Monday, August 31, 2026

The FTC and 22 state attorneys general filed suit against Amazon, alleging the company changed its ad auction mechanics to overcharge advertisers by over $20 billion.

Australia is exploring legislation that would allow users to opt out of algorithmic feeds on social media platforms.

Rank Math acknowledged a consent failure with a controversial feature, paused it temporarily, and stated it plans to restore it.

Instagram is adding tags to AI-generated profiles to help users distinguish between human and artificial intelligence accounts.

Google has finished rolling out AI performance reports to all Search Console users worldwide, enabling tracking of AI Overview and AI Mode impressions.

John Mueller confirmed Google won't penalize a site for old outbound links that point to content that has since become low-quality or malicious.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has crossed the EU's threshold for "very large online search engines" based on 159.1 million average monthly search recipients, triggering Digital Services Act obligations.

Google has published details on its mandatory European search data licensing program, a requirement under DMA gatekeeper designation.

Search Engine Land reports that Google Business Profile calls and clicks are declining while direction requests surge, indicating users complete their journey within Maps rather than clicking through to websites or calling.

Google is expanding AI Overviews to cover more queries, pushing organic search results further down the page.

MartechTribe's analysis of 953 real-world martech stacks shows that revenue outperformers don't buy more tools—they align their investments to industry and business context, not feature breadth or vendor maturity.

Google enhanced the Popular Products report within Merchant Center with improved coverage and insights capabilities.

Google's August 2026 spam update took down sites combining programmatic content, AI-generated pages, thin affiliates, and scaled content abuse over roughly two days, with affected domains losing tens of thousands of queries and experiencing site-wide visibility drops.

Microsoft now requires all Copilot users to log in, though the restriction doesn't yet apply to Copilot Search answers within Bing.

Rajan Patel, Google Search VP, confirmed the company's spam team remains well-resourced and continues pushing spam-fighting updates.

Google is expanding ad placements in AI Mode by showing shopping carousel ads inline and at the bottom of results.

John Mueller tested whether AI crawlers actually request markdown from websites and shared his findings.

Search Engine Journal reports that Claude and Claude Code search the web at different rates, prioritize different brands, and direct their agents to different page types.

Ahrefs data reveals Facebook Groups now rank second among Google's forum and discussion results, appearing in 38% of those SERPs behind Reddit.