You shall not pass… unless you pay: Cloudflare has launched a private beta enabling customers to allow, charge, or block bot-access to their content. For it to work, bot operators such as OpenAI or Google would have to use a new protocol named Web Bot Auth and be willing to pay.
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Google AI Mode Live In US: Tests Deep Search, Live Search, Personalization, Custom Charts, Shopping & Agentic. And no, Search Console data will not include breakdowns for AI Mode and AI Overviews. (Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable)
Testing Dia: The AI Browser Betting on a Future Beyond Chrome and Siri
For the last ten days, I've been using Dia, a new AI-enhanced web browser. So far, it's not going great. But first, let's look at the premise. Several players are racing to slap AI onto our everyday web use, betting that we're not ditching the whole "sitting in front of a screen to get things...
Another fun one: Cloudflare CEO warns of AI-driven “existential threat” to publishers as search traffic dwindles amid bot-fueled content skimming. (Christine Wang, Axios)
The rise of retrieval bots raises questions about data ownership, monetization, and the future of the open web. (Nitasha Tiku, Washington Post)
Google’s AI Mode could deal a devastating blow to the web’s business model. (Thomas Germain, BBC)
Metrics mutate: SEO rankings and clicks out, “embedding relevance” and “chunk retrieval” in as GenAI rewrites the rules of engagement. (Duane Forrester Decodes)
Google tests NotebookLM’s chatty AI podcast on Search.
Google is turning search results into podcasts
One click, and you’ve got two AI voices having what sounds like the world's most scripted coffee shop conversation about whatever you just Googled. It’s called Audio Overviews and works like the feature in NotebookLM, powered by Gemini's text-to-speech. As usual, it’s only live in Search Labs in the US for now. And weirdly, it's...
SEO agency analyzes 75k AI Overviews, finds that one-fifth cited media as sources. 31 percent came from BBC, NYT, and CNN.
Comparing Google Search with AI Mode
This is a snapshot of a beta feature. It's June 2025. To test Google's AI Mode, you currently have to beam yourself to the US and go to Search Labs. Or you do a Google search, get an AI Overview, and discover, top left, a new feature called "AI Mode". Asked about layoffs at Business...
Google’s new AI chatbot mimics Perplexity and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, prompting questions about the future of information discovery. (Tripp Mickle, New York Times)
“The best way to get your client’s message into the output of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and the rest is by talking to journalists.” (Ben Smith, Semafor)
AI search is (likely) hurting publishers: “The data is really messy, and … we have no real way of differentiating … to see what is really going on. But overall, it all points to there being a problem.” (Thomas Baekdal)
“LLM grooming”: Russia automates the dissemination of misinformation by exploiting vulnerabilities in AI search. (Joseph Mann, Washington Post)
