Search, social and AI news that actually affects South African businesses — short, plain-English, every weekday.
One account uploaded more than 150 photos to unrelated Google Maps listings, every one carrying the same phone number. Plus 131 specialists rate Google's…
Read the brief →Ninety seven percent of the answers inside Google's People Also Ask boxes are now AI Overviews, up from 12 percent fourteen months ago. Meta…
Read the brief →New survey data shows 57.5 percent of AI users have been talked out of a purchase by a chatbot, and nearly nine in ten…
Read the brief →Google Shopping ads are showing less often but converting better, and new data across 175 billion impressions explains why. Plus a warning from Google…
Read the brief →Google has quietly made exact and phrase match keywords eligible to serve inside AI Mode, reversing a rule that kept tight keyword targeting off…
Read the brief →Google put Gemini 3.8 Flash into AI Mode this week and the citations disappeared, which Google has now confirmed is a bug. A separate…
Read the brief →Google Analytics standard reports have shown zero traffic since 1 September, and Google has acknowledged the fault sits in its own reporting pipeline. Google…
Read the brief →Calls from Google listings fell 11.9 percent and website clicks 12.5 percent, while direction requests rose 21.1 percent. Google also switched on a site…
Read the brief →Google has confirmed that AI Overviews now expand into full answers for some searches, removing the Show more button and pushing your listings down…
Read the brief →From today Google stops applying its site reputation abuse penalty to anyone searching inside Europe, after pressure from the European Commission. Also this week:…
Read the brief →The IRS dropped out of Google search this week because its own bot protection blocked Googlebot, and Cloudflare's new defaults on 15 September will…
Read the brief →Google is routing search clicks through its own redirect links at close to full rollout, which will make rank tracking harder and more expensive.…
Read the brief →One short email each weekday: what changed in search, social and AI, and what it means for your business.
