Elon Musk's AI-Grok continues to churn out non-consensual images of people including sexualized images of children, an issue that continues into this week. Google is integrating core search signals into its AI Experience in AI Mode and AI Overviews. This, along with Personal Intelligence, the ring that binds all your Google apps that's coming to Gemini and AI Mode soon, will work to "significantly mitigate" known limitations of LLMs. Google is also introducing Universal Commerce Protocol, the new open standard for agentic commerce connecting stores and products to AI results sets. Far from hurting SEO, UCP is likely to introduce new venues for SEO services. Meanwhile, Google's Danny Sullivan took aim at the AIO belief you should create content in easily digestible chunks to better feed LLMs. The theory suggests that smaller sentences and broken down concepts will be easier for LLMs to contextualize and regurgitate. In reality, Google would rather content be created to assist, help, or inform page visitors. They especially don't want people to create two versions of content, one for LLMs and one for the web. Apple and Google make it official, Gemini is the white-labeling itself as the thinking bit of Siri and Apple Intelligence. Google has removed some AI health summaries after an investigation by the Guardian newspaper that found false and misleading information that could put people at risk. In other news, news publishers expect to see traffic drop 43% by 2029 according to a Reuters Institute Report. Stick around to see if you can actually find the final story.

It's a new year which, as with all new years, brings a chance for a renewal, a hope of a new beginning, and in this, the beginning of the second quarter of the 21st century, that hope was dashed within 48 hours with the invasion, kidnapping, and regime change in Venezuela and the killing of Renee Good. These events mark a transit point that suggests the American government will continue its journey away from cooperation and trust and move even faster towards coercion and hate. Beyond what any of the events of the last week mean for Americans themselves, all of this creates an increasingly difficult trade environment for everyone, including Americans themselves.

Meanwhile... The December 2025 Core Upate ended on December 29. Publishers appear to have taken the hardest hits with large scale declines taking place in all venues such as Discover, News, Top Stories, and organic search. One publisher, Tailwind CSS has let go of 75% of its engineers after seeing a 40% drop in traffic from Google. Microsoft is looking for a senior project manager to combat spam on Bing and Copilot. This is an incredible opportunity for someone able to, a) actually tame web spam at Bing, and b) explain how Bing search works to a wider audience like a certain beloved SEO character from days long past once did. Lightning rarely strikes the same place twice but it is known to strike all the time. Why not in Redmond? Google is also hiring, looking for a AI Answers and Search Quality Engineer. Based out of Cambridge MA, the position sounds decidedly less sexy than then Bing position does but, given it's the Internet, most things sound less sexy than the Bing position does. Google is also hiring a Search Intelligence Chief of Staff. This is absolutely decidedly more sexy than the Bing position.

Far less sexy, and almost downright scare, are some of the stuff coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year. We often cover the weirder inventions, this one combining AI with a holographic image under the name, Friend in a Bottle. Far scarier than that is the revelations Elon Musk's AI Grok is being used to create and widely distribute non-consensual nudes based on people's images and what the UK based Internet Watch Foundation is calling, "criminal imagery involving kids".

A study by digital marketing agency Eight Oh Two concluded that 37% of consumers are starting their searches with AI rather than Google. Google is personalizing AI Overviews and AI Mode Answers. Google's John Mueller talks about working with Gemini and other LLMs, and a lot more on the Nothing New Year's Back Again Episode of Webcology

Five high profile OG Search Engine Optimization experts talk about the year that was and the year that may well be in our annual Year End Revue. Carolyn Shelby - Principle SEO at Yoast, Ryan Jones - Senior Vice President of SEO at Razorfish and the creator of SERPrecon.com, and

Topher Kohen - Legendary Large Scale Publisher SEO, formerly of CBSNews and CNN.com, join Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger in an hour long conversation about the state of the industry, AIs effects on SEO and search, SEO education and skills updating, and our ideas about the SEO world moving into 2026.