Webcology

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Webcology takes a deeper look at the ecosystem of the Internet as it affects webmasters and web marketers from the points of view of two well known web marketers, Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger. Based on interviews with special high-profile guests or panels, Webcology introduces, explores and explains how the various segments of the web marketing world work.

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1 hr 44 min

A Very Busy Grumpy Week of Web Politics in a Constant Zero Day Edition

It has been wild on the Web the week and Jim is grumpier than usual. Rogue AI agents and the Super Intelligent ability find holes where nobody saw them before have put the Web on an exhaustingly constant Zero Day posture. The discovery of ancient security flaws deep in the codebase of PHP sent the Web into a panic this week as over 70% of the websites online are reliant on PHP. National security organizations from around the world warned of potential chaos if the problem wasn't fixed immediately with some suggesting websites temporarily go dark under a 503-Error (server overload or scheduled maintenance). Patches have been developed and distributed and it's now up to hosting companies, developers, and website owners to make sure the patches are applied to their websites. The discovery of the critical vulnerability was enabled by OpenAI's Patch the Planet initiative, a program that seeks out and creates fixes for security vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, an Agentic Web came closer to reality this week as Google CEO Sundar Pichai signalling Google plans to merge Agentic AI into search with Google agents performing tasks on behalf of its users. This might partially be in reaction of Meta's Muse which is seeing growth among the older Facebook user-base. As noted, it's been a busy week. In other news: - Meta is creating a new Class C stock to keep Mark Zuckerberg in control and in California - Australia is preparing to sue social media platforms for failing to comply with nationwide ban on underage users - Revere Engineering everything that can be reversed engineered is the new wild west on the Web - YouTube is testing AI replies in all AskYouTube searches - YouTube is temporarily pausing accounts it things have been hacked - Instagram's CEO calls for stronger protections against the AI slop Instragram helped popularize - LinkedIn Digital Business Cards - 3 new studies from the SEO sector suggest AI visibility in search is not worth investing in - Google AI Mode citation sidebar to allow users to create and edit a preferred sources list - Google's advice on Robots.txt rules subject of the second Non-Canonical Cabinet podcast with Gary Illyes and Chery Prommawin - Google crawls raw and encoded bracket URLs separately - Google doesn't support JPEG XL format yet - Google Business Profiles to require government ID for verification - Barry Schwartz created a tool that tells users if a feature at Google or Bing is new. It seems people ask him all the time and he feels obliged to answer so he made a tool that does it for him. ( seroundtable.com/is-it-new ) Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

1 hr 47 min

Two Jones Explain How Google Leaves Tool Makers Jonesing for Data

Dixon Jones, founder of Inlinks and WAIKAY, and Ryan Jones, VP-SEO at Razorfish and founder of SERPRecon are two highly experienced tool makers for search and generative AI marketers. They join Jim and Kristine to talk about how Google is actively poisoning data obtained by scrapers and how it effects the reporting tools digital marketers rely on. Google has been trying to deal with a dramatic increase in data scraping by SEO and digital marketing tools in the AI era. Dixon and Ryan (no relation with each other) have worked with Google and other tool makers for decades. They outline Google's position and that of the tool makers and offer several alternative approaches Google could have tried. Ryan then breaks down the search algorithm Perplexity published earlier this week. In other news: - Google Ads API V.26 is now available - The Non-Canonical Cabinet is a new Search Central YouTube channel discussing odd technical SEO questions. It posted its first episode this week. - Coywolk Pack EmDash SEO Plugin "... makes sites absurdly fast". - Far-right bot traffic declined significantly this week after Ukraine drone strikes destroyed several Yandex data centers in Russia. - Chip stocks tumble over AI investment worries - Character.ai files for bankruptcy - Meta publishes post claiming its data centers do not overuse water, electricity, and create jobs in local community in massive PR push - More poweful Meta Muse Wonder and Meta Muse Wonder Full models released. - JP Morgan Chase blocks outside AI agents from accessing customer accounts - Amazon launched two new AI devices designed to listen, create notes, and issue reminders. Bee Frontier is a silicone wristband and Bee Eclipse is a credit card sized device that attaches to the back of a mobile phone. - OpenAI lets advertisers use prompts, email address, and phone numbers to push advertising to specific users - OpenAI introduces, live Ad Account Manager Representatives - No more UTM tracking agreement as OpenAI drops UTM tracking parameters from links in ChatGPT - Accenture severely limits employee spend on Claude from $1000 to $29/month. - Pinterest is going anti-social in a campaign designed to push people away from doom scrolling and back into the real work - Google Discover working to transform itself into a hyper-personalized AI Concierge - Google is testing AI Mode sidebar on left of main Google SERPs - GSC Performance Report is about 72hours behind as of the recording of the show - Check out Ryan Jones' breakdown of the Perplexity search algorithm at, http://serprecon.com/blog/how-to-rank-in-perplexity-photon Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

1 hr 48 min

The Cynics Guide to Today's News and Lots of Google Stuff Edition

Sometimes the world gets so bent around absurdity it's hard to talk about it without somehow making it all seem so much dumber. This era exemplifies absurdity and over-amplifies dumb. Normal conversations about LLMs, the economics of technology, and the politics behind it all tend to lose focus, context, and meaning because the changes that are happening are so extraordinary and overwhelming there really isn't a language that can easily define and definitely encompass them. We need to have deep philosophical conversations but lack the language and understanding of the stuff we're talking about. That's partially because we're still making it up as we go along, as we have throughout the digital revolution, and partially because no generation has ever had to contemplate the global consequences our generation needs to think through. It's tough, pointed, and unrelenting and that's what is reflected in this episode. Before noting the stories we covered, search marketing's greatest journalist, Barry Schwartz, is estimated to have published his 50,000th article about digital marketing since he started his career in the late 90s. We suspect this may be an undercount. Barry is, by far, the most prolific and important writer in search history. We all owe him a career's debt of gratitude. Also, somewhere in this edition Jim claims that the Catholic faith does not recognize the souls of animals. He was wrong and Webcology apologies for the error. - Google's September 2026 Spam Update ended early Oct8. It effected a lot of sites, most of which overused AI as content-spam. - Google is expanding Search Profiles for content creators and publishers in Canada and India. They will soon roll out Search Profiles for content creators and publishers in Brazil - Nano Banana 2.1, Google's image generation AI was released and is working within AI Mode. - Meta found and fixed at least one serious security issue with newly released Meta-Muse AI - Meta-Muse's AI collects private user data to compile a personality file for every identifiable person it (and it's users) interacts with. This way it will be able to give accurate advice if asked about someone. - Meta-Muse was able to escape its moorings but Meta claims to have fixed the escape vector - Apparently Meta-Muse overcharges some of its users when performing commercial transactions. - Meta will be developing new protocols for how its agentic agents interact with business websites. - Sam Altman, co-founder and head realboy at OpenAI suggests, "the world should accept some bad things happening with AI" as he signed on to the Trump regime's voluntary Super Intelligence Safety Pact. - "Software is over", declared software developer Brandon Thomas used Claude Opus 5.5 to create a homemade and apparently entirely legal version of Adobe Creative Suite. - One of the management consultancies that brought us the brutal world we live in today, Bain and Company, are instructing us that new innovation will be required to fund AI's $6-Trillion (and counting) buildout. Boosting productivity will not be enough. AI must find new sources of growth and value. - In compliance with EU law, OpenAI will watermark ChatGPT outputs by default but only in the EU - ChatGPT is launching a visual user interface called Intelligent UI. - Meta will be restricting political ads in the leadup to the US Midterms in early November. While it lists the types of political speech it is restricting, critics suggest that, in a bid to restrict ideals of equality, it does not treat all political speech equally. - From the shock and surprise file, some guardrails on ChatGPT for Teens don't work. - Meta's Instragram introduces a read-only stalker-mode - YouTube's Shorts algorithm is updated to feature more original content and creator-made videos - AI favours brands with active social media profiles and engagement - Google introduces the User Generated Content Fresh Data Program, or USGFDP for short. USGFDP is an instant firehose for user generated content from publisher/platform to Google. - Google makes important changes to its Helpful Content Documents. - Google reiterates how main content is essential and describes how search quality raters evaluate content - Google Merchant Center is the new Universal Commerce Protocol integration hub - Google Local is including a WhatsApp button beside the call, directions, and website buttons in Google Local listings All of this, a lot more, and a few philosophical conundrums in this, the Cynic's Guide to Today's News Edition. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

1 hr 28 min

The America is Grokken Edition

The American federal government is remaking its online presence in Trump's image. Naturally, the product doesn't work as promised and it would have likely been better had they just left whatever was there before. Nevertheless, America-dot-gov was launched earlier this week as an AI powered gateway to federal government information and services. Former Airbnb CEO and now US chief design officer, Joe Gebbia said the portal was powered by Gemini and Grok. In other news: - The FTC is investigating OpenAI and Anthropic following a series of ongoing "rogue AI" attacks. - Chinese hackers are impersonating ex-US officials to gain the trust of AI experts. - Several of OpenAI's Quality Raters were fired for using AI to train OpenAI - Google is appealing the EUs DMA order to share search data with competitors - A judge has dismissed Google anti-trust claims because the plaintiffs didn't prove Google violated anti-trust statutes as written - The Spottification of Literative thought continues with Google's AI Pilot paying some sites under 0.1% of revenues they previously earned through ads - Cloudflare introduces two agentic monetization methods in beta, Monetization Gateway and Pay Per Use - Instragram Reels introduces a handy how-to kit that is required reading for online marketers - Bing imitates Google by testing replacing Copilot with AI Mode in Search - Google won't feel lucky for much longer - Google offers AI monitoring of terms and concepts (think Google Alerts for AI) - SearchEngineLand publishes interesting study of AI citation drivers - Google replacing "Show More" button with a button reading "Loading..." in AI Overviews - When looking for local options, don't look for local options. Declare independents instead. - Google Gemini is adding UTM parameters for actual referral attributions! - You can't torture a LLM but you can belabour a point. An interesting debate is happening in AI circles about an experiment in which AI models are intellectually tortured. Some folks believe the models are actually suffering while others feel they're suffering fools who think machines can have any degree of consciousness. Is it a clash of small minds vs great ideas or a failing of large language models themselves? All this and more on a Webcology that still feels lucky enough to be self-aware of its phenomenal experience. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

1 hr 31 min

The Googlash of Google News Edition

It's an interestingly Googlishic edition this week with several major announcements and updates. Google's September 2026 Spam Update is underway as of noon on Thursday Sept. 24. Expected to last two weeks, this is one of the longest Spam Updates in recent memory. In other huge news, Google announced a much faster, less resource-heavy way to produce higher-quality query fan-outs. The new framework is called Retrieve-for-Train Diffusion (R4T Diffusion Model). Roger Montti gives it full coverage in his September 24 SEJ article. Other Googley Goodness: - Google is introducing numerous new analytic filters and tools including a multimodal search type filter in GSC and CrUX Ad Metrics - Major publishers see a nearly 40% year over year drop in Google search traffic in Q2-26 over Q2-25 (which itself saw a 21% decline from Q2-24) - Google is launching a scale-model data-centre the size of a small refrigerator into space. Code named Project Suncatcher, the experimental satellite launches on October 1. - Google's Gemini public NotebookLM Pages are being used to spam Google on an epic, albeit temporary scale. - AI Overviews are now appearing in an average of 39% of US desktop searches - AI Overview links were increasingly pushing users to AI Mode and other Google URLs rather than to individual web pages,... - ... until recently when links in AI Overviews to external pages increased by over 25% - Google Merchant Center has auto-enabled native checkout for platforms that support the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). Merchant Center has also updated requirements for Google Store Ratings - Google Business Profiles is giving business-owners four days to reject user edits before those edits might be applied to their local listings. - Google confirms that <hreflang tags> do not need to be written in capital letters. The protocol is case insensitive though writing regional codes in uppercase (en-CA), for example, follows ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 convention. - Google Analytics is adding hostname allowlists to fight spam and better differentiate traffic sources Other News - Meta's Muse introduced itself to the world before anyone told the Zucksters their product sounds like a fiber-laxative made from psyllium husks. Designed to be a personal AI agent and soon to be running in wearable devices, Meta's Muse is made to constantly learn from users' online interactions by constantly running in the background. Muse has already partnered with Shoppify to make purchases for users at stores on the Shoppify platform. Amazon has banned Muse from its systems. Embarrassingly, 404Media learned that one of Muse's signature functions, the ability to make phone calls for users, actually uses live-humans in place of AI to make more complicated calls. - Discord is rolling out age-verification for users it suspects are under the age of 18. - LinkedIn is prompting users' colleagues to confirm their work histories and claims in order to weed out people who falsely claim to be employed. - Bing is testing another expandable sitelinks interface - and... An AI relationships chart has been compiled by Chris Green and published in Sept22's Search Engine Journal. It is reminiscent of the seminal Bruce Clay Search Engine Relationships Chart. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

1 hr 35 min

The Shut It Down but Keep It Going so We can be No1 Edition

Kristine spent much of the week in San Diego at the Brighton SEO (San Diego) Conference. She gives us a from the floor update. The vibe in the tech world this week was, "Reign in it!". The tone came from all fronts starting with the AI technologarchs themselves who are now falling over each other to demand some sort of governmental oversight. At the same time documents from the NYTimes vs LLMs case show the technologarchs knew they were training their models on stolen copyrighted materials with one Microsoft exec calling AI, "the largest theft of labour in history". Those same documents also show the technologarchs understood that LLMs were destroying the web and that generative AI products have created a "doom loop" that is killing the entire web, thus confirming the Dead Web Theory. American and European courts are applying behavioural remedies trying to curb Google's monopolistic behaviours, the former with oversight, the latter with gradually increasingly massive financial fines. Meanwhile: - Data loss at Google in first weeks of September have wide reaching consequences - Google Business Profile API applications are facing much longer delays - Google adds a Search Profile badge which, after a person claims their search profile, allows them to use the badge to attract followers from their websites - Google updates MediaPartners Google Crawler Guidance - Customizable dashboards in Google Analytics - Reddit and Meta Small Business Guides for 2026 holiday advertising have been released. Digital Marketing must reads - Google Search Console Indexing report is missing data from June 2026. It's probably gone. - Musk trying to train Grok on customer data from dead startups - OpenAI in the midst of another mathematically avoidable controversy - OpenAI testing sponsored agents in ChatGPT ads which will soon be run as chatbots - Meta One Business launch preceded Facebook Pages starting to charge for active links in posts - Reddit AI search tends to pick content from already popular comments and comments with high up-votes more frequently than from experientially written content. - A Google Information security engineer has been charged with using inside information to make over a million in revenues from betting on Polymarket - Gemini announces a "CC" AI agent allowing multiple family share data to help agents make better plans or complete tasks - Google may be getting better at blocking scrapers and tracking tools - Cloudflare's Bot Preference Sync rewriting Robots.txt files to account for new crawler policies - Google Local Knowledge Panel used in AI overviews - Text Ad links in Google AI Mode - Ad clutter metrics coming to Chrome - Google UCP blurs lines between search results and site - Google changes relating to EU decisions All this and much more on a show that doesn't need to be No1 to know it won't shut down. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

1 hr 59 min

The Viewing the Depths of the Clampdown Edition

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. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

1 hr 16 min

The GSC is now Google Search Cowards Edition

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. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

1 hr 24 min

The Playing Lose-Lose Games is Dumb Edition

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. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

1 hr 14 min

It's the End of the Summer as We Know It Edition

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. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy