Interested in ChatGPT ads? Looks like CPC campaigns are live for some advertisers. Joe Kaziukenas pinged me with some screenshots. You can select between Reach or Clicks for objective and then enter your Max CPC for the campaign. ChatGPT says to enter a max bid between $3.00 and $5.00.
This seems to be flying under the radar -> Redirects for AI Training enforces canonical content
Once a site opts in via Cloudflare:
"When a request arrives from a verified AI Crawler, Cloudflare reads the response HTML. If a non-self-referencing canonical tag is present, Cloudflare issues a 301..."
They started appearing in December in the SERPs -> Google adds 'Read more' links best practices
* Make sure content is immediately visible on the page to a human (and not hidden behind an expandable section or tabbed interface, for example).
And more...
The section got nuked based on the manual action (deindexed), so I wanted to see how that impacted ChatGPT citations for the news content (which was surging for many prompts).
You can check my article to see how those citations fared in ChatGPT once the section was removed from Google's index.
My latest case study is a great example of "Mt. AI" in action (and its impact on ChatGPT citations) -> When “Mt. AI” crumbles, ChatGPT can follow [Case Study]
There was a big manual action applied recently after Futurism published an article about NationalToday and its /us/ directory.
Competitor ads in ChatGPT. Not sure if this was the strategy by Sonic or if ChatGPT just matched up the company with the topic, but interesting to see. :)
"The second pillar — deploy on any surface — centers on the new Agentforce Experience Layer, which separates what an agent does from how it appears, rendering rich interactive components natively across Slack, mobile apps, Microsoft Teams, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, & any client supporting MCP apps."
"The first pillar — build any way you want — delivers more than 60 new MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools and 30-plus preconfigured coding skills that give external coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Windsurf complete, live access to a customer's entire Salesforce org..."
No browser needed. This is in response to "one of the most turbulent times in enterprise software history" -> Salesforce announces Headless 360, an initiative that will give AI agents access to Salesforce's platform capabilities through APIs, MCP tools or CLI commands
The entire AI news section (over 850K urls) was completely deindexed. Poof, gone. But again, took a news article about the situation to get this on Google's radar.
We have a new "Mt. AI". It took a news article about this operation to get Google's attention I guess... It scaled to close to 900K urls indexed with AI-generated news content. It ranked across news surfaces including Top Stories, Google News, etc. Now it's tanking. Beware.
ChatGPT ads are getting cheaper -> Ad buyers say ad rates for ChatGPT are falling from $60 CPM to as low as $25 and the minimum spend to advertise is down to $50K from $250K at launch
"One ad exec said on condition of anonymity that they’ve been seeing CPMs range between $35 and $25 in recent days"
Expanding from Search to AI Mode -> AI Mode can now call nearby stores for last-minute shopping
"This tool launched directly on Search last November, and it’s rolling out in the coming weeks on AI Mode in the U.S."
I'm really hoping the SEO community can help Jenn! I've known Jenn for the past year and she's an incredible person, a great mom, and a fellow SEO.
Jenn is now battling an aggressive form of cancer and needs help. If you can donate (no matter how much), please help Jenn out.
I'm sure OpenAI is like, wait, what? ... as they roll out their new ad platform. LOL -> Google Ads Removed 8.3 Billion Ads - Up Over 60% (Most Before Serving)
"Google removed 8.3 billion ads, which is up almost 63% from last year's number of 5.1 billion."
Oh boy, I'm not sure publishers will be thrilled with this change -> AI Mode will now open publisher links side by side with AI Mode (versus taking you directly to the publisher website). So both AI Mode and the site will be open at the same time (sharing the window).
"Our systems now better detect specific scam patterns, which lets us stop suspicious posts before they go live. If we do see a sudden spike in spam reviews, we’ll quickly remove the fake content, pause new reviews on the profile, alert the Business Profile owner and display a notification banner."
Focus on Local? This is big news -> New ways we’re protecting businesses on Maps
*Stopping review scams before they start
*Using Gemini to catch fake edits even faster
*Making it easier to manage Business Profiles
I think they are smoking something over at SEL 🤣 -> March 2026 Google core update more volatile than December
The March 2026 core update wasn't even close to the power of the December 2025 core update. Not even remotely close.
searchengineland.com/march-2026-g...
AI Mode is the default there -> Google released a Windows desktop app yesterday. It defaults to AI Mode. Yes, we are already at a point where AI Mode is the default (for some search products). :)
Note, if you don't identify yourself in the form, your info will not be sent through. i.e. Google isn't identifying you, but you can identify yourself in the submission (if you want). So if you report spam, be aware your report will be sent to the site owner verbatim *if* a manual action is applied.
Important change from Google for how spam reports are handled AND for people filing. 1) Google can now use those reports to issue a manual action. And 2) If they do issue a manual action based on your spam report, Google will send the entire spam report to the site owner verbatim.
Sending web design platform stocks down -> Anthropic is preparing to release Claude Opus 4.7, along with a new AI-powered tool for designing websites and presentations, maybe this week
"News sent the share prices of Adobe, Wix and Figma down more than 2% in the house following this report."
Thanks for the reply, John! I'll share this update.
Could this be the start of Google correcting the impressions situation? These emails could just be a byproduct of the changes they are making (and maybe Google didn't realize these emails would be triggered). :)
piunikaweb.com/2026/04/14/g...
It started with an email from my client that they had been completely deindexed. My knee-jerk reaction was that AI-generated content could be at play... but then digging into GSC (especially the right properties) revealed the issue. And yep, it was bad.
www.gsqi.com/marketing-bl...
Ready for a good mystery? I'm glad my client let me publish this case study. It was an interesting one, that's for sure :) -> Deindexed, Delayed, and Down: Investigating A Site’s Removal From Google Before A Delayed Manual Action Arrived [Case Study]
Yeah, it's a few years late, but I'll take it! :)
Net-net, if someone writes a book about the history of SEO, it sounds like Barry, and then several others, will probably get Wikipedia pages quickly... This just seems stupid IMO. :)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...
OK, @rustybrick.com's Wikipedia page was just deleted. If you read the conversation between Wikipedia contributors, you will be shaking your head the entire time. Hard to believe Barry doesn't meet the threshold for a Wikipedia page...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...
