Google Says People Love AI Search. A New Study Says Otherwise. 

Last week, I wrote about Google’s recent steps to pay publishers for content the Big Tech company uses in its AI-generated responses.

Shortly before that announcement last month, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Northeastern University published their findings on Google’s AI search features, confirming realities that publishers know all too well that, as Search Engine Journal puts it, “directly contradict Google’s assertions that people love AI search and that it is sending more traffic than ever.”

The Biggest Names In AI Are Backing A New Way To Opt Out Of Scraping

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic say they will adopt a new standard that publishers can use to opt out of being scraped by AI, as reported earlier by Search Engine Roundtable. With this control, publishers can apply their AI training preferences across multiple AI companies, instead of setting them individually. The shared “policy token” signal … will live within a website’s robots.txt file, which has long signaled which web crawlers can and can’t scrape a site — whether for search indexing, archiving, or AI training. Currently, sites have to signal their AI training preferences separately to each AI company.

Google Says Technical SEO Remains Key For AI SEO

In a recent interview conducted by David Iwanow, Google’s John Mueller discussed the future of SEO in AI Search, explaining which traditional practices will continue to matter and that the rise of AI Search doesn’t necessarily change what makes a successful SEO strategy. … Mueller [said] that building a solid foundation for a website is preferable to relying on short-term tactics because those always have an expiration date, whereas a site that focuses on quality, what Mueller terms a solid foundation, doesn’t face that kind of expiration date where traffic disappears. 

Reddit Forced Login Requirement Intended To Boost Ad Performance 

During its earnings call on Thursday, Reddit announced that the platform will transition to a “logged-in-only experience,” scaling back the open-browsing access that defined the platform for two decades. Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO, said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call that the platform will authenticate users in a move to improve advertising performance, personalize content feeds, and protect data across its platform from unauthorized scraping by AI.