This week, we of course had more Google search ranking volatility, this time on the 12th. Google is testing new AI buttons on its home page……
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Prompt Tracking: How to Find (and Fix) Your AI Visibility Gaps
Your brand could be ranking #1 on Google, but still be invisible to AI.
Absent from conversations your customers are having with large language models (LLMs) about your category.
Or worse, showing up inaccurately, with outdated or incorrect information that’ll …
Claude watermarks its output: what content teams should know
Anthropic now marks content that Claude generates or edits. Here’s how the watermarks work, what they can‘t prove, and what content teams should do.…
Daily Search Forum Recap: August 13, 2026
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today……
Spammy Google Selected Canonical In Search Console
When you use the Google Search Console URL inspection tool, Google will show you what it calls the “Google-selected canonical.” Sometimes that URL will look off, weird and even scary, because sometimes it might be a URL for a spammy …
Misconfiguring Cloudflare Can Hurt Your SEO Badly
This is just a random tip, make sure not to misconfigure Cloudflare, your content delivery network and/or your hosting server. I see way too many cases of this popping up and causing such a pain for SEOs to fix. All …
OpenAI Makes The ChatGPT Sources Less Visible
OpenAI is testing or rolling out a change to how you can click to see the sources from the ChatGPT responses. It used to be a button named “Sources” in the footer of the response, but now sometimes it is …
Google Lowers Subscriber Requirements For Search Profiles
Google has dropped the minimum number of followers needed to be approved for a Search Profile on Google. Previously, it was 100,000 subscribers across YouTube, Instagram, X and Tiktok. Now it is 35,000 subscribers across YouTube, Instagram, and X but …
Google Search Ranking Volatility Spikes On August 12-13
We saw a spike in volatility yesterday amongst the Google Search results rankings. There was a spike in ranking movement outside the day-to-day norm that seemed to start yesterday and maybe into today. The chatter is somewhat cool, but the …
Daily Search Forum Recap: August 12, 2026
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 has amended its lawsuit against SerpApi……
ChatGPT Ads With AI Descriptive Heading
OpenAI is testing placing descriptive headings above the ads within ChatGPT responses. I assume it is using AI to generate these headlines above the ChatGPT Ads.…
Google Merchant Center Performance Reporting Update Coming August 24th
Google announced several new updates to the Merchant Center performance report, starting on August 24, 2026. There are four updates: separating YouTube affiliate results from organic traffic, updating the YouTube organic traffic definitions, expanding product-level reporting for Google Ads, and …
Google AI Overview Local Results Pulling From Low-Quality Listicles
Google will randomly show AI Overviews for local results, and when it does, It will often show AI-generated information about each local listing. The issue is that Google often cites low-quality and self-promotional listicle articles from across the web when …
Google Amends Lawsuit Against SerpApi Over Licensed Content
After Google’s lawsuit against SerpAPI, the Google Search scraper tool, was dismissed a month ago, Google has decided to amend the complaint. Google filed the amendment on August 10, 2026 as an “Amended Complaint.” Google is now taking an approach …
Google Ads New Local Customer Optimization Help Doc
With Google migrating Local Service Ads to the main Google Ads platform, Google is already preparing new Google Ads help documents with more details about the change. A new document named About Local customer optimization within Performance Max campaign for …
Google Still Aggressively Poaching Agency Ads Accounts
I feel like a broken record and that Google simply does not care but again, I am seeing numerous reports from the PPC community about Google representatives attempting to poach their client accounts from them.…
Google Travel Campaigns Migrating To Search Campaigns For Travel
Google will be migrating Travel campaigns to the new Search campaigns for Travel in Google Ads. This is happening sometime in the third quarter of 2026; we do not have a specific date.…


