Search, social and AI news that actually affects South African businesses — short, plain-English, every weekday.
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 →From 1 October, Google Local Services Ads will charge you for calls nobody answered, and for the follow up call as well. Google tag…
Read the brief →Search Console emailed thousands of site owners on Monday claiming a new owner had been added, and it was a bug. Google also admits…
Read the brief →Google confirmed on Sunday that the search favicon bug is fully fixed, and repaired the Search Console crawl stats gap over the same weekend.…
Read the brief →Google has stopped tidying up badly escaped structured data, so rich results can disappear without a single warning. Reddit lost 86% of its ChatGPT…
Read the brief →Google's video carousel now shows on under 20% of searches, down from just over 30%, and on tracked brand names it fell to around…
Read the brief →A 41 day experiment split one site's internal links between plain HTML and JavaScript. Googlebot found 2% of the JavaScript pages and the AI…
Read the brief →Google started the August 2026 spam update on Monday and it is still rolling out worldwide. WordPress 7.1 ships today, Instagram will now let…
Read the brief →Your Search Console AI impressions collapsed on 13 August and Google has confirmed none of it was real. Plus a paused AI Overviews test,…
Read the brief →One short email each weekday: what changed in search, social and AI, and what it means for your business.
