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.

The December 2025 Core Update continues to roll out, as one does pretty much every year around this time. Some are seeing results early but there hasn't been a major stir or fuss from the SEO community. That might be because it is somewhat harder to judge early outcomes of a core update based on page ranking or page traffic while these metrics are being effected by the transition to generative AI results and search behaviours. At least it's easier to measure now that Google Search Console is reporting fresher results again. Meanwhile, Google is assuring publishers and SEOs that the web is thriving. They are clearly optimizing the look and output of generative AI responses in both AI Overviews and AI Mode to include more links back to content that either informed or is quoted in the generative response. This optimization appears to be leading to better converting clicks, according to both Google and a report from SEMrush. It is also leading to changes in search user behaviours as searchers adapt to generative AI results appearing more regularly. The SEMrush study showed how those AI Overviews first trickled into results, then surged in the summer, before slightly declining to more regular appearances based on search intent in the autumn.

Meanwhile, several Google spokespersons spent a lot of energy in the past few weeks assuring web marketers that SEO is the way to optimize for generative results and that AIO, GEO, and other acronyms are just evolutions of age old SEO techniques rather than inventions of new ways of doing. Google is introducing two new AI features, DISCO and CC. DISCO will help users make instant apps based on data found in the open Chrome Tabs they're working in. The other is CC, an AI informed morning scroll that will include personal, business, news, calendar, and other items drawn from the myriad of Google services most people use. Google reaffirms the need to keep meta data solid in both render and response formats because their crawlers can't keep up with so many goshdarn JavaScrips that need unpacking in an AI driven universe to unpack them. We talk about a lot more Googley stuff too but, speaking of packing, Donald Trump's Truth Social is getting involved in a fusion nuclear generation scheme that might literally leave Trump with what amounts to an unlimited source of power. And on that, all of a sudden it's time for a much needed winter's break. We're back sometime before the New Year with the Webcology 2025 WTF Happened Year End Revue - staring a cast of veteran SEOs looking backwards and forwards and whatever's in between. Happy Holidays to everyone out there. Be save, be well, be loved, and rank well.

It's the middle of December and throughout the Web, all the crawlers are stirring and AI Bots getting fed. The products displayed on folk's sites with due care, in hopes that St. Googlishous would bring traffic there. Suddenly somewhere in GA4 there arose such a clatter, I had to get off of my ass to see what was the matter. And then what from Schwartz's deli of news briefs should appear? Notes that another Core Update was already here... Perhaps it's not such a big deal however as Google confirmed it issues core updates more frequently than previously announced. In fact, Google performs several unannounced core updates each year. This isn't really a surprise but then again, neither is a major update in mid-December. Google seems to do it every year.

We welcomed legendary SEO Jenny Halasz to the show to talk about her new book, "AI Powered Content Marketing and SEO", co-authored with Catherine Seda and published by Pearson O'Reilly. We also talk about the Yext study that reveals more about how the Local Pack gets formed, the 1-year long deal-cap being imposed on Google, Microsoft's pull back on Copilot due to lack of user interest, Disney's $1Billion deal with OpenAI that will bring AI versions of Mickey and Darth Vader together again, Megadrama in the Metaverse, Operation Bluebird, the OAI-SearchBot Crawler, how Google Shopping crawlers are too fast for your JavaScript, more links in AI Mode, and a lot more stuff you need to know before the web slows down for the early winter break.

It was a long week following a long Thanksgiving weekend that opened on CyberMonday with a login-outage at Spotify. Folks who logged out of their Spotify accounts on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday awoke to a virtual lockout which was finally cleared between 3 and 5pm. Google Search Console reports are lagging a couple days behind. This podcast was recorded on a Thursday and that data hadn't been updated since Monday. The Trump administration will add social media inspections of all new H-1B applicants and their H-4 dependents to the list of student and exchange visitors it already inspects. The order forces all applicants to turn their social media privacy settings to "public" in order to allow for inspections. Google and other competitors, mixed with the realities of not owning a the operating system, are causing massive problems of Sam Altman and OpenAI. OpenAI has declared a Code-Red after the release of Google's Gemini 3. OpenAI's ChatGPT needs to urgently improve the chatbot's personalization, speed, reliability, and ability to understand a wider range of queries. Meta is investing a lot more in the Metaverse moving forward. The popular Messenger app is going to be killed quite quickly adding to the resource base being reallocated to the virtual reality project. For transactional or commercial searches, Google's AI Mode is seen delivering traffic for 69% of queries. Google is investing in a massive Gemini App UX overhaul. Google adds LLMs.txt to Search Dev Portal, and then quickly removes them. LLMs.txt documents are present at developers.chrome.com. Do not set-and-forget AI Max or you might max out your budget awfully quick. All this discussion and a lot of Google tips and comments in a nearly two hour long Cyber-Funday edition of Webcology.

Even Google's Gary Illyes is saying it, "the change is hard to accept" in regards to the evolution of AI in search but that SEM and SEO will coevolve with search, just like it has the past 30 years. That optimism is something to be thankful for, even if AI is likely to mess up thousands if not millions of Thanksgiving dinners as it mashes more than potatoes with pinches of this and that drawn from different similar recipes and mixed together to forge something predictably unpredictable. We also talk about how Google unleashed the awesome powers of NanoBanana Pro on Google search and Ads, a Motoko Hunt article on How AI's Geo-Identification failures are Rewriting International SEO, Google Ads in AI Mode, the continuing Zero-Click realities faced by many publishers, how the multiple client Google MCC profiles kept by agencies are seeing a rise in hijacks, and a whole lot of other Googly goodness in a Thanksgiving Week edition of Webcology

Adobe bought SEMrush in a $1.9Billion dollar deal putting SEO back in the middle of the boardroom again. Jim and Kristine discuss the purchase, Adobe's intentions, and the implications of Adobe owning SEMrush, Search Engine Journal, the SMX Conference circuit, and other important assets in the search marketing world. In other breaking SEO related news, someone related to search going by the name Al Seckel, performed reputation management services for Jeffery Epstein according to documents released by the House Oversight Committee. Meta is not a monopoly, according to a federal judge. Google is introducing six options for publishers to control AI crawlers (hint: none of them actually give publishers much control). Tons of Google advice, and much more in an episode that acts like its seen monopolies come and monopolies go.