Tuesday, September 8, 2026

Australia's government is pushing social media platforms to default to chronological feeds instead of algorithmic sorting, potentially setting a precedent for other countries.

Australia is implementing regulations that require social media platforms to offer chronological feeds as a default option, letting users opt out of algorithmic ranking.

Threads added an AI-powered summary feature to profile analytics that surfaces trend insights on follower and viewer engagement.

A UK news publisher lost nearly all its Google News search visibility after switching from .co.uk to .com, with the new domain failing to inherit the old one's rankings.

Google's John Mueller indicates that old low-value programmatic pages can continue to harm a site's ability to recover rankings, even after removal or improvement.

Search Engine Land is hosting an SMX Now webinar on entity audits that teaches practitioners how to identify gaps between their declared schema and Google's NLP understanding.

Google published documentation clarifying how search features and layouts vary by region and country.

Search Engine Land reverse-engineered Google's Geostore system to expose 72 Oyster Rank signals, 793 data sources, and a multi-stage ranking pipeline that goes far beyond proximity.

Common Crawl's analysis of over 584,000 llms.txt files reveals most are template-generated, many contain no links, and some misapply crawler-control rules the format doesn't support.

Semrush found that manufacturing brands cited in AI search results don't see corresponding traffic gains from those mentions.

MARTECH reports that while AI accelerates early-stage content drafting, marketing teams still lose time to approval workflows, team coordination, and decision overload—suggesting the real bottleneck was never copywriting.

Google told Reuters that implementing EU Digital Markets Act compliance resulted in the biggest quality reduction in Search's 29-year history.

ChatGPT Ads lacks industry benchmarks and audience data six months after launch, leaving advertisers unable to assess performance against standards.

Google Business Profiles insights are showing no data for September, eight days into the month, despite typical delays of only a few days.

Google is rolling out AI-powered Gemini dashboards in Google Ads to advertisers, several months after the feature was announced.

Google is experimenting with paginated follow-up questions and responses within AI Mode, allowing users to skip them.

Google Search Console's links report has stalled for approximately a month without fresh data.

SERoundtable reports Google is testing a narrower citations panel in AI Overviews that could reduce visibility and clicks to source articles.

SOCi's analysis of expanding versus contracting restaurant chains reveals expanding brands earn 6–7x more ChatGPT recommendations and maintain consistently higher scores across search, reviews, and social signals.

Google is hosting Search Central Live conferences in Mexico City and Bogotá for regional SEO professionals.