A 47-step AI tool that writes nothing: Bauer’s internal content briefing system pulls articles from competitors, looks at rankings, and identifies content gaps. The journalist still has to write the piece. “The premium is on expertise and authority. We wouldn’t ever want to do anything which dilutes that.” (John Rahim, The Media Stack)

Google says no: “We really don’t want you to think you need to be doing that or produce two versions of your content, one for the LLM and one for the net.” (Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land)

Swiss Tagesanzeiger reports on the business of junk content and automated pseudo-news. Fakes were spread about one of the article’s authors. The journalists spoke with a junk site operator who comes from the SEO world (of course) and thinks it’s all wonderful.

AI bots endlessly scrape publisher sites, causing costly downtime and meager traffic. (Charlotte Tobitt, PressGazette)

Google steady but social and direct referrals are down: Chartbeat data shows traffic trends to 565 US and UK publishers since 2019 (Charlotte Tobitt, PressGazette)

“There’s no getting around the decline in traffic”: Another apocalyptic roundup on what’s happening with search. (Klaudia Jaźwińska, Columbia Journalism Review)

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)

Metrics mutate: SEO rankings and clicks out, “embedding relevance” and “chunk retrieval” in as GenAI rewrites the rules of engagement. (Duane Forrester Decodes)

SEO agency analyzes 75k AI Overviews, finds that one-fifth cited media as sources. 31 percent came from BBC, NYT, and CNN.

Data analysis challenges Google’s AI Overviews claims, suggesting 34.5% fewer clicks.

SEO, but for AI search engines: Is it really that simple, optimizing for semantic search rather than keywords, just match the pattern of the search query? (Threads)