News
What's happening in the industry? (13)
We follow AI, search and digital marketing news and add our own reading.
We measured the BIST 100: 15 company sites are closed or empty for AI crawlers
None of Borsa Istanbul's 100 largest companies blocks the search crawlers of ChatGPT or Claude in robots.txt. Yet 15 of their sites are effectively closed to AI because of firewalls, bot blocks or empty pages.
Read News · Search 3 min readGoogle's September 2026 spam update has finished rolling out
Google's status dashboard shows the September 2026 spam update finished on October 8, with a final phase felt around October 4-6. Site owner reports are mixed.
Read News · Search 3 min readJudge throws out two antitrust suits over Google AI Overviews
Penske Media and Chegg argued that AI summaries were draining their traffic. Judge Mehta ruled that expecting traffic is not an agreement, so the antitrust claims failed.
Read Data · Performance 4 min readWe tested award-winning agency sites: most fail on mobile
We ran seven award-winning, motion-heavy agency sites through Google's own test. On mobile five scored under 40 and one would not load. The same motion can score 93.
Read News · Search 3 min readGoogle tests paying publishers for AI answers
Google is piloting payments, via Search Console, to publishers whose content helps generate AI answers. Only contribution to generating the answer counts, not being linked.
Read News · Search 1 min readUS launches America.gov, an AI portal for federal services
America.gov runs on Gemini and Grok and answers from about 29,000 government websites. It is led by US Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia.
Read News · Search 1 min readMistral's model comes to Firefox Smart Window
Mozilla is adding Mistral Small 4 to Smart Window, Firefox's AI browsing mode, and opening the beta in France with French support.
Read News · Search 1 min readCloudflare now blocks AI bots on ad pages by default
Since September 15, training and agent bots are blocked by default on the ad pages of many sites that use Cloudflare.
Read News · Search 1 min readGemini in Chrome on Android starts handling bookings for users
Google opened Gemini in Chrome to all US Android users on August 18. Auto Browse, on paid plans, handles tasks for them.
Read News · Search 1 min readThe Gemini app passes 1 billion monthly users
The app generates more than 150 million images a day, and Google's open model Gemma has passed a billion downloads.
Read News · Search 1 min readAI-driven orders on Shopify tripled in a year
Shopify's revenue grew 34% in the second quarter. Orders from AI channels tripled, and classic search did not decline.
Read Data · Search & AI 5 min readAI is not sending you clicks, but it is reading you
Every AI chatbot combined still sends under 1% of web traffic. Reading that as "not worth it" gets the story exactly backwards.
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