seo

SE Ranking Faked a Brand. AI Mode Ranked It #1 for 90% of Branded Queries.

SE Ranking's Bogdan Babiak built a fictional brand on a brand-new domain in March 2026 and tracked 825 prompts across 15,835 AI answers. Google's AI Mode placed the fake brand at position 1 for roughly 90% of branded queries, while a single "Complete Guide&

Blueprint-style illustration of a crossed-out robots.txt BLOCK stamp next to a $40M cash stack and an Oreo cookie revealing data inside, on a technical grid.

Mondelez Spent $40M Unblocking the AI Crawlers It Spent Years Blocking

Mondelez originally blocked AI crawlers from indexing its content, then watched Oreo get cited in roughly 10% of AI chatbot cookie answers despite owning the most famous cookie brand on earth. The company has since reversed course, unblocked GPTBot and friends, and committed $40 million to an AI marketing platform

Blueprint-style schematic of a YouTube play button connected to a chat bubble, with timestamped citation markers along a video timeline.

YouTube Built Its Own 'Ask' Search Because Google Stopped Surfacing Videos

Google launched "Ask YouTube" on April 28, 2026, a conversational search test inside YouTube for US Premium subscribers, 18 and over, on desktop, in English. The experiment runs through June 8, 2026 and converts video content into text summaries with cited timestamps and persistent follow-up threads. The implication:

Blueprint-style diagram of a Bing Webmaster Tools AI Citation Share dashboard with grounding query labels next to a faded Google Search Console panel.

Bing Previewed the AI Citation Share Number Google Search Console Still Hides

Microsoft Bing previewed a Citation Share metric for Webmaster Tools at SEO Week New York on April 27, 2026. Citation Share would show what percentage of citations a single site captures inside a given AI grounding query. Google Search Console still bundles AI Mode and AI Overviews into the total

Blueprint diagram of a browser back button blocked by an interstitial, with history.pushState code and a Google Search Console warning notification overlay.

Google's Back-Button Hijacking Warnings Are Catching Sites That Don't Hijack

Google began mailing Search Console warnings for back-button hijacking on April 27, 2026, two weeks after announcing the new spam policy on April 13. Publishers have until June 15 to remove the offending code before automated demotions and manual actions begin. The first batch of notices is based on a

Blueprint chart showing AI tool share climbing from 0.54% to 1.72% of desktop visits while Google search holds 94.3% organic share, per Datos Q1 2026 report

Datos Caught AI Search at 1.72% of Visits While Google Climbed Back to 94.3%

Datos, a Semrush company, published its Q1 2026 State of Search report this week, drawing on clickstream data from millions of desktop users across the US, EU, and UK. AI tools hit 1.72% of desktop visits in the EU and UK, up from 0.98% a year earlier. In

Blueprint-style diagram showing Polymarket bet rows infiltrating a Google News headline layout, with structural lines connecting the bet pages to NewsArticle schema fields

Polymarket Outranked Reuters in Google News Because Bet Pages Look Like News

Polymarket's prediction-market pages surfaced in Google News' For You feed, home page, and Top Stories results between January and April 2026, sometimes ranking above Reuters and the Financial Times on stories like Strait of Hormuz transit. Google called the placement "in error" and stopped surfacing