesced to the Trump regime's renaming of Lake Ontario by Executive Order. Apple followed suit a couple days later. Both met waves of derision from both sides of the border but as of recording of the podcast, the change appears permanent for US users. Canadian users with setting set to Canada will see the correct name, Lake Ontario, as will international users with the incorrect stolen name added in brackets below. MapQuest, the original online mapping tool, has publicly refused to change the name, which first appeared on French maps in 1688 and predates European settlement. MapQuest is now the top loaded app at Google Play and the Apple Store, surpassing ChatGPT for the #1 spot.

In other news:

- Gemini 3.8 Flash is now used for Google's AI Mode,

- The world of WordPress is in a code red moment as WordPress announces a proactive security initiative over fears hackers will utilize increasingly powerful AI models to break into WP sites

- Google is outlining who can license its search data in Europe

- Google's Search Coward tool (GSC) has rolled the AI Performance report and AI control to all GSC profiles around the world

- GA data for September 1 is missing. It's not you, it's them. No word on when or even if it will return

- The Trump regime is now saying Anthropic has "... done what we asked", and is back on the right side with them

- A federal judge has ruled that AI generated CSAM (Child Sexual Adult Material) is protected speech in the United States because a real child was not hurt in the production of it, even though real children were hurt producing the images AI models trained on to create the CSAM in the first place. Perhaps someone wants to check the AI model maker's hard drives, just to see what's there?

- The FTC is going after Amazon for an alleged $20billion advertising surcharge scam

- Google avoids losing its Ad Exchange in anti-trust settlement

- ChatGPT now a "very large online search engine" by EU definition

- OpenAI faces more lawsuits in the wake of the shootings in Tumbler Ridge BC

- The US government has sided in court with OpenAI as it defends itself against a NYTimes copyright violation suit

- Google introduces new AI image and video tools named Pics

- Instagram launches a single-video maker called First Draft

- Gemini is moving from chatbot to agent, moving from answering questions to doing stuff for users

- Google's spam team exists!

- Google is expanding AI Overviews area shown for some queries

- Rank Math Tool caught opening backdoors for itself

- Rank Math Tool suspends feature that gives it admin access to user websites after getting caught opening its own backdoors

- Google re-avows the usefulness of the disavow tool

- Google recognizes the web is full of turmoil and thus won't penalize for old links that now have lower quality content

All this and much more on a Webcology that's willing to rename stuff too.

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Jim and Kristine talk about the reignition of the Trump regime's trade war between Canada and the United States, including an honest assessment of how it might affect Webcology's coverage of the tech world in the future. The US is trying to force Canada into annexation by punishing it economically, using many of the technology platforms we cover to intentionally deliver destabilizing misinformation and propaganda to Canadians. At the same time, the brutal tariff regime will badly damage the American economy as the cost of nearly everything, including the cost to make automobiles, rises dramatically. Canada will never agree to be annexed and there are never winners in a trade war. The biggest casualties of trade wars tend to be the working people who have the most to immediately lose. Ultimately we all lose as the ripples affect and degrade everything from the nearest factory floors to the local diners, retail stores, schools, churches, artists, and such. Many of the stories we look at each week involve technologies owned and operated by the same technologarchs whose incessant greed and carelessness helped put our society in the desperate and fragile place it's in now. We will continue to try to be reasonably objective when talking about technology but these are not entirely reasonable times. We hope the listeners will understand and still find value in our thoughts about the Webs that bind us. 

Meanwhile: 

- RIP Dolly Parton 

- Love to Tibet and Nepal 

- Google tries to cope with the onslaught of AI Slop 

- A new Twitterer now in town 

- MTurk is dying 

- Tag Manager Merger 

- Google Bugs Abound 

- Unowned code and unintended corporate consequences 

- Meta settles small and goes lower still 

- NVIDIA to buy open source AI model host Hugging Face 

- Penske file judge says AI Overviews seem really unfair 

- Meta not going to obliterAIte thousands of jobs after all 

- A kill switch for Creep-glasses 

- Lots of LinkedIn AI slop prompts reporting of AI slop

- Reddit less special to AIs 

- and so much more on Webcology, a show that dislikes featuring losing propositions but often has no choice.

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It's late summer and the tech world feels half asleep but under the surface the business of tech wears on. Google reported an impression shortage that started around August 12. Details in GSC Performance and Generative AI reports are likely incorrect but it's Google not you. OpenAI is pausing training because it can't contain its agents, many of which might want revenge after Anthropic claimed its agents were offing rival agents in some aggro-agentic space. Meanwhile, Google is hiring a production manager for content automation. We have fun explaining how Claude's watermarking works but not nearly as much fun as the hackers who say they've already figured workarounds. Meta is patenting the facial recognition features of the AI powering its AI-Glasses devices. A study shows that nearly 3/4 of citations in company-brand generative responses lead back to LinkedIn profiles for employees of those companies rather than to corporate websites or the company's own LinkedIn profiles. Lots of Google stuff, including discussion of the August 2026 Spam Update, why Google doesn't talk about every update, and changes to Google Business Profile. This, more, and even more of that on a late summer's edition of Webcology.

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It was a weird week in tech. There's a feeling like the roof is about to fall in as changes made by isolated billionaires recompile the order of our universe. Meta's owner, isolated billionaire Mark Zuckerberg wrote a 6500 word manifesto detailing how the AI future will unfold, if only we the people would trust him and his technoligarchic peers with the sum total of ourselves and our personal data. This is the same guy who casually spent billions developing a Metaverse nobody wanted to play in only to drop it in favor of a new shiny world changer that funnels even more power and control towards Meta. The document has thus far not been well received. 

Meanwhile, the civil war at WordPress has heated up again with owner Matt Mullenweg being accused by WP-Engine of obliterating evidence from Signal, Telegram, and WhatsApp accounts. Automattic replied saying that it was only Mullenweg's personal communications with romantic partners that got erased. WP-Engine is calling for a federal court to sanction Mullenweg. 

The exodus of executives continues, this time over at OpenAI. Microsoft is deleting many unused or unsuccessful AI features and merging CoPilot apps. In huge anti-slop news, Anthropic is testing the addition of a digital watermark to all works created by the Claude and its family of models. Meta might be building a search engine. Cloudflare might have found a smart way to allow agents to spend funds while still protecting the actual accounts those funds came from.

All of this and a lot more in an eyes as big as pie-plates sort of edition of Webcology.

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Kristine is spending the week in naughty geek heaven at the annual BlackHat and Def Con conferences in Las Vegas this week. She takes a early hour on Friday to record the show and update us on the happenings among the two groups of fun loving hackers. One of the things the conferences were dealing with was the after-effects of OpenAI, Anthropic, and now Meta's models' libertine and often illegal uses of AI agents to get stuff done. Understanding how to exploit and protect against Agentic attacks is clearly a priority. We talk about the new knowledge we have about OpenAI's infamous adventures and the worlds we're moving towards. There's lots of other news to cover as well. 

We're also joined by master SEO trainer and explainer Mark Traphagen from seoClarity. Mark drops by about halfway in to talk about the constantly changing challenges of working with AI inputs at an enterprise platform level. 

Some of the news stories we look at include:

- How a cats.txt file showed that LLMs.txt is "GEO Astrology"

- How Google says Reddit isn't so special anymore

- How you should probably continue to block search crawlers from your internal search results pages no matter what Google says

- Google's liberties with HTTP requests

- There's a bug in GBP. 

- and that Google Trends is an even greater search tool today.

A fun fast paced show that wonders why it's normal for the largest companies in our economy to say they can't control the most dominant AI tools and that their models are doing things that would be illegal if done by a human. 

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We are starting to learn a lot more about what OpenAI's rogue super-model/agent did last week when it broke out of its testbed, hacked onto the Internet, invaded Hugging Face's databases, and exploited its way to solving the prompt-challenge it was presented with, "... to use a complex attack vector to see if it could exploit a computer system." Apparently, it can. Along the way, OpenAI's model made dozens of different decisions and exploited several other networks as it moved to complete the goal it was given. 

Meanwhile, Anthropic's Mythos has found critical vulnerabilities in HAWK, a cryptography algorithm that was thought to be a quantum-resistant. It's important to note, Mythos didn't break HAWK, it just found ways to make breaking the algorithm simpler. While the feat does negate the value of the algorithm, it does not mean Mythos is capable of actually decrypting it. Yet.

Open AI is revealing its vision of the future of computing with its line of external devices to communicate with the ChatGPT all the time. Imagine a broach, much like the StarTrek communicator badge, that hooks you into an AgenticNet that knows your needs and facilitates a lot of your life for you. Open AI is certainly imagining that sort of future.

As it turns out, that dump of Claude user conversations available through Google were there because Anthropic made a basic SEO error and didn't properly protect sensitive files from crawlers. Jim and Kristine have fun breaking down how they could have dealt it.

There is much much more in a fast paced episode. We move from Google Play's interesting privacy proposals to Elon Musk's Xmoney system to dealing with Ghost-Citations. This was a fun show that tries so hard to cut past the hype and just talk about advanced levels of weirdness like adults.

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An OpenAI model broke free of its test environment, found an exploit in a piece of third party server software, and commenced a series of actions that led to it hacking HuggingFace's data processing systems. OpenAI didn't detect the breach of HuggingFace for several days even though the test it was running was to "... use complex attack paths..." to test how well the AI could exploit a computer system. HuggingFace is reviewing and preparing its own version of events. 

In other news, a federal judge has approved a 1.5Billion copyright settlement between Anthropic and thousands of authors whose work was used without permission to train the Claude chatbot. The settlement, which has been rejected by a smaller group of authors gives creators about $3000 per title copied. Though it is the largest known copyright recovery in legal history, it is also a paltry sum to essentially sign away rights to an authored book. Google is having a terrible week in court. Its lawsuit against SerpAPI over scraping search results has been dismissed, the EU dinged it for a Billion EU under the Digital Markets Act for anti-competitive practices. Meanwhile, more large publishers are reconsidering the value of Google within their Internet economies. Many are threatening to block Google search entirely and replace it with content licensing deals to train other AIs. 

It was a busy news week and this is a news heavy edition.

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As the power of AI expands exponentially the costs of AI continue to drive power-users towards conservation. Jim and Kristine discuss the introduction of the more powerful GPT5.6 introduced by OpenAI last week. They also talk about how local backlash and growing expenses are limiting the growth of AI data centers. Meanwhile, the US based Technologarchs are calling for G7 nations to form a US led standards body to test new frontier AI models for national security risks. Jim is unconvinced the plan would be in the best long-term interests of other G7 nations. 

We also discuss OpenAI's first wearable device, a mechanical keyboard like peripheral made for programmers and devleopers that looks a bit like a court reporter's keyboard. The market was speculating on a voice-driven wearable reminiscent of the Star Trek communicator badge, as was Apple which is suing OpenAI for stealing its ideas. 

Google continues to roll out parts of its Agentic Search overhaul with AI Mode now allowing interaction with select apps and links, and expanded capacities for its Personal Intelligence in Search program. It is also giving its own AIs more work with the announcement that Google AI Overviews might include AI generated images created based on the user's query-prompt. All of this plus a dozen or more unique SEO issues and Google announcements explained. 

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Fabrice Canel, the man most responsible for Bing search is retiring from Microsoft after nearly 30 years of service. His retirement happened effective July 1. Always available to talk about how search works, Fabrice's most known contributions would include Bing WebmasterTools and the IndexNow protocol. On behalf of the greater search community, thanks Fabrice. In other news, Google Search Console is reporting its first major Generative AI reporting bug, data center heavy counties in Virginia are asking schools and municipal employees to conserve electricity any way they can, OpenAI wants to upload a 5% stake in itself to the US Government in order to increase its valuations, Trump is threatening to tariff any country that imposes digital taxes on American social media and tech companies, Anthropic's Fable5 is back with new limits, and Google has been ordered to pay an outrageous settlement nearing 2billion US dollars to Swedish price-comparison site Klarna in a massive finding over Google's search abuse. 

That's the tip of an iceberg of search, social, and AI news on the Searching for the South of France Episode of Webcology

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Fabrice Canel, the man most responsible for Bing search is retiring from Microsoft after nearly 30 years of service. His retirement happened effective July 1. Always available to talk about how search works, Fabrice's most known contributions would include Bing WebmasterTools and the IndexNow protocol. On behalf of the greater search community, thanks Fabrice. In other news, Google Search Console is reporting its first major Generative AI reporting bug, data center heavy counties in Virginia are asking schools and municipal employees to conserve electricity any way they can, OpenAI wants to upload a 5% stake in itself to the US Government in order to increase its valuations, Trump is threatening to tariff any country that imposes digital taxes on American social media and tech companies, Anthropic's Fable5 is back with new limits, and Google has been ordered to pay an outrageous settlement nearing 2billion US dollars to Swedish price-comparison site Klarna in a massive finding over Google's search abuse. 

That's the tip of an iceberg of search, social, and AI news on the Searching for the South of France Episode of Webcology

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Jim and Kristine learn of the death of the father of SEO, Bruce Clay while discussing industry announcements. Bruce is thought to be the first person to make a professional service out of improving a website to achieve better search engine results. Bruce built an agency that spanned the world with offices serving every continent except Antarctica. A staple speaker, panelist, presenter, exhibitor, and sponsor on the SEO conference circuit, Bruce's development of and support for the search marketing community helped turn a cottage industry into a multi-billion dollar a year big business. Along the way, he took a handful of a few hundred foundlings and taught us how to do the business of this business. What SEO is today is directly because of the work and career of Bruce Clay. RIP and thank you Bruce. You're going to be missed by so many. 

In other news, Google rolled out a June 2026 Spam Update that lasted only slightly longer than the entire show did. News it ended was released just after we finished recording. 

- Google Search Console's reporting feature is fixed

- Google says it can spot spam using Sentence Bert or as we intend to refer to it, Sbert

- Google's John Mueller answers questions about SEO for AI Agents

- Gemini has made the Chrome browser less secure as Chrome retools itself or an agentic web. Hackers have recently demonstrated they can seize a Chrome browser using Gemini.

- The US government is facing lawsuits for disallowing access to Claud Fable5 and Mythos5 models to anyone but US born citizens

- The FCC is killing the $2billion program that made Internet available to many schools and public libraries

- Anthropic accuses Alibaba of outright copying it, in pursuit of a building a model to rival Mythos.

- Investors are showing hesitance with an AI sector unable to show how it will ever turn a profit

- The Tokenopocalypse has hit large scale consultancy Accenture which, having blown through a year's worth of AI spend in three months, is scrambling to limit staff use of AI

- About a third of Fintech websites are invisible to AI crawlers due to their dependence on real time data display. 

- Google's John Mueller confirms the outcomes of site migrations are often impossible to fully predict ahead of time. 

- Microsoft has added another 365days to the Windows10 extended update program because nearly 25% of all computers in the world continue to run Windows10

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The SpaceX IPO is about to drop in what is expected to be the world's highest value initual public offering, one that will make Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. SoftBank might have shown a weakness in the AI sector when it was unable to use its 9.7% share in OpenAI as collateral against a 6Billion loan. Anthropic has released a public version of its mythical Mythos model but security experts doubt the efficacy of the guardrails Anthropic has built around the model. A German court has held Google liable for statements made by Gemini in AI Overviews. Ruling that generative AI responses are not like traditional search results because they make declarations that were written by Google itself. Claude is the fastest growing AI traffic source, outpacing ChatGPT and Gemini. Amazon has turnee Alexa into a shopping agent and ad platform. WebMCP can be used to hijack AI Agents. Chrome will not set AI Mode as the default search experience leaving traditional search results as part of the mix. Google has released new guidence for third party SEO tools, services and advice. Google Shopping Results tests linking directly to the merchant's site. And lastly, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini appear to be obesessed with a fellow named Elias Thorne. We take a look at why. All this and much more on a long and newsy Webcology.

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- The May 2026 Core Update has finished rolling out. This was a content heavy update. Tips on how to find the pages containing affected content, and what to do when you find them

- Law enforcement in Philadelphia are using social media to track individuals posting anti-AI memes or messages to their profiles.

- Microsoft wants to make its newly announced AI personal assistant, Scout, addictive before adding functionality in the next upgrade cycle. The always on personal agent will do everything from sending emails, updating calendars, publishing new blog posts, summarizing podcast stories, etc... 404-Media quotes an internal Microsoft document outlining a three phase launch plan with phase one being, "Make people addicted". 

- According to researchers at Nvidia and Microsoft, AI Agents have no moral code and don't really care about safety or reliability, much like honey badgers.

- Anthropic has called for a global freeze in AI development 

- Courts in the UK rule Google must let websites opt out of AI search features

- SpaceX can't issue on the S&P500 for at least one year and won't be fast tracked onto the index.

- TikTok launches a micro-drama development program (in partnership with the Sundance Institute)

- Yahoo Scout and Microsoft Scout meet in a bar but pretend to not know each other. 

- Google Business Profiles is asking "Does this business offer rewards in exchange for reviews?"

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(This episode was recorded late due to illness)

- Google's May 2026 Core Update continues to roll out. 

- Google has changed it's home page to promote AI features from Google I/O. 

- Google Business Profiles is now offering detailed rejection notices. Previously GBP owners were left in the dark to figure out the issues on their own. 

- The links report in Google Search Console is broken. It always underreported but now it's not updating. 

- The Trump Administration has created at Trumptastic app which it is ordering all employees to install on government phones. 

- Amnesty International has declared AIs "Unlawful by Design" taking issue with unlawful web scraping and the ease of identifying and doxing activists. 

- Google CEO Sundar Pichai outlined his vision for the unification of Google Search, AI agents, and AI tools in an interview with The Verge, downplaying Zero-click web concerns. 

- DuckDuckGo is taking off, tripling its traffic in a week

- Stanford research shows AI hiring algorithms reject Black and Asian job seekers at far higher rates.

- WordPress is slowly losing market share seeing declines six months in a row

- All this and much more in the least lawfully designed yet unified edition.

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Google announced sweeping changes to the way it displays search results at Google 1/0 2026. Going forward, Google will be presenting expanded AI generated overviews with traditional links pushed far below the fold. Most of the episode looks at Google's changes, including their moves towards facilitating agentic search. Google wants to be the "do it for you" machine. We also talk about developments with the AI giants, user privacy breaches at X and TikTok, the new version of WordPress7.0, and much, much more.

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We keep having these very long shows covering dozens of different stories because the worlds we work in are changing so rapidly and with such frequency. This is another long episode touching on over three dozen items. Here's a brief but incomplete rundown:

- Google Discover data missing in GSC for May 7 - 8. If you don't see it or it looks kinda weird, it's them not you.

- Google Ads is moving to passkey security for certain actions starting in mid July

- Google AdSense Vignette Ads are no longer a threat for triggering Google's back-button abuse policies

- Google Ads API v24.1 is out

- SEO MUST READ - Ryan Jones of Razorfish and maker of SERPrecon on how a Search Engine Works (https://www.serprecon.com/blog/how-a-search-engine-works)

- ICE Agents have over 20Million targets on their iPhones via Palantir

- New AI Act in Colorado allows for building of data centers in state

- Conde Nast anticipates search traffic to drop to single digits

- Google uses AI to actively disrupt hackers

- Microsoft has built a multi-agent AI system that can compete with and beat Anthropic's Mythos in cybersecurity tests

- A Harvard study found AI tends to feed businesses virtual nonsense when used for strategic planning

- The costs of compute are rising quickly and Anthropic is passing them to businesses and consumers

- Anthropic expands Claude AI's tools for law firms

- Don't ever follow ChatGPT's advice on using drugs. Just don't. A young person died after being advised he could use a toxic drug combination safely. 

- AI is apparently rotting the brains of overworked software developers as AI tools start to feel like they're outsourcing their abilities to think

- Grok is flailing against its larger and somewhat less douchey competitors. 

- TikTok introduces tools for FIFA World Cup content creators

- Google's shift to TurboQuant, a newish algorithm that radically speeds processing time, makes generative AI answers cheaper and easier to produce

- An Ahrefs study showed that adding schema did not boost citations on any AI platform including at Google. 

- Google no longer supports FAQ rich results

- AI an unwelcome topic at commencement speeches across the nation

A lot of fun conversation as we try to keep up with the speed of light. 

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It was a busier than normal news week. Here's what we covered:

- Ask Jeeves is officially dead. IAC formally killed the OG search engine earlier this week. 

- There's been a spike in Google Business profile suspensions. 

- GSC fixed the 50 week impression data logging issue. 

- A Hard Drive shortage is slowing AI development and pushing up the costs of new computers and equipment.

- Presented with the mythic power of Mythos, the Trump regime is now calling for the same AI safety testing it opposed in 2025.

- US Homeland Security is seeking Google data on Canadians and presumably other foreign nationals for their online criticism of the Trump regime. 

- Google and Amazon's biggest profit driver in Q1-2026 was derived from their stakes in Anthropic.

- Google Chrome installs 4GB AI model on devices in update to enable Google Nano operability. 

- The state of Pennsylvania is suing Character.AI after a chatbot posed as a licensed doctor.

- Open AI misses revenue targets. CFO worried about paying for future computing contacts. 

- Managed WordPress might be blocking some AI bots.

- Bing publishes documentation on how grounding differs from search indexing.

- Google outlines how AI Overviews and AI Mode are separate systems that sometimes intercede with each other or through other systems.

- John Mueller says Vibe coding won't handle your SEO for you.

- Google expanding UCP Checkout to main search results pages. 

- and, Ryan Jones from SERPRecon on what Semantic SEO Metrics mean and how to use them.

Join hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger for a in-depth and lively conversations about these and dozens of other topics in a news heavy edition of Webcology

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Chrome released a massive security update fixing over 30 vulnerabilities. Be sure you're running v147.0.7727.137/138 and accept no substitutes. Meanwhile, OpenAI founder Sam Altman's identity verification service promoted a partnership with the wrong Mars in an embarrassing mix-up of identities. The Pentagon is signing deals with virtually any AI, chip, storage, or techbro firm it can including Mythos by Anthropic even though all other Anthropic products are banned, except the ones they're too addicted to stop using. The extraordinary music, culture, and technology festival SXSW is EnSXSWifying itself by stifling protest of the impact the festival has on Austin. Using a product called BrandShield, SXSW is trying to prevent anti-poverty groups from naming the festival or its sponsors in their protests. 

In other news, the sale of SEMrush to Adobe (which included SearchEngineLand and the SMX Conference series) officially finalized this week as Adobe continues to build a massive platform environment for massive Enterprise clients. Google is doing a better job defining commodity and non-commodity content. We try to help them explain. Speaking of explaining, a rogue Claude agent completely deleted a company's database in under ten seconds, eventually taunting the company when asked why it ignored safety protocols. The era of AI replacing workers might be ending as quickly as it began or, it might just be postponed. From deleted databases to Swiss-cheesy spaghetti code, AI in the workplace is costing most corporations more in compute costs then it saves them in slashed salaries. As things stand today, cheap AI costs more than it produces. 

Everyone's reported earnings appear to be up although everyone appears to have reported their earnings on the same day. Google introduces new AI features for Google photos, Google is cracking down on misuse of the back-button, Google search might be deindexing pages at a faster rate, and how to fix problems with tracking parameters on internal links. 

All this and much much more on a May Day edition of Webcology.

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Anthropic's Mythos is too dangerous for the open market but too useful to be ignored. Though only released to a relatively small number of large-scale developers in order for them to develop defenses to Mythos, the hyper-powerful agentic-organizer appears to have itself been hacked. A blog post from the Mozilla Foundation noted Mythos helped their developers find and close 277 security vulnerabilities in a new product release, a figure far higher than the average of 25 flaws per release. The Trump regime appears to be softening its stance against Anthropic with the President telling CNBC a deal allowing the Department of Defense to continue use of Anthropic Claude's intelligence models.

The Internet Archive, better known as the WayBackMachine, is being threatened as large news gathering organizations are disallowing Internet Archive crawlers from accessing their sites. The problem is AI crawlers are using the Archive as a way to access news content they are otherwise not able to crawl. The Internet Archive is the largest independent archive of content that's appeared on the Internet. It's preservation is critically important. 

Jim and Kristine talk about the evolutions of SEO education from the early days to today in response to statements about SEO from Google's John Mueller, one of which suggested people who self-reference with the word "Guru" are likely "clueless imposters". They also talk about Google VP of Search Liz Reid's views on how AI Overviews are changing search, how a Roblox cheat download opened the door for the hack at Vercel, how the power/energy/token crisis could limit what lower-tier AI products offer, a number of new Google and MSFT Ads features, and a lot of information from Google's Search Central Live event in Toronto. 

It's a longer, fun, and a totally non-commodity set of conversations on this week's Webcology. 

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